Body As Resource
Befriending the body for balance, empowerment and connection to soul.
Some time ago I wrote a piece on using Breathe as Resource; as an inner resource that you can immediately turn to and utilise to help calm or activate your energy and recalibrate your nervous system. The ability to remain calm, creative and clear even while challenging things are happening is key to making conscious choices that challenge automatic reactivity and conditioned responses. Bringing more awareness into our bodies too, as an inner resource can help us understand what we need. Not only in moments of challenge but as a way to bring greater consciousness and connection to how we move about the world and in our relationships day-to-day.
With our highly evolved brains and their huge capacity for thinking and reasoning, there can be an overemphasis of the intellectual, the rational, and language-based knowing and understanding. The body, with its mundane flesh, bone, blood and organs is relegated to either the unimportant and too basic, so is ignored, or objectified to fit into some ideal, or quantified and mechanised to its pure function (… the heart pumps blood, my legs take me around, my neck holds my head up, my head holds my brain, my brain is a computer). Until recently psychology hasn’t considered how anatomy, nutrition, movement and bioenergetics can influence our mental and emotional states. I still doubt that psychology degrees incorporate somatic therapy into foundational trainings.
However the body, and all its idiosyncrasies, can be a untapped resource of information for deepening self-knowledge, inspiring creativity, and accessing intuitive wisdom, for guidance, and physical, emotional and spiritual healing and transformation.
From the way you hold and move your body - your posture, to how you walk, your unconscious gestures, to the sensations and signals that your body is emitting – a squeeze in your chest, a lump in your throat, and buzz in your hands, quiver in your thighs …. These are signals that are telling some sort of story, about your history, your emotions, your needs and desires. As you learn to notice, interpret and respond to your body’s signals you’ll naturally feel more whole and balanced, more connected to self and soul, so more confident.
Next I’ll describe different types of ‘body work’ - ways that you can begin to develop this relationship by becoming aware, befriending and getting to know your body, and developing a communication with your body. You’ll find your body will like it! when you pay attention, get interested, listen and understand and respond to what it is telling you.
The Body Remembers
Babette Rothschild coined this phrase in her book “The Body Remembers”, and some years later Bessel Van Der Kolk wrote “The Body Keeps the Score”. In between and all around there’ve been a multitude of books and therapies that essentially describe how trauma responses become “trapped” in the body and how the body can be used as a source of wisdom to help with healing. When strong emotions are experienced during life threatening or traumatic events, shutting off from the intense bodily sensations that arise from being in fight or flight is protective if it was either impossible or dangerous to physically run away or aggress to get out of that situation. This would become freeze or collapse reactions like, bracing, detaching, numbing or dulling, even dissociating - going “out of body”, and this was appropriate or lifesaving at the time.
This writing piece isn’t going to delve specifically into trauma and the body. But if you’ve experienced trauma, and never done any body-focused exploration before, then I advise you approach this work with some care, patience and possibly the company of a professional or steady friend. If there’s been a habit of detaching from the body due to trauma, all of a sudden paying attention to it can reflexively unleash more force that you’re capable of dealing with straight up. Go steady and with radical self care.
However many of us experience difficult or non-life threatening events that are overwhelming, hurtful and stressful. A pattern of cutting off from body can still develop as a habitual response in the same way described above. If unconsciously applied to present situations, it’s no longer serving that protective purpose. In fact it’s limiting and keeps you stuck in an irrelevant storyline. Beginning to listen to the body, recognise the forces and impulses that want to be processed and released is a way to self-empowerment and confidence and healing through the body.
Befriending the Body
Interoception is the process where you’re able to focus and sense into both the gross and more subtle states and experiences of our body - to what’s happening inside. Awareness of body parts, the body as a whole and where it is in space, as well as the quality within the body. Eastern medical practices such as Ayurveda, and subtle body medicine practices of energy healing understand the body to have its sixth sense in the skin, flesh and fascia and so learning how to “read” it, develops an intuitive, sensing-feeling kind of knowing that’s connected to soul and deep self.
Getting to know your body in a very literal way is a first step to developing a relationship with it. One of the most accessible is simple awareness of the body. “I notice my feet, … I notice my legs, my back … I’m aware of my hands, torso, chest …” etc. There are many body scan mindfulness meditations and exercises that will systematically guide you to track and scan the body. Just resting your awareness on the parts, without judgement, analysis or story-telling, then going to the next part, and the next …
This type of practice though can be done simply enough even on your own and in a few seconds as you navigate your day. Just before bed, or upon waking are also nice times to connect to your body in this way.
The traditional practices of yoga nidra will often have a body scan section and I find this practice to be particularly relaxing and deeply healing. Another favourite of mine is a practice taught by shaman Jose Luis Stevenson that he calls “Saying Hello to the Body”, where you place awareness systematically on each part of the body, but also give each part a directive to “be healed and whole” and “I love you”. Just lovely. People report these practices in all their simplicity, with no analysing or intellectualising, to be deeply relaxing, and at times insightful and profound with seeming spontaneous psycho-spiritual healing occurring.
Body Language
When clients start sessions with me, at first there’s usually a sharing of their story - their problems, issues, history – the verbal component. As this is happening, I’m also observing any movements, gestures, shifts in posture, the quality in their voice … And then dropping in an occasional , ‘can you notice what’s happening in your body right now as you talk about this’.
For people not accustomed to this sort of questioning, it’s a strange enquiry. A somatic-aware therapist can help people bridge the gap between mind and body, so that the link between the situation or story, and how your body is responding as a sensation, impulse or movement, starts to become obvious.
Developing this awareness that 1) something is happening in a particular part of your body and 2) then describing what that something is, is a skill you can develop if you have keenness and curiosity to practice. The most common issue is not having the language or vocabulary to describe what’s happening. I suppose a lifetime of denying your body signals has meant that there’s been no need to describe them. When you first start to venture into describing your experiences, you might notice that something is happening, but find it hard to articulate what that is. Do not be discouraged. It is totally ok to express
“I’m having a strong sensation in my body but it’s hard for me to find the right words to describe what’s happening”.
Words to help you describe what might be happening inside, like: open, tight, heavy, light, squeezing, swirling, shaky, bubbly, hot, searing, twisting, stuck, and more. A google of body sensation words will give you much more here to inspire you. Aside from words, your body might offer up images, colours, or even full visions of actions, scenes from imagination or connected memories.
Dialogue with the Body - Body as Metaphor for Soul
Once you start becoming aware of your body, sense it, and have a language to describe your experience, communicating with your body naturally follows. Although again, it can feel strange for some to consider having a conversation with a part of yourself, that doesn’t talk back, at least not in the conventional way. So dialoguing with your body is a creative, intuitive and imaginative practice. And when we dialogue with the body we are dialoguing with the soul and tuning into our soul’s language.
An exercise that I’ve used in session and with groups is to give voice to different parts of your body. Letting each part of the body speak. Relaxing first to help imagination to flow, you then visit in with each part of the body, say hello, and ask it about its role, and how it feels. Eg. I’m Mendy’s feet, and my job is to carry her around, I feel stable” and so on around the body. It can be an intriguing experience to realise your body has something to say! and has feelings!. If a verbal dialogue is challenging, drawing the body may feel less confronting. The exercise is to draw not how your body looks realistically but how it feels. And the enquiry or discussion with a partner about “the heavy black outline” or “angular limbs” or “tiny hands” can bring a new awareness and understanding, and fresh insight to what is going on energetically and unconsciously.
However, the practice of dialoguing needn’t be so formal. Thomas Moore encourages an everyday poetic attitude in communicating with the body, as if it were a friend. Asking directly of a body part under stress “If the pain could speak, what might it say?’, or checking in with your belly, or kidneys or back … , “Are you enjoying yourself? Or am I doing something that is making you depressed?”. In this sense Moore sees the body’s voice, even in illness and discomfort, as meaningful and worthy of paying attention to and responding to with imagination and creativity.
Moving the Body
Practices and exercise soulfully performed such as yoga, dance, tai chi, qi gong, martial arts, and sports, or simply walking, can help you develop a sense of your body, confidence and appreciation for it. Moving consciously can help you know its strengths and challenges, its uniqueness and quirks (my left hip is tighter than my right, I could balance today but not yesterday), and awareness for how it moves in space and through the world. Allowing your physical senses, emotions, imagination to be involved in the movement helps relate to body as ensouled and not just a mechanical lump of flesh that moves our minds around.
When you’re attuned to your body signals and sensations, and have developed a relationship to how it likes to move, you’re more able to respond to its needs instead of overriding them. Recognising your tired body as feeling heavy, pulsing, and slow you’’l let it rest rather than push harder because ego says it’s lazy. If you’re feeling a strong buzz of energy and force due to nervousness over a presentation, you’ll let your body go for a brisk walk or run around the block to release the charge rather than fuelling the stress with more thinking.
In somatic trauma work like Sensorimotor or Somatic Experiencing therapies, you learn to track and listen to what body wants to do through sensation and impulse (not what your mind-ego says it should do), to find that an empowered action wants to take over and be expressed. When clients finally surrender their minds to their body, to follow the historically repressed, blocked or truncated sensation or impulse, all of a sudden body wants to push or pull in the arms, the legs want to kick or run, the spine wants to lengthen, hands want to grasp or tug or press, mouths want to open up in a yell or scream. It can be powerful stuff to let the body express itself, unbridled by the need to be polite or proper or fearful or submissive.
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Marion Woodman says, a body that hasn’t been paid attention to, acknowledged, or honoured and cared for, is essentially unconscious. So what body work can help with is the process of bringing matter (the body) to life! to consciousness! and so “simultaneously releasing soul”. The body deserves honouring and reclaiming as sacred. So much healing can happen, without thinking! if we could just recognise the body’s value. As Dr Estes says of the body, “Its purpose is to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within … to be a repository for memory … to lift us, propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight.”
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Mendy xx