Читать книгу Reclaiming Your Body - Suzanne Scurlock-Durana - Страница 10
ОглавлениеBlind Alleys That Throw Us Off Course
Don’t let your mind bully your body.
— ASTRID ALAUDA
Having a good relationship with one’s body is clearly important. Yet I know that somehow I lost touch with mine, and I know that I am not alone in this dilemma.
After several millennia, the Western world has left many of us partially or completely divorced from our body sensations and wisdom. Whatever the reason — whether we blame Descartes or trace this back to the fall of the ancient goddess traditions and the rise of patriarchy — the results are the same.
Many of our religions and spiritual traditions speak of being wary of the body, controlling the body, rising above the body, and most of all, putting the body in a subservient role to the mind. In numerous ways, we are taught the body is “less than” our thoughts and mental faculties.
In the thousands of interviews I have conducted and healing sessions I have facilitated over the last three decades, I have seen that this loss of good relationship with the body is pretty universal, and it can cause major mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual problems.
First and foremost, not feeling connected to our body leaves us very vulnerable. We get anxious even when there is actually nothing to fear. We unknowingly put ourselves in harm’s way. We lose out on the opportunities for joy in each moment. If we are not connected to our body’s wisdom, we miss inner signals that are vital for surviving and thriving in today’s world.
All of us operate from a variety of body myths and either unconsciously or consciously believe them to be true. Body myths are often handed down to us through our family lineage. Below, I’ve identified five body myths based on my experiences, conversations with peers, and the stories shared in my trainings and private sessions across the last three decades. These may not all seem true for you at the same time; some may seem partially true; or some might have felt true at a particular time.
However, these are myths that you probably do not want to continue living from if you have a choice. The first step in this process is awareness. With awareness, we are given the possibility of choosing anew.
Body Myth 1: The Body Is Too Painful
Numerous students have said to me: “When I turn my attention inward, all I feel is pain, and I feel overwhelmed. I don’t know how to deal with my pain, so I don’t want to — I can’t handle anything more. How can feeling this pain more than I already do possibly be helpful?”
If any of this sounds familiar, ask yourself these questions:
Do I view my inner pain as an insurmountable problem?
Do I feel only anxiety when I drop inside?
Do I feel like my pain is bigger than me?
Many people who have survived traumatic, overwhelming events may have this initial response when they drop their awareness to sensations within their own inner landscape. The pain is real. That part is definitely not a myth, though we may have been told it was. The myth comes in believing that the pain is all that inhabits our insides.
All I Am Is This Huge Ball of Pain…
Jennifer was newly separated from her husband of ten years when she came to one of my classes. She was an attractive, well-dressed woman whose sweetness shone through her face and eyes. The tension in her shoulders and back told me that she was also carrying an inner burden of pain.
As the class started and it was her turn to share, she began to cry. Through her tears, she told us that although she was firm in her decision to divorce her husband, every time she stopped to reflect on it, she became overwhelmed with a deep ache in her midsection. When I asked her more about the size and shape of the pain, she described it as a “watermelon-size ball of excruciating grief.” It brought her to a flood of tears just describing it. I acknowledged her pain and how that huge, contracted ache in her midsection must be controlling her life.
To help her come out of feeling so overwhelmed, I asked her to notice how her backbone felt resting into her chair. She relaxed slightly as she allowed her awareness to expand to that area. I asked her to notice the weight of her ribs and spine as she rested back even more. Her flood of tears started to slow down as her pain lessened.
Next, I asked about the sensation of her sitting bones on the chair. As this awareness settled in, she spoke through her tears, “I am all alone without support now that I have struck out on my own. Even my family is upset with me for leaving my great provider of a husband.”
I didn’t know most of the facts regarding her current situation. However, I did know that she had come to my circle with two friends, who were sitting on either side of her. I asked her to allow her awareness to spread out to either side so that she could feel the supportive presence of her friends. As she explored this possibility, her tears slowed to a trickle.
Next, I suggested that she direct her attention to the sensation of her feet resting on the floor and, within the ease of this connection, to simply notice how supportive it felt. Gravity connects us to the earth, without any effort, in every moment of our lives. This resource is available to everyone, although few are conscious of it. This awareness seemed to shift something inside that turned the tide of her grief.
Finally, I asked her how that watermelon-size ball of grief in her midsection was doing. She got very quiet, and her mouth curled into a smile as she reported that it was about the size of an orange and that she was feeling much better. We had dispelled Body Myth 1, and she now had more of herself to compassionately hold her sadness and grief.
Body Myth 2: The Body Is Mysterious and Dangerous
I grew up with Body Myth 2. I was raised in a good Southern Baptist family with lots of wonderful singing, praising of God, and the community life of church potlucks. What was missing was any education about the primal instincts of the lower half of the body — of what could happen if I dropped into the “danger zone” of the scary unknown. I sensed that base emotions of anger and rage lived in these depths, and I didn’t want to venture too far down for fear of them.
Body Myth 2 is fed by fear of the unknown and what it will bring if we venture outside of the comfort zone of our known world. This myth is also fed constantly because of the way our brains are wired. The neural circuits for survival — which look for anything possibly dangerous — fire much faster than the measured, thoughtful circuits that lead us into creative endeavors in new arenas.
To dispel this myth, the key is to slow down and expand our awareness — widen our perceptual lens on the world. Then we won’t automatically decide that what might be a magic wand or a walking cane is always a dangerous snake! This becomes more nuanced as we take a closer look at all the ways the world can harm us and all the ways it can delight us.
Thawing Out the Freezer
I had worked with Janet for a number of months on her fear of relationships with men. What emerged, as she felt safe enough to share, was a particular memory that had haunted her for years.
When she was growing up, she had a beloved uncle who had always been her protector. He was her “listening ear” in a chaotic, alcoholic extended-family home. Unknown to her at the time, he still lived in their home because of his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder and drug addiction.
One night, at age thirteen, Janet came home excited to share that she had gotten a big role in the school play. She rushed into her uncle’s semidarkened room and gently shook his shoulder to wake him. He startled from his drug-induced stupor. Raging like a bull, he started to throttle her. The long seconds it took for him to recognize her and remove his hands from her throat seemed like an eternity. For her, it was a dreadful nightmare.
When the uncle finally let go, Janet fled from his room in shock and cried herself to sleep. Typical of many victims of violence, she took on the blame. Feeling ashamed, she hid the bruises that emerged on her neck with scarves and turtleneck sweaters so no one would know. Not only was she physically traumatized; she had lost her best friend.
Janet’s sweet, quiet uncle became a monster in her eyes. She was not sure how it had happened, but she believed that somehow it was her fault. Perhaps it was her joy and exuberance that had ignited the rage deep within him. Perhaps she was responsible for this mysterious, life-threatening violence.
When her uncle awakened the next morning, he had no conscious memory of the incident. His addiction deepened in the weeks that followed. Soon after, he committed suicide, magnifying Janet’s trauma, guilt, and shame. She walked around in a fog feeling like a zombie.
It was years before she could look fully at a man she cared about. If she was in a darkened room or a car at night with a man, her belly would grip in fear and her heart would pound, causing a panic attack. She was sure that something about her might cause men to turn into raging beasts. She withdrew further and further into herself.
As an adult, Janet finally went to psychotherapy and got the courage to ask remaining family members about her uncle. She discovered the truth about his lifelong struggles. This lessened her panic attacks, but she could not shake her deep mistrust of men and the sense that something about her might elicit a mysterious, dangerous rage from their depths.
CranioSacral Therapy and Dialogue
Body Myth 2 was alive and well in Janet’s psyche and her nervous system. To dispel this myth, I sat with her and suggested that she needed a strong ally to meet this powerful fear. I asked her what would help her to feel more present with her thirteen-year-old self, who had made such an isolating decision to withdraw and protect herself.
She intuitively felt that, since this trauma was physically induced, she needed to be physically touched for this trauma to resolve. She also realized that she needed her wise adult self — the part of her that had done years of therapy — to be available to support her traumatized self. She was shaky but resolved as we began her session on my treatment table using my primary mode of hands-on healing, CranioSacral Therapy.
I gently let one of my hands hold the top of her chest while the other held her upper back, cradling her heart, as she recalled that night, first running up the stairs to share her joy with her uncle. I felt a trembling from her lower limbs that slowly dissipated.1 Then I began to feel her chest tighten and get still and cold as she got closer to the actual traumatic moment. I let her know in a gentle voice that I was with her, as an ally, and that the grown-up part of her, who had uncovered the truth about her uncle, was also with us.
Janet’s inner thirteen-year-old remained frozen and mute. Her chest continued to feel tight and cold. I let her know that I would patiently wait with her, as long as it took, for her to feel warmth there again.2 I also reminded her that her cellular intelligence knew what to do and that she could let things unfold in her own time. Something shifted under my hands ever so slightly when I spoke. My words and presence conveyed to her that I saw her clearly, I was not pushing her, and I had no agenda about how this might unfold.
As I felt a deep stirring in her system, I explained that her frozenness was a natural nervous system response to such danger and that it had been her only possible defense at the time of her trauma. The numbness had helped her to survive such an overwhelming event. We explored whether she might want to thank it for its years of valiant service. I felt more stirring under my hands in response to those words.
Out of the Deep Freeze and into the Light of Awareness
It is often a surprising but welcome idea that we can have gratitude for a part of ourselves that was helpful in the past but is hindering our forward progress in the present moment.
Janet’s chest softened significantly in the minutes that followed. This disowned part of herself, which had contributed to her panic attacks and mistrust of men, was finally feeling recognized for its original job of saving her from the overwhelming confusion, fear, and pain of the tragic experience with her uncle. With that recognition, the frozen tightness was able to loosen up a bit, slowly releasing its position as guardian of her safety.
I asked Janet’s older, wiser self to explain to her thirteen-year-old self what had happened that night. Janet told her that it was not her exuberance and joy that had triggered her uncle’s rage. It was not her fault at all. At the time of the event, he was deep in his own pain, confusion, and addiction, and she simply had no way of knowing that.
The older, wiser part of Janet thanked the freeze response, and I felt her chest coldness melt under my hands. Her breathing deepened and returned to normal as she cried sweet tears of relief.
In the aftermath of this session, Janet’s panic attacks went away completely. She slowly began to make friends with the men in her life, at work and play. Her irrational sense of fear dissolved. That fear of her body and its panic response, as well as the fear of a primal rage response from men, was gone.
Body Myth 3: The Body Is Seductive and Leads You Astray
This body myth says that the primal sensual and sexual urges of the body will get us into trouble and lead us astray if we listen to and act on them.
Most major religions — whether Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, and so on — impose sanctions against fully feeling the body so that this feared primal energy is kept in check. This is expressed in instructions like these:
“Guard against your body’s urges.”
“Control your body’s impulses and sublimate them.”
“Stay in charge of your body and hold its compulsions at bay.”
Meanwhile, popular culture, advertising, and the media flood us with sexual images because marketers recognize that this primal energy can help sell almost anything. Advertisements turn around and twist what is acceptable and attractive, leaving most of us chasing a phantom image that promises to make us feel whole and lovable if only we buy into it.
In the meantime, the message is, “Whatever you do, do not fully feel your sensuality and sexuality — it is dangerous. If you are a woman, you might be preyed upon or called a woman of loose morals. If you are a man, you could be seen as a dangerous predator.”
This primal life force is powerful. My friend Emilie Conrad, who developed Continuum Movement,3 taught that the energy of eros, the Greek word for “intimate love,” is what makes our cells ignite. It allows us to feel our juiciness. In fact, it is the creative force of life itself. It feeds our joy and raison d’être, our reason for being.
Yet, Body Myth 3 tries to convince us that our core sensuality and sexuality are evil, seductive forces. How did this body myth come into power?
The problem arises when we judge this part of ourselves as bad, corrupt, or wicked and try to compartmentalize and seal off this powerful energy from the rest of our system. This acts like an aerosol can in the sun or a restless volcano building internal pressure. Like the closing love scene in Like Water for Chocolate, where the long-repressed lovers finally consummate their relationship and go up in flames in the process, this myth tells us that our sensuality, allowed free rein, will set fire to our world, burning out of control.
In fact, when we allow pleasurable sensation to flow through our entire system with the wisdom of each part of us informing and integrating it, the powerful energy we feel is not a force for evil. It is the energy of life itself.
If I am feeling sexually attracted to someone, it does not mean that I need to act on it. However, if I hold my sensual nature tightly wrapped, it can become a seductive shadow side of who I am. When we allow our sensations to fill all of us, the direct experience of this connection has a deep and abiding integrity, not a seductive one.
Locked Out of Her Own Sensuality
Karen is a high-powered administrator who successfully leads thousands of students at a major university. She came to see me with multiple physical issues that included asthma, chronic throat infections, and ongoing tightness in her solar plexus area, which made it hard to breathe deeply most of the time. My inner knowing was drawn directly to the area of her respiratory diaphragm, so we started our session with my hands on the front and back of her lower rib cage.
The sensation between my hands was of a drawn-in-tight achy pain. I asked her to drop her awareness inside to explore this area of her body with me. I felt her system pull in even tighter as she turned her attention inward.
She described to me the sense of her torso being not available, or “closed for business,” as she said. I asked her how long it had felt that way, and she started to cry.
She told me that she was married to a wonderful man and had a daughter she adored. Even so, four years earlier she had fallen in love with someone else. There was a strong sexual attraction. He was a dynamic person who awakened her sensual side as a woman. The affair was short-lived, ending soon after her husband became aware of it. Feeling guilty, she shared that, when this happened, “I locked down my heart and pelvis and threw away the key.”
She had spent the last four years struggling with her health and trying to prove to her husband that she still loved him and that she wanted the marriage to last. In her misguided fear that her core sensuality had caused the affair, she disconnected from the juiciest parts of who she was — and her health was suffering for it.
On my table she realized that she was afraid to breathe deeply or she might start to feel the “sensations” in her pelvis again. She said, “That was a primary part of what led me into the affair.” Another key facet of self-blame, particularly for many women, is that when we find deep joy in our sensual experiences, it feels like a forbidden treasure, rather than one of our most primary natural responses.
She also had not forgiven herself for her “transgressions” and was carrying a heavy weight of guilt, which closed down her heart, slowing her energy flow further. Her throat was shut down as well, so she would not speak “the truth of my heart,” she said.
I gently held her solar plexus and heart and asked what she would say if this affair had happened to her best friend. She got quiet and replied that she would feel compassion and would tell her friend to let go of her guilt and move on. I asked her if she could be her own best friend in that moment. I felt her body relax a bit as she took a deep breath and accepted that idea.
I then asked her if she was still in love with the other man, and if she wanted to leave her marriage. She said no; that moment in time had passed and she had moved on in her life. Another wave of relief released under my hands as she realized she was not in danger of succumbing to the seduction of this affair again.
As a woman living in our culture where sensuality is ignored or vilified, Karen’s longing for a deep sensual connection made her vulnerable. A strong sexual attraction is almost impossible to refuse unless the integrity of the whole body is onboard.
I shared with Karen about the wisdom she could experience when her sensuality was alive and connected to all the other parts of her body. With the heart connected to the pelvis, gut, and head, we are inspired to approach important choices in our life journey by pausing, taking a breath, and seeing the bigger picture. We realize the implications and probable end result of our choice. Our decisions become grounded and based on whole-body informed thinking.
We talked about recognizing that her natural, primal needs deserved to be fulfilled and that she could bring her sensual longing home as a gift to herself and her husband. This choice would validate Karen’s grounded, whole-body-informed thinking.
Her torso relaxed slowly and completely as we spoke. She could sense that I held no judgment of her, had no agenda for her. Her sensual nature had not seduced her — it was not at fault.
We spent some time connecting her heart to her gut, her feet, and her legs, and then to the clarity of her bones and her head. When she got up off the table, the color had returned to her face. She was visibly more relaxed and present. Karen was awed by the depth of the work she had just done.
Karen is not alone in having this split between her head and her body. Body Myth 3 is alive and well in our culture, and many powerful women have left their body behind to get the job done successfully. This split creates vulnerability and makes us susceptible to the pulls and tugs of sensations that are only seductive in isolation.
Body Myth 4: The Body Is Out of Control and Must Be Dominated
Do you see your body as something you have to constantly control — masterfully riding it until it gives you what you want? This myth about the body centers around the idea that if you are not controlling it in every moment, your body will become something despicable, or it will collapse emotionally and fall apart. So you work to control it, altering it in whatever ways you think will get you love and acceptance, as well as safety and protection from harm. It is a fact that to feel loved and accepted is a primary human need, so fear of losing this feeds Body Myth 4.
For instance, you may discipline yourself to diet and exercise, not as an act of loving self-care, but rather in an attempt to create the body you think will make you more lovable, safe, or protected.
This form of self-judgment about your body may be based on cultural norms, the media, or friends and family. To have an acceptable body, you may feel you have to live your life on a diet or constantly work out. Controlling what you eat in this way and pushing your body physically beyond healthy limits are both natural outcomes of believing Body Myth 4.
At a deeper level, this body myth may be fueled by unresolved trauma. If you have a history of feeling overwhelmed by traumatic events, then the alarm bells of the nervous system may continue to sound in your head and body long after an event has ended. In general, the external world may feel overwhelming and out of control. This could, in turn, cause you to exert extreme control over the areas of your life that you can control.
Witnessing the effects of pain and trauma in others can also be traumatizing. Consider the high number of people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing a terrorist act.
If, when you were a child, someone you loved wailed and cried uncontrollably whenever they felt emotionally overwhelmed, as an adult you might find that similar sounds put you into an alarm state. You might become hypervigilant even though you are not personally in danger. You could find your insides going numb, the way you did as a child, to control your own fearful feelings.
All of the above can be a huge impetus to clamp down and control the body and its reactions to a life that seems threatening.
Control at All Costs
James came sauntering into my office with his clean-cut good looks, muscular physique, and big smile masking his deep pain and anxiety.
It did not take long for his pain to surface, first reported as numbness. “I can’t feel what you are talking about in my body. I have no idea what you are asking me to do or feel,” James reported to me.
When I asked him what his childhood was like, James sarcastically replied that it was “normal.” He was the eldest of three boys. When his dad would come home from work, his mother would report the antics of his sons that day, and his father would discipline them by sticking their heads in the toilet and flushing it. When I asked how that abuse had affected him, James displayed his degree of self-judgment by saying, “What abuse? We deserved it — we were really bad.”
Upon further inquiry, it became apparent that James was echoing what his father had said to them. James was quite certain that he had not been a good child and that his father had “only been trying to keep me in line.”
James described how he had spent his life trying to please his overly critical father, who was so self-centered that he never really knew James or his other sons. This is codependence on steroids. His father was an alcoholic who drank at night and took his inner angst out on his sons, physically and emotionally. This had taken a heavy toll on James, who had a huge tender heart battered by years of abuse.
By his fifteenth birthday, James was as tall as his father. One evening when his dad came home drunk and started to abuse his younger brother, James ended up pinning his dad to the wall. That was the last time his dad hit anyone in the family. He stopped drinking shortly thereafter, but his inability to show love to his sons continued.
James was in his early thirties when he came to see me. He was a Navy SEAL who had hardened his body through grueling workouts and training. He rarely visited his parents, so dealing with his father was no longer the problem. What plagued him was that he was unable to let his tenderness emerge in his marriage and with his own children, and he desperately wanted that.
Whenever James had a difference of opinion with his wife or kids, and his emotions began to surface, he felt threatened. His body response was to go numb and withdraw. If pushed further, he would become enraged. This scared everyone, including James.
James did not want to reenact his own childhood, and yet he felt helpless and out of control of his body and mind. In those situations, his emotions seemed to belong to someone else. He tried to keep himself under control by working out relentlessly every day. After an especially hard workout, he would come home tired and finally sleep well at night.
I began our sessions by asking him to take his awareness inside, to follow his breath and let it deepen as he felt his entire body all the way to his feet on the floor. For weeks he practiced the basic inner-awareness exercise (see chapter 4, “Exploration 1: Opening Awareness,” pages 55–59), but all he felt was continuing numbness.
All James’s Navy SEAL discipline came in handy, since he stuck with it, week after week. I asked him to be patient and keep returning his awareness within, simply being kind and not judging. I asked him to act toward himself the way he would with his best buddy.
After several months of this daily practice, the numbness started to change. His purposeful yet nonjudgmental attention to inner sensations, no matter how uncomfortable or downright painful they might be, was paying off.
He was learning to cultivate his curiosity, his openness to discovery, rather than his habitual pattern of clamping down on all feelings and sensations. James was building his capacity to be with himself, no matter what showed up in his awareness.
Then we moved to the next stage, where James allowed himself to fill up with nurturing sensation, creating an inner container of nourishment for himself that helped him feel stronger and steadier. His numbness was dissipating layer by layer as he felt fuller and fuller.
With a steady container of sensation to depend on, James felt safe enough to have issues surface. Initially, all he felt was a general muscular tension throughout his body, as though he were tightening down for protection or preparing to run.
Then actual early memories began to surface. We worked through them together, holding and cradling the tender abused little boy that he had been. Slowly, James came to understand that he had not been a bad child at all. Finally, he recognized himself for the sensitive, caring brother that he was. His sadness emerged, and his tears flowed freely.
Within that strong, fit, man-body was a little boy who was still defending himself against the blows of his father, from whom he only wanted love.
The painstaking process of teaching James to feel his own body again, without immediately rushing in to control it, required my patience and willingness to move at a careful, purposeful pace that worked for him. We could only move as fast as the slowest part of him felt safe to go.
Initially, James could not relax and turn off the fight-or-flight response. Feeling anything would set him off. In those moments I would help him to slow his process so as to grow a greater sense of grounding and build a bigger, stronger container to hold his emotions.
As the months passed, he developed trust in the process. As he continued the daily practice of calming himself and dropping inside to explore his feelings, James eventually began to have a different experience. He was recognizing that it was paying off.
His wife remembered why she had fallen in love with him. Once again, James was able to see her and his children for the wonderful human beings they were.
Even though there was occasional backsliding into the old behaviors, this happened less and less, and James’s huge heart and loving tenderness emerged to the delight of those in his world.
James told me about his fellow SEALs and how he could now sense their pain and woundedness. I suggested that he sit with them and simply listen if they needed to talk.
He would grin at me and say, “If they could see me now, crying and admitting that I have such a big tender heart!” We laughed together, and I knew he was on his way home to himself and that Body Myth 4 no longer had him in its grip.
With up to one-third of our current population suffering from the effects of past trauma, learning to heal in this way is paramount for everyone. Doing so will change the trajectory of the lineage we unknowingly hand down to our children or inflict upon our partners and community.
In the attachment research world, Dr. Daniel Siegel names having a “coherent narrative” about one’s childhood as the biggest predictor of whether a traumatic attachment history will get unknowingly passed on to one’s children.4 A coherent narrative requires self-awareness and enough healing about our own childhood and attachment experience to be able to recognize and avoid repeating it with our own children.
This is hopeful because it says we can change the unconscious patterns of how we connect or not with those closest to us. Healing in this way also frees us up to manifest the gifts we were born to share with the world.
Body Myth 5: The Body Knows Far Less Than the Brain
I am continually mystified by the brilliant minds I know who second-guess their instinctual gut knowing, or their heart’s inspiration, or their bones’ deep clarity, and as a result drive themselves crazy. Most of us in the Western world are trained to trust our logical left brain and rational thoughts over our body.
In the last decade neuroscience has shown that the gut (or the enteric nervous system, which is called our “second brain”) makes more neurotransmitters than the brain that resides in our head.5 I recently read astounding research showing that the body registers incoming events before the mind or visual system can see them coming.6 Many of us remember circumstances when our body took a wise action that saved us before our mind had time to react.
And yet, Body Myth 5 remains epidemic in our culture, which I will be talking about in more detail throughout this book. The late Emilie Conrad, my wonderful colleague and friend, used to say, “Admit it, Suzanne. We in the bodywork and movement fields are still out in the barn. The rest of academia is up in the mansion discussing the future of humanity, and if we are honest, we are still out in the barn with the animals because of our focus on the wisdom of the body.”
It is time to move out of the barn! Again and again, I see evidence of the split between the wisdom of the body and the logical brain. This lack of understanding of our body wisdom wreaks havoc on our health and well-being and robs us of our potential for happiness and the juiciness and joy inherent in life.
Our bodies are naturally well-calibrated navigational systems once we learn how to listen to them and respect their assessments in any given moment. If we disrespect our bodies and second-guess their messages, they will go mute over time. The loss of our body wisdom leaves us vulnerable, as we are forced to navigate our life with only the signals from the brain and past experiences.
It is our present-moment sensory experience that provides the foundational data to the prefrontal area of our brain for the wisest decision-making possible. Without a conscious sensory connection to the present, we are forced to orient to the past.
People with unresolved trauma histories are at an even greater disadvantage due to numb, frozen, and painful places in their bodies, keeping them from accessing this wisdom.
Amazed and Dazed
Bartholomew is a brilliant physician and an excellent pediatrician whose mind has served him well. When he first entered my world, he was looking for answers to leg pain that had plagued him for years.
During our initial interview, I realized he was looking for a medical, left-brain reason for why his pain persisted even though his allopathic medical worldview had failed to explain it.
In his first craniosacral session, I tuned in to his body’s wisdom and gently took his leg and foot in my hands. He felt a growing shakiness inside, in the area between my two hands. As he tuned in to the exact area of his leg pain, things got even shakier and his leg started visibly trembling.
In order to help him understand what was happening, I briefly explained Dr. John Upledger’s “energy cyst” model, which describes how trauma memory in the form of disorganized, chaotic energy is walled off and encapsulated in the body in order to help the system deal with things that are overwhelming at the time of the trauma.7 I explained that when the time is right, the body naturally wants to let go of this chaotic energy so that it can function better again. I further reassured him that this is a natural body release process, so he could understand and relax into the shakiness and the other sensations that were occurring.
An actual memory surfaced about an accident that had occurred a decade earlier. While Bartholomew rested during a hike in a remote canyon out West, a huge branch fell, glanced off his head, and landed on his leg. He was in shock initially, and others helped to lift off the heavy branch. Bartholomew worried that he had broken his leg because the impact was so powerful, but in the end, he was okay and could hike out of the canyon on his own. He had long since left this incident behind, but his leg had not.
Bartholomew was slightly dazed and totally amazed! The trembling and release from his leg was undeniable. He felt ripples of new awareness enter him as the pain left his leg. When we were done, his pain level was significantly reduced, and it continued to drop.
When Bartholomew arrived for his next visit, his analytical mind was back in the driver’s seat. Even though he was still free from pain, he was second-guessing his experience. His left brain had once again taken over and his body’s wisdom had gone mute. I reminded him of exactly what had occurred in our session. It was as though he had amnesia about the process. It certainly did not fit any model he had studied in medical school.
I realized that he needed more body awareness, more inner-sensation experiences, to overcome this prejudice, so I taught him the Core Embodiment Process that I have been refining for years (see Exploration 2, pages 59–66). Bartholomew has now been doing this body-centered practice for several years. He no longer immediately questions his body’s wisdom. However, he still relies on his mind to corroborate what he is feeling, just to make sure it is real.
Wisdom Ignored at a Price
When Cassie arrived at my office, she was suffering with relentless shin and leg pain. She had recently run in a marathon, and in the second half of the race, her knees and shins had started to ache. She mistakenly thought, if she continued to run, her endorphins would take care of the problem. Instead, it grew steadily worse.
Cassie did not listen to her body but plowed on, letting her mind’s agenda override the obvious pain message telling her to stop. By the time she reached the finish line, Cassie was hobbling, and she had been hobbling ever since.
As we worked together, it became apparent that one of the reasons Cassie was not healing was because she was “angry with my stupid body for not doing what I wanted it to do.” Further, she was not giving her legs the rest they needed in order to heal due to her anger and frustration about how they should be behaving.
In her CranioSacral Therapy session, I held her shins and knees and tuned in to what was going on. The initial sensations under my hands felt really hot and inflamed. I asked her what she noticed when she dropped her attention down into her legs.
Cassie had a hard time getting there at first, but then she registered shock as she began to feel the heat. I explained to her that when tissue is inflamed like hers, no amount of willpower can heal the area if the person is not prepared to work with the body’s wisdom about what it needs.
Cassie went silent for a few minutes, and then she shared how her Asian immigrant family lineage was one of pushing through and beyond the needs of the body in order to survive. Willing herself to do more, go beyond, and not listen to her body was all she knew.
In Cassie’s family, the body was seen as the servant to the mind, whose sole purpose was to further the family and individual standing in their community. This attitude is almost epidemic in our culture today in many ethnic groups.
As I continued to hold her legs, she slowly allowed herself to recognize how her family belief system was impeding her healing process. We dialogued with her legs, and she made a promise to allow them to rest and heal, demonstrating how she valued them. She was able to see that resting did not equal weakness, but it actually was a sign of intelligence — body intelligence, that is.
Within weeks, her legs were well on their way to healing after months of inflammation and pain. With that, Body Myth 5 was dispelled. Cassie was hopefully on her way to greater body wisdom in the rest of her life as well.
Where Do We Go from Here?
These five body myths, or some combination, are alive and well in many people today. Take a moment now and consider which of these are hindering your life.
Awareness is the first step in letting go of them and making a new choice. Until we are aware that they are playing in the background or foreground of our lives, often driving our actions and decisions, we will be unable to choose anything different.
Of course, the second part of this equation is recognizing them as myths. These attitudes are not a part of our true nature. They are adaptations, compensations, and defenses against what has occurred in our lives and those of our ancestors.
When we can recognize these myths for what they truly are — myths — new horizons open up. New choices can be made. We are free to be who we are at a deeper, more authentic level. Then life is experienced at a richer level with more joy, more ease, more realness, and all that entails. Life does not become a rose garden, but it has more resonance with who we truly are at a soul level.
