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Want a Good Bedtime Story?
Our bodies are a great source of stories. Hidden in our muscles and corpuscles is a record of all our experiences and what we have made of them – the stories of our lives. Indeed, our bodies have been shaped, in part, by these stories. If we’ve been beaten down often enough, physically or otherwise, our chest may have a caved-in tendency or it may stick out in perpetual defiance. If we’ve “held our tongue” like we were taught in childhood, we may experience TMJ — facial pain caused by temperomandubular joint dysfunction — in our later years. If “hurry up” was our family’s mantra, as it was in mine,” a tendency to rush and its accompanying tension may take up residence in neck and tummy muscles, and more than the needed amount of adrenaline and cortisol is regularly cued up.
In a course I teach, called Writing Your Own Permission Slip, participants pay attention to their bodies through reflective and playful activities, then do some writing to discover the stories living there. Once on paper, the stories become artifacts, separate from the writer, and open to revision. As participants share their revelations and revisions, the community of witnesses in the class become midwives for new identities to emerge. A retired engineer in his seventies had lost all sense of joy or pleasure. His only remaining destiny, as he saw it, was to care for his wife who had Alzheimer’s. His sober expression and stiff torso confirmed this view. A therapist had diagnosed depression. In this man’s case, his body’s hidden story of playfulness and creativity was dusty on a basement shelf in the more remote corner of his personal library. In fact, he said he had never really played in his life, because he had to do farm chores and field work from his earliest years. In the class, we played catch and made faces and did other activities that re-activated the sensations and movement of childhood pleasures. The depressed man was slow to join in and couldn’t recall having had such experiences, but his body had not forgotten. The feeling of connecting bat to ball or of running from “Tag, you’re it” never goes away. It wasn’t long before, in an impromptu acting out of one class member’s wildest dreams of being queen of the jungle, the man with the no-play memory was on all fours at her side, purring playfully in loud tigerly style. His ability for imaginative playing with others had come back to life. By the end of the class, he had remembered the fun of playing in his school band and he wrote that he had decided it was time to take up guitar lessons. He also made plans to find a tai chi class. Our bodies, when attended to, have much to tell us that will free us. Another student in the class, who had suffered considerable discomfort for many years from breast enhancement, found the courage to reverse the surgery. In a class writing exercise, she asked her breasts to tell her their wishes, and (with her pen) they wrote a passionate request to her to be returned to their original size. In a circle of people who were honoring the history and wisdom of their bodies, she found the support to write a new chapter in her body’s story. My hope is
that in many intentional community circles we can encourage each
other to honor the stories our bodies want to tell, especially
as we get older. We can harvest their wisdom for the healing of
the individual and the inspiration of all. |
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Editor's
note: The author is a writer, speaker, and transformational educator.
Her forthcoming book, Body Odyssey: Lessons from the
Bones and Belly (available
from
This
massive archive in our somatic library is available for 24-hour
checkout. The longer we live, the more it seems to invite us in
for a look. If we take notice of what’s on the shelf
before pain and illness strike, we may find some very
interesting reading. We can even rewrite some of the stories,
potentially reshaping our identities and our lives. This
activity is especially powerful when shared in community.
