"He Lived at a Little Distance from His Body."

That’s what James Joyce says about Mr. Duffy, in his short story “A Painful Case.”⁣⁣ I think many of us have worked out a similar arrangement. ⁣⁣ ⁣⁣
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We’re often alienated from our own bodies. Instead of inhabiting them, we become hyper-vigilant (or half-awake) brains, dragging around unfamiliar and uncooperative meat-sacks.⁣⁣
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How does this happen?
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For starters, it’s so easy to get caught up in the noise and tumult and To Do lists. It’s not unusual for us to pay much closer attention to what’s happening on our little screens than to what’s going on inside of us. ⁣⁣
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We have smartphones and dumb bodies.⁣⁣
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Or perhaps we disconnect from our bodies as a coping strategy, because they carry the scars (visible and invisible) of old hurts and painful conditioning.⁣⁣
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Even those of us who pay hyped-up attention to our bodies and do all the exercises and drink all the organic smoothies may be just as disconnected. That is, more driven by shame-based shoulds and comparative anxieties than real attunement to the signals our bodies continually send us about our needs. ⁣⁣
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We can get to the point that our baseline is skewed. A certain amount of tension and uneasiness just feels “like us.” A close friend once said that he was scared to get a massage, because he was afraid that it would relax him too much. He wasn’t sure who he would be without his nervous energy.⁣⁣
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Paying attention to our body can cue us into mental and spiritual conflict and dis-ease that’s existing just below the threshold of consciousness, so subtle that we’ve normalized it.
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Sometimes when a coaching client is having a hard time articulating a feeling state or a complex knot of beliefs, I’ll ask them locate it in their body, maybe even give it a shape, color, and pressure. And then discussion of the body sensation provides an opening—perhaps triggers a memory.⁣⁣
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⁣Once, as part of an intro class to regulating the nervous system, I was doing a breathing exercise. It didn’t have any kind of visualization or inquiry component: just pay close attention to your breath, and don’t take the next one until your body asks for it. I did it for just a couple of minutes and then, spontaneously, was racked with sobs. ⁣⁣
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I had no idea that was coming—the teacher hadn’t warned us in advance. But there was a big cache of unshed tears hidden in there, and attunement to my body gave me access to it. And you can bet that stored sadness had been showing up in other ways as I went through my day.⁣⁣
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Some very effective approaches to healing trauma are body-based rather than mind- or story-based. When we have a trauma response, there is a whole bunch of hard wiring that gets activated. Sometimes, it may be more productive (with skilled support) to allow your body to follow its own wisdom and complete the physical action that was interrupted in the trauma, than to rehash all the accumulated details and feelings and beliefs. Less talking, more shaking. ⁣⁣
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Early on, I was almost exclusively focused on the “story” side of healing. Get your head / attitude / beliefs / intentions right, and the body will follow. I’ve since come to see that as a one-sided, even impoverished view of the human ecosystem. ⁣
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The body and the mind / spirit each offers a door to the other side, and things work better if we travel easily back and forth between them, and stop thinking of them as separate. They are dynamically interwoven parts of the whole that is you.⁣⁣
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Stop. Right now. Take a breath. Get in touch with the fact that you are a body located in a particular space at this specific moment in time. What’s going on in there? ⁣⁣
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Feel the ground under your feet or the chair supporting you. Tune into your jaw. We typically carry a lot of stress there. How tight or loose is it? What's the feeling behind the tension? How about your neck? Your lower back? ⁣⁣
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How about your eyes? They’re always on, and we’re always looking at something else through them. Rarely do we put our attention directly on them. They might feel really tight and tired. As the poet David Whyte says, “When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.” Give them some love, and note the change that follows. ⁣⁣
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Trauma is a full-scale bodymind event, and so is healing. ⁣⁣
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Duffy, it’s time to pull it together.⁣