The power of involving the body to ask it questions--

allowing it to really feel and name them

Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash

Peter Levine is someone who does extensive work with trauma-healing from the standpoint of somatic healing. Body healing work—involving the body to feel its feels and to use that as a tool of working through traumatic experiences.

I know this. I am familiar with his work—Waking the Tiger and In An Unbroken Voice, Trauma and Memory.

And yet, I never did this, tried it on myself. Really did the practice. I’ve read extensively about it.

I was instructed to do so in therapy yesterday and holy fuck—-

All while talking to my therapist and answering her questions, narrating my life, externally processing, and I just broke down and bawled.

I had to identify the pain of my losses, where they were in the body, what color, texture, shape they were.

It perhaps sounds silly and meaningless, but getting to name what I was feeling from my body, allowed me to sit with and process the emotions longer. (Usually, though I feel deeply, I then just move on quickly, to thinking about them.)

Afterwards, I burped. My therapist said my body was processing and allowing the emotion to pass and move through the body.

After doing this a few times, I felt so much lighter. I was calmer.

I am amazed.

There were other patterns of behavior and family junk I talked about, of course, but then—-

My therapist said the next time you can’t sleep, Danielle, pay attention to your body. Ask it what it wants and listen. Stay there for a moment. Dwell.

I said do you think my thoughts and my head are getting in the way and that’s why I can’t sleep, she said yes—

It perhaps sounds silly, I know, in this very cerebral culture we live in. I definitely have dwelled there a long time and often, what I do. And our over-reliance on Cognitive Behavior Therapy. New neural pathways. Train your brain. And all of that is very important, indeed. But—

We’re not only brains. We are bodies. They hold stories and trauma and wounds and emotions too that need to be processed.

On the way home with my very sleep-deprived self, I decided to do an experiment:

I kept asking myself questions about what my body was feeling. I listened. I paid attention. I adjusted when my body was more comfortable. I laughed and smiled at myself and took in the sensations.

I chuckle now to write this because I frequently say in my classes and work that we are disembodied as a culture.

Well, me too—

And the more I engaged with my body, the calmer I became.

I had my first real and extensive conversation with my body.

I relaxed and I cannot overstate how unrelaxed, tense, and anxious I have been lately. So this was huge. I even felt myself falling asleep because I was so relaxed.

I was and am astounded.

I knew this—cerebrally. I mean I do theatre and meditation and emphasize embodiment in cultural rhetorics. I practice yoga.

I have two of Peter Levine’s books on Somatic Healing sitting on my dining room table now.

But I didn’t give myself a chance. And it carried those emotions with them.

The body does indeed keep score. I truly believe that trauma cannot be treated or divorced from the body’s imprints that it has left. You need to work through those.

And, like my therapist said last night—we are not taught to process emotions. This is partly why I am so glad that my cousin is raising his young son with books like The Boy With the Big Big Feelings, to be able to learn some language and hopefully have better practices then we were taught.

It’s strange because as a forty-year old woman I know my body a lot better than used to, externally anyway, then I used to—as a woman in my twenties and thirties.

And yet, I never really knew the internal part. I guess I didn’t think I could. I thought the mind, the cerebral, more important.

And we’re in a busy culture. We move fast.

I move fast and think fast, read and talk and write fast. But—

There is value in slowing down. I know this. I forgot. I didn’t give it its proper attention.

So, folks—I am on a new journey toward healing, to learning about my inner landscape, the hidden emotions in my inner world. To heal, grow and transform.

Ask your body what it feels the next time you can’t get out of your head. Stay there. Dwell. Ask to name its colors, texture, shapes, and what it wants you to know.

Listen.

You may be surprised.

I sure as hell was.