Wild Body
The best way I can describe what it was like when I pulled myself up off the floor is a pervasive scent of body odour.
Is that me?
I sniffed the air, caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror with wild hair slicked back on my head with sweat, eyes wide open, my voice hoarse. And something in me smiled.
I was primal. animalistic. untamed.
One thing about me is while I love somatic work, I’ve never believed in catharsis for catharsis sake. A good cry has the potential to overload the nervous system into collapse, and I’ve just always gravitated to softer approaches. I’ll intellectualize my feelings any day, but being in the body outside of noticing and making micro movements felt beyond what I’d signed up for.
Because of this, I have a tendency to collapse in the face of activation. I rarely mobilize my activation response, and if I do it’s probably to run away. I read in a textbook once that individuals with hyper mobile tendancies more often gravitate to social appeasement or collapse responses, that they aren’t often “fighters.” Even their tissues lend themselves more to falling apart than they do to fighting. And as a hyper mobile human myself, this made so much sense.
With all that in mind, it isn’t a free pass to become a fainting goat, and as such I’ve been working to activate my mobilization responses.
Hence how I find myself in a somatic release workshop where the primary objective was to shake, and growl, and get primal with it.
I don’t like being imperfect and I have a tight grip on control. I said recently I use control as a punishment technique: I can always get more rigid, tighten myself up. Release, that’s for the weak. Give me a good marination session and I can hold a grudge like nobody else.
At first the sway and side step felt natural, and not unlike the movement I invite students into in a buti class. And then we practiced growling, and self defence.
The noise that came out of my body surprised even me. I sounded scary. I immediately found my eyes darting around the room to try and find someone else who had energy that I could land in.
Cue every time I didn’t say no, went along with something I didn’t want, didn’t defend myself, was forced into something. Somewhere between growling deep from my belly (since my transplant surgery, with all my scars and cut nerves, one of the things I’ve lost access to and have been trying to reclaim is making any sort of noise that utilizes my deep core) and physically moving my body in a defence position, the emotions came.
We’re not hurting anybody. No one is here to get mad at you. This is just giving yourself an outlet so the emotions don’t distort the rest of your life.
I’m working on a keynote speech for an event next month on the stories of our body, and how we keep and metabolize these stories. Body stories, left to run rampant, distort how we move through our lives. And I’ve been living in a lot of distorted stories.
As I lay on the floor at the end of practice, the instructor spoke about body image. How we view ourselves, and despite ways we might try to adjust the story so we’re not passing down the same thing to our kids as was handed down to us, we’re still in the narrative. I hate my thighs into think of what your body can do not what it looks like all exist in the same larger picture. And until we get face to face with the story, until we contend with what we’ve stored inside our skin and we get real and honest, we keep distorting the story and passing it along.
I thought of all the narratives I’ve ever heard about medical trauma and living in a chronically ill body, and what it means to be a “good patient” and how this idea of cathartic release goes against what we have as a concept of what a good patient is. The idea of crawling around on the ground and growling after a doctor’s appointment feels counter intuitive.
But regardless of how my brain understood what happened, my body has its own story and if I don’t sit in the reality of that story I’ll keep looping, and distorting.
What if, in order to be a good patient, I first had to get a little bit wild?
