body joy

It’s mid-afternoon and I feel like moving my body, but instead I return phone calls, wipe down the kitchen counter, sort through my daughter Lilly’s school papers. I haven’t really moved in nearly two weeks, at least in any meaningful way, and I’m in “the box,” a place of parched fear, harsh over-analysis, and sour self-criticism. I find myself here about five or six times a year, each time allowing life to push me faster than I can keep up spiritually and emotionally. Then I narrow my focus to the “just do it” bandwidth, and when I lift my head, I find I need a big burst of passion and perspective, but I’m afraid to move toward it. The longer I am in the box, the more afraid I am, because moving is painful and joyful, and the tightness has become a familiar, if unsatisfying, way of being.

I know what will free me: to allow my body, not my mind, to express what I am feeling. Just moving, not to burn calories or tone my thighs or perfect a yoga pose, but to breathe and shape my impulses, to jerk and scream and lunge and feel life moving through me. Conscious movement (for me, anything from yoga to spinning and moaning) leads me to initiate an intimacy with myself, an intimacy that gives me vitality, the intimacy I crave.

Many of us get into the box, isolating ourselves from our bodies. I recently led a weekend retreat for 22 women focused on rest and inner listening, which included a fair amount of movement. The participants had come hoping to recapture a spark of joy, a sense of self free from “shoulds” and to-do lists. The movement exercises proved to be the most challenging part of the retreat for several women, and the most life-changing for them.

In the first exercise, I asked the group to ask their bodies (not their minds) to show them how they felt in their everyday lives. The circle erupted into jumps, runs, grabs, marches and falls. Then we paused, breathed, and noted how it felt. I asked the group, “How is your sacred break?” It looked like this: graceful swaying, arms open and outstretched, slow deep breathing. The contrast began. But as we continued the exercise with different questions and expressions, I saw one member of the group, Kit, run out of the room and several other women barely moving.

On a break, I found Kit on a bench overlooking the city. “How are you?” I asked. “Scared,” she said. “I feel like there’s a roar inside of me. I want to let it out, but I’m afraid of what might happen if I do.” We talked about giving herself permission, being kind to herself, taking things at her own pace, the most important advice from her when she befriends the wisdom of the body.

Walking back to my cabin later, I marveled at how compellingly real our fear can feel, how seemingly impenetrable in its accumulation. Not just a box, but a fortress. I asked Camille Maurine, author of Meditation Secrets for Women, movement teacher, and my guest at the retreat, “What are we so afraid of?” “Consciousness is a great mystery,” said Camille. “That we can be aware of our own existence is a wonder, but awareness is also a mixed blessing. Awareness of being alive brings awareness of death, and the more aware we are, the more we feel. Movement puts us in touch with that wonder and awe, through the sensation, through the breath, and that can be a terrifying awakening.”

The retreat went wonderfully: movement, journaling, and quiet time outdoors slowly worked miracles, peeling away our layers of fear, rush, and self-criticism. I noticed how much younger we all looked and how much more laughter filled the center. We were discovering how exciting it is when we regain our juice to live, our own life force, when we open our arms and abandon our somatic routines.

After dinner on the second day, Elizabeth told me this story: “When you asked us to move in the first morning, I froze. I didn’t want to look stupid or stand out. But then I had an experience that changed everything. I took a walk afterwards.” from our class, and the young lady who lives here joined me. We stopped to watch a horse being shod, and she brought me a handful of flowers and said, ‘I’m so lucky to live here!’ As she said this, her body squatted down and she got up again: a spontaneous movement! I thought: ‘This girl didn’t ask herself how to express herself or if it was acceptable. She just moved.’

“Later in Camille’s class, when she asked us not to move until the urge came from within, I thought of that girl. I froze for five minutes, determined not to move until my body was ready, reliving every moment. awkward moment of my teenage years, all the times I had learned to shut down physically. When the urge finally came, it was so exciting. My body was breathing me in. It was like my mind was a bystander, and as I watched, it was my body that was watching. He would tell me. He would tell me stories. When I finished one, I would just sit still and still, and then another story would come out. It was impressive.”

You can only be the person your body can handle you to be. Most of the time, we don’t realize that we’ve huddled into ourselves, shoulders slumped, chest concave, unable to take a deep breath. Stuck in repetitive and limping ways of moving and breathing, certain possibilities in life are closed to us. But if we are able to feel our feet on the ground, our expansive chest, our relaxed breathing, our body capable of swaying and softening, a whole new way of being opens up to us, with new options for action and connection.

I’m back home in my living room, reminding myself, reminding my body of the lessons reinforced over the weekend. I stretch out on my yoga mat, close my eyes, turn my attention to my breath, allow my exhalation to be longer than my inhalation. I silently recite a mantra, “God breathes me.” I remember that fear can only exist when I project myself in time. Fear needs time. What is here, right now, in my body, in my sensations?

I ground my energy, taking root deep into the earth, allowing myself to feel that I am, in fact, in a body. I get into the moment, I drop the fight against myself, I drop the stories about how I will always be a neurotic, worried dervish or that it doesn’t matter how I feel when other people are starving. I breathe and wait until my body is ready to communicate, until the urge to move comes from within: some gentle yoga poses, then dance, then rest in child’s pose. I am letting my body remember itself.

My fears and worries coalesce into smaller and smaller particles, and I move in the space between them, experiencing that moment of joy when breath and body come together and I allow what wants to become to come, without being forced or forced. mediated by my mind. I stop to write in my journal from time to time: snippets about new ways of listening to my daughter, an idea of ​​a character in my novel. I listen and move…seeing, asking and listening through my body to a new perspective.

SIDEBAR:

This simple exercise helps my body, not my brain, tell me how to move.

1. Get into Child’s Pose: Kneel on the floor, knees hip-width apart. Lean forward with your belly resting on your knees and your forehead on the floor. The position of the arms will depend on comfort: either place them at your sides, palms up; stretched out in front of you, palms on the ground; or, my favorite, elbows on the ground, hands in prayer position, either in front of you or “tent” over your head.

2. Silently repeat “I’m being breathed.”

3. Ask your body “How would you like life to move through me right now?” There is no need to force a response. Just rest in the confidence of the child’s pose, being breathed in, content to let your body do the talking.

4. Give in to your body’s prompts to move, rather than your mind’s instructions: You can roll on the floor, get up and dive, swing, sing, or shout. The point is to give expression to whatever wants to move through you.

5. Follow these impulses to a natural ending point. Return to child’s pose and rest in a moment of gratitude.