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August 2023
It is humbling that the majority of my paid work exists beyond easy explanation. I trust the nature of the work I do. I also come from a family culture that promotes science above all other faiths. Even while I continue to train in anatomically-based techniques, much of what I feel to be happening is beyond my ability to explain in scientific terms. What transpires in the quiet time when my hands hold, reach, press, stretch, rest on another person’s body? Between the science and the felt sensation is a gap. I find myself in it when asked to speak about what occurs.
What is happening?
What would I say if I dared speak of what I feel and respond to within a bodywork session, without needing it to be backed by provable facts? I would reference loving attention. My honest response would arrive in words that are more textural than molecular. When, with a deep voice, I dare speak of the non-verbal realms that my hands, heart and gut understand, I ask people to suspend their disbelief in order to trust in non-linear processes and the power of attention.
My experience with bodywork is similar to the experience of art–of how it sends me to comprehension rippling beyond words. I imagine each of us has been changed by an experience of art that we cannot articulate but feel within our cells. For the most part, art is accepted as a portal to these non-verbal places of knowing in ourselves. Even while bodies are so palpably full of unexplainable mystery, many of us still grasp for logical understanding of what happens when we find ourselves in the caverns and cushions of our internal experience, especially while ignited by touch. Most of us want to know how touch is helpful on a tangible level.
Physical compression, when applied appropriately, summons more hydration to a restricted area. Increased hydration often increases range of motion within the fascia, muscles and bones. A nervous system can more easily rewire itself to incorporate shut- off or assumed-to-be restricted areas when innervation, circulation and motion are redirected there, both through my touch and through the movement and awareness of the person on the table. This is one reason why my touch invites more elasticity and fluidity into stiff and under-resourced areas. These are factors that heavily guide my choices of where and how to move my hands.
Dropping through layers of connective tissue and cavities, I follow lines of tension with my hands. I often make choices through an osteopathic lens: I move in the direction of ease. Rather than trying to force two parts away that pull towards each other, my hands will hold each point and then encourage them to continue in the direction they are taut, along the line of tension. This creates release in the area as the pressures change. Sometimes the body holds onto a restriction longer than it needs to and can gain more range of motion when manually reminded of how movement is now possible. With manual cueing and encouragement, such restrictions resolve and allow a return to healthy motility (the inherent unconscious movement of internal parts), which returns increased ease into the surrounding system. When persistent gripping dissipates, the body may gain enough new information to update its internal map. Our bodies change with movement. Our bodies are moveable. And hands are powerful tools.
There are layers to us that can be palpated through specific gradations of pressure. When I speak of pressure, there is a distinction between pushing and sinking. The ‘pressure’ I speak of is pressure that arrives with patience so that the body has time to “let it in,” to participate. Pushing past the speed of a tissue adjusting its tone can lead to it further squeezing in distrust. Sinking at the speed of trust opens doorways into deeper zones.
While I work I map the anatomy in my mind. The brachial plexus passes through here. Here is the origin of the powerful psoas. My logical, studied brain cues location, function, and pattern, and my hands and heart gather information in the feeling realm through moment-to-moment renewal of attention. There is firmness here, a pulling in of the tissue, a quivering release.
Yet I catch myself from being able to say that I am working with the liver because how could I actually be sure? I have learned techniques to release it. These techniques rely on my trained ability to modulate pressure amount and direction in order to move through the layers of connective tissue, cavities and tubes. But who am I to say with certainty that I did a liver release? This is where my felt experience comes in. Heat was released. There was more movement after. My hands were no longer pulled to the liver like magnets after the “release” was complete. This is what I can feel.
I often assume that when people ask what I picked up on, they are wanting the logic of the anatomically-mapped body. However, while I can give an answer accordingly, the anatomy studied from books originated with men in the 1500s who needed to separate spirit and body in order to justify human dissection in a world governed by the church. Purely by-the-book anatomical references will not get at what I felt to be happening. I can talk about the length of a client’s psoas as I was perceiving restrictions in their ASIS attachments and diaphragm. However, if I was being truly uncensored, I might actually say that I felt their diaphragm needed to cry a little and be held and heard, that their psoas needed the support to quiver with fear.
In western medicine we can explain a lot, which has led to incredible applications. Yet we do not know everything. Hovering on the periphery is the persistent element of the unknown. The hard-to-speak-of truth is that the intention and attention with which I touch have an impact. Love is at play in these sessions. Would I dare say this to a client? I was loving you. It is almost that simple. Love is an experience I have in my own body. It is also an energy that our bodies seem to drink in, with positive impact.
Scientific studies have shown that compassionate care (as defined by “the understanding and emotional resonance from…providers”) significantly enhances patient outcomes.(1) Other research involving MRI scans showed that patients who experienced “‘compassion—the action component of trying to alleviate another’s suffering,’” had reward pathways light up in their brains.”(2) In the realm of touch, a third source points to how there are nerve fibers in our skin dedicated to both detecting and responding emotionally to specifically kind and attuned touch from another person.(3) Daniel Goleman writes, “Touch is a means of communication so critical that its absence retards growth in infants.”(4)
During a session, I return and return with my attention in order to take in each change of state I perceive in the person I touch and adjust my hands accordingly. How do I feel these changes of state, if not through my intuition, my heart, the kind of listening we do with people we love? Love is a word that explains how I might sense to touch differently with each person. Love is what is happening, often. Yet never have I dared say this. I do not know most of my clients well, in their off-the-table personalities. So how could this be true?
Babies. Babies are an entry into understanding, perhaps. I imagine it may be easier for many people to see how a baby’s world is more sensation than personality, more cause and effect than choice. When an adult comes in with an idea of how a baby should be, perhaps based on other babies or their own needs in the moment and tries to coerce the infant into a different state, said baby will likely protest. Similarly, if this adult is preoccupied by their own neurosis while holding a baby, failing to quiet their distractions with past and future in order to tune to the state of this being in their arms, the baby may become insistent upon receiving something different, even while it cannot articulate what or how.
Babies are magnets for attention. They feel attention. They feel its absence. Attention is energy like light landing on their new skin. Of course we experience this with other animals as well. Your cat probably knows when you are looking at her. And vice versa. We feel attention. We are still learning so much about this.
Similar to caring for a baby, if I were to be pushy and self-driven in my attention to a guarded area of a client’s body, it would not have the same effect. Doing so, I would become part of the threat. I would be like someone yelling at a baby to stop crying. Loving, gentle, and listening attention creates safety for change to happen. My attention is felt in the quality of my touch. When generosity and curiosity move through us towards another, it is not thought- or science-driven. It is a melting, a streaming, a meeting.
This is the fine line in which much mystery unravels. When my hands move to an area of restriction, I must be a loving witness—simply a finger showing the way. Here we are, beyond language. In this meeting place beyond words, attention communicates. I meet an experience with recognition while standing enough out of the way for this body to move towards its own knowing, its own movement, its own health. This is love—standing out of the way but not too far, close enough to say “yes, yes, yes.” Here we are. You are not alone. You are okay. This is happening. What you feel is real. We do not need to understand.
It might seem that an adult is less like a baby than a book, than a machine, than a cell phone. But what I feel when I am touching another’s body, forty-five minutes into a session and having entered a non-verbal space, is much akin to holding a baby. When it seems safe to slip into a realm beyond rational logic and socialization, the underbelly of our being swells up, eager for space.
So how does this relate to an injury healing or a pain dissipating?
We accrue complex protection mechanisms throughout our lives, either already activated or quick to activate within us. They are all smart and good and necessary at one point. However, oftentimes our systems need reminders about other ways to relate to what is happening in our lives, once unsafe conditions have changed—in present time. Our bodies hold onto stresses as though they are still happening, often needing to be ushered into the current moment and other possible options of response. This is akin to when something happens earlier in the day that causes a rush of adrenaline and fear. Even though the event has resolved, the adrenalin and fear may persist into the evening or even the next day. It may persist so long that this person does not consciously remember what initiated the anxiety in the first place. Perhaps they haven’t slowed down to ask, “Do I still need to be afraid?,” and to shake and reset and establish safety again. If it goes on long enough, anxiety may become a new normal and this person may not realize they are being governed by stress responses at all. All the while, their body remains vigilantly taught, in a duration beyond what it is designed to sustain.
Sometimes titrating a past trauma may bring more discomfort to the surface before there is relief. For many, trauma creates an overload that leads to blocking against feeling as a way to keep going. In order to integrate and come alive in the present moment, this discomfort may need to be felt, with resources, in order to be released. The classic adage, “move in to move out” is relevant here. This doesn’t mean the discomfort will last forever. Quite the opposite. By feeling it, we allow it to express, move and transform. A lot of tension comes from trying not to feel pain. When we have the support to experience pain sensations—with curiosity rather than gripping—relief is more possible.
Every body inherently wants to return to health. Health is the freedom of movement within a system that wants to move. This is no mystery. And reproductions of anatomy cannot depict all of the murmurings that we feel within. My mapping mind, given free rein, may actually see a dark jungle of criss-crossing desires rather than the depictions of nerves and vessels, muscle fibers and attachments I have seen in reproduced images. Yours may perceive something altogether different. Here is the mystery. The mystery is that restriction can be felt that cannot be seen. So can love.
1) Watts, Emelia; Patel, Heli; Kostov, Anthony; Kim, Jason; Elkbuli, Adel. 2023, September. “The Role of Compassionate Care in Medicine: Toward Improving Patients’ Quality of Care and Satisfaction.” Retrieved 9/4/2023. chttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022480423001257
2)“Compassion: A Powerful Tool for Improving Patient Outcomes” https://stanfordmedicine25.stanford.edu/blog/archive/2019/compassionimprovingoutcomes.html
3) Halton, Mary. 2021, March 21. “Humans are made to be touched — so what happens when we aren’t?” https://ideas.ted.com/we-are-made-to-be-touched-so-what-happens-when-we-arent/
4) Goleman, Daniel. 1988, February 2. “The Experience of Touch: Research Points to a Critical Role” https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/02/science/the-experience-of-touch-research-points-to-a-critical-role.html
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This is often not talked about. Lying on a massage table is an atypical relational situation in most of our lives. Rarely do we receive touch from someone we do not know, albeit attentive and caring touch. Rarely do we receive attentive and caring touch for an hour or more. Rarely do we receive.
It is understandable if any of these arrangements stir discomfort. This can be challenging when we are most likely showing up to be soothed by warm hands and attentive presence. In bodywork, we seek relief from the confusion of our body’s messages. We may think we want these messages to go away when really we are seeking help in listening to them.
We need allyship in saying ‘yes’ to our bodies when our knee-jerk response to most painful sensations is ‘no!’ What does body allyship look or feel like? I am still answering this question, learning through experience. It does seem related to this “still-and-always-answering” quality, not needing to explain something away. In this context, an ally holds me or some part of me in the fullness of a multifaceted experience, not asking for anything to be different. This might look like lovingly hanging out with pain, excitement, overwhelm, disorientation, expansion, reorganization, and more. This may be within an individual organ or woven through in a larger chain or pattern.
In order for this kind of ‘holding’ attention to exist, a witness (be it within myself or someone else) must be connected to a sense of a larger okay-ness. Allyship is a meeting without a joining. When I join with discomfort, I become only that. I merge with it. Alternatively, when I am able to meet discomfort with a larger attention–one that bears witness from a place of okayness–the discomfort exists in a larger field of experience.
With more space, there is more room for that experience to move, to change. This change happens through the alchemy of acknowledgement rather than coercion. This is embodied acceptance, a simple internal message of ‘You are here, I feel you.’ Inherent in this relationship is a big listening, a bigger listening—this meeting rather than merging.
When we enter into body listening, such as in a bodywork session, our bodies ask us to feel. Even though we are often propelled by the quest for comfort, it turns out that when showing up to bodywork, we are actually showing up to feel. And this may not feel good.
Many of us commit a lot of energy to strategies for feeling less. These may include rushing, screen-time, social media, various forms of medication, staying very busy, stimulation, under- or over eating, consumption, any form of addiction. There is an internal experience we do not like or don’t feel we have capacity for. It becomes too much for us. However, in silencing it, we numb more than just the pain.
Imagine a classroom of young children. Some kids are being yelled at, told that they are not okay how they are. The children who are being praised register how they are treated differently. They continue to perform according to their praise. But now there is most likely fear propelling their behavior. The stakes are high.
As for so many of us, I react with micro or not-so-micro resistances to unfamiliar and uncomfortable squeezes, pinches, clenches, tugs, tingling, burning, stinging, humming, tightening. Resistance leads to tension, to tightening more. The pressures build. As in the classroom, in order to welcome comfort, let alone pleasure, I must welcome it all. This requires internal participation—directing awareness toward how I am internally meeting the sensations and corresponding reactions arising in each moment.
Sometimes a pain passes through me while receiving bodywork that threatens to take up my whole body, my whole awareness, the whole session. Often my first response is that I do not want this. I want to feel good. I want this to be different. I want this to be fixed. The thought “what is wrong with me” is quick to surface.
What if, instead of pushing these uncomfortable messages away, I met them? What if instead of going away, I move towards and with? I go in the direction that the squeezing, pinching, clenching, tugging, tingling, burning, stinging, humming, tightening is puzzling. I can follow it around the curve of its path, where my resistance would not let me go. This is a shift from pulling away to moving with.
More than my posture changing or injuries healing, it has been a marvel to learn internal trust from repetitions of this experience while on a bodywork table. When I follow these big feelings down the trails they are on, other things happen. I feel more. I feel differently. When I am soft toward a hard experience (supported by the extra hands and presence of the bodyworker also taking this stance), I become more than that hardness. It is included in a ‘community,’ so to speak. This instills courage. I begin to trust my okayness. It is a loop, because from this trust, I can more easily feel with less reaction to the untranslatable experiences of my body. There is often unexpected relief in ‘being heard.’
What would be different if we all knew that in feeling pain, pain changes? It is not that the injury magically heals or the atrophy fantastically reverses. Pain may persist. Change is not the same as erasure. I suppose what I am talking about is the difference between pain and suffering. Pain can be hugged, cared for. Within it are micro-shifts.It is a portal to feeling, which is a fluid state. Feeling brings us into the world. Suffering—which includes the thoughts and reactions we have to a concretized pain—takes over and separates us from life.
Writing this, I could better welcome the sense of bone-on-bone irritation in my cervical vertebrae. Avoiding bringing my full awareness here, I have been disliking this feeling. I have been pulling away from it, while also rubbing against it with repeated unconscious efforts to crack my neck, which have been escalating the irritation. When I met it–just now–with more curious (rather than aversive and avoidant) attention, a warmth crept in. This didn’t make the irritation go away. But it felt better-met. I can now feel an opening in the experience, which was previously walled off, not okay, impenetrable.
A feeling is more okay when I trust it is okay. When a child falls and an adult responds with immediate concern and fear, that child is more likely to feel pain and cry. So, too, within our bodies.
It is tempting to use acceptance like a once-over airbrush. Because I met my experience with acceptance yesterday, I’m all programmed for ease. ‘It’s all good.’ Acceptance becomes dismissal. But then the experiences keep coming. My belly aches, my head hurts, my heart breaks, I feel loneliness, sleepiness, the weird nerve pain down my right leg, the way it builds and I start to limp a little. What is the difference between a habitual sweep of ‘I accept’ and the lived acknowledgment of each new experience? It is easy to brush something off with ‘I accept.’ The distinction, here, is feeling. I have to slow down. I feel it. In saying ‘yes’ enough to feel it, I begin to accept it.
Acceptance is one of those words that has been used so much that it often summons associations before it summons experience. It can weaken from overuse. In fact, ‘acceptance’ is bigger than most things, because it holds it all. Acceptance does not hush, it enlarges. It is bigger than the individual wave. This harkens to the classic invitation to be the ocean rather than the wave. Waves can knock you down and take up all your vision. They are also finite, passing. They are part of something larger. That bigness is you.
Sometimes I lie down on a bodywork table and I am gripped, tentative, unsure. I feel this most often with new practitioners. For me, speaking up is a big part of how I build trust. Yet how do I really ask, ‘Is it safe to feel all this pain here, and in so doing, to relate to it differently, with more support for acceptance? It is okay to not know how, but to start to learn?’
In order to feel what I have previously been too scared to feel on my own, in order to feel more, and thus also, more goodness, I have to feel safe. I have to feel safe enough to move towards what I am habituated to running from.
Let’s talk about this more. Let’s bring honesty into the room and onto the table so that our bodies can relax their protection and be more fully here. Sometimes comfort does not arrive until discomfort, or protection, is welcomed and accepted. This takes time. There is no rushing a body. In slowness is feeling. Let’s meet ourselves.
How do I ask?
October 2022
Questions matter. A question can be a gift.
A question born(e) with attention bears a resonance. Attention exists first.
I imagine attention as a multi-directional flow. Paying attention, I notice in multiple directions—inside and out, behind as well as in front. Unto itself, attention can feel like a question. What is this? What is happening? What do I notice? What have I not yet noticed because of my conditioning? What else is there to feel here? How am I relating to that feeling? What about behind my back? What do my feet know? What am I positioning outside of the center or even on the periphery, due to how I am seeing?
Questions that feel like gifts are the ones that wake me up. They awaken me as both asker and receiver. Regardless of whether I am asking or receiving, these questions situate me for simultaneous listening and discovery.
When answering such a question, I often better hear myself. I join the asker in listening. Sharing with more presence, I discover rather than report. For instance, when a friend asks me about an experience, I take a moment to locate something honest and perhaps not-yet-fully- realized, rather than an easy and general response. This kind of sharing is vulnerable. I share something that is new, tender, not yet fully formed. Like listening, sharing in discovery is also a gift. It is a doorway to more honesty. This is reciprocity—I am invited more into myself through the attention-borne question, and through my honest sharing, I invite my friend into deeper intimacy.
A generous question invites us out beyond what we may know or expect to know. It is a question that responds to the moment while still wanting to learn the moment. A question borne on inquiry furthers.
Last winter I had the privilege of rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for 21 days. Other than my partner, everyone was a stranger to me. We were brought together by the practicalities of keeping each other safe in a landscape so vast that we encountered only ten other people over those three weeks. There was a changeover on day ten, in which two people hiked out and two hiked in. Sharing a raft with one of our new group members the next day, I noticed that he asked me a gift-question.
For the first time in those two weeks, I shared from a place of excitement, and with it, vulnerability. It was simple–he asked what brings me alive in my life. I shared about Authentic Movement, a practice I do at home. It lit up my being and also the day, to simply share that piece of me. I remembered more of myself by sharing, and I felt cared for through his demonstrated interest.
Most other questions I was asked during the trip (besides those posed by my partner) were information-gleaning. They were usually based on, “Have you done this thing that I like doing?” “No?” We are soon at the end of the conversation. Curiosity drops away. I enjoyed the three weeks immensely– the canyon had my heart– but I didn’t grow very close to anyone in the group. I missed generative questions.
I feel how easy it is to pass through life without asking generous questions. We become accustomed to the familiar ones—’How are you?’ ‘What did you do today?’ ‘What are you up to?’ They are grabbable. Fast food questions. They are not to be digested. Just like when we grab for food without listening to our body’s ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ grabbing for an easy question often means not listening to the question ourselves, as we ask it. We become disconnected from a desire to ask.
When this happens, questions are less likely to usher us toward reflection. When I am lazy in my question-asking, I am more likely lazy in my listening. On some level, I assume that I know what I will hear. When some part of me thinks she knows what she will hear, I am likely already moving onto something else. A lot of asking and answering can happen before I remember to listen.
When asked a question, it is easy to imagine that the person asking will not listen very carefully to my response if they are not listening to their own asking. I tend not to share what feels true or meaningful if I do not perceive listening on the other end. I protect my heart from the hurt of my honesty not being heard. When someone is not listening with curiosity, I don’t feel like sharing.
Lazy questions come in many forms. Sometimes lazy questions can come as the too-oft repeated curious questions. For instance, I have heard the question “What is alive for you?” so many times in particular communities that I begin to distrust that it is not just a new version of a script. A script indicates, more or less, how I should answer. I become resistant to questions riding in on non-transparent expectations of how I should respond.
There are ways to answer a lazy question generously, of course, by interrupting the predictable speedy pace with a pause and an honest reply. Should I answer with disarming honesty rather than polite succinctness? I may throw the whole conversation off if I do: that was not how this was supposed to go. Now we must improvise.
The speed of social anxiety often compresses the space for curiosity. Walking with a friend I haven’t seen in a while, when I struggle to slow down before engaging, I fire off questions such as “What are your plans this summer?” and “What have you been up to?” I genuinely want to learn about my friend and yet I haven’t regulated my own excitement enough to access a question with care. When I am quick, I choose timeline questions, outline questions. Knowing about their summer locates me in a very general sense of their life, a short-hand for catching up. Watching myself reach for plan-related questions, I feel the pang of how hard it is to enter into intimacy. It is easier to stay just outside, even when what I want is to enter.
What is the difference between laziness and slowing down, or rest? In somatic realms, this is akin to feeling the distinction between collapse and yield. Yielding maintains openness to new information. With softness, new experiences can be let in. Collapse is a closing down. When I am collapsed, I am less available to feel what is here.
So how do I transition away from this speed of interaction which, in its quickness, pushes me into expectation? How do I segway into a slower pace, where response rather than expectation inspires? For me, new questions do not necessarily show up on their own. They emerge when I tune to the tone of inquiry. Inquiry both probes and receives. There is a balance. Here is the same thing, again: When I ask a question, I have a responsibility to listen for my own interest. This matters. Listen, ask, listen, ask, listen.
What do I hear if and when I listen to myself as I ask someone, ‘How are you?’ Do I hear myself repeat how I have heard this before, in past scripts? Or am I indicating something more specific to the moment? If so, how do I lean into that specificity? Now I am tugged intently into the effort of clarification. What do I mean by ‘how are you?’ For this particular person in this particular moment? Where is my care located in asking? Do I want to hear what is good? Do I want to hear what is raw? Do I want to hear what they haven’t yet heard themselves? Does it not matter what I hear or whether we move somewhere together? Can I communicate any of this, explicitly?
Specificity leads to more connection. When I hear that someone wants to go somewhere with me or is wondering about something very specific in my life, I feel cared for. When I feel cared for, I want to engage. I want to play. I feel curious and open. We enter intimacy.
On my first date with my partner, I noticed how he inquired. He didn’t ask me the question I asked him. He paused. He arrived at a new one that he, seemingly, genuinely wanted to ask. It wasn’t a volley. I noticed his pacing and so I also slowed myself down, especially in the space between responding to his question and asking him one in return. I didn’t want him to feel that I was shooting one back out of etiquette, out of habit, just to get through. I wanted to truly ask. And that slows things down. Without naming it, we somehow felt and established a different question asking culture than I had experienced much before. There was attention in the rhythm because there was attention in our listening. This includes listening for the question.
I suppose if I were truly present, it wouldn’t matter what question I asked. My presence would be the question. “Who are you?” would usher me into open curiosity and resonant listening each time. “What is happening?” would bear enough renewed listening to last a lifetime. What if a conversation was the same question over and over? With enough attention, perpetual change is revealed.
My partner introduced me to a practice much like this, called ‘Inquiry Practice.’ For ten minutes, I ask him the same question. This question could be: “What are you afraid of?” “What is home?” “Who are you?” “What do you long for?” “What do you love?” He lets his answer be new each time. I say “thank you” and then ask, with the same words, again. Then we switch. I am often surprised. The repetitions reveal the many ways to hear one question. Answering unveils the spiraling, multiplicitous nature of what may feel to be true in a given moment, in response to a given question.
I am a bodywork practitioner. When I place my hands on someone else’s body, the tone of my touch is impacted by whether I ask a question with my contact. With my touch I ask their body, “Where are you pulling towards?” I may lift their legs and slowly traction, decompressing their spine. I engage slowly enough that I can listen for what part of them responds—what resists, what yields. My question is a way of communicating through my touch that I am not here to fix or change but rather to listen and to be led. With a listening tone I try not to superimpose what it is I am looking for. There is room for surprise, for emergence. I ask the same question at the end of the session to learn how the response has changed.
A bodywork mentor and friend calls questions that do not need to be answered ‘open questions.’ With bodywork, we are often inquiring into non-verbal territory. In an experience that is either new or beyond-words, a search for an answer can shift me back into a more known paradigm and away from open inquiry. What happens when we look for an answer? Questions that do not need to be answered concretely or immediately can open up worlds.
This is much like riding down the Colorado River. Early on in the three weeks in the canyon, I realized I wanted to ask the river questions. Very quickly I discovered that I had to ask without a need for an answer. Listening in the canyon had a longer time scale, just like the rocks themselves. Listening for what the water might share over time, I felt the profundity of staying with one question without trying to hear, or perhaps concoct, an answer. The question does not always need to be a new one. And yet, the question will always be different, even if I use the same words to ask it.
A generous question ushers me into learning. I do not know where the answer will come from. I do not know what an answer is.
A question born(e) with attention bears a resonance. Attention exists first.
I imagine attention as a multi-directional flow. Paying attention, I notice in multiple directions—inside and out, behind as well as in front. Unto itself, attention can feel like a question. What is this? What is happening? What do I notice? What have I not yet noticed because of my conditioning? What else is there to feel here? How am I relating to that feeling? What about behind my back? What do my feet know? What am I positioning outside of the center or even on the periphery, due to how I am seeing?
Questions that feel like gifts are the ones that wake me up. They awaken me as both asker and receiver. Regardless of whether I am asking or receiving, these questions situate me for simultaneous listening and discovery.
When answering such a question, I often better hear myself. I join the asker in listening. Sharing with more presence, I discover rather than report. For instance, when a friend asks me about an experience, I take a moment to locate something honest and perhaps not-yet-fully- realized, rather than an easy and general response. This kind of sharing is vulnerable. I share something that is new, tender, not yet fully formed. Like listening, sharing in discovery is also a gift. It is a doorway to more honesty. This is reciprocity—I am invited more into myself through the attention-borne question, and through my honest sharing, I invite my friend into deeper intimacy.
A generous question invites us out beyond what we may know or expect to know. It is a question that responds to the moment while still wanting to learn the moment. A question borne on inquiry furthers.
Last winter I had the privilege of rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for 21 days. Other than my partner, everyone was a stranger to me. We were brought together by the practicalities of keeping each other safe in a landscape so vast that we encountered only ten other people over those three weeks. There was a changeover on day ten, in which two people hiked out and two hiked in. Sharing a raft with one of our new group members the next day, I noticed that he asked me a gift-question.
For the first time in those two weeks, I shared from a place of excitement, and with it, vulnerability. It was simple–he asked what brings me alive in my life. I shared about Authentic Movement, a practice I do at home. It lit up my being and also the day, to simply share that piece of me. I remembered more of myself by sharing, and I felt cared for through his demonstrated interest.
Most other questions I was asked during the trip (besides those posed by my partner) were information-gleaning. They were usually based on, “Have you done this thing that I like doing?” “No?” We are soon at the end of the conversation. Curiosity drops away. I enjoyed the three weeks immensely– the canyon had my heart– but I didn’t grow very close to anyone in the group. I missed generative questions.
I feel how easy it is to pass through life without asking generous questions. We become accustomed to the familiar ones—’How are you?’ ‘What did you do today?’ ‘What are you up to?’ They are grabbable. Fast food questions. They are not to be digested. Just like when we grab for food without listening to our body’s ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ grabbing for an easy question often means not listening to the question ourselves, as we ask it. We become disconnected from a desire to ask.
When this happens, questions are less likely to usher us toward reflection. When I am lazy in my question-asking, I am more likely lazy in my listening. On some level, I assume that I know what I will hear. When some part of me thinks she knows what she will hear, I am likely already moving onto something else. A lot of asking and answering can happen before I remember to listen.
When asked a question, it is easy to imagine that the person asking will not listen very carefully to my response if they are not listening to their own asking. I tend not to share what feels true or meaningful if I do not perceive listening on the other end. I protect my heart from the hurt of my honesty not being heard. When someone is not listening with curiosity, I don’t feel like sharing.
Lazy questions come in many forms. Sometimes lazy questions can come as the too-oft repeated curious questions. For instance, I have heard the question “What is alive for you?” so many times in particular communities that I begin to distrust that it is not just a new version of a script. A script indicates, more or less, how I should answer. I become resistant to questions riding in on non-transparent expectations of how I should respond.
There are ways to answer a lazy question generously, of course, by interrupting the predictable speedy pace with a pause and an honest reply. Should I answer with disarming honesty rather than polite succinctness? I may throw the whole conversation off if I do: that was not how this was supposed to go. Now we must improvise.
The speed of social anxiety often compresses the space for curiosity. Walking with a friend I haven’t seen in a while, when I struggle to slow down before engaging, I fire off questions such as “What are your plans this summer?” and “What have you been up to?” I genuinely want to learn about my friend and yet I haven’t regulated my own excitement enough to access a question with care. When I am quick, I choose timeline questions, outline questions. Knowing about their summer locates me in a very general sense of their life, a short-hand for catching up. Watching myself reach for plan-related questions, I feel the pang of how hard it is to enter into intimacy. It is easier to stay just outside, even when what I want is to enter.
What is the difference between laziness and slowing down, or rest? In somatic realms, this is akin to feeling the distinction between collapse and yield. Yielding maintains openness to new information. With softness, new experiences can be let in. Collapse is a closing down. When I am collapsed, I am less available to feel what is here.
So how do I transition away from this speed of interaction which, in its quickness, pushes me into expectation? How do I segway into a slower pace, where response rather than expectation inspires? For me, new questions do not necessarily show up on their own. They emerge when I tune to the tone of inquiry. Inquiry both probes and receives. There is a balance. Here is the same thing, again: When I ask a question, I have a responsibility to listen for my own interest. This matters. Listen, ask, listen, ask, listen.
What do I hear if and when I listen to myself as I ask someone, ‘How are you?’ Do I hear myself repeat how I have heard this before, in past scripts? Or am I indicating something more specific to the moment? If so, how do I lean into that specificity? Now I am tugged intently into the effort of clarification. What do I mean by ‘how are you?’ For this particular person in this particular moment? Where is my care located in asking? Do I want to hear what is good? Do I want to hear what is raw? Do I want to hear what they haven’t yet heard themselves? Does it not matter what I hear or whether we move somewhere together? Can I communicate any of this, explicitly?
Specificity leads to more connection. When I hear that someone wants to go somewhere with me or is wondering about something very specific in my life, I feel cared for. When I feel cared for, I want to engage. I want to play. I feel curious and open. We enter intimacy.
On my first date with my partner, I noticed how he inquired. He didn’t ask me the question I asked him. He paused. He arrived at a new one that he, seemingly, genuinely wanted to ask. It wasn’t a volley. I noticed his pacing and so I also slowed myself down, especially in the space between responding to his question and asking him one in return. I didn’t want him to feel that I was shooting one back out of etiquette, out of habit, just to get through. I wanted to truly ask. And that slows things down. Without naming it, we somehow felt and established a different question asking culture than I had experienced much before. There was attention in the rhythm because there was attention in our listening. This includes listening for the question.
I suppose if I were truly present, it wouldn’t matter what question I asked. My presence would be the question. “Who are you?” would usher me into open curiosity and resonant listening each time. “What is happening?” would bear enough renewed listening to last a lifetime. What if a conversation was the same question over and over? With enough attention, perpetual change is revealed.
My partner introduced me to a practice much like this, called ‘Inquiry Practice.’ For ten minutes, I ask him the same question. This question could be: “What are you afraid of?” “What is home?” “Who are you?” “What do you long for?” “What do you love?” He lets his answer be new each time. I say “thank you” and then ask, with the same words, again. Then we switch. I am often surprised. The repetitions reveal the many ways to hear one question. Answering unveils the spiraling, multiplicitous nature of what may feel to be true in a given moment, in response to a given question.
I am a bodywork practitioner. When I place my hands on someone else’s body, the tone of my touch is impacted by whether I ask a question with my contact. With my touch I ask their body, “Where are you pulling towards?” I may lift their legs and slowly traction, decompressing their spine. I engage slowly enough that I can listen for what part of them responds—what resists, what yields. My question is a way of communicating through my touch that I am not here to fix or change but rather to listen and to be led. With a listening tone I try not to superimpose what it is I am looking for. There is room for surprise, for emergence. I ask the same question at the end of the session to learn how the response has changed.
A bodywork mentor and friend calls questions that do not need to be answered ‘open questions.’ With bodywork, we are often inquiring into non-verbal territory. In an experience that is either new or beyond-words, a search for an answer can shift me back into a more known paradigm and away from open inquiry. What happens when we look for an answer? Questions that do not need to be answered concretely or immediately can open up worlds.
This is much like riding down the Colorado River. Early on in the three weeks in the canyon, I realized I wanted to ask the river questions. Very quickly I discovered that I had to ask without a need for an answer. Listening in the canyon had a longer time scale, just like the rocks themselves. Listening for what the water might share over time, I felt the profundity of staying with one question without trying to hear, or perhaps concoct, an answer. The question does not always need to be a new one. And yet, the question will always be different, even if I use the same words to ask it.
A generous question ushers me into learning. I do not know where the answer will come from. I do not know what an answer is.
Entering the water
Summer 2022
Hush. Wherever you are, find a quiet you can rest in. There is no wrong way to rest.
Even as someone who has committed substantial attention toward honoring my body’s rhythms and thus building internal trust, I still at times catch myself relating to my body as a nuisance. I try to squeeze needs into time slots. I will rest in a timely way. I will rest in order to get back to doing other things.
But rest is an ocean. Its edges are in motion. It evaporates, it settles. It arrives with built-up weight. It comes in waves. Its bigness sings of the thin margin between death and life. Is rest not a disturbing reminder that we must step away from the activity of life, eventually for always?
Resting asks us to release both yesterday and tomorrow. This can feel scary. Tracking time is often woven into a sense of safety. Could stepping away from business become obliteration of self? (Don’t tell anyone I took the afternoon for a three-hour nap and then watched leaves move while sun filtered through. How indulgent. What am I doing with my life?)
Fear of rest is a distrust of rhythm—of cycle, of change.
I (like many, I imagine) tend to wait until my body demands rest. Then I am forced to pass the barrier of resistance with oft-gritted teeth. This happened when I had a concussion, when I had a bike accident, and then when recovering from post-covid fatigue this summer. Once through the tunnel that extends between the strong, active version of myself into the soft, only-do-one-thing-today, listening version, I lose nothing.
How do I trust my body's needs? Through conscious experience, my body takes time to re-learn that I will listen rather than respond with restriction, denial and aggression. It is finally then that my body no longer needs to communicate sideways and by always getting louder.
Reprogramming around the non-negotiability of rest is similar to healing from an eating disorder. A friend who struggled with an eating disorder eventually re-built self-trust by eating no-matter-what every time she felt hungry. She committed to this for three months. She knew that her mind would be endlessly inventive in its justifications for why not to eat. And so as a rule, she had to ignore it all. As an experiment, she trusted her body over her mind. This was doable for three months, even while it was terrifying. And it worked. The messages of her body shifted. Her relationship to food steadied in a lasting way. She learned to trust her hunger. She learned to listen.
What would my body learn if I rested when I was tired? It may have cultural consequences that feel scary to consider. When my body says she’s tired, I rest. ‘But imagine how many commitments I might miss.’ ‘Imagine how much less I might ‘do’ in my life!’ My brain revolts.
In a dance class, Anya Cloud shared a score that she was introduced to by dancer Derrel Jones. Taking the High Intensity Interval Training structure of 30 seconds exertion (in the case of the class, it was 30 seconds disorientation) and 10 seconds rest, we examined how rest, and also exertion, change throughout many cycles. I learned that what-rest-is can surprise me.
That is how, despite this growing prioritization of rest, I can contend with being enchanted by feeling spent and then accessing new pools of energy when I simply keep going. There is often more when I think I am empty. Exertion often leads to satisfaction. Does this contradict what I have been saying?
With more nuance, what and how I rest can become fluid, non-fixed. There is a difference between experimentation and denial. When I disdain my body’s asks, I am unable to hear the tonal differences between them. Nuance emerges after permission. Only once I move beyond my internal debate about whether rest is okay can I be creatively receptive. Then I can explore how rest may manifest amidst exertion.
In this learning, I might need to start with broader strokes. ‘I am tired, I rest.’ As I learn the worlds of rest and tiredness, I start to discern the variance in each moment.
If I did not do this work now—of moving toward rest and meeting her as a friend rather than a foe—then, if I am lucky to live long, I expect to arrive in elderhood with overwhelming loss. I will likely be less flexible in my ability to reorient to new body values at that point. I will likely have decades behind me of building a sense of self through the capacity to control my body. This has to break down at some point. Why not now?
If rest is, at least in part, a surrender to death, I would like to rest so that I may more fully live.
As counterintuitive as it feels to my pusher and doer–my biker, swimmer, hiker, adventurer–I want to dare to enter the darkness of rest. I want to do this on a regular basis while I am still strong and young. Parts of me may need to die a little. (They may resist this until they are held, encouraged in their surrender.) I want to grow bigger through softness. I want to let life lap at my frayed edges.
The rest can rest.
Even as someone who has committed substantial attention toward honoring my body’s rhythms and thus building internal trust, I still at times catch myself relating to my body as a nuisance. I try to squeeze needs into time slots. I will rest in a timely way. I will rest in order to get back to doing other things.
But rest is an ocean. Its edges are in motion. It evaporates, it settles. It arrives with built-up weight. It comes in waves. Its bigness sings of the thin margin between death and life. Is rest not a disturbing reminder that we must step away from the activity of life, eventually for always?
Resting asks us to release both yesterday and tomorrow. This can feel scary. Tracking time is often woven into a sense of safety. Could stepping away from business become obliteration of self? (Don’t tell anyone I took the afternoon for a three-hour nap and then watched leaves move while sun filtered through. How indulgent. What am I doing with my life?)
Fear of rest is a distrust of rhythm—of cycle, of change.
I (like many, I imagine) tend to wait until my body demands rest. Then I am forced to pass the barrier of resistance with oft-gritted teeth. This happened when I had a concussion, when I had a bike accident, and then when recovering from post-covid fatigue this summer. Once through the tunnel that extends between the strong, active version of myself into the soft, only-do-one-thing-today, listening version, I lose nothing.
How do I trust my body's needs? Through conscious experience, my body takes time to re-learn that I will listen rather than respond with restriction, denial and aggression. It is finally then that my body no longer needs to communicate sideways and by always getting louder.
Reprogramming around the non-negotiability of rest is similar to healing from an eating disorder. A friend who struggled with an eating disorder eventually re-built self-trust by eating no-matter-what every time she felt hungry. She committed to this for three months. She knew that her mind would be endlessly inventive in its justifications for why not to eat. And so as a rule, she had to ignore it all. As an experiment, she trusted her body over her mind. This was doable for three months, even while it was terrifying. And it worked. The messages of her body shifted. Her relationship to food steadied in a lasting way. She learned to trust her hunger. She learned to listen.
What would my body learn if I rested when I was tired? It may have cultural consequences that feel scary to consider. When my body says she’s tired, I rest. ‘But imagine how many commitments I might miss.’ ‘Imagine how much less I might ‘do’ in my life!’ My brain revolts.
In a dance class, Anya Cloud shared a score that she was introduced to by dancer Derrel Jones. Taking the High Intensity Interval Training structure of 30 seconds exertion (in the case of the class, it was 30 seconds disorientation) and 10 seconds rest, we examined how rest, and also exertion, change throughout many cycles. I learned that what-rest-is can surprise me.
That is how, despite this growing prioritization of rest, I can contend with being enchanted by feeling spent and then accessing new pools of energy when I simply keep going. There is often more when I think I am empty. Exertion often leads to satisfaction. Does this contradict what I have been saying?
With more nuance, what and how I rest can become fluid, non-fixed. There is a difference between experimentation and denial. When I disdain my body’s asks, I am unable to hear the tonal differences between them. Nuance emerges after permission. Only once I move beyond my internal debate about whether rest is okay can I be creatively receptive. Then I can explore how rest may manifest amidst exertion.
In this learning, I might need to start with broader strokes. ‘I am tired, I rest.’ As I learn the worlds of rest and tiredness, I start to discern the variance in each moment.
If I did not do this work now—of moving toward rest and meeting her as a friend rather than a foe—then, if I am lucky to live long, I expect to arrive in elderhood with overwhelming loss. I will likely be less flexible in my ability to reorient to new body values at that point. I will likely have decades behind me of building a sense of self through the capacity to control my body. This has to break down at some point. Why not now?
If rest is, at least in part, a surrender to death, I would like to rest so that I may more fully live.
As counterintuitive as it feels to my pusher and doer–my biker, swimmer, hiker, adventurer–I want to dare to enter the darkness of rest. I want to do this on a regular basis while I am still strong and young. Parts of me may need to die a little. (They may resist this until they are held, encouraged in their surrender.) I want to grow bigger through softness. I want to let life lap at my frayed edges.
The rest can rest.
Resting and responding - or how this time of global social distancing is like having a concussion
April 2020
I was forced to take a long break from everything normal last spring. Before the two concussions that knocked me out for five months, I had never truly felt my brain as a muscle. As a bodyworker and dancer, I have studied the nervous system. I learned about it on a conceptual level and was beginning to understand the experience of nervous system regulation — what it feels like to be safe, what it feels like to be frozen or wanting to flee. Healing from a brain injury taught me so much more about what it means to respond to these messages. What is ‘normal,’ really? What does it mean to pause, to change?
Having resources to pause is a privilege. So many cannot pause right now, either because of lack of essential support (money, food, shelter) or because they are stepping up again and again to the frontlines, often without a safety net or appropriate protection. The labors of care continue to be under-compensated and largely unseen. The ill and disabled are indispensable. Disability justice advocates have long been sharing the wisdom of slowing down, seeking alternative and essential adjustments to the inhumane capitalist norms.
After I hit my head (both times!), a community came together to support me. The generous economic, social and environmental support I received was necessary. I learned that I could not have a concussion and just keep going on my own. I was lucky to be living in a rent-free situation in which I could continue a minimum of manual, screen free labor for housing. After a month I was able to resume seeing bodywork clients, allowing my vulnerable state to teach me more about what it is like to fear and crave a healing process. I was lucky enough to get around on foot for months on end, including to patches of woods. I long for the accessibility of these resources for others.
So what happened to me? There is a panic that grips, biologically, when our bodies sense pain. Something is not right here! I had previously felt the fear that can take over in response to and protection of injury. Never before, though, had I experienced the degree to which my concussed system screamed, ‘Alert, alert!’ Off and on throughout my life, I have struggled with fairly severe depression, anxiety, and related disorders. On the other side of five plus years of healing work, with more access to my power and more availability for intimacy, I can see it all as a gift — a gift that I can now share through empathy and understanding. I thought I was in a pretty practiced place of self-loving. The weeks and months following my concussions, though, were some of the hardest of my life.
I experienced gut-wrenching helplessness as most of my familiar coping mechanisms and strategies for satisfaction, now triggers for concussion symptoms, were stripped from me. Of course screen time was out of the question. As was going anywhere that was not completely silent and mostly dark. Reading, talking, dancing, moving my head (a strategy I often use to shake up my perspective), even thinking would make me dizzy, nauseous and freaked. Added to this mix of symptoms was magnified depression and emotional dysregulation. I spent a fair amount of time in complete panic and resistance. I wanted to be saved. I was terrified to be alone, which I was. I didn’t know what to do with myself or how to calm the terror in my nervous system. Rest is what I needed, but I was ironically buzzing with the response of bruised nerves.
How does this all relate to Covid-19, social distancing protocols and economic collapse? It relates because we are being asked, as a global community, to pause everything familiar. We are being asked to feel the muscle of society, to track the ways we are interrelated and thus affecting one another. We are in a swath of time that will end, of course, but the duration is unknown. It is a moment in which most of the ways that we take care of ourselves are stripped away — social connection, work, leaving the house, and many forms of exercise, with parks and gyms closed. This undeniable need for ‘pause,’ and all of the ways we are each resisting it, feels similar in my body to concussion time. In this case, it is manifesting on a global scale.
I have joked that the concussion literally grounded me. It became clear that not doing all of the things was how I was going to heal. Ultimately, I ended up finding unparalleled contentment and ground in the simplicity of what the moment necessitated. I was forced to take care of myself on a level that I had not yet learned. There was no point in pushing through the parties that I was no longer enjoying, due to noise sensitivity or general overwhelm. I had an excuse for putting myself first and many opportunities to practice it. (Reading Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown helped!) I learned how not to do the things that led to more suffering because I was forced to pay attention to what those were and how they affected me long-term.
I sat on a porch swing for hours, letting my attention be fuzzy. I had to soften even my ingrained propensity for making the most of a moment. Just noticing and appreciating details around me would add a tonality of trying, enough to make my brain hurt. So eventually I stopped, figuring out how to soften in response to sensations in the muscle of my brain. Staring at flowers became a favorite form of connection. I imagined the daffodils seeing me. And I rested like that. Lying in the dark and quiet began to feel like intimacy. I surrendered to these new forms of solace only after living through — experiencing — the consequences of resistance and panic.
I have read articles urging academics and the unemployed to let go of perfectionism during this time, to let go of productivity, to surrender expectations for excellence. Even so, most of us are filling our days with screen time. We do this in the absence of physical connection and community, seemingly turning blind eyes to the effects of screen time, even in a normal life, of disconnecting us from our bodies, abstracting our identity, numbing or adrenalizing our nerves. I know this desperation. We can’t help reaching outward, overwhelmed by the abnormalcy of this situation. I have felt the panicked question of what to do with myself in all this space and time, in all this change. ‘If I just take all of the zoom movement classes, I’ll be connected. If I post my meaningful experiences to social media, I will be included!’ Even if all the gatherings occur on isolated computer screens across the nation, I will belong. I know, based on how I feel at the end of a day full of screen time (dull and grumpy), that this moment is asking me to slow down and learn new ways of connection with the world, the world as felt first through my nervous system.
So how do we truly stop? How do we rest within such uncertainty? How do we surrender to what we do and do not have control over right now? How do we connect to ourselves when many of our familiar resources are not currently accessible? And how do we get resources to those who do not have the safety net they need and who deserve to pause in this moment?
In healing from a brain injury, I learned to surrender to and ultimately enjoy the quietness of non-effortful, non-productive alone time by first feeling the pain I caused myself when I was trying — trying to do anything that ran against body signals of alarm. Enough people told me that I wasn’t going to heal if I pushed through symptoms that I began to use them as reliable signals to which I adjusted my state and my choices. Just as now, we are being asked to stay home, to wash hands, to keep each other safe. We are all capable of pushing through symptoms, resisting restrictions, resisting reality. What is harder, and far more rewarding in my experience, is practicing quick responsiveness to our body’s requests — for more or less.
There was a particular moment of desperation last spring in which I had a breakthrough. I realized that I could trust that what felt good in my nervous system was in fact a path toward recovery. It seems obvious, but I realized that if I listened to and responded, as quickly as I could, to what created comfort in my body, I was participating in a process of healing. If doing what felt calming would lead to fewer headaches, it seemed worth trusting the logic. In the woods, I never had headaches, yet I was shaming myself for how desperately resistant I was to being alone. In that moment, I decided to trust that if my body was telling me that time in nature was healing, my desire to be with people might also be part of that same wisdom, and not, in fact, some weakness that I needed to resist. Maybe I am a relational being and others will help me heal! So I let myself reach out. I let myself need people. I wore earplugs and sunglasses and hung out quietly on the sidelines. I soaked in the comfort of being surrounded by others, and I saw my relationships change. Unfortunately we are not able to surround ourselves with others right now, but we can receive (and give) support. What feels good? What are the supports that you need right now, to reach for the new ‘norms’ that this moment calls for?
I was substantially transformed by my concussion. People have reflected a felt difference. Layers I was using to protect myself were stripped away. Because I had to drop out of life as I knew it and was skilled and lucky enough to seek and receive support, more of me is here now. Our lives are being interrupted and disrupted. How will this moment of societal pause teach us more about what our bodies and our cultures are asking for, in order to heal?
I see the dangers and possibilities of these Covid-19 times. The air is literally clearing. At the same time, the federal government is pulling back emission regulations, detaining immigrants and the incarcerated, and deporting children. Profiteers are taking advantage of states, hospitals, and scared people. In this pause, we cannot stop responding — protecting and standing up for the world we want to see. A healthier world, one of safety and responsiveness for all, is made even more clearly necessary by Covid-19 (for those of us fortunate to not have felt it glaringly obvious before). We are interconnected. Capitalism, the separator, is being revealed again as inherently and dangerously flawed. These times are an undeniable reminder of this, and of our true connectedness. For many, ideas that seemed unfathomably radical are now looking possible and even necessary.
The messages are here if we stay sensitive, and change is possible if we act quickly to see that resources are provided to those who need them. In the debate about whether anything will be changed from this experience, I offer this: our willingness to move toward and welcome the sensitivity and interconnectedness of this moment will lead us to more health — for all. I cheer you on in your methods of resting and responding. By resting and responding as we each are able, we can move towards cultures that celebrate interconnectivity, safety, and liberation.
Having resources to pause is a privilege. So many cannot pause right now, either because of lack of essential support (money, food, shelter) or because they are stepping up again and again to the frontlines, often without a safety net or appropriate protection. The labors of care continue to be under-compensated and largely unseen. The ill and disabled are indispensable. Disability justice advocates have long been sharing the wisdom of slowing down, seeking alternative and essential adjustments to the inhumane capitalist norms.
After I hit my head (both times!), a community came together to support me. The generous economic, social and environmental support I received was necessary. I learned that I could not have a concussion and just keep going on my own. I was lucky to be living in a rent-free situation in which I could continue a minimum of manual, screen free labor for housing. After a month I was able to resume seeing bodywork clients, allowing my vulnerable state to teach me more about what it is like to fear and crave a healing process. I was lucky enough to get around on foot for months on end, including to patches of woods. I long for the accessibility of these resources for others.
So what happened to me? There is a panic that grips, biologically, when our bodies sense pain. Something is not right here! I had previously felt the fear that can take over in response to and protection of injury. Never before, though, had I experienced the degree to which my concussed system screamed, ‘Alert, alert!’ Off and on throughout my life, I have struggled with fairly severe depression, anxiety, and related disorders. On the other side of five plus years of healing work, with more access to my power and more availability for intimacy, I can see it all as a gift — a gift that I can now share through empathy and understanding. I thought I was in a pretty practiced place of self-loving. The weeks and months following my concussions, though, were some of the hardest of my life.
I experienced gut-wrenching helplessness as most of my familiar coping mechanisms and strategies for satisfaction, now triggers for concussion symptoms, were stripped from me. Of course screen time was out of the question. As was going anywhere that was not completely silent and mostly dark. Reading, talking, dancing, moving my head (a strategy I often use to shake up my perspective), even thinking would make me dizzy, nauseous and freaked. Added to this mix of symptoms was magnified depression and emotional dysregulation. I spent a fair amount of time in complete panic and resistance. I wanted to be saved. I was terrified to be alone, which I was. I didn’t know what to do with myself or how to calm the terror in my nervous system. Rest is what I needed, but I was ironically buzzing with the response of bruised nerves.
How does this all relate to Covid-19, social distancing protocols and economic collapse? It relates because we are being asked, as a global community, to pause everything familiar. We are being asked to feel the muscle of society, to track the ways we are interrelated and thus affecting one another. We are in a swath of time that will end, of course, but the duration is unknown. It is a moment in which most of the ways that we take care of ourselves are stripped away — social connection, work, leaving the house, and many forms of exercise, with parks and gyms closed. This undeniable need for ‘pause,’ and all of the ways we are each resisting it, feels similar in my body to concussion time. In this case, it is manifesting on a global scale.
I have joked that the concussion literally grounded me. It became clear that not doing all of the things was how I was going to heal. Ultimately, I ended up finding unparalleled contentment and ground in the simplicity of what the moment necessitated. I was forced to take care of myself on a level that I had not yet learned. There was no point in pushing through the parties that I was no longer enjoying, due to noise sensitivity or general overwhelm. I had an excuse for putting myself first and many opportunities to practice it. (Reading Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown helped!) I learned how not to do the things that led to more suffering because I was forced to pay attention to what those were and how they affected me long-term.
I sat on a porch swing for hours, letting my attention be fuzzy. I had to soften even my ingrained propensity for making the most of a moment. Just noticing and appreciating details around me would add a tonality of trying, enough to make my brain hurt. So eventually I stopped, figuring out how to soften in response to sensations in the muscle of my brain. Staring at flowers became a favorite form of connection. I imagined the daffodils seeing me. And I rested like that. Lying in the dark and quiet began to feel like intimacy. I surrendered to these new forms of solace only after living through — experiencing — the consequences of resistance and panic.
I have read articles urging academics and the unemployed to let go of perfectionism during this time, to let go of productivity, to surrender expectations for excellence. Even so, most of us are filling our days with screen time. We do this in the absence of physical connection and community, seemingly turning blind eyes to the effects of screen time, even in a normal life, of disconnecting us from our bodies, abstracting our identity, numbing or adrenalizing our nerves. I know this desperation. We can’t help reaching outward, overwhelmed by the abnormalcy of this situation. I have felt the panicked question of what to do with myself in all this space and time, in all this change. ‘If I just take all of the zoom movement classes, I’ll be connected. If I post my meaningful experiences to social media, I will be included!’ Even if all the gatherings occur on isolated computer screens across the nation, I will belong. I know, based on how I feel at the end of a day full of screen time (dull and grumpy), that this moment is asking me to slow down and learn new ways of connection with the world, the world as felt first through my nervous system.
So how do we truly stop? How do we rest within such uncertainty? How do we surrender to what we do and do not have control over right now? How do we connect to ourselves when many of our familiar resources are not currently accessible? And how do we get resources to those who do not have the safety net they need and who deserve to pause in this moment?
In healing from a brain injury, I learned to surrender to and ultimately enjoy the quietness of non-effortful, non-productive alone time by first feeling the pain I caused myself when I was trying — trying to do anything that ran against body signals of alarm. Enough people told me that I wasn’t going to heal if I pushed through symptoms that I began to use them as reliable signals to which I adjusted my state and my choices. Just as now, we are being asked to stay home, to wash hands, to keep each other safe. We are all capable of pushing through symptoms, resisting restrictions, resisting reality. What is harder, and far more rewarding in my experience, is practicing quick responsiveness to our body’s requests — for more or less.
There was a particular moment of desperation last spring in which I had a breakthrough. I realized that I could trust that what felt good in my nervous system was in fact a path toward recovery. It seems obvious, but I realized that if I listened to and responded, as quickly as I could, to what created comfort in my body, I was participating in a process of healing. If doing what felt calming would lead to fewer headaches, it seemed worth trusting the logic. In the woods, I never had headaches, yet I was shaming myself for how desperately resistant I was to being alone. In that moment, I decided to trust that if my body was telling me that time in nature was healing, my desire to be with people might also be part of that same wisdom, and not, in fact, some weakness that I needed to resist. Maybe I am a relational being and others will help me heal! So I let myself reach out. I let myself need people. I wore earplugs and sunglasses and hung out quietly on the sidelines. I soaked in the comfort of being surrounded by others, and I saw my relationships change. Unfortunately we are not able to surround ourselves with others right now, but we can receive (and give) support. What feels good? What are the supports that you need right now, to reach for the new ‘norms’ that this moment calls for?
I was substantially transformed by my concussion. People have reflected a felt difference. Layers I was using to protect myself were stripped away. Because I had to drop out of life as I knew it and was skilled and lucky enough to seek and receive support, more of me is here now. Our lives are being interrupted and disrupted. How will this moment of societal pause teach us more about what our bodies and our cultures are asking for, in order to heal?
I see the dangers and possibilities of these Covid-19 times. The air is literally clearing. At the same time, the federal government is pulling back emission regulations, detaining immigrants and the incarcerated, and deporting children. Profiteers are taking advantage of states, hospitals, and scared people. In this pause, we cannot stop responding — protecting and standing up for the world we want to see. A healthier world, one of safety and responsiveness for all, is made even more clearly necessary by Covid-19 (for those of us fortunate to not have felt it glaringly obvious before). We are interconnected. Capitalism, the separator, is being revealed again as inherently and dangerously flawed. These times are an undeniable reminder of this, and of our true connectedness. For many, ideas that seemed unfathomably radical are now looking possible and even necessary.
The messages are here if we stay sensitive, and change is possible if we act quickly to see that resources are provided to those who need them. In the debate about whether anything will be changed from this experience, I offer this: our willingness to move toward and welcome the sensitivity and interconnectedness of this moment will lead us to more health — for all. I cheer you on in your methods of resting and responding. By resting and responding as we each are able, we can move towards cultures that celebrate interconnectivity, safety, and liberation.
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