Bodywrithe

We go deep. Apart from the conscious part, there's the swirling undercurrents that pop themselves up when you night dream, when you daydream, when you create. Then there's the different layers, the different parts of your brain and body which sometimes can be at cross-purposes with each other. The limbic part, the one linking us to our deep ape ancestors.  Our bodies. We treat our bodies the way we've treated the earth - as dead living slabs, to be done with what we will.  But both our bodies and the earth have a language all of their own.

There are different dances you can do that don't even involve music or dance floors.  This latest one I tried, TAT, made my body writhe.

Christi Nielsen (creative commons)

Down in the deeps my body is scared of males. Up top here in my mind, while they can perturb me and even dismay me, I'm not scared of them the way I am in the part that I didn't even know was there.  My body in tandem with my limbic system trips me up at inopportune moments that have nothing to do with anything except memories that I have now forgotten. 

Last night I practised this simple technique. It's like others I've done.  They have all made me excited and in wonderment at my body speaking out and releasing the stuckness you knew was there.  Last night I brought to mind several recent incidents, all of which involved my partner, who in this instance is entirely innocent except for being a trigger.  I feel ashamed, the shame dripping down from my head through all my organs, dropping in wet clumps from my heart onto my stomach, looping down through my gut, gushing down my legs, running out the soles of my feet like piss.  This hot shame, as if I should somehow by now have dealt with all of this stuff. 

This stuff, this stuff, all of this stuff.  Some of it is from my own history, some from my parents, my grandparents and theirs, all the stuff passed down through the ages. Sometimes I wonder if some of it is from other people who appear to be entirely unrelated to me.  I mean, where do we stop and others start?  Where does I end? Sometimes, I think there is no stop and start.  Sometimes, I think we are all me, I am all you, and we are in some strange way our worldview has blinded us to, all together.  Walruses included.

God, I wish John Lennon was still here. 

This trauma is like a hidden layer that is almost invisible when I'm out in the daylight.  I can be myself without its interfering.  Then I go too far and suddenly up it pops, like one of those air-filled men that fly around outside shops selling vacuum cleaners.

Last night I allowed my body to do what it wanted to do.  This space for allowing seems to be a primary aspect when I do these sorts of exercises.  I have to sort of tell my body that it's okay if it wants to do its thing now.  Otherwise it sits patiently for decades, carrying its load.  It's not like it bursts into flail while I'm walking in the park or sitting at the footy.  I have to be alone, it has to feel safe, I have to say yes.

When I say yes, it beings its slow writhe.  In response to the technique I did, which is below, for about 20 minutes or so my body moved itself about in different directions.  No pinched muscles this morning, though it wouldn't be surprising if there was.  But then, my body doesn't jerk like the vacuum cleaner man when it's doing these gyrations.  It's so smooth in the way it moves, though I don't understand its dance. What is the meaning and the beginning of this arrow thrust of movement up my spine?  I can feel and see its progress, like the wind, by the way my prone body lifts up a little as the energy travels up, kind of like the way it looks when people have ECT, only not so violent.  Or the way when you orgasm.  The arrow keeps moving, travelling right up my back to the top of my spine, pushing up my shoulders, my neck, my head forward, on its way to my brain.  Being lifted, for a second, by electricity.  Gut and brain talking.

At another point the energy flows into my right shoulder, the one that's been a little sore the last few days, and it pools there.  It turns me slightly sideways on the couch, so that my shoulder is pressed into the cushion, and here it stays for 10, 20, 30 seconds.  I lie, submitted to whatever is going on here, trusting this body even though I am disappointed in its failings.  This is an oasis in a sea that taught me to do the opposite of trust.  This body, which is treated as an object, as a walking dead slab of matter by this stupid world, is speaking.

I wrote about this this morning.  Hopefully one day I can finally shake these traumatic reactions, I wrote.  Haha, shake these reactions.  I wrote without realising the deeper impact of those words.  Where does that term come from?  How did people know they had to "shake" something off?  Animals know how to shake it all of and continue on.  We are in the process of relearning what we've forgotten.