The legacy in our body

As I started to deepen my own somatic awareness, and with it my practitioner skills, I got introduced into somatic bodywork. A deeper skill set that enables a somatic practitioner to not only work with the body, but on and through it too. It’s essentially a practice of creating openings in the body’s armouring bands (areas in our bodies where we constrict or open) using touch, breath, and somatic conversation. 

The occiput and mandibular bands for example are bands that circle our eyes, jaws, and chin area. Those bands typically relate to our outward oriented self, the social self. Think of the automatic smile, the strained jaw, two feet ahead life perspective likely induced by a laser focused eye gaze.  Other big ones are our pelvis and chest bands. The practitioner's role is to bring forward heightened somatic sensibility through touch to help the client uncoil these bands to let the energy run. Ultimately supporting the body to open in service of one’s desire. 

Makes sense right? It’s really not rocket science. At least I didn’t think so. It’s only till I had a few experiences myself that my skepticism was given a run for its money. I wanted to shoot the messenger (the somatic bodywork modality), but it was really the message that I was resisting. I still didn’t fully trust that our body holds the answers. Despite making a career out of somatic work, I still held lingering fears of fully surrendering into my body’s wisdom. What if I truly didn’t depend on that which is outside of me for a solution? What if my body is actually leading whether I chose to believe it or not?

Today, I stand corrected and I bow my head to my body ever more. 

The skeptic that I am

I typically hold a rather reserved view when trying new things. I’m not sure if it’s pragmatism or cynicism, but I definitely developed an aversion to speaking in absolutes when it comes to new things I learn. One, because I don’t believe any approach is fundamentally good or bad, it’s a matter of how I choose to relate to it. Two, because I learnt to adopt a malleable self that’s open to change in the presence of new information. Consciousness or whatever we want to call it, is not so much about finding answers as much as it’s participating in something that’s always unfolding with open curiosity. 

And so when starting my journey with bodywork, skeptic Zeena came online. The good news is, she’s always accompanied by beginner's-mind-Zeena, ready to soak up the knowledge regardless and make up her mind later. I listened attentively from the incredible Stacie Haines and Richard Strozzi Heckler. In and of itself, a learning opportunity I don’t take for granted. 

My entire body lit up every time something they said landed like a golden truth. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this when you hear something so on point that you want to jump in agreement. My body knew the floodgates of stored sensations were about to be opened. 

At the Strozzi Institute, their biggest thing is that you don’t learn to become a somatic practitioner intellectually, you learn by becoming one in your body first and foremost. We practice an equal amount in the practitioner role as we should in the client role. In other words, you don’t just put in the number of hours in supporting others, you have to receive those yourself too. In making knowledge embodied, you can practice with true integrity. You speak from the felt experience. 

Opening to aliveness

I filed my first bodywork session in the ‘nothing to write home about’ cabinet despite experiencing significant release and visible openings in my face and stance as someone more centered and open. I remained curious nonetheless, not so much because I was eager for a specific destination, but because I’m committed to being a student of the body. My body. What unfolded in the bodywork sessions I received after that first time had me really reckon with the legacy that sits in our body. 

It’s truly profound how the body knows exactly how to unfold when given a safe container to do so. When we get out of its way. There’s much that unfolded that I don’t feel ready to transcribe the details of, but I do want to share a few things I’m integrating. 

The first is that unexpressed anger festers. There’s a cap I’ve put on expressing anger, and while in earlier years it came out in bouts of unfair projections, today I realized I make very little room for it. Granted there’s less that makes me angry, but there’s almost this overriding that happens in service of a more ‘regulated’ state of being. A word popularized in today’s self-development vernacular, but one that can be extremely dismissive of one’s own experience in favor of staying calm.  Creating a form of hierarchy of preferred emotional states. So much is missed when we skip over the sympathetic response of anger without fully acknowledging the sensational reality it creates. Our mind might have gotten over it, but our body continues to reverberate with it. 

The second thing is that as I worked my way through the body, the process is not so much of becoming as much as it is of remembering. It’s opening back to myself before the layered beliefs, habits, stress, and trauma began to shape my view of the world and with it my identity. It’s a visceral feeling of remembering the wildness, innocence, unfiltered expression that resides inside. As a woman (I’m sure there’s a different experience for men that I would be so curious to hear about), but as a woman that remembering of the force, creativity, tenderness and power that resides in my body and womb. It pulsates with energy and a thrust for more of life. I remember the innate changing cycles and seasons inside me. Really feeling into them. Feeling the mother, the wild woman, the innocent girl living inside me. An experience so beautifully linked to our biology and hormonal expression.

But lastly, and most profoundly, it is how the context and environment we grew up with lives in our body. Palestine, longing for home, the ‘other’ I never confronted, all of it contributed to the shape I hold. I met the parts of me that are deeply angry, the ones that just want to go back to a place I was never in, but it was in me. The parts of me that intricately felt how unfair it all is. The bottom line is that the experience of race, culture, gender, whatever it is lives in the body, and shapes so much, so much, of our present experience whether we are aware of it or not. This work make you aware, and choice follows awareness.

What becomes possible?

It’s one of the most powerful questions my teachers always ask upon experiencing an opening in the body. My journey into somatics has me slowly and most beautifully open to my full expression in increments. It started to wake up parts of me that had been dormant for a longtime. Whether that’s the volume of my voice, my sense of confidence, my ability to turn words into action, or my reorientation towards pleasure. 

Everything becomes possible when we change the way we relate to our bodies. When we lean into the primal language it speaks in, the language of sensation. Of images and memories. Of movement. That gear switch from leading life cerebrally to engaging our body is life changing. It’s scary because we think we will lose control, but the illusion of control is perhaps the biggest truth we have to reckon with when making the choice of meeting our bodies.