the invitation of pain
I thought I could force my way out of symptoms.
If I found the magic combination of grit, will, determination and rigid control I could make all my symptoms disappear. It’s an idea I’ve unpacked for a long time, with threads tracing back to colonization and the idea that the body is something to be dominated.
I know why I got the message too. As a child, I was handed the idea that my disease relied on strict control, with zero wiggle room, and the alternative was death. As a child, I interpreted this message as control = safe and symptoms = out of control = death.
I woke up this morning symptomatic. Blame it on the weather, on a stressful day at work the day before or a less than ideal night of sleep but my first instinct was to root into anxiety. What had I done to cause this and what could I do to fix this?
It was this line of thinking that completely took me out of my embodied experience and into a mental narrative. My mind felt safer than my body. But in jumping out of my body and into my mind, I was bypassing the wisdom in my body and locking myself into the anxiety loop. All I’d done was trigger another fight response, only this time what I was fighting against was me.
The truth of my body was that I had been engaged in a dynamic where there was a power imbalance, and the shock of this was still registering in my body. I was trying to seek safety in the only way I knew how, which involved my body “throwing all these symptoms.”
As I sat with this knowing, I began to unpack a few truths. The first being the way I had been told to meet my body, what society and medicine and the world had taught me about my body and my symptoms, weren’t necessarily true. There wasn’t anything “wrong” with me. There was something asking for attention. But if I’d been hyper focused on the fix instead of the story, I would have created deeper rupture and missed the opportunity for repair.
What if I was never broken? What if healing wasn’t something I had to white knuckle my way to? What if all of it was an invitation?
I want to tell you that after this breakthrough, my symptoms resolved. (they didn’t.) I want to tell you that it became so much easier to sit with my symptoms and be in my body after I realized what they were trying to say (it didn’t.) I was still sad and lonely and frustrated and felt out of control and powerless.
We can use somatic tools and nervous system regulation techniques to try and force our way to healing too. There isn’t a tool out there that is going to save you from yourself. The only way through is straight through (and all those other cliches people say but are actually true)
I’m trying to allow myself the messy middle of the narrative. What happens when we accept the invitation to arrive in the guts of our story? What sort of truth emerges?
I’m co-leading a workshop at the end of this month with a dear friend of mine, Megan, from BeCeremonial, on this very thing. Come join us as we dig deeper into our embodied stories, the grief around them, the societal expectations and rituals to feel into our own body stories. Find out more here: https://www.beceremonial.com/events/rituals-for-body-grief/
