What is a body story?
Blessed am I as I navigate this part of my body story.
I wrote those words at the top of the page in my journal, paused. It was the way I immediately went to the language of “body story” to describe my experience. I’d just gotten released from the ER, where I received another diagnosis, another snap back to reality of how chronic illness seeps into my life.
And here I was, able to see this is the next layer of unfolding in my body’s story as it is being told.
What is a body story? I used the language of body stories to explain the work I do in the world long before I knew other practitioners also used the term. Working with chronic illness, with stories of grief as they relate to our bodies, I knew each physically held expression related to a grander story that was being unraveled.
Body stories, as more eloquently explained by other practitioners, are narratives of the subjects felt experience of the body, told from the inside out (Dr. Rae Johnson) and convey our body’s history, significant events and reoccurring patterns. Body stories, in essence, are how our bodies move through the world, the things they hold, the stories they tell, and they are told from the inside out.
My body story isn’t me telling you the story of my body by shoving language onto myself, but the other way around. My body story is told from the perspective of my body. It’s finding language for who you are in your body without the world telling your body what it has to be.
The world has a lot of ways of putting labels and identities onto people that may or may not be true. We have ways of putting people into boxes, and punishing them when they don’t fit those societally imposed narratives. I’m thinking of a conversation I had recently with a friend about themes like ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and more. All of these external narratives get pushed onto our body story.
Another thing about the body is your body doesn’t speak in English. It doesn’t speak in French or German or even sign language. Your body speaks in symptoms, patterns, sensations and feelings.
What landed me in the ER was both part of my body’s story (the events that took place there, how I was treated, the fears I had about not being believed because of the narratives society places on chronically ill and disabled individuals) as well as a communication of my body story. The body speaks through sensation, and the current sensations in my body were communicating a deeper issue.
When I’m working with people, even though the people I work with are really in tune with their bodies, the language of a body story is rarely used. The body is a thing to pathologize, diagnose, force upon.
“Our body and our personhood are so intimately connected that they can never be separated. We are not just a mind, or brain, carried around by a meat-puppet of flesh and bones.” (Dr. Hillary Mcbride)
To be honest, I don’t know how my story is going to unfold next. I could sit and hypothesize and make a plan, but all of that is taking me out of the present moment in my body. Venturing into the unknown is easier only because I have a relationship with my body. There’s a level of trust that is being built. There’s a level to which I trust the symptoms and sensations she is expressing are part of a larger story, and they are asking me to pay attention.
How might your worldview change if you looked at your body story? If you allowed your body story a seat at the table, instead of silencing and exiling? What is your relationship with your body, and what might need to change or what might you need to embody for you to become the person you want to become?
