During one of our sessions, I told Michelle, the kind patient woman who is helping me with strength training, that I could actually feel my triceps muscles.
“I want to really know my body!” I gushed. Feeling my triceps so clearly gave me hope that I could feel the rest of my body in this way.
I’m sorry to say I don’t recall her exact response and I want you to know that what I’m going to tell you I heard was entirely my interpretation. What we hear from others is merely our interpretation and thus may have little or no resemblance to what was actually said or done. Having warned you of my filter, I proceed to tell you I heard her sort of take a quick breath and say: “Well, good luck with that!” I didn’t quite know what to think of her reaction and felt surprised and a little disappointed with her response. At the same time I had an inking she was on to something.
After our session, I did what I usually do when I feel puzzled—I searched my library! I found The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living and didn’t have to read very far to begin unraveling the mystery. In Chapter 1, Dr. Hillary McBride, described two ways of thinking about the body that I thought might begin to explain Michelle’s response.
The first way, common in our Western culture, is thinking that our body belongs to us, much like we own our cell phones. When we believe our body is a possession, we say things like, “my body was really there for me” or “my body really let me down.” Thinking this way, our body is an object, a thing.
In the second way, we believe the body is alive, conscious, and indistinguishable from my ‘self.’ Body and self—cannot be separated. Describing the body and sensations this second way we say: this body is me. This sensation is me. Like a fish in water, one can’t live without the other.
When I said I wanted to get to know my body, I made my body an object. It was like I intended to look for an owner’s manual that would explain how to care for it. The manual would teach me what to eat. How much rest was needed. Considering the impossibility of knowing any of those, I started understanding more Michelle’s wise response. She was telling me that our work was a process. There was no owner’s manual.
I realized I no longer wanted to think about my body as a thing I owned that could easily be reprogrammed if I got to know it well enough. My body is a living breathing mystery – a system that is always changing.
Do you think of your body as an object you own or do you converse with your body as a living system? I’m still pondering this and would love to know what you think.
IMAGE: Probably last daisy for this year. Beautiful!
