The Choice To Be Touched by the World Around Us
Physical sensations often represent the way our body has manifested our past decisions and the choices we carry throughout our life. By learning about the physical experience, we are often able to re-choose as adults. A first step in choosing differently might requires us to understand some of the roots of what we wish to change. In doing so, we also learn what would be the loss or gain when we succeed.
“Breathe”, I tell myself again and again. My lungs can support me in breathing better. I know how easily I took air in and out in the bodywork session last week and yet today the air refuses to enter freely, to increase and flex the space I carry in my chest.
It’s so familiar – a feeling that the weight of the world is sitting there in the middle of it all, hardly allowing any free movement. My mind is sharp and clear, my legs have energy enough to walk and dance but my breathing is short and difficult. It’s almost as if the last thing I would want is to bring more energy in, as if I am afraid of the consequences – whatever they are.
There is a rock in the middle of my chest – an old ancient rock of emotional trauma that has a will of its own. It can come and go as it pleases and I don’t remember putting it there. I guess that I preferred feeling that rock than perceiving the horrible pain that wanted to be felt and experienced. Who knows if it was a smart decision? Who knows if it was indeed so needed? It would have been easier if the choice had been offered to me like something at the market. I remember how the shop owner asked me yesterday what kind of tomatoes I wanted to buy, whilst explaining to me the difference between the types she had on her table. Maybe it happened like this – that one day when I was really young, somebody offered me different options of what load I should carry. “What is it that you want sweetie?” she would say. “You can walk around with a sharp unbelievable pain that will remind you of your sadness; this nagging feeling that there’s nowhere to go and no reason to be there or here. Would you like to have some endless loneliness that can pierce through you at will? Or you can have a rock there instead – a heavy rock that is built exactly in the shape of your own body and can cover any unhappiness, any pain, and any difficulty. Which would you like?”
“What would be the price?” I would ask. “Not much,” she and all of her wrinkles would say. “Only the price of not feeling the world”.
As adults we often make conscious decisions; we are aware of our reasons for wanting certain things while rejecting others. As children our decisions happened in a different way. We coped with situations we encountered such as when the situation at home was too difficult, and we found our own ways to endure it. Many times our way to overcome certain situations was by doing our best to not feel anything about them. We learnt to create a barrier between us and the world around us. This barrier existed in the way we felt, the way we sensed and the way we acted, but it also existed in our muscles and our body experience. As adults we often wish to take away this barrier, we wish to let love enter, to let laughter and kindness to touch us, but our body might still fight an old battle, remembering the times when all felt too much. By noticing the physical experience of ‘not wanting to feel’, of this particular ‘wall’ we created as children, we might be able to start to break it down. We might notice that today, as adults, we are able to let old scars be without letting them break us. We might even notice the opposite – that letting the ‘wall’ fall might make us stronger, yet in a softer way, teaching us how to improve self confidence, while giving us more freedom and more options.
