Body Story

The body is an amazing thing.
It grows, it heals, it repairs, replaces, it feels, responds, reacts. And it absorbs.

Every situation, circumstance and environment we put our bodies in, the body absorbs it. The electrical charges, ionic composition of the air we breathe, the frequencies of voices around us, the vibrations of the words we hear, the music we listen to, the images we see, the food we eat, and the way we speak are all internalized in each and every cell of the body, which then adjust in response. We are composed very literally of the story of our past. Everything we've experienced from a conversation with a stranger to the action of climbing a mountain helps to create us on a very physical level. Each and every one of us is the physical manifestation of our lives; stories walking around written on flesh.

Here's my story, piece by piece.

I began in a small wet place, warm, and throbbing with the sound of life. I was carried in the belly of a woman, an artist, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife. She claims to this day that she's never felt better than she did while she carried me and my sister, three and a half years prior. She recounts feeling energetic, busy working in an art gallery in a town in Massachusetts outside of Boston. She was active in play with her daughter, my sister, Erin. She, my father and Erin kept a routine of nightly walks in the neighborhood after dinner. We lived in a house neighboring a Greek woman who warned my mother of all the right and wrong things to eat when pregnant with me (even prior to my birth, emphasis was placed on my nutrition).
I was born early on a Sunday morning after 14 hours of my mother's labor and a caesarean. My mother tells me she was not as physically exhausted as she had been with her previous caesarean, and her body healed much faster than it had before.
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I know of a story from when I was very little, still in a crib. I was sick and my parents were going to give me some drug from the doctor, but Erin knew that drugs were bad and so she stood in front of my crib, her arms spread wide in protection of me. My father explained to her that only some drugs are bad, and others- like from the doctor- are good. She accepts this with hesitation and cautiously moved aside. From an early age I was exposed to the notion that western medicine was not necessarily trustworthy.
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Being held in my mother's arms one summer afternoon. She holds me to her chest, above the water level of the pool. I wiggle and fight for freedom. She gives me that freedom, and I sink, slowly, down to the bottom of the pool until I am sitting, eyes gazing back up through the water to mother, who expects me to swim back up to her. I don't. She quickly becomes frantic and her arms dive down to lift me back above water. Inhale.
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This summer in Mexico, a curandera whom I had never previously met (at least in this life) named Angelina felt my pulse, looked into my eyes and told me that my pulse was cold because I was afraid of water. She said there was something that had happened to me as a very little girl that had created a shock in my body. (!!!!)
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I am the youngest grandchild, the little sister, I have been "the skinny one," when I was younger and my friends and I played Spice Girls, I was Baby Spice- my identity has almost always been tied to size, and more specifically, small size. When I got older and felt insecure about my growing body and growing responsibilities, my response was to pull back into myself, to shrink away from the world, to feel small, and to hide in smallness, to disappear.
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The summer between 6th and 7th grade- age 11. My older sister was focusing on being healthy, on exercising, eating well, and taking care of her body. I think she was feeling some balance between fear of genetic disposition of obesity and true health consciousness. She wanted for me to be health conscious as well, urged me to exercise with her, to do crunches, to go rollerblading and bike riding, to run around the block or swim laps. I just wanted to play.
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Freshman year in high school, I found myself lost in a sea of unknown identity. I felt the pressure to create a definition of myself and the only tangible thing that felt authentic was my smallness. And I went to town (as previously discussed in this blog). My body became a receptacle of hate- it was very much my identity, and at the same time, very disconnected from my Self. I was so full of hate, my heart physically shrank. (yes, like the Grinch.)
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Sophomore year in high school, after being discharged from the hospital, I started practicing yoga. A year later, I created an apprenticeship program for the teacher training school at the yoga studio near me. I started learning about my body, human anatomy, the chakra system and just how interconnected the physical is with the emotional and spiritual. I began to find integration. The summer after my junior year in high school, I journeyed my yoga teacher training. One component of the process was taking 36 yoga classes outside of the 200 hour teacher training. One class I took, a restorative/meditative movement class ended up being a very profound experience. We were moving through a meditation with postures, and at the moment of the profundity, we were in pigeon pose, a deep hip opener. The instructor guided us through the meditation and encouraged us to "let go of any tension we've been holding, release any mental or emotional blocks that may still exist, any negative patterns that we may be holding onto, let go of that which does not serve you." and with that, I was bawling. Somewhere between the physical stretch and the mental focus, I had experienced a shift in consciousness, I reached a level of awareness of what I needed to do for myself, and an understanding that my body has indeed been absorbing all the negativity I've thrown at it.
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I often say that one of the best examples of unconditional love I have experienced is the love from my body. No matter how hard I've tried in my past to destroy it, it has always rebounded, repaired, and continued to love me.
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Just as all my experiences create who I am becoming as a person (which is always changing), I am also always creating my experiences. My body is a physical representation of my Self, and all of those experiences are a part of me, now they are a part of my body, too. So even if I change as a person, the moments that inspire my body modifications are necessarily a part of whatever changes I go through in the future. As an living organism engaged in the process of evolution, I am constantly adapting and evolving to my environment and responding to stimuli in every moment (responding by getting tattooed). I inevitably will change in the next moment as well. So if in this new moment, the new me has a new tattoo, I am continuing to alter my environment which is altering me (and back and forth and back and forth etc.) I only continue to engage in this interaction with my universe and it with me in a different way- expressing to the world around me what I've learned and gained from these interactions and illustrating my perpetual growth in a physical way.
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In high school, I got very accustomed to pretending. I got very good at creating illusions, (being that for a large part of that time, I was living a lie) I spent almost all of my high school career involved in acting, and it became a large part of my identity and talents, in a way that was almost below my own radar- I didn't know I was acting... So when it came to my relationship with my boyfriend in high school, I was also actively involved in this illusion-unbeknown to me. I faked orgasms. A lot. More times than I actually HAD them. It made him feel good, and that was all that mattered. Except not. Because then, when it finally came time for me to stop faking it, I didn't know what to do. It lead to a few fairly awkward encounters with men asking me, "Why aren't you doing anything?" and me not knowing exactly how to respond. My body had internalized the act of pretending, of masking the truth, of faking, of lying, and it was hard to break it. But when I finally did, and could finally be honest, it felt so empowering, so real, so true. I could actually be myself. And it felt good. REALLY good.
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My body is sacred, the house of my spirit, the vehicle of my dreams. Sometimes I forget this. Sometimes i try to de-story my body, I try to dismantle the essence of my Self from my self. I try to separate the life from the thing that's lived it. And when I think of the way my body and my life are inseparable, I think also of the ways in history people have tried to destroy peoples. It always comes down to de-storying the people- stripping them of their language, their tales, traditions and all the aspects of a person's and of a culture's story. Then their bodies change- the traditions of body modification, the food cultures, the views these people have of their own bodies etc.
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I am highly susceptible to pink eye, I hold an extra two pounds of water weight the week before my period, I have a tendency to roll in on the arches of my feet and I'm slightly bow-legged. My right hip is more flexible than my left, my left breast is larger than my right, my right ear is higher than my left and I have a fairly sensitive digestive system. I've learned to become as acutely aware of my body as I can, to plug into the wisdom my body has that I had discredited for so long.
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I am what I am, and there's nothing else I could be.