Tag: Body Narrative

 

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body –the wishbone.  –Robert Frost 

 

Our bodies respond to our thoughts, emotions, and our inner spirit. In this  column you will be asked to dialogue with your body and explore what your body has to say to you. 

 

The body never lies. The body says what words cannot. –Martha Graham 

 

If we listen to our body’s language, we may learn that a stiff shoulder carries the weight of our stress, or that a locked jaw holds unspoken words. Listening and appreciating our body’s knowledge is essential to a healthy relationship with our body, and just by extension our writing and our voice.

Dialoguing with our body (body parts, your body’s capabilities, your inner healer) will facilitate your awareness and connection within yourself to your body. For example, if you don’t like how your thighs look, think about their strength, their power, the way they can wrap themselves around a lover. If you’re not happy with the shape of your nose, think about all the amazing aromas it allows you to enjoy. Let these grateful acknowledgements become seeds for you to express love for your whole body, in all its imperfect glory.[i] In writing about your body, write about any messages recieved, behaviors or patterns observed. Feel free to draw a symbolic image of any message(s).

A poem to inspire you to dialogue with your body:

 

“Praise What Comes”

Jeanne Lohmann

 

Praise what comes

Surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved

of days of solitude, your body’s immoderate good health

that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

 

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books

that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks

before sleep…

 

…the jumping-off places between fear and

possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,

did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy? (lines 1-6, 13-15)

 

Adrienne Rich’s beginnings as a poet can be traced back to a forgotten moment in childhood when, as she says, describing what is in effect a Lacanian entrance into the Symbolic, “my mother’s feminine sensuousness, the reality of her body began to give way for me to the charisma of my father’s assertive mind and temperament…and he began teaching me to read”[ii] What does it feel like in your body to jump between fear and possibility?

In her book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, Dr. Christiane Northrup instructs her patients to ask what their bodies are trying to tell them and write about it in their journals. One woman asked her pelvis what wisdom it was trying to express through her fibroid and heavy menstrual bleeding. She waited for several days until her body responded, “Your periods are symbolic of the way you give yourself away too freely. The heavy bleeding represents your own life’s blood draining away.”

Have a conversation with your body—features you particularly love, gratitude for your body’s capabilities. Think about a friend –the good, the awful, the hilarious. Dialogue with your body as if it were your best friend.  Think about the part of your body you’ve treated poorly, judged, or were reluctant to embrace. Write a letter to that part of your body. Add some humor.

What does your writing say about how you relate to your body? Your attitudes and feelings towards your body? What does your body most need?

The following exercises may help you get started with having a conversation about/with your body.

Exercise 1: Dialogue with, a body organ or part; your voice, your goddess, inner healer, or sage. Alternate your name with the name of who or what you want to dialogue with. Give yourself plenty of time.  

Exercise 2: For further exploration of dialoguing with the body, feel free to also consider dialoguing with an emotion, whether it is present or absent: anger, hate, or rage, love, sadness, pain, guilt, fear or with survival, attitude, vulnerability, belonging, security, being grounded, boundaries, taking risks, a shadow world, your authentic self. What do each of these things feel like in your body?

You can also write about specifics: such as muscular legs, holding hands, a tanned back, perfume and heels, boots and belts, straps and hooks, body art, body fluids or the naked truth.

Summary exercise: When you feel the dialogue is complete, ask, “Is there anything more?” Trust the process. Acknowledge what you are grateful for.

One puts down the first line…in trust that life and language are abundant enough to complete it.

Wendell Berry 

To fully connect with the skin you live in now, you may want to blindfold yourself and touch your elbows, your heels, your hips, your face. Taking the visual element out of the equation often helps us feel things with more openness and clarity. Write about what your fingertips discover[i]

Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write, says “You must feel when you write…You must disentangle all thoughts. You must disconnect all shackles, weights, obligations, all duties….”[ii]

Stretch your body, then get comfortable in a sitting position. Notice what is going on within you.

Beginning with the time you were a toddler, then growing older—whichever years you wish to explore, try to recall/express the embodied experience of being these various ages. What did it feel like to live inside your skin at these different ages?[iii]

 

If you get stuck, consider the following:

 

• What did your hands feel like at five? At thirty? At fifty?
• How have your knees changed?
• Your feet?
• Your hair?
• What shifts have taken place on your face? What has stayed the same?
• What name would you give each decade? What image or metaphor would you use to talk about your body?

With each passing decade, describe your body’s internal wear and tear. How has it weathered the ride? 

“It takes courage to grow

up and turn out to be

who you really are.”

–e.e. Cummings

Eugene Gendlin, philosopher and psychologist, writes: “A felt sense is the body’s sense of a particular….situation…It is a body-sense of meaning.”[iv] The next series of questions will ask you to dwell in life experiences that gave you a felt sense of meaning.

What were some of your epiphanies about your body? Who were wise people in your life when you had questions or needed guidance on body issues? What did they reveal to you? How did this influence your life?

When we bring awareness to our bodies, we bring new life, our own life, into our writing[v] Pay attention to the position your body is in right now. Where are your hands? How does your scalp feel right now? Your belly? How is your body responding to reading my words—do you feel any hesitation bunched in your shoulders, maybe some anticipation sizzling in your chest? Do you want to sigh?

 

To occupy your body is to occupy your life. The body is everything in a way.

Jacob Needleman

 

Reflect on your present physical condition. Think about the way you walk, your posture and how you hold yourself erect, the soft hiss of your breath as it flows in and out, the sound of your voice, the shape of your hands. Allow yourself to accept your body, your beauty, your identity, at this age, in this moment, realistically and compassionately.

 

Everybody has a part of her body that she doesn’t like, but I’ve stopped complaining about mine because I don’t want to critique nature’s handiwork…My job is simply to allow the light to shine out of the masterpiece.

Alfre Woodard

 

Your body is remarkable and the foundation of your greatness.

 

The Bodies of Grownups

Janet Morley

 

The bodies of grownups

come with stretchmarks and scars,

faces that have been lived in,

relaxed breast and bellies

backs that give trouble,

and well-worn feet:

flesh that is particular,

and obviously mortal.

They also come

with bruises they can’t forget,

and each of them

a company of lovers in their soul

who will not return

and cannot be erased.

And yet I think there is a flood of beauty

Beyond the smoothness of youth;

and my heart aches for that grace of longing

that flows through our bodies

no longer straining to be innocent

by yearning for redemption

 

In pondering about your grownup body, think about your favorite feature(s). What part of your body do you absolutely love? Your belly button? Your ankles? The little crease beneath your bottom lip? Write an ode that celebrates the part of your body you appreciate most. Be elaborate with your praise! 

Jessica Lovejoy, body positive advocate and writer, encourages you to thank your body each day. Thank your strong, powerful legs for the many miles they have carried you since you learned how to use them. Thank those arms as strong as tree boughs that have carried, hugged, held and loved. Thank those shoulders who have held the weight of the world. Thank your eyes for all they have seen over the years, the good and the bad, and everything that has come your way.[vi] How is your body aging?

 

Each individual’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms.

Gloria Steinem

 

Now that you’ve sung praises to your favorite feature, write a love poem or a letter to your entire body. Every inch of our bodies deserves our love.

 

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.

Anne Lamott

We take these sounds as testimony: violin, skin, tongue. Our bodies know these testimonies as beauty. –Susan Griffin

Words have mysterious and profound power. The process of writing can be life changing and therapeutic. Research suggests that expressive writing can improve health and well being. Dr. James Pennebaker, the premier researcher in the area of writing as healing, says, “Story is a way of knowledge.” Let your story tell you where it wants to go. This column will address resistance in body-narrative writing and how to use stream-of-consciousness writing as a way to counter resistance as well as taking your body back to its roots.

In his book Writing from the Body, John Lee calls us to remember the primacy of the body in writing. “The call to write is a call received in the body first. Creativity is not tidy or polite—it’s insistent. It calls us to feel, not dimly, not safely, but widely, passionately, in every cell and fiber.” Lee writes, “If we are to answer this call, we have to be able to feel every part of our lives…To write from truth, we have to radically reclaim and renew the body.”[i]

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;

There you have a solid place for your feet.

Think about it carefully!

Don’t go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,

and stand firm in that which you are.

Kabir from “#14” in The Kabir Book translated by Robert Bly

Writing body narrative can be approached as journaling for your own benefit or as something that would eventually be published. Keeping a daily journal allows one to explore the intricacies of life and any beliefs, judgments, or feelings we have difficulty releasing. Using everyday language to write body narrative, your body story can facilitate insight and transformation. Furthermore, using imagery and metaphor in the creative process aids in healing.

French anthropologist and ethnologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, argued “the transformations of healing involve a symbolic mapping of bodily experience onto a metaphoric space represented in myth and ritual. The narrative structure of the ritual then carries the participants into a new representational space, and with this movement, transforms their bodily experience and social position.”[ii] Thinking about this in terms of body narrative, sometimes adding just a few sentences to your journal entries about the surprises you came across while writing, what you want to further explore, or what you are learning about yourself through writing fuels further reflection and clarity. 

At each writing session, it is necessary to

1. Devote time to yourself
2. Create a safe space
3. Protect your privacy 

If you get stuck or feel resistant, ask yourself how being resistant serves you. Make a list of what you are resistant to. For each item, ask yourself, what you get to do or avoid because of the resistance. Can you imagine the possibility of what might happen if you let go of your resistance? Before returning to your writing, let your imagination float around freely. Allow the process of writing to lead you into the heart of what needs to be written.

After much thought, I realized that the trouble I had writing that bleak Friday afternoon was due to my approach. I was trying to analyze…trying to explain rationally… I was failing miserably because I was approaching the task through my head… I had to drop into my belly.

Marion Woodman, Interview, Common Boundary, July 1992

Self-awareness encompasses an awareness of movement and body sensations as well as thoughts and feelings. To help get you into your body, first consider the following: What does body awareness mean to you? What words or images would you use to describe body awareness? Do you view the mind and body as separate entities?

Enter into your writing fully without hesitation. Write with intention. Stream of consciousness writing allows you to let your words spill out as fast as your thoughts. It doesn’t matter if your writing is disconnected or repetitive, or whether punctuation is correct. Free-write for ten minutes. Sink into the depths.

“Delve deep into your roots—the roots that connect your body to your family, to the earth itself, the roots that dangle beneath your desire to write. Your words will blossom more freely when they are grounded in your own fertile soil.”iii         

Take your body back to its roots, to its ancestral homeland. Enter the body of your mother or grandmother or great-grandmother. What would it be like to live inside her skin? How did she feel about her own body–as a child, a teenager, a young mother, or an older woman? Write from her voice. Let your body tell the tale of the bodies that came before you, the bodies that brought you into being, the bodies that still sing through your blood.

Think about place as well. What landscape has informed and constructed you? What corners of the earth have you felt a deep union with? Bring this place –and your body’s response to it—to full, three-dimensional life on the page. Remember and name each little detail, from the wild mustard scent of the breeze to the burrs that clung to your socks long after you ran through the scrubby field. Write about being at home in your own flesh, not just a visitor in your own skin[iii]  

If you need emotional distance, write prose from a third person point of view or write as an observer. Putting your writing aside for a length of time–enough time that allows you to see with fresh eyes may be helpful. 

 

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