I have been working on becoming embodied. Honestly, though, I skipped the first part of understanding what embodied means. Not intentionally; I’ve just struggled to wrap my head around what it means to be in one’s body. I set alarms on my phone that remind me to check in:
- 8:30 am: Check in with your body
- 11:45 am: What do you need to adjust right now?
- 3:00 pm: What’s happening now?
- 7:00 pm: Take your damn meds
I take a moment and remind myself that this brain is attached to a body and that all of that system is me.
But I’m 53 years old, incredibly not fit, and have spent the majority of my life simply trying to survive being human. Becoming embodied will take a hell of a lot more than setting alarms.
~
In her book, Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at a Time, Laura Khoudari writes:
“Being embodied requires your prefrontal cortex to be online, so that you can make meaning of the sensations and feelings that arise in your body as you experience them. This might be challenging, or even impossible, if your system is constantly managing stress from unprocessed trauma. When your baseline stress levels are already high, it is easy to become overwhelmed and move into a limbic state—and possibly even stay there.”1Khoudari, Laura. Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at a Time (p. 41). Wonderwell Press. Kindle Edition.
Of course, she also writes about the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, so this quote makes far more sense than it does when floating in the middle of this post. I’ll talk more about that context later.
For now, please bear with me as I pull out just one part of that longer quote:
“…so that you can make meaning of the sensations and feelings that arise in your body as you experience them…”
That is my goal. To stop being in survival mode only to come up short 5, 10, 40 years later and recognize that my life is driven by my unresolved past. To know that today is real and I am in it as fully as possible.
It sounds so simple, and for many folks, it is. For me, I feel like I’ve been struggling in the ocean in the middle of a hurricane, trying not to drown. Therapy gave me a boat, which has been much better than swallowing seawater in the relentless waves. And now I’m noticing that despite the boat feeling, and actually being, a safer place to be, I’m still in the middle of the same damn storm.
And as long as I’m still struggling to stay afloat, the constant danger of being back in the water guides my actions.
I need to find a way to calmer waters. Or perhaps a way to calm the waters. I don’t know yet.
They say the only way out is through. That may be true. But going through while making decisions based on fear likely won’t bode well.
Maybe it’s time to figure out how to move through rather than continuing to struggle to simply survive.
Maybe it’s time to face the storm.
This is a real-time work in progress. As a writer, it’s a horrible idea to share this “shitty first draft,” especially of a process as complicated as trauma healing. Tomorrow, I may not believe a word of this. If you’re hoping for a linear, tidy narrative, you’ll be disappointed here. This will be messy, and I have no idea how it will unfold. Or even how long I will share these writings. But for today, for right now, I’m here, making my way and inviting you to follow along.
Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash
Your quote from Laura Khoudari and description of still being in the same storm resonates with how I’ve been feeling. Beautifully said. Yeah, the boat is helpful, but I spend any brief break in the weather waiting for the next squall.
Thank you for your courage and your eloquence. Hang on!
<3
Thank you for your kind words. Your sharing about waiting for the next squall reminded me of a post from Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle:
“Sometimes trauma survivors can get anxious AF when we actually GET something we want — because we have a voice in our head saying, ‘good things don’t last.’
No, actually — it’s often more like ‘good things get taken away.'”
So we never get to actually relax, even if the weather is beautiful because our bodies know that it is fleeting. Our experience has taught us to prepare for, as you say, the next squall. Damn.
We keep going. We’ll get through. <3