The Long Journey of Coming Home to My Body

In the summer of 2018 I was in contract to sell my apartment, where I had lived for 13 years. I was one step closer on the path of implementing a vision that I seeded in the darkness of my recovery from a brain injury in 2015, to rid myself of my attachments to what no longer served me and embark on a new way of working and living. I wanted to travel, to explore living in new places, to do the work I do best and to do it from anywhere. I was going to live “home-free.”

Suddenly, I started having fears. Could I really do this? I tend to be a nester, and especially so since the brain injury. I knew from my study of energy and the subtle body how important it is to be grounded. How could I serve at my best if I had no roots planted anywhere?

I realized that if I was going to do this home-free living thing that I had to find home in my body — the one home you can’t sell.

I have been fighting with my body for a long time.

I don’t remember what age I was when I first felt shut out of my body, but it was early. No matter what the sport or activity, I always seemed to come up a little short. I wasn’t strong like the strong girls. I wasn’t flexible. I couldn’t do a cartwheel or touch my toes.

Too tall. Too skinny. Not flexible enough. A little clutsy. Two left feet. Coordination challenges.[1] No matter what I envisioned, it seemed that my body couldn’t make it happen with ease and grace.

It’s like my mind can envision these great things but my body can’t keep up. It’s locked in its own world. I can envision myself as a powerful athlete or a nimble trapeze artist, or executing a plan, but my body is locked in a different dimension.

And for as long as I can remember everyone around me — family, friends, kids at school and summer camp, strangers — felt the right to comment on my body and my appearance: on my bony frame, my flat chest in seventh grade, my seeming inability to gain weight, what I ate or didn’t eat.

I was examined, looked at, and looked over.

But I wasn’t seen.

My Misperception of My Body

Perhaps this is how I learned not to see my body for all it does for me, as a vessel for divine energy, as a home— a temple — that is capable of housing sacred work and creations.

Instead, I saw my body as an impediment to doing what I wanted to do in life.

My long limbs and tall frame didn’t fit in anywhere. I stuck out in pictures with friends, pants and sleeves were always a little to short for me, and I tended to bang myself up just doing daily tasks, constantly walking into things.

At every turn, feeling a profound sense of not belonging, not fitting in. My body doesn’t fit the world.

Quarantined in the Mind

No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to get my body to flex and move the way I wanted it to. And that created a “domestic dispute” within my home.

My body locked me out, so I learned to live in the mind, the realm of intellect and cognition.

The mind is also a place of stories and fears and projections. It is where anxiety thrives.

The mind is a terrible place to live.

So I knew, as I was preparing to sell my home, that if I were to live home-free I had to find home in my body, even if I didn’t fully know what that looked like.

The Long Road Home

What that’s looked like most of the past year has been intense work in trying to get access to my body.

Several months of daily physical therapy to learn and train foundational movement patterns and retrain my nervous system, which has been the major force locking me out.

Despite working with physical therapists, trainers, a movement coach, several great yoga teachers and energy healers, and spending hours in the gym, I’ve been constantly frustrated at my lack of progress.

Looping Anger and Judgment

I’ve been angry about all the things I’ve tried that haven’t worked, and the small gains that evaporated when I returned to New York after several months in California.

The consistent judgment I find beneath my anger is that this isn’t working. The physical therapy exercises. The yoga. Training. Weightlifting.

Any progress I had made in California evaporated within a week of returning to New York. The openings I found by the beach closed up as the concrete jungle closed in around me.

I’m not getting stronger or more flexible. My mobility has felt more limited than ever. I don’t feel anything happening.

Nothing’s working.

Of course, it also begs the question: how would I even know if anything is working?

From Workout to Work-in

In this time of quarantine I’ve taken a break from my trainer and weight lifting, and it’s been too cold for me to do a workout outside. So I’ve focused exclusively on my yoga practice for the past few weeks.

After a couple of weeks of experimentation, I settled in on a set sequence that I’ve done daily for the past 2 weeks. I do it super slow, focusing on each movement as I feel for the alignment. I don’t have a mirror to check, so I have had to use the principles and techniques I’ve learned.

I’ve focused on basic poses and sequences to work my feet and my hips, because everything starts in the foundation. Ability requires stability.

If you’re a person who tends to prefer fast vinyasa classes, a slow-moving practice with longer holds may not seem like much of a “workout,” but looks can be deceiving. I’m working up a sweat and, if my Apple Watch is to be believed, I’m torching calories.

But even more crucial is the inner work. While some people think of yoga as a form of “workout,” I have always considered it a “work-in.” The poses are not goals, but tools: a way to see where we are.

Repeating the same sequence daily opens an opportunity for new awareness and insights.

In the silence of my private home practice, I am slowly getting glimpses of awareness around when I’m in the joints and when I’m compensating. I

I’ve been working on correcting movement dysfunctions for over a year; trying to get into hips and force them to do their job. A basic hinge movement has been a major challenge for me.

So in the past few days, as as muscles quiver under the stress of being called to do their job, I’ve found myself crying on my mat.

Partly because the sensation can be strong — my hip and glute were burning today — but more for the joy of the sensation and the hope that maybe something is finally starting to shift.

Although the moments are sometimes fleeting, they are milestones.

Maybe my body is finally going to let me in.

A New Insight

Today during my post-yoga meditation I received this download:

My relationship with my body is like my relationship with any other person in my life. If I want it to let me in, I have to stop pushing it to be something it’s not ready to be.

The first role of the system is to maintain safety at all times.

The body stays tight because it’s doing it’s job. The body is more intelligent than the mind and more sophisticated than we can understand. It tightens up to keep itself safe. It won’t allow movement beyond a certain range if it doesn’t perceive safety.

The Myth of Instant Change

There’s a dangerous myth often promoted on social media and fitness blogs that you can change your body in a few weeks or months with daily practice and a dose of positive thinking. It sets up a lot of expectations and judgments, not to mention the physical abuse that comes from pushing my body further than it’s ready to go in that moment.

It’s just not how things work with the body.

Trying to mold something or someone to our expectations or desires never works. It doesn’t work with other people and it won’t work with myself.

I must change my relationship with my body and how I approach that relationship.

The moments like I had today, even if fleeting, tell me that my thought loops are lies. My practice is working; it just takes longer to see results than I expected.

Patience, Trust and Compassion

I realize this requires patience. And patience requires trust, and compassion.

I am doing my best not to judge where I am or what’s happening. Instead, I try to investigate it with compassion and simply notice:

What is going on here? Where is my body today?

I’m not always (or even often) successful.

I still wonder if I’ll ever feel the fluency I long for in my body, if I’ll ever move with ease and grace. I wonder if I’ll ever find that flow I envy in others. And if I’ll every feel strong and confident in my body’s ability to support my visions.

With time and persistence, maybe it will happen. This isn’t a 2-month process. Clearly it’s not even a 12-month process.

How long will it take?

I don’t know.

It’s going to take as long as it takes.

With patience, time, and compassion, perhaps one day I’ll finally work my way fully into this home, this temple body of mine.

Until then, I’ll continue to show up on the mat to do my work-in.