The Story of Our Bodies

“What is body? For Saint Paul, in moments of grace, categories dissolve. Words like body and mind do not hold. The “where” of where one is, is ineffable.” -Michael Eigen
 
My mother recently said to me on the phone, after I had been encouraging her to find a therapist to help her through a difficult time; “I want to find out if my dystonia was caused by my trauma. Is that where all this began, when I was just a little girl?” And if it was, it should be noted it is killing her. Dystonia. Trauma. As she prepares to undergo a high risk brain surgery that could extend or take her life, I pause to wonder, dystonia, trauma. “What is body” and why do we lack such adequate language for its ephemeral, ever changing borders?

Recent grief, loss and stress brought shingles to bear on my body, a nerve ending signature of physic overload that was too much for one body to carry, day to day. Then an internal staff infection constellated so close to my blood, nearly ending me. “What is body?” I wonder. A well know book on the topic bears the apt title; The Body keeps The Score. The body remembers everything we don’t. How can we tend to something we may not want to remember, when remembering could be more dangerous than forgetting? It seems our bodies tell us otherwise, to forget is to pass it on to the body.

Michael Eigen describes the bodily experiences of one of his patient’s physical ailments in such attentive, loving language;

“Kirk rubbed his shoulder and spoke of a pain he felt just under the joint ball, where it meets torso. After a time the pain spreads into chest and he speaks of heart pain, now rubbing his chest. I am aware he is under treatment for elusive physical difficulties and wait it out. He said something hard to hear about “ghosts”, pains as ghosts, as they slid from shoulder to chest. Pain as ghosts of emotional trauma, mute impacts seeking-resisting acknowledgement. Ways the stress of feeling from infancy on pinch nerves, bones, muscles, organs. Bion says the core of a dream is an emotional experience. Our body is an emotional body and language an emotional experience. We lack capacity to work with feeling well and tend to suffer from partial emotional indigestion. We do not know what kind of pain is being dealt with how.”

Had my mother’s body twisted and deformed, moved bone, nerve and tissue around to suit an internal occupancy of shadows? Can we ever know for sure? “We do not know what kind of pain is being dealt with how.” Does the body rearrange its borders to make room for the unspeakable? In the throes of my grief and the grip of stress of an upended world, my body just broke down. It refused to fight anymore. Had some part of me given up? What room had I left unattended? We do not know what is doing what to us sometimes until something in us gives.

For the moment, my mother is curious (and for how long, perhaps longer than I have known, she has wondered if maybe it was not perhaps her trauma that brought on her Dystonia) she wants to find out what she has forgotten how to say.

“We breathe around the pain, contract, find ways of surviving. For the moment everything is in a breath… There might be ways we stop breathing, never breathe again. Feeling has breath as well as taste buds. Our literal body might go on breathing in restricted ways, enough to get by, but emotional breath and taste may be damaged. Can you imagine a person who has stopped breathing emotionally? I know places in myself where this is so… Attention can be placed on body surfaces and insides in ways that open infinities of feeling. The more one focuses on body areas, inside or out, the more nuances of being one discovers.” Ibid

Do we forget to breathe even while we breathe? But of course, there are things we must forget to familiarize our routines in life. And there are things that if left unattended too long become ghosts in our blood, beckoning, rattling chains. What happened will not unhappen but it asks us to acknowledge its happening, to mourn its loss. A lot can go wrong when we bury our curiosity. What is doing what to us and how?

“The body visible is mostly invisible. Feeling touches us from unknown places or no place at all. It is not easy to pin ourselves down and undulating waves of body feeling are part of life’s elusiveness, a sense including the rise and fall of spirit that is part of the rhythm of faith.” Ibid
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A faith that includes infinity, not knowing, the navel/untieable knot of the dream. How does the body bear it? It sends us post cards from nowhere land, the dark tunnel that sits between the spaces we’ve dug to draw fire away from where we live. But the fire reaches us. Perhaps curiosity is water. Not enough to put it out but maybe enough to work with it. A little bit of anything, after all, goes a long, long way.