The Stories Your Body Tells
To exist means for us to exist bodily. We are here embodied, with all the weird absurdity of the body that that brings with it - both seemingly “us”, and yet in many ways outside our control; both intimately close, and yet also weird, foreign, sometimes gross, sometimes beautiful, both to ourselves and as ourselves.
What do you notice when you become aware of what it means to exist bodily?
If you close your eyes, and pay attention to your body, what do you become aware of?
You may notice that your awareness of your own body is really a bundle of a lot of different senses and perceptions. Maybe you notice your sense of touch, and the textures you can sense against your skin. Maybe you notice a sense of temperature, how hot or cold your body feels. Maybe you notice your feeling of balance, whether you feel upright and balanced or if you’re leaning to one side or the other. Or you might notice pain, tingling, itching, pressure, or any awareness of internal processes like your heartbeat, digestion, or hunger.
We’ve looked in a previous post about the way that we organize our experiences through concepts into narratives, ways that we connect the dots of our experiences and tell ourselves stories about ourselves and our world.
Let’s call this storytelling that we do with our thoughts our “cognitive narrative”. But there’s another, deeper layer that’s always going on as well.
Trauma experts Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell remind us in their book “Nurturing Resilience” of another kind of narrative that goes back further in our history: our “somatic narrative”. This is the story of our body (“soma”, meaning “body”).
Early on in our lives, when we are infants and young children, our brains have not formed enough to use conceptual language to organize our experiences. In other words, we don’t know enough to tell ourselves any kind of story.
But we have to begin to organize our experience somehow. Just like how our cognitive narratives connect the dots of our experience into stories we tell ourselves, our bodily experiences initially connect together into a kind of body-oriented story.
Since we don’t have a word-based vocabulary early in our lives, our first narratives are instead built out of body-based vocabularies.
We don’t connect the dots of concepts we recognize when we’re infants: “Oh, it’s lunch-time, so my mother will be arriving soon with my bottle, and then I’ll feel less hungry.”
We don’t have any of these concepts of “lunch-time”, “mother”, “soon”, “bottle”, “hungry”, or even “me”. All we have is immediate sensations and experiences of the body, a rumbling pain in the belly, an unpleasant tired feeling all over, feelings of various textures or pressures against our body. And these dots get connected into our somatic narratives, our body-oriented stories.
As we grow up, our somatic narratives get overlaid with our more cognitive and concept-based stories. But they are still there.
And just like our cognitive narratives, our somatic narratives necessarily overlook and leave out information. Any narrative has to leave out information in order to form some useful organization of experience.
Bring this back into your own body by turning your attention back to what you notice with your senses. What does your attention tend to first go to in your experience of your body? Is there any pattern in what you tend to notice or focus on in your body?
Maybe you tend to focus on a certain pain or tension in your back. Or maybe you tend to focus on a sensation of hunger in your stomach, or anxiety in your gut. Or maybe a tension around your head.
Just like with our cognitive narratives, it can be useful to ask ourselves what our narrative is leaving out. In our awareness of our own bodies, what do we tend to leave out? What are we not noticing?
Perhaps there’s a feeling of groundedness or stability in how your feet touch the floor. Or a sense of calm in your out-breath. Or a little feeling of comfort in the clothes you’re wearing.
If it’s difficult to discover such calming, soothing, or grounding feelings in your body, it might be worth working intentionally on developing your body-vocabulary and exploring sensations that create these feelings.
One of the many things therapy can be a space for is learning new vocabulary of the body. If our body has not had the opportunity to learn the vocabulary of safety, of calm, of being soothed or feeling grounded, then this is a language for our body still to learn.
With the development of a new somatic vocabulary, we are then more equipped to experience new somatic narratives in our body. We can navigate life’s challenges with a wider range of embodied experiences, including new experiences that can help us feel safe, soothed, calm, and grounded even in the face of challenging situations that come with existing as a person.
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