Which is your first body memory? When did you realised that you come here with a body?
Was it pleasant? was it painful? Was it shocking and traumatic?
I am going to tell you mine:
" I am about three or four, I am wearing a very wide red checked dress that mum made for me, I am alone in a room sitting on the floor, my tummy is bloated and hard, I am trying to have a poo, sweating in the process, I remember being there for a while on my own until my sister told my mum of my suffering".
That is my earliest body memory, when I realised that I had a body... it was physically painful and emotionally embarrassing -even though it was before my family, and they know my ailments-.... I remember that sense of shame so vivid ."
I had many health problems in my childhood that were badly treated with medication and I developed lots of gut problems that made me very constipated, It could be 10-15 days between one bowel movement and the next. The size of my tummy was unusually big for a little girl, that my mum had to make herself my cloths, they did not come for my body shape.
Body in pain, sweats to have a poo, isolation, shame and embarrassment; no much fun for a pre-school girl that could not start school until she was almost 8. I also think that very unconsciously, I blamed my body as the reason why I could not start school as early as my sisters, which I asked and longed for.
For this little me recognizing the body was a mixed cocktail/combination of physical struggle plus emotions of shame, embarrassment, self-blame, isolation.
As the story rolls on and I grew up, I become healthy and very active physically, but never happy with my body, even though I worked out a lot and my body was in good shape, I struggled to acknowledge my perfection and never felt that I could feel proud of my physical expression. I felt fat when I was not, I hide my curves because I did not like them, I wore big shirts because I thought my breasts were too big and so on.
As an adult, in my late twenties, I become very overweight and then I had the perfect excuse -because it is an excuse we create- to dislike my body even more, to blame it, and to feel ashamed and embarrassment if I was seen.
Although I had been active through my late teens and twenties, I only started practicing yoga in my late twenties and I honestly started doing yoga to shape my body and to lose some weight. There was no conscious spiritual inquisitiveness, but at some level the spiritual hunger was there.
It was through my yoga practice that my journey inwards started, and my conscious body work really kicked off in my live. Practicing Yoga, Deep Stretching and Dance as my main physical modalities, have facilitated me to engage with my body's memories, sensation and traumas. Embodiment is a great resource to dig inside our psyche.
Although these physical practices have helped appreciating, accepting and loving my body, the journey must go also inside to transform negative patterns and programs that make us feel in certain ways around body confidence and body power. Using modalities such as PSYCH-K, and shadow work through protocols like emotional release and feeding your demons has been part of my journey.
Getting to the point of accepting, appreciating, loving and empowering the body has been in my personal experience and with clients, a healing journey towards recognising the beauty and the perfection in our toned or flaccid body, thin or round, strong or not so.
This body is a gift and a resource to explore shadows, blessings, pleasure. This exploration can be risky some times. We can encounter those unwanted corners, secrets that we have hidden away in order to protect ourselves and others, we can see the until now unseen but manifested in our paradigms, actions and results. But it can be there where the treasures to transformation reside and that is a great opportunity to have a happier a more fulfilled life and at the end we all want it.
So... engaging with a conscious movement practice, allowing yourself to feel that pain body that you suppress and to talk about this pain, can be a great starting to heal with joy and connecting to your closer ally, your forever partner, your physical intelligence, the one that never lies: The body.
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