Support precedes Movement: Reflection for week 8

My roommate has expressed repeated interest in having me guide her in a yoga practice, and I noticed how clearly she was looking for a kind of work-out activity on this particular morning, rather than the exploratory questioning place I've been moving from these past weeks. So I gave her shapes. For some reason I was called in my body to move with her, and I'm not sure if I was trying to provide support by making it so she wasn't practicing alone, or if I was exploring what I felt I needed to be supported in each of the poses I took us through, to have a clearer sense of what I believed about them. Later when we chatted about it, she mentioned resonating with a moment when I touched her feet and hand as I talked about how they were in supportive communication with the ground - and I continue to notice moments where a certain kind of directed touch that helps them to know something about themselves has been really appreciated by my students. I have an inkling about a vocabulary building, an overlap between the study I've done and the awareness in my fingertips, like a potential divining rod for pathways, currents of force.

My peer that I practiced with has mentioned to me on multiple occasions being disconnected from her body, or grossly unaware of it. It felt kind of huge and superfluous to talk about shapes, so I went back to a place I know - we sat and I touched, said hello to and named every bone in her body I could remember (on her right side, I told her the other side was up to her), starting from her fingertips inward, down the parts of the vertebrae I could access, and then from her toes up. We wiggled joints and tried to figure out which ways bones spin in their sockets and she talked about what she felt and what she didn't. Afterwards I had her do some familiar movements, take a flow etc. With that information, of what both she and I noticed, we unearthed some interesting connections between unmoving parts and physical hang ups transitioning between certain tricky poses. We talked about how to find the kind of room or time for moments of personal body exploration in an hour class with a bunch of bodies in various states of awareness - and an hour and a half after I started, I finally came to a place where I might be able to transmute what I've been learning the past 2/3 years into something useful, something that can come out of me in a potentially helpful way.

These two experiences really asked things from me that seem like they live on opposite ends of the spectrum, but maybe one is the warp, and the other is the woof, and I need to figure out some other crucial things - the shape of the loom, the colors of the threads, the pattern I'm looking to weave.






xo

what to change in order to become yourself

As I relaxed into the embrace of the floor, I could feel myself there, the honey and tawny strands of the floorboards spreading out from underneath me, the sun spilling down on us through the windows. But I could also feel the past bubbling up to the surface, I considered the particles of memory floating like dust motes in my field of vision between me and the floor receiving the forces pouring through me. A shitty little house in Nowhere, Florida with almost no furniture and an empty fridge. The places where my brother and I slept were two couch cushions on the floor, shoved in opposite corners of the room, my body still small enough that I could curl myself onto it, as I watched the roaches skitter around in the dark. That house where my brother and I were mostly alone, I was too small to reach the sink in the bathroom or the countertops in the kitchen as we tried to feed ourselves, if I needed water, to clean myself. Once I reached up to the top of the electric stove in curiosity while my brother's back was turned, and seared a perfect spiral onto the flesh of my tiny hand, radiating out from the center all the way to the fingertips. I think he was just tall enough to boil some hotdogs for lunch. That was when my father still claimed joint custody of us, and those weekends still pop up in my emotional radar sometimes, collateral damage while my parents used us as pawns in a game I was helpless inside of.

The floor. Like reflections on a soap bubble, the past swirled around me as I watched. And it was the past, so I let it fall away to feel the coolness underneath my body that balanced out the heat on my skin from the window.

As I moved, considering the instructions from the teacher of what and how to explore, I found a familiar wall of panic when I reach a place where it feels like I am incapable of doing what I was being asked to do. Getting as still as possible and trying to slow my breathing, I knew I needed to stop moving before I triggered a full blown panic, but I could feel the painful contractions starting around where I imagine my vocal chords to be and instinctively pulled myself inwards, like a reverse unfurling of a fern. Like a switch was flipped, I was free, I could move past the paralysis at the beginning of a meltdown.

Once when I used to babysit the neighbor's triplet toddlers, I was around for a birthday party. The father was a problem, and not much long afterwards they went their separate ways (he took the older son, she took the triplet girls), and I don't remember what he said or did, but one of the girls started crying from a startle. I was in high school, just helping in every way I could because I saw the mom needed help, and I heard something I recognized in that little girl's cry - after the third one that sounded exactly the same, like a computer, a record caught on a loop, I knew I had to disrupt the repeating pattern and I gathered her in to me. While her parents snapped at each other in whispers, her cries multiplied and then subsided after a fractal shift. My mother has mentioned a few times her early experiences of being potty trained - my grandfather punished their accidents by making them wear their soiled panties on their heads, overlapping their face, their breathing pathways. Recently I've started to wonder about how being shamed about something you have no control over affects us as adults, maybe the thread of chronic constipation she has suffered her whole life is a story I am telling about her relationship to shame and her need to be in control even at the cost of our relationship. Her inappropriate sharing with me of her sexual escapades as I moved from prepubescence into sexual maturation also gives me the perspective of how her bowels turn to liquid when she is emotionally or sexually attuned to a man, and in her lack of control, we were often forgotten in her blind hunger for something only her interactions with these men could potentially fill. I wonder if her inability to let stuff out is intimately related to my inability to receive.

Manifesting is both a concrete and completely unpredictable thing. I wonder if noticing any of those potential connections might be a way for my mother to knit back together some damage, to be able to tell new stories about how she relates to others. I wonder why I have the distinct habit of relating everything I experience to a few early similar experiences, instead of being able to fully be inside of something new. My mother and I, why must we always be in control over everything? I can't even bring myself to what seems like a childish place of hoping for a return of adoration in a sexual partner, to let myself be so lost in something as unpredictable and defenseless and dangerous as being 'in love' whatever that silly fabricated idea arises out of.

This is not my father's floor and I am not that child on a couch cushion. How can i wade through these stories, untangle these threads enough to make a different choice and not succumb to the emotional bubbles trapped inside of them? Maybe I am exactly where I need to be, learning how to love the floor, how to receive its support, how to give it the fullness of my weight. To know it can't be taken from me, the it won't turn me down, that when I lay in its embrace, it is impossible to fall.

Experience vs Story: Reflection for week 2

I didn't make a plan to do anything different - I just listened. To myself, to the 'students', to our ideas of shape and space and roles and expectations. To the places where those things grated on each other, and where they seemed aligned. Where they needed the story I was unwilling to tell. Where I told stories because they made sense on someone's body once, somewhere in the past, but maybe had no place when I tried using them again.

Some things that I heard/noticed - There is an underlying support that I need to be able to offer, even when re-calibrating my expectations and shifting directions, how being caught up in the motions of telling a previous story can leave the 'student' feeling lost or unsupported. Even though I have a fear of naming a familiar shape because of how present our preconceived ideas/patterns of relating to it often are, I can't just remove all of the rules, not everyone is so ready to give those up. What are the structures that support that kind of chaos, that inspires curiosity, the ability to play? Sometimes stories are a really important way in, a thread to follow when it feels like all that is available is darkness, that stories can be a map for an experience someone may never have had so that they may be able to consider and eventually find it on their own. The more I can listen, the more responsive I can be to the complex set of questions being asked at any moment in time by the individual I am relating to in this particular dynamic.

I learned that we are co creating a new story about a million different things between us, my clearest job/question I have found this week is about how to Be With - both myself and the student. How can I be fluid while being a support for self and other? How does my witnessing and supportive presence help give others a platform to feel comfortable enough to engage with their own stories and to possibly let some go, to make the space to tell new ones?

And how am I changed in the process?

What am I Becoming-With?