Moving with Anxiety
how the body can lend a helping hand & heart
Last Wednesday, through the magic of Zoom, I guided a student through a movement meditation practice.
Lying on her back on the floor, knees bent, feet planted, and arms crossed hugging her ribs, she remarked…
“I feel weirdly smaller!”
It was an Alice in Wonderland moment and I knew we’d fallen down the magic rabbit hole! 🐇🎩🐛💖
We’re Golden
Like Alice, my student was discovering a mismatch between her expectations and her reality.
The gentle movement, shaking and curious exploration through the senses had moved her awareness out of her head and into her body. At which point, she felt peculiarly small.
In the world of internal body arts (if I can outrageously call them that), when curiosity meets confusion, we’ve struck gold.
Confusion & Curiosity (C&C)
The confusion was arising because the mind was telling her one thing whilst the body was telling her something else.
Confusion is a magical place where we get to question old ideas about ourselves.
If we can stay curious, we get to entertain more and more questions…
“What’s happening!?”,
“Why do my beliefs no longer add up!?”,
“Have I been working under false pretensions this whole entire time…what else could I be wrong about!?”
Body Double
It hits different than *counselling because the body is a much deeper reality than the one floating around between our ears.
that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses - Wiliam Blake
This is why yoga isn’t a talking practice, it’s a body-centred one.
Even something as mysterious as ‘buzzing up your chakras’ is an attempt to locate your awareness in the body… and maybe shake things loose in the process.
*I’m not knocking talking therapies by any means. Do all the therapies. I’m just highlighting the importance of not being separated from your body as you do your thing.
Finding Space in the Mundane
We don’t need to be in deep meditative states to appreciate the magic of C&C.
Today, on the quiet country drive to my daughter’s nursery, I pulled in no less than four times; making way for 2 cars, 1 tractor and a walker out on a stroll.
Every time I stopped, I waved to the motorists and the pedestrian as they passed. And every time my wave went unacknowledged. Every. Single. Time.
This would typically infuriate me…as indeed it did my dad the many times I’d seen it play out from the back seat of the car. I’m now in the driving seat and it sends a shudder to think I’m already passing this onto my 8yr old sat in the back.
Perhaps because I’m writing this article I didn’t get mad, I got curious.
Curiosity has a way to make you smile in usually fraught situations.
In leaning into my curiosity I was able to ponder the source of my dislocation of expectation.
What was it I was expecting exactly?
A friendly wave…a nod…a finger lifted off the steering wheel…just some kind of acknowledgement…?
Here’s what I was expecting and way over there, a million miles from my expectations, is what really happened.
Curiouser and curiouser
A curious thing happens when you get curious. For me, sitting at the wheel, I noticed I wasn’t taking it as personally as I would normally have done.
Being blanked or ignored was no longer about me and more about someone late for a dental appointment, someone distracted by the radio, or just plain old absentmindedness. The walker was worried he’d misjudged his fitness levels and was concerned he’d bitten off more trail than his hiking boots could chew.
Coming up with these ideas and stories about distracted drivers and mind-wandering walkers I got to thinking how curiosity and creativity were close cousins.
I also got curious about kindness…what kind of kindness is it, if it’s simply waiting for something in return?
If I pull in and let a motorist pass, and the kindness is unacknowledged and I get pissed off...is it still kindness?
It’s a rather immature form of kindness. A kindness not yet out of diapers. A mean and meaningless form of kindness.
The Great Puzzle
If we’re as curious and as brave as Alice, we may get to invite really big questions in.
Questions like…
“Who in the world am I?
Ah, THAT's the great puzzle!”
Alice asks this question of herself in Chapter 2 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, just after she has grown to a giant size and frightened the White Rabbit away.
The Problem of Identity
If you’re engaged by my writing, then you’re likely a lot like Alice…a complex mixture of childlike curiosity and modern-day restraint and moderation.
Despite her curiosity, Alice finds herself tremendously frustrated in a land where the laws she’s lived her whole life by, no longer apply.
Politeness, kindness, decorum, and unwavering common sense seem a very rational approach to life and yet here in this underworld wonderland they have no currency.
Perhaps you’re also wondering how much your niceness and even your kindness are bearing the fruit you would like to see in the world.
“Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to
try to be better than you are than to be who you are.”
― Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study
Keys to the Mansion
Curiosity, or plain old wonder and fascination, might just be the keys we need to unlock the rooms in our inner house we don’t normally have access.
My student, lying on the floor as she was, was experiencing her conventional day-to-day sense of herself, whilst at the same time finding a whole different story of wonderland characters and ‘Drink me’ shrinking potions.
In more conventional language, information from the mind was meeting information coming from the body…and they were at odds with each other.
The Minds Relationship to The Body
The mind doesn’t understand the body, as well as the body understands the body.
The mind holds the body as a concept; it is one step removed from the body.
Amongst other issues, it has all sorts of ideas about the size and shape of the body.
Often these notions are wrapped up in our perceptions of other bodies and ideas about society’s body standards.
How many disparaging and derogatory ideas about bodies have we inherited at some point in our lives?
Body of Truth
The body, in contrast to the mind, only ever lives in the present.
We could say the body offers a more accurate picture because it’s sending you sensory information about where you start and finish in real-time.
Hocus Pocus it’s time to Focus
We can’t always focus on sensations coming from the body.
At any point during the day, there’s an infinite number of things to process…think about the room you’re in right now; the individual fibres in the carpet, the patterns of grain in the wood, the natural blemishes in the brick or paint work…and on and on and on…
It’s staggering that we get anything done at all, given the amount of information available to us at any moment!
The ability to selectively focus is a fundamental key human strength.
In the middle of a long drive, you stop at a service station and as soon as you get out of the car you notice your stiff and cranky back.
It’s not stiff because you’ve stopped driving. Rather, you’ve stopped driving and you’ve just noticed the stiffness.
So, we can actively shift our focus and choose what it is we’re paying attention to.
If we choose to pay attention to the body, how much information is there to receive?
Well, it’s a bit like paying attention to the room…on first inspecition you see walls and furniture…you look again and you see textures and shadows….you look further still and you start to see scratches and stains…deeper we go and we notice dust and individual fibres…
There’s almost an infinite amount of information available to us and that’s true of the body too.
Let’s Get Physical…Physical 🎶
When did we lose touch with our physical selves?
We no longer live physically, in a way our ancestors once did; butting up against the elements and nature…skin-on-bush contact, nostril and nature, vision and wide open vistas. The pads of their feet cushion both the earth and themselves. It’s a small wonder they walked more softly on the earth than us moderns.
Religious teachings have cautioned against the sensations of the flesh and the Victorians took this idea and ran with it. Everything arising in the body was a source of sin - a turning away from God.
Where does that leave us and lead us in 2023?
We’re most likely defaulting to what’s going on in our heads for large parts of the day…if not, our lives.
It might be important to consider whether you’ve fully decamped to your headspace because it feels safer or simply more prudent following traumatic events or you experienced complex relationship dynamics from your immediate caregivers growing up as a child
Do we need to reclaim our bodies?
Embodiment is kind of a fashionable word at the moment (in my circles at least) but you can see why it might be an important concept…
If we’re a people adrift from our bodies we are adrift from moment-to-moment reality.
Embodiment should, in the long term, bring a great source of comfort and strength to you.
In the immediate term, it could be a source of a great deal of alarm and anxiety. Just understand that this is completely normal and you aren’t doing it wrong.
Absolem, the Caterpillar (The Blue Caterpillar)
Lewis Caroll (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgarly had a lot of questions for society and I think one of them was around the nature of being an ‘adult’.
It’s really unclear who the adults are in Alice’s newfound, topsy-turvy world. The people with the most power and influence, like the Queen, are also the most unpredictable and irrational.
What does it mean to be an adult in our culture? Do our leaders and politicians seem any more adult-like than the Queen of Hearts?
There doesn’t seem to be any clear growth from childhood to adulthood in Western society, we just end up with more stuff and call it adulting.
I’d love to hear your considerations as to what makes an adult, an adult.
Perhaps Absolem the blue caterpillar is the only real adult in the whole of Wonderland.
Caterpillars represent transformation and change and it wouldn’t surprise me if Absolem has already been a butterfly and metamorphosed back, deciding he quite preferred being a caterpillar.
He’s the only one to challenge Alice’s preconceived ideas and I think we’d better let him have the last word…
Caterpillar: Who... are... you?
Alice: I- I hardly know, sir. I've changed so many times since this morning, you see...
Caterpillar: No, I do not 'C.' Explain yourself.
Alice: I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir, because I'm not myself, you know.
Caterpillar: I do not know.
Alice: Well, I can't put it any more clearly, sir, for it isn't clear to me.
Caterpillar: You? Who ARE you?
That’s so mental, I’ve literally been saying recently that I feel a lot like Alice in wonderland recently !!!!! My days feel full of the same magical adventure and mystical experiences 💛💙 I don’t know if you remember my Alice painting that you once saw at my house (half queen of hearts with a heart in a cage and half Alice with the key and a bird flying freely) - I sold it at the wkend because the image of the heart in the cage had to leave my space ❤️🩹
I loved reading this. So much to think about and I REALLY want to watch Alice in Wonderland. The Cheshire Cat was always my favourite. “The mind doesn’t understand the body as well as the body understands the body.” Gold!