Understanding & Unlocking The Body
Blindfolds that Obscure Clear Seeing 1
While polyvagal’s idea of ‘befriending the nervous system’ might sound reasonable, hopefully even feasible, as a clinician I hearken back to Hopwood’s point about moving the needle on the big five personality trait spectrums. He’d said, “while they can change, they are not easy to change”. For me, moving the needle on reactivity–actually becoming undefended–is not easy. The first major hurdle of moving the needle on reactivity involves how little initial space there seems to be between ‘us’ and ‘our bodies’. Ramana Maharshi said: “The darkness of illusion never touches the Seer who knows his True Identity as Awareness Pure, vast as the sky, bright as the sun. Only the blind, who think they are bodies, suffer from dark ignorance.” Nondual teachings have a long history of pointing out that we ‘aren’t’ (just) our bodies. The title of Nisargadatta’s famous book, I Am Not the Body, makes me wonder if some of the pre-internet nondual teachers were practicing a form of spiritual clickbait, shocking people into paying attention. Of course we ‘know’, in one way, that nondualists always have a handy escape clause, which says, “not this AND not that”–in this case meaning, “I’m not the body, and I’m not not the body (since the body is everything, which I also am).”
I find this kind of philosophical mucking around totally pointless—none of it served me in my process. If you’re tempted to go the route of self-inquiry on whether you’re your body or not, hats off to you. Cheers and godspeed. From my perspective, one need only spend a few minutes looking at online threads of nondual communities with people (usually men) getting into intellectual pissing matches to see that these kinds of dialogues most often feel like a festival of ego parts (who haven’t done much personal process work!) trying to leave their bodies via going into their minds, (which to me feels like just as much of, if not more of, a trap than working with your body–which doesn’t particularly care if you believe you’re it or not).
As a clinician, I think it’s fascinating that people tend to ‘lean’ one of two ways (and sometimes, quite challengingly, both simultaneously). Some people live almost entirely in their heads. In the field of psychotherapy (which is, unsurprisingly, staffed with this style of head-led human) we think of these folks as intellectualizers. The primary strategy of mental-focused people is to try to not feel all the challenging stuff in the body by compartmentalizing, shutting down, and engaging in constant mental activity. Since this strategy is often quite successful in one way, for some period of time, I often use a now mostly outdated visual metaphor of landline phones to gesture to how this strategy ultimately doesn’t work. In my generation, when we still had landlines, it was quite common for an adult to be talking on the phone, and a young child to try to get the parent’s attention. Generally, the more the parent didn’t respond to the kid, the louder and more insistent the kid got. Our bodies tend to be like this. The more we don’t pay attention to communications from the body, the ‘louder’ and more insistent our bodies get, often starting to ‘scream’ at us in the form of physical pain, or alternately, laying us out (through major illnesses we can’t ignore, like cancer or major depressive disorder).
Another way for people to lean is towards 100% identification with their body. Quite sensitive, these folks often feel like they’re under siege by their powerfully expressive bodies, as if the everyday somatic experience dominates. When people lean in this direction, it often means that symptoms–like stomach and digestive issues, muscle tension, headaches, low or excess energy, racing heart, insomnia—are what brings the person in for treatment in the first place. Usually, for these clients, the desire is to ‘get rid’ of the symptoms, ideally by magic (so they don’t have to actually engage with the body).
And then there are people (like me!) who fit with the title Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. We alternate between leaving the body, and total identification with the body. Personally, I feel like I spent vast chunks of my life dipping in and out of having a body. My lifelong friend used to tease me that it seemed like I went through episodic phases–of total, stressful productivity, alternating with complete relaxation. By this he meant I would do a trimester at U. Chicago (where my body, like fun, seemed to die), conceding to physical needs by eating food (usually hard boiled eggs or oatmeal– bland, cheap food to fuel my mind) and engaging primarily with ‘the life of the mind’. Then, during school breaks, I returned to bodily experience, lounging at my grandfather’s beach house, lying in the sun, swimming in the ocean, eating strawberries: re-entering the spell of the sensual.
One way that I think about the huge switch that flipped in my life in 2017 was a shift towards fully arriving in my body in a way that meant I couldn’t dip out anymore. It no longer felt like an option to live in the mind. At many moments in my process this felt more like a curse than a blessing. To me, fully inhabiting
Unlocking the Body: Antidote 1
But, spoiler alert: the body, it turns out, is also the most amazing thing. When you decide, finally, to work WITH your body, it will tell you exactly how to find everything you thought you were looking for (which is right there, and was never lost). For me, polyvagal theory simplifies everything by letting the nervous system speak for itself—directly. Our bodies, through muscle tension, breath, alertness or sleepiness, calm or chaos– tell us much more information than our conscious minds can.
Clinically, I’ve started trying to get a sense of where people fall on this continuum from the very first conversation. I find it a lot easier in some ways to work with folks who have honed their bodily intelligence. By trade or hobby, these folks identify as athletes, meditators, yoga practitioners, body workers, dancers. They listen to their bodies, sometimes so much so that they feel powerless against the body, and feel caught up in reactivity, emotions and intensity. Neutrality seems inaccessible or elusive.
Because of my nerd history, however, the ‘intellectualizers’ feel like my people. Perhaps similar to how I find it easier to help youth decondition their systems (because everything is less entrenched, with fewer years of reinforcement), but I don’t particularly like the youth work, a part of me loves the challenge of working with people who lean predominantly intellectual. And, (again unsurprisingly, in a book about nonduality and how every dichotomy collapses upon investigation) none of us actually ‘are’ one way or another, especially given that we merge with parts (some of whom might have dissociation or mentalizing as primary strategies to manage, protect or defend, while other parts, like young parts, engage with the world in a developmentally- appropriate, felt-sense way of processing experience).
Ultimately, what I found so super helpful about polyvagal theory is that it allows us to see the difference between what our nervous systems think is happening, which gets communicated through the bodily communications, vs. what we might say is the actual truth, based on clear seeing. It also gives us practical ways of working directly with the nervous system and body. So for my intellectualized clients, I encouraged them to bring awareness into the body, training them to use their powerful minds as allies in tracking fluctuations in breath, heart rate, and muscle tension as we explored different cognitions or issues. I invite the ‘super-feelers’ to access wisdom and de-identification strategies, offering practices that could help them engage higher level cognitive processes in the prefrontal cortex to increase neutrality before revisiting what previously had felt like disturbing bodily sensations. What was getting exciting for me in clinical work, now that I had these left brain conceptualizations of IFS and polyvagal, was that clients and I could tune into the communications from the body and nervous system–wherever the person’s system was in that very moment–to have a better sense of what the parts were up to. What parts had gotten activated, which parts were triggered, what glimmers could move clients out of mobilization or dorsal collapse back into ventral. If you remember the game minesweeper, where you click on one square and a whole bunch of squares reveal themselves, it felt like we could bring awareness to any place in the body, and whole pockets of information would open up and present themselves to be worked with.