Body Disconnection

I've said in this blog before I am a neck up person. Meaning, I walk around most hours of the day, most days of the week disconnected from my body and hyper-attentive to every micro movement of my mind. To the point that, if my body and my mind were my two children, Department of Children and Families would be charging me with neglect for how I ignore my body and a child Psychologist would be calling me a Helicopter Parent for how I hover over my mind. Both are undoubtably unbalanced.

This lack of balance became very apparent to me about a year ago after the birth of my daughter.

In November of last year I had had a second C-Section. Because I had been through the surgery 4 years before, I already knew what to expect with recovery, or at least I thought I did. Because this time I had multiple complications after the birth including a need for a blood patch due to a spinal leak from the epidural, magnesium treatment for skyrocketing blood pressure, and to top it off, a sensation in my abdomen like someone was holding a lit match to my skin because a nerve had apparently been severed in the surgery and the sensation of a burning fire in my abdomen would be present until it healed.

Now you would think with all of these various physical issues going on I would use this as an opportunity to connect with my body. Maybe not even because I wanted to, but because there was no other choice. But I didn't. And what's more problematic, at least to me, I didn't even notice I was still operating from my head as the primary control station. Which is not to say that when intense pain was present, like the mother-of-a-headache you get from a spinal leak, I did not get totally preoccupied with the pain. I did. But that is not "connection" to me, that is am overwhelming feeling of engulfment. Connection is relationship. It is a sense of relating in the space between two or more entities by acknowledging what is present with kindness and compassion.  In this case, I was not relating to what was present in my body with kindness and compassion. Like, not at all.

I came to this awareness when in conversation with an old friend after I finally came home from the hospital with my daughter. Not surprisingly, this friend has been practicing connection to her body in the form of yoga, reiki, and massage for many many years, and in that phone call she asked me if I was practicing "loving on my body." She said my body had just gone through such an ordeal, had worked so very hard for me, she wanted to know if I was now expressing my gratitude toward my body in the form of tender self care?

Her question totally stopped me in my tracks. At that moment I was caught up with enormous frustration toward my body. I was frustrated with the the pain. I was frustrated with my body's limitations. I was disgusted with the way my body sagged when I looked down and could not see my legs because my belly got in the way. My thought toward my body was: "would you please hurry up and recover! I've got things to do! A 4 year old and an infant to take care of. Laundry to do. Breastmilk to pump. Crunches to do. I don't have time for this recovery-thing!"

So, compassion? No. Kindness? No. Patience?  No. Tender self care? Absolutely not.

And the thing is, I would not have been that critical and impatient toward anyone else's body- not in a million years. But my own? You betcha.

Yoga teacher and activist Seane Corne said in an interview with Krista Tippett on the radio show "On Being" in July of this year: "Especially in our culture, there's so much denial about our body, because we all get so fixated on the way it looks. If we're not comfortable with the way that it looks, we deny it, shame it, or try to repress it." Which is so unfortunate because, as she goes on to describe, the body has all the potential do its job of walking our head around all day, but also to be a vehicle toward emotional regulation and ultimately for some, a path to god.

After that phone call with my friend I stopped what I was doing and told (not asked) my husband I was going to take a shower- neglecting to shower daily is a very easy thing to get in to when you have an infant. In the shower I began to wash my body slowly with a wash cloth and my Irish spring soap. Nothing fancy. No candles.  No bubble bath. No soft music. Just slow movements tenderly cleansing my arms, then legs, then special care for my belly that still had the visible wound of surgery. I imagined myself as a mother caring for her child. The soft touch and willing manner one uses when caring for a beloved.  And it was nice.

I was reminded of this moment almost a year ago now, when I actively recognized connection to my body, in my more recent experiences of doing the Body Scan. This is a practice I had been introduced to in the past, but never embraced as a practice (not surprisingly) myself. Regular teaching and practice of the Body Scan has been part of my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class I'm currently enrolled in. I wrote in this blog about my aversion to this practice as it prompted feelings of vulnerability back in September when the class first started.

I'd like to report that since the time of my Aha in the phone call with my friend following my surgery, and certainly now 5 weeks into my MBSR class, that I now willingly embrace the Body Scan as a practice and means toward loving relationship with my body. Alas, that is not the case. In fact, I continue to have quite the aversion to the Body Scan. Laying still on the floor and painfully slowly bringing my attention to each area of my body with a warm presence remains very difficult for me.

Whether it be the Body Scan or moving through the practice of asana in yoga as Seane Corn suggests, the attention to the body can bring up a whole untapped world of lived experience that resides quietly (and sometimes not so quietly in the case of physical pain) in our bodies. What Ms. Corn says about awareness of the body and yoga is "what we're taught is that there is no separation between the mind and the body, and everything that we're thinking or feeling or experiencing over the course of a lifetime...has an affect on your cellular tissue."  I can totally see that, and that's what makes it so hard.

But, and I think this is a big "but," I am at least now aware. I'm aware of my aversion. I'm aware of my difficulty. I lay my yoga mat on my living room floor. I turn on my Body Scan CD. I pull a soft fleece blanket over me. And I begin again. Bringing my attention to the toes of my left foot to start, and spending the next 30-40 minutes bringing loving awareness to each part of my body.  I keep practicing. So that some day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I could truthfully write that I feel confident and connected in and with my body.

So what about you? What is your connection to your own body? Could you bring kindness and compassion to your self care today?