You’re (not) on your own kid

I’m sat in my office, which the former owners used as a linen cupboard and, judging by the paint splatters on the walls, someone before them used as an art studio. I’m in my little bolt hole, there’s a warm woollen blanket across my lap, a woman with a kind face and propensity for pausing at just the right moment is on Zoom. She’s holding the space for me. Asking gentle questions as I turn my attention to my right shoulder.

My right shoulder is in Italy, 2001. My right shoulder is experiencing a terrible thing that happened over twenty years ago. Something that changed the internal landscape of who I was and how I moved through the world.

I am here, now and I am there, then. Both concurrently.

I feel as a wave of sensation rolls through — a tight, cold fear, a rigid bracing, the urge to shove something away. The kind-faced woman reminds me that she’s still with me. She offers an energetic hand on my shoulder and some part of me wants to say no. To push her away and white knuckle through this alone.

But listen. Deeper. There’s another part saying yes. Please help me hold this. Please stay with me in this. I accept, gratefully.

As her metaphysical palm lands warm on my shoulder blade, something shifts. Like a cork popped from a bottle the sensation that had been a spiralling tornado in my shoulder races down my right arm. Muscles straining as my arm pushes the air away. My hand splays out and then releases. It falls back into the warmth of my lap, softened.

And then relief. Space where once there was none. And a fast moving wave of grief bubbling up like a sacred spring. Something long frozen has started to thaw.

✹

Somatic work is funny.

Not funny ha ha (although sometimes funny ha ha), more like hard to explain. I’m continually challenged by how to describe it.

From the outside, that experience could look like doing nothing. Just me and my kind-faced practitioner sitting quietly on Zoom together. She didn’t probe or poke. Didn’t tell me what to do or push for that moment happen. We hadn’t even talked about the terrible thing, she never knew it existed. There was no doing on her part. Only the steady presence of her being.

And similarly, I didn’t do a lot either. At least not externally. I didn’t arrive at the session with a plan to work through something that happened back in 2001. I didn’t process it to death in my journal or talk it out with my loved ones. I simply sat, slow and stable enough, and paid attention. Let myself be supported as old experiences emerged. Let them reveal what they needed.

The magic of somatic work is in the being. Together.

Like a shy cat, the body will come forward when it’s ready. When it feels safe enough, stable enough, resourced enough. Only then do the undigested moments of overwhelm that we’ve lived through arise. So that we can meet them, tend to them, let them move through in ways they couldn’t at the time. Find resolution. Tiny piece by tiny piece. Together.