Re-membering

But the real secret to lifelong good health is actually the opposite: Let your body take care of you.
Deepak Chopra

The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.
Isadora Duncan

I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together.
Denzel Washington

Emotion, Motion, Ocean, Om.
Greeting the Four Directions; West, Element Water

One summer morning in my early thirties, I sat in the consulting room of the psychoanalyst who had been working with me once a week for the previous six months. We had been making good progress: me recounting dreams, especially the recurring one of driving my younger siblings through foreign territory and, having paused for a walk, not being able to find the keys of the car to continue our journey. He slowly getting an overview of my very large and complex family of origin, my exile to Germany, and the first green shoots of my own cross-cultural nuclear family here in Germany.

Both he and his wife, also a psychotherapist, had consulting rooms here, nestled on the second floor under the roof of a historical timber framed dwelling, dating from the 1700’s. This was situated directly beside the river, water wheel and all, upstream of the City of Nuremberg. It was convenient for me to do early morning sessions once a week, as this was on my way to work. After the sessions, I generally took a short walk along the river before continuing on to the office, arriving there shortly before 10.00, to begin a busy, long day in the world of corporate management. It was not a rare event for me to take advantage of the seclusion of the riverbank to roar out my anger or frustration which resulted from the content of the session just finished, to clear my mind before work.

In the middle of this session, the therapist surprised me with a declaration to which he had been gingerly coming since our discussion began. `Herr Little, I think it is time you returned to your body´, he said in a friendly, somewhat nonchalant tone.

`Return to my body´, I gasped. `What on earth do you mean by that?´

`Well, as far as I can see from what we have unearthed to date, one aspect of your survival strategy in the very early years was to leave your body and take up residence in the various quarters of the mind: Logic, imagination, daydreaming, intellectual endeavours, analysis, pattern recognition, and the like. It is very understandable why you would have chosen this path, considering your emotional sensitivity and proclivity for sensory overload in the highly charged environment of your childhood. Now the time has come, however, for you to gradually begin to re-enter your body. It will do you good and will be helpful for the process we have embarked upon here.´

`And how exactly do you suggest I go about this re-entry?´, I asked. `Daily exercise of some sort or other. Even eleven minutes each day would appear to suffice. Why don’t you sign up at a fitness studio for starters?´

It was true. My lifestyle was already becoming somewhat sedentary. One of the favourite quotes in my youth was from Winston Churchill, when, on his eightieth birthday, asked for a recipe for a good, long life replied: `Absolutely no sports!´ I hated most sports at school and was so clumsy and fearful that no right-minded team captain would want to have me on his side. Most of all, I was afraid of getting clobbered.

Much later, in my mid-twenties, it was discovered that my eyesight was so poor that eyeglasses were mandated before I could receive my driver’s license. My abhorrence for sports was equally matched by my condescension for anybody who would engage in them, brown-nosing the teachers on their way to becoming class prefect or, ultimately, school captain. No, this was not the life for me. From my mid-teens, I preferred to drink pints, and warble on about Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and Ezra Pound with my equally sport-averse band of comrades.

From then until my thirties the drinking got harder and any intentions to exercise dwindled. There was my garden, of course, which I worked with passion, thinking this would suffice, until my little daughter announced one day that `Papi was becoming a Komposti´. This began to worm me.

The timing of the intervention was therefore impeccable. Joining a fitness club only confirmed my abhorrence of such places, but I did meet some folks there from a local road cycling club. Secretly with my wife, they organised a second-hand bike for my June birthday that year and I never looked back! I took to road cycling with such gusto that I racked up over 5,000 km in the first twelve months.

It was the beginning of a remarkable change in my way of life. When selected for an international work assignment with lots of travel, I reasoned that, while I couldn’t take my bike,  there was room for running shoes in any hand luggage trolly. Thus began a new hobby which led to multiple marathons throughout Europe and North America. Climbing was the next thing that attracted my attention. Always feeling that a squirrel could be found deep within me, I embarked on regular training with my young son. This continued for some time, until he pulled far ahead of me in terms of both strength and skilfulness.

On deciding, in 2003, on the clean and sober life, the intensity of my sporting activities increased. The joys of being very fit and learning a lot about nutrition and how the body generates fuel were mine. As was a love of dancing, which remains with me to this day. I also took a three-year course in Kinesiology and began to get insights into Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayuveda, and more modern approaches to health and healing. The kinesiology concept that: `The body knows all the answers´ made a deep impression on me. All we needed to do was to find an accurate way of asking it and of reading the signals it would give in response.

The concept from clinical research into trauma: `The body keeps the score´ (Bessel van der Kolk) came my way many years later and is equally powerful. My research tells me that every incident, every impression, every memory is stored in each of the billions of cells of our bodies. Anything that eclipses out true essence will beckon for our attention when the time is right. If we ignore the signals, the pressure increases until we acquiesce.

So, encouraged that day many years ago in a therapy session,  I did begin to return to my body. The process continues to this day.

Taking a photo off the shelf this afternoon, showing me sitting on my father’s lap in my first year, I can now re-member the pure state of connectedness, protectedness, contentedness, and incandescence which radiated from me before that strategic decision to leave my body, to become `No-Body´.

These attributes never left me; they simply got buried under a load of `stuff´, stuff I began to believe to be necessary for my very survival. In what Richard Rohr SC describes as the post-mid-life `Spirituality of Subtraction´, I have spent the second half of my sixty years painstakingly working through and becoming liberated from that stuff, layer by layer, so that my true essence may shine through more visibly.  

Even today, after so much practice, I forget, and revert to the self-protection stance, losing my sense of embodiment in the process, once again becoming `No-Body´. This happens far less often than in the past and, when it does, I have the tools and the people to remind me to apply them. Often, three deep breaths are sufficient to reset, to calm down, and carry on in positive energy.

After having to learn in my thirties how to take care of my body, I can now let my body take care of me.