Have a pain in the neck, a burden on your shoulders, feeling choked up, punched in the gut, stabbed in the back, side-swiped, whip-lashed, biting your tongue, hit between the eyes, like you cant stand up for yourself, or like youve been violated? These linguistic metaphors are often accompanied by a physical corollary to the emotion, because we are hard-wired to communicate to ourselves and with others. Once you hear the bodies cries, and bring them to conscious awareness, you can no longer ignore them, a former Russian interrogation specialist advised me. Find the evidence of the crimes committed against the body in the forensics of the emotions. Thoughts and feelings are “things” with specific, identifiable, traceable, measurable impact. We express the negative, degenerative aspect of it, when we ignore and deny the cognitive-linguistic cues we blurt out into conscious awareness. Working with the emotionally traumatized, Ive come to listen very carefully and take every turn of phrase as a potential piece of evidence in a concealed crime against the body. Whether it be a soldier, a victim of a home invasion, a pilot, a new mother, a surgeon, a rape survivor, a firefighter, a victim of a car crash, or just a bullied, overweight kid like I was, our central nervous system attempts to express a hidden trauma through language. Listen, and we can hear our body calling our attention to a neglected issue. But there is also an equally positive, generative aspect as well. Feel like your head’s in the clouds, like you can speak your mind freely, as if the weight of the world was removed from your shoulders, as if your heart soars, like you can truly grasp the issue, like youre ready to embrace your fears, et cetera. This truly interesting phenomenon is the two-way street. As much as what you think and feel, you become... what you do and repeat, you become: Hunch over, croon forward, slump down, and you manifest the collapsed thoughts and compressed feelings of that posture and movement. Lift up, reach out, breathe free and you become those as well. You are what you do most often. As my grandmother used to say, “Don’t try to find those things that make you smile so you can be happy. If you want to be happy, smile.” You don’t have a soul. You ARE a soul; you HAVE a body. And it reflects your spirit. Instead of lifting weights, make your spirits, what you “lift.” very respectfully, Scott Sonnon facebook/ScottSonnon
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:55:02 +0000
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