A Body Story

I have that mom-thing that when I am taking care of someone else, I unconsciously put myself on hold. It’s been that way a bit since Nate’s knee surgery on Thursday. I can ignore hunger pangs and even push through the need to pee for hours at a time if I’m focused on someone else. A friend who is a high level bank executive recently told me that she arrives at work daily at 6 a.m. with a 20 ounce coffee and works steadily at her desk until around 10, even though she can feel her back and shoulders locking up and her bladder crying out for attention. She is a brilliant woman whose intelligence I’ve always admired; I knew her in high school and was downright intimidated by how cool and together she always seemed, long-limbed and blonde, edgy and smart. And yet, she, like me, often refuses to pee because she has too many other things on her plate. Who knew?

It seems to be a particularly human trait to ignore signals that come from the body, as if somehow these are suspect. My dog certainly doesn’t ignore his biological processes, if he’s gotta go, he’s gonna. Likewise, little children don’t/simply can’t “hold it in” in the same way that adults do. This willful body ignorance applies well beyond our processes of elimination. How often have you supressed your awareness of a symptom in the hopes that it would simply vanish? I’m not getting a headache now because I have a big report due tomorrow. I have too many meetings scheduled this week for this to be the flu. It’s just a cold. I’ll push through it. (On the other hand, we tend to obsess about other body signals: the nagging abdominal pain that we are pretty sure might be cancer, ignoring the possibility that it’s related to our 5-latte-a-day Starbucks habit.)

When an animal is sick, it rests. Years ago we had this badass cat named Huckle. Every summer, he used to go “on walkabout”, disappearing for weeks on end into the coyote-ridden woods that surround our yard. His longest stint al fresco was about three months. We had given up looking for him, figuring that if he met his maker on the losing side of a life-and-death-battle in the wild, that’s how he would have wanted it. Then one morning, we heard a yowl at the back door, and lo and behold, Huckle half-dragged himself into the house as if he’d never left, although he’d clearly seen some action out there: He had a tear in one ear, a couple of chipped teeth, and a broken pelvis, according to our vet. Huckle knew it was time to come home and rest – no more duking it out in the wilderness. He found a quiet corner in our basement and curled up, sleeping for about a week before emerging up the stairs with a bound as if he’d never felt better. He didn’t have to google “sharp pain when I breathe?” to know that something was seriously wrong with him, nor did he need Web M.D. to prescribe rest.

With our screens and LED beeps and blips providing an eerie glow into the night, with emails and texts tinging and pinging at all hours, with unfettered access to medical information in just a few key strokes, we live in a time when it is increasingly easy to become distanced from our body’s natural rhythms and wisdoms. It’s hard to make time to listen to the body, rather than just tell it to fall in line until our next meal, CrossFit training or bowel movement. When the body calls, I am so often too preoccupied with my ego’s agenda to pick up. Kind of like when caller ID announces robotically “Call from…Mom” when I’m busy. I’ll think: “Oh, it’s just my body. I’ll call her back later.” As if she’ll always be there for me. No matter what.

That old saw: “write what you know.” I am still coming to know my body and our relationship has surely had interesting narrative turns. But as a Nia teacher, and now adding work with movement-challenged populations as an Ageless Grace educator, I am fascinated by my students’ relationships to their body stories–how they move, why they wince, the moments when they transcend themselves and I can literally see their souls moving underneath their flesh.

My students constantly surprise me. They are mostly women, typically between their late-forties and seventy years in age. They come to class for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they like the music and they love to dance. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life, but never one like this, where it daily feels like a privilege to be among them, to bear witness as they learn new steps or try new skills, often moving through pain or limitation. And whether by nature they are creaky and off-tempo or limber and rhythmic just doesn’t matter. I can see something of their struggle in life in how they move, in which movements or songs call them out of themselves and unlock their younger selves – transforming achy or self-conscious idiosyncracies into sudden bursts of playfulness, freedom or sensuality. Each of their bodies tells a story: I had colon cancer when I was in my fifties; here I am, dancing. Take that! I had breast cancer ages ago but that was child’s play compared to Parkinson’s; I’m just glad to be alive. I was a competitive ice dancer; now spinning makes me dizzy. I’ve always been a klutz, but I don’t care; look at me shakin’ it! I played three sets of tennis yesterday morning and another two last night; bring it on. I’ve been trying to lose these 10/20/30/40 pounds for the last 1/5/10/15 years; I feel beautiful when I dance. I haven’t slept well for the last year; this stretch feels so good.

Life in the physical body can be a pretty tough business. For some people, it’s a shit-storm of pain and frustration; for others, it’s the slow drip of diminishing returns. The luckiest among us may live pain and disease free, may even glory in good health, but we still find plenty to complain about. And yet, for all of us, there is joy to be had. That’s a body story.

Four years ago, I discovered an exercise class called Nia, which combines dance, martial arts and healing arts in a class choreographed to music. The class was taught in the studio where I practiced yoga. You couldn’t help but notice the freedom and pleasure on people’s faces as they left Nia class, animated and chatty. They were a community, not just a class. I thought it was all a little weird.

Who knows why I walked into that first class. The focus that day was “sensing joy.” “Be present to your sensations,” the teacher prompted as we danced. “What does joy feel like in your body?”

Joy has a lot of physical sensations, I have since realized: Breath that fills the lungs all the way down to the small of your back, power, speed, air on skin, music vibrations washing over me. I have learned it is impossible to skip in a circle or exchange smiles and not embody joy. Perhaps spirit has to be incarnate in part to experience these physical sensations of joy and community.

They cut me down but I leapt up high
I am the life that will never never die
I’ll live in you if you live in me
I am the Lord of the dance said He

Dance dance wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the dance said He
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be
And I’ll lead you all in the dance said He.
—Sydney Carter

The “He” above, in the poet’s mind, I always thought, is God, or maybe Jesus. I’m not really familiar with the author, Sydney Carter, so I googled him. I was thinking he was some kind of pious, tight-assed Episcopal choir master (with apologies to all the sweet, open-hearted choir masters I’ve ever known), one of those guys who’s all letter and no spirit. But it turns out, Sydney Carter was an English folk musician who wrote the words above in the trippy 1970’s. He wrote musicals and revues, and a song cycle entitled “Songs of Doubt and Faith.” (This is my kind of guy — how can you have one without the other?) He was a committed pacifist, a conscientious objector in World War II. He had a minor hit in 1962 with the song “Last Cigarette,” about trying to give up smoking and failing. You just never know where your next dance will take you.

So far, I’ve shared this blog with only three people, and they have to be nice to me: my seventeen year-old daughter Mia, who greatly values her driving privileges; my twenty-three year-old son Nate, who lives in Texas, but this week is back home, laid up in his boyhood room after ACL surgery (ever seen the movie “Misery”? He doesn’t want to be the James Caan to my Kathy Bates); and my husband, because I put up with his obsessions all the time — lawn care, his swollen knees, Keira Knightley . So what’s a little blog post?

One post a day for a month is me throwing down the gauntlet to my dormant inner writer. My daughter’s friend Ingrid challenged herself to do a handstand a day for a year (that’s her, above, in our hallway on day 360). Seen in that context, a post a day is small change. And hey, February is a short month.

I am always saying I am going to write. But then I don’t.  I’ve been paid to write for ages: covering horse shows and high school plays for the local small town paper; penning marketing materials, admissions brochures, web content, newsletters, and press releases as communications director for a school; ghostwriting correspondence for executives and board members; teaching writing to high school kids – my own three, and a bunch of other people’s, too. Give me an assignment and a deadline and I am a thoroughbred: fast out of the gate and running for the roses. But faced with complete freedom—no sense of urgency, no prescribed goals, just me and my imagination with all the time in the world—I become a mangy pony in a petting zoo, wandering around aimlessly, glassy-eyed, hoping for snacks.

My dad once said to me: “You don’t do well without structure.” As much as it irritated me at the time, he was right. So here I am at 55, giving myself an assignment and a deadline. It’s not Tolstoy. It’s not going to rock your world. The unfinished manuscripts or teleplays buried in the archives of my hard drive still may never see the light of the desktop. This is just me trying to create some scaffolding.  Maybe there will never be a building.  But at least I might get my fingers onto the keyboard to do this activity that is so much a part of me, that vexes and thrills, that terrifies me.

By way of introduction, that’s me dancing in the photo above. I’m not a trained dancer. I just love to move to music. True confession: the picture was taken last summer, right after an uncharacteristically self-disciplined dietary cleanse and just before I decided to stop coloring my hair. I was about seven pounds lighter and ten shades darker. I don’t think I’ll go back on the hair color decision – it’s been unexpectedly empowering to embrace my silver side, although at the moment it’s a curious ombre of white/silver/faded-caramel, tossed haphazardly through the original very dark brown. My fantastic and sweet hair stylist for the last several years (Katie Astone at Salon Astante in Waltham, if you must know) is concerned for me. Whenever I come in these days for a simple cut and blow dry, she asks me nervously: “How are we doing with the color?” She picks warily through the grizzle, as if some explanation for my defection lurks there. To her credit, she is unstintingly supportive and gives me a beautiful cut without fail. I wonder if she worries that I’ll go postal in the salon chair, shredding the Us magazines and knocking product off the display shelves – who knows what may be going on with me?

People, especially women, compliment me on going gray all the time. Their expressions range from sympathetic to mystified to awestruck. Many tell me: “You are so brave,” as if I am trekking solo up Kilamanjaro. I also get a lot of “I wish I had your self-confidence,” and “You must be so comfortable in your skin.” The outer Holly nods politely and affirms how great it is to free oneself from the cultural aesthetic that tells women we are not allowed to age, or some other mature and enlightened crap like that. The inner Holly is floored. “Self-confident,” “brave,” and “comfortable in my skin” are not words me and my body have been on easy terms with for most of our life. For years, these words only resonated when I was thinner and glowing. Not until my late forties, when I discovered Nia (check out the links on the blog menu) did I begin to feel truly at home in my body, from within.

Another true confession: I still, and always will, hope to re-lose those seven pounds.

So I don’t know exactly what I did, but yesterday I had something funky going on with the second toe on my right foot. It’s not easy to walk without putting weight on your toes, just try it for a second. But I had to get Westley some exercise (remember him – the dog who ate the dental floss?) or there would be no living with him, so I strapped on my most supportive boots and the two of us headed out – him bounding, and me doing this weird pronated roll that probably looked a little drunk. It was an unseasonable 60 degrees in Boston, and the trails in the wooded dog park where we walk were a patchwork of indistinguishable ice-caked mud and mud-caked ice.

After about forty minutes of slipping, slogging and Marty Feldman-like lurching to protect my sore toe, my back was starting to feel weird. My entire skeleton was tipped to the left with a countering torque to the right like some kind of teetering Tinkertoy contraption. But what me, worry? I am a Fitness Professional, after all, so I was fairly confident that my body could handle this tweaked gait for as long as it would take my toe pain to ease. Or at least until I got home for a cup of tea. In a moment of true calendar serendipity, I just happened to have both my monthly massage and weekly chiropractic visit scheduled for that afternoon. So I wasn’t too concerned, for someone with a toe thing, a back whatever, and a dog marinated in mud.

Indeed, things seemed better after Beth worked her magic on my traps and Nina gave me a good crack. (They are both master practitioners. Send me an email if you live in Metrowest Boston and want their contact info.)

And then Westley ate the dental floss, and the vet nervously asked over the phone “Can you bring him in NOW?”, and he didn’t want to get in the car because it was 5:30 and dark outside and he is no dummy: he knows we are not going for a walk. So I had to give him a kind of a one-footed-half-shove-half-lift into the backseat of my fucking Volkswagen TDI that spews nitrous oxide when it was supposed to be good for the environment, and something in my lower back went twang. Or maybe more like twaaaang. And then we got to the vet and Westley lunged out of the car and dragged me across the parking lot to the door because he LOVES the vet and he LOVES the vet techs Holly, Lauren, and Brooke who give him treats and pat him and there are other dogs there and he just couldn’t wait to get inside, and my back went TWAAAANNNG.

So go back and read yesterday’s post if you’re worried about the dog, but the bottom line is that when we got home, he was all sunshine and good times and I was doubled over in discomfort.   Neither Advil nor Arnica nor white wine brought much relief. I Igor-ed up to bed with my heating pad, bracing for one of those nights when you strategize for five minutes about how you are going to roll over without gasping. Still, I was hopeful that a good’s night sleep would sort me out.

The night’s rest wasn’t so good, apparently. This morning, the twang had bored deeper into my lower back and a sharp pain shot through my core when I stood up. Oy. I messaged an SOS to some of my teaching colleagues seeing if someone could sub my 9 a.m. class. Thank goodness Amy saluted. Otherwise, we’d have all been treated to a class of rolling around on our backs while groaning.

I curled up gingerly in my favorite armchair to do some writing instead. I hate to miss teaching a class (or taking a class) because dancing has become the central joy of my body’s life, and because no matter how logey or achy I might feel beforehand, I always, always feel better afterwards, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But my common sense mind was telling me to rest.

It took only about 40 minutes of sitting in the chair for my body to overturn this decision. I was worse after resting overnight and stiffer still after resting this morning. Earlier, I had noticed feeling better coming down the stairs when I really paid attention to the sensation of pushing down with my feet, instead of moving from my hips. Likewise, I squatted Sumo-style to feed Westley, and the leg action of sinking down to rise up almost entirely relieved the pain.

I mean, I felt a little silly, squatting like a weightlifter to put down the dog bowl. But: Huh.

So let’s test this:

I shuffled creakily over to my laptop and pulled up the playlist for a new Nia routine I’ve been meaning to learn. The very first thing the teacher does in this particular body of work is to have you take a gentle inventory of your joints, waking up first ankles, then knees, hips, wrists, and so on. My initial intent was simply to bob around a little, like a buoy on a pond. That’s about all I could manage in my disabled state this morning, I thought. But just a little gentle movement unlocked a myriad of tight spaces where I was dug-in against discomfort, irritation, and the anxiety of not knowing when I would feel better.

Forty minutes of dancing is all it took. At the end of the routine, I felt loose and juicy enough that a triangle pose felt like a good idea. Reaching out to the right, I heard a tell-tale “pop” – my femur clicking back into alignment with my right hip, restored after yesterday’s sailor’s gait. When I shifted my triangle over to the left, I sensed a ripple of little clicks as my Tinkertoy spine realigned itself. And just like that: no pain. I mean none. Seriously.

Thank you, body.