Softening the body
One of the notions that comes up in the Tai Class most weeks, is of softening the body. Relax into the posture. Soften. It did not take me very long to realise that this is a significant issue for me. I’m not physically soft. Often I’m very tense. Pain, anxiety, inflammation of tissues, and whatever else is going on in here conspire to make me stiff and tense. What would it even mean to become softer? What would I need to do in order to achieve that?
To make things more awkward, there’s a lot of stuff in my history around being told the state of my body is my fault. That I’d be healthier and experience less pain if only I could learn to relax and put some effort into that. Oddly, I’ve never found that being blamed for being tense has helped me shift towards being less tense. There was always a subtext of how I would be more useful to someone else by this means, also.
I have a lot of trouble letting go. I’m not emotionally present or expressive in most contexts. I may be making an effort not to let my face show what I’m feeling. I’m not good at opening myself to other people, or letting people touch me.
Softness would mean acceptance – largely of myself, to some degree of others. It would mean trusting people not to hate me or hurt me if I let them in close enough.
I can soften in terms of being kinder to myself. I’m exploring that with craft projects at the moment – slowing down, being gentler with my hands. If I’m not pushing hard all the time to get more stuff done, if I can drop pace with the typing, take more breaks from the mouse and keyboard, that helps with pain with in turn helps with stiffness. Taking care of me takes time, and to have that time I need not to feel under massive pressure to be doing things that don’t help me.
Trying to soften my body seems to call for a heart softening towards myself. Not seeing my body as a means to other people’s ends, not letting anyone treat me as a tool to use and not a person. Holding a sense of self-worth that allows me to be kinder and gentler with myself. Dealing with pain kindly, not pushing through it to be useful.
It’s turning out to be a complex process, but I’ve achieved odd moments of feeling myself soften –physically and emotionally. I have a long way to go and this might well be a rest-of-life sort of project. I realise that being softer would also mean being kinder to myself about the timescales in which I can make those changes. I have to ush out of my head the several people who have shamed and berated me for not being other than I am. They were never trying to help, they were only ever feeding the problem. Experiencing a genuinely kind and supportive space focused on physical activity has taught me a lot about how unhelpful some of my historical experiences have been.
