Striving, Somatics, and a Commitment
My year of anti-striving.
Two days ago I finished a twelve week long somatics workshop focused on body liberation. I showed up to every session, despite my own resistance and although I moved into a new place and started a new job in the span of the class. We met online, via Zoom, which was strange given the physical nature of somatics, but it worked.
Through the twelve weeks I practiced exercises like hand on chest, an exercise with two or three people, where two participants exchange a question such as what would your life be like without diet culture. The asker reaches their hand out, and the answerer, when they feel the connection of the hand, places their own hand on their chest before answering the question.
At first these interactions were clunky, but as the weeks progressed our exchanges became profound. We began to trust each other and release the need for approval; the need to seem smart or elegant in our understandings of ourselves.
I found that, when I was in my body (something that I have only recently been exploring), images arose in my mind. Seaweed, to represent a relaxation into the flow of life. I pictured the plant and the way it undulates in the water, never resisting, always rippling as if it were part of the surrounding water instead of separate from it.
Above my desk I have a picture of members of J-pod, a family of Orcas who recently welcomed a new member near Seattle. I look up at it often to gaze at the way the animals break the surface tension of the water, their noses gliding through, the water curling around them. I think about us, and how we are doing the same with air. We live in a world like theirs. When we enter the water, we must rise to breathe.
I was resistant to the somatics class because being in my body sometimes feels intolerable.
For most of my life, with my eating disorder, substance use, and sex, I lived somewhere outside of my body, avoiding at all costs sensation and presence.
I wasn’t aware of what I was doing.
I only felt an insistent whirring sensation whenever I was alone and sober, one that propelled me to do things that simultaneously pressed hard enough into my numbness to remind me I was alive, and retraumatized me. I couldn’t spend a night at home alone; I needed to go out and drink. I couldn’t spend a night sober; I needed to escape.
I had this vision of who I wanted to be, but couldn’t get there.
I’d learned a very specific relationship dynamic. Acceptance and authenticity were not accessible, but rejection, submission, and debasement were part of my naturally learned language. The people that felt “right” for me were people who were as fucked-up as I was, who manipulated, lied, and abused.
Since the death of my mother, who had helped to establish that relationship dynamic for me, I have slowly been untangling who I am in the world. I’ve needed a lot of space to do that.
In a lot of ways, I still naturally gravitate towards a shape of being that I call striving. It moves against the current. I turn away from what feels easy and loving. I turn towards people and things that are resistant to me. It’s their love I long for. The tension of their rejection insists. It’s magnetic.
I feel it, and yet I am learning to turn towards the people who love me for who I am.
Being embodied is not part of our cultural knowledge, nor is it valued in the capitalist mindset. If we are embodied, we’re not so vulnerable to marketing ploys, diet culture, anti-aging campaigns, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy. If we’re embodied we are living inside ourselves instead of looking for something externally to fulfill us.
As I take stock of what 2020 has meant for me, I see a lot of striving in my actions. The longing to be accepted, to want my writing and existence validated. My ambivalence with social media is a result of my need for approval— life feels better without social media because being on Twitter and Instagram inevitably unravels me. I check my favs and retweets and can’t help but saturate them with some sort of value.
I’ve also led workshops, which has been lovely and also very difficult. It’s brought in extra money to supplement my nanny job, which pays alright but not a lot. I want to supplement my income and branch out as a business person and teacher. I want to be successful. I wonder at my definition of “successful.”
It’s challenging to settle in again as a nanny, when nannying is such an undervalued profession in our culture, along with most jobs that have to do with service and children. The job itself can be straining and thankless, but also infinitely rewarding. In truth, I probably work as hard as many of my more “professional” counterparts. I am constantly multi-tasking, making dinner while caring for the boys, reading childcare books and listening to podcasts, doing my best to be my best for them.
But as I settle in, I settle in. The discomfort is, like many of my discomforts, rooted in the longing for approval.
An idea has begun to take shape in my mind. An experiment. A year of anti-striving, where I only write for myself (let’s not talk about my book, which still doesn’t have a pub date) and take a long and much needed break from all forms of social media. Where I release the need to lead workshops or teach anyone anything at all, and instead open myself up to learning more about who I am and what I want.
I’m partially inspired by Marlee Grace, who built a platform on social media and is stepping back from the medium. That takes a lot of bravery, and it’s inspiring.
In somatics there’s something called the “shame trampoline,” which is discussed in the book The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci K. Haines. The concept of the shame trampoline is this: there’s a trampoline, and we bounce on the trampoline with everything we are ashamed of. Imagine all the things you feel shame about: internalized stereotypes and negative beliefs, messages from family members or peers that have been hurtful, race, gender and class stereotypes. All the things you believe about yourself that are shameful. You’re jumping, and they’re bouncing with you.
The shame propels us to strive, to always look outside of ourselves for some sort of validation or approval or object that can ease the pain of these belief systems, but of course nothing outside of us can truly have a lasting impact.
One would think this is the most painful thing. It isn’t, necessarily. By staying in the cycle of shame, we convince ourselves that we have agency. In the context of diet culture and our culture’s fatphobic belief system, this could be construed as all I need to do is lose twenty pounds and I’ll be…. In the context of toxic masculinity, white supremacy, classism, etc… all have different ways of forcing us to remain on this trampoline, cycling with our shame, hoping to somehow relieve it.
What’s underneath the trampoline? Our true pain. Trauma. Abandonment. Agony. Terror.
In asking myself not to strive, I am saying yes to looking underneath the trampoline.
There’s a process in somatics called “blending". In other spaces this could be called shadow work. It’s about opening to the most traumatized parts of ourselves. In the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy this would be referred to as opening to the rejected parts of ourselves. In shamanic practice, it’s soul retrieval.
What I’m saying is there are a lot of ways to access these most damaged parts of ourselves, and to allow them back into our full experience.
But it has to be done in relationship.
(No, not on Twitter or Instagram).
So, this is part of the journey I’ll be going on this year. I’ll be participating in a yoga teacher training with Sangha Yoga (they gave me a scholarship!) as well as deepening my work in trauma-informed care and my eating disorder recovery. I’ve been sober for nearly seven months. As always, I’ll be in therapy.
I hope you’ll join me. Slowly this newsletter will morph into my experience of anti-striving. And I won’t be on social media anymore, so if any of this resonates with you, please do share it.
Music, Books, Art
I made a holiday playlist I’m a little too proud of. Give it a listen.
Right now I’ve been very into this album of Erik Satie compositions. Very good writing music.
I’ve also been obsessed with Eartha Kitt. I listened to Santa Baby, the Christmas song she’s famous for, then went into a deep dive and found this gem, amongst others.
I enjoyed reading this piece about Curling by Michael Calore, which convinced me to watch Curling.
Right now I’m reading The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante. I loved her Neapolitan series, and this book is interesting in its own way. I’m really enjoying it. Next in line is James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (I want to read his entire oeuvre in order) and Lidia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. Actually, I have about ten books I need to read from the library, so I’d better get going.
I very grateful for you.
With love,
Stacy