Stories from the bones

What the body knows...

Stories from the bones - what does the body know?

A few years ago, I was exploring a theme around parenting using methods from Focusing (which I will say more about later). I had been struggling with connecting with my son in an empathic way and kept losing my temper. I was curious about what was going on under the surface and if my body knew something more about this difficult situation. I took this whole topic inside and waited. What came quite easily was an image. It felt significant in some way. The image was of a jigsaw puzzle, but an incomplete one. It had all the edges but not much in the middle, just a few pieces here and there. I didn’t have to do much checking, as it was very clear.

So I sat with it. I knew it clearly meant something. Then, as I described it, the meaning came in the words I spoke. I said “I don’t have all the pieces” and then it came to me – the deep rightness in the words that spoke so clearly and truthfully about my parenting: I don’t have all the pieces, specifically about how to be a father. I was brought up in a family with only a distant connection to my real father and a fractured connection to a stepfather. My body, or deeper knowing, knew that and communicated it to me through this symbol. What came next was a release of emotion, of held back grief that I had not had the whole experience of being fathered. I only had a few pieces. What followed then, was something I would only describe as deep self-compassion or empathy. I just sat with that part of me that struggled with how to be a father. It still struggles to this day, but when I notice this, I remember to be kind to myself… and to my son. I remember that I don’t have all the pieces.

I share this story as a poignant example of how our bodies hold deeper truths than we usually have access to, stories from the bones you could say.

An image that might communicate this even more fully is the roots of trees in a forest, like the illustration below.

Image - kind regards to Antonio Di Bacco

In our usual life, we may only be be aware of what’s above the ground, or perhaps we may be aware of only one leaf or branch of what is above ground. Yet below the ground is a vast network of roots and mycelium. A single tree is not just connected to the immediate environment but in intricate way is connected to the whole forest. In this network, the beings of the forest share resources, warnings, news about changes in environment and who knows what else. Suzanne Simard called this the Wood Wide Web.

How are we like trees? Well, in our living system that we call a body, that is usually below conscious awareness, there are also many dimensions of knowing. Some of us have access to these through dreams, or creativity. To others this is a lost realm and barely accessible. I want to try and evoke something of these dimensions of knowing, something of the knowledge of the bones. Note that whenever I use the word “body” I mean much more than the physical body, I mean your whole being, your whole organism. So what does it know?

What’s needed

As a living organism our bodies and beings have multiple essential needs: nourishment through food, hydration, how to regulate temperature and fend of illnesses. It even knows what environment will help bring healing. We have other more complex needs like belonging or contribution. It can be easy to ignore even the basic needs, and super easy to ignore needs like belonging. Either way the body knows what it needs even if we don’t listen… and if we do listen, then we are tuning into a deep and powerful intelligence that can inform our life.

What’s missing

My dog (A lurcher called Willow) is very attentive to who is, or isn’t in the house or on a walk. If one family member goes out, she will make it known. She does not have to think this through as far as I know, she knows it on an immediate bodily level. Humans are not dogs, though sometimes I wish humans were more like them!, but we do know when someone or something essential is missing. Living with grief is a vivid example of this. When we lose someone of course we grieve, but even years after that sense of missing can still live in the body. Apparently twins who have lost their twin in the womb can sometimes feel this. Our incredible bodies feel directly the presence or absence of our kith and kin, human and more than human.

What we have lived through

Any therapist or bodyworker will be familiar with the experience that our body holds unfinished experiences. It’s as if our body has lived fully through every moment of our life, and in a way it has literally, even if we are absent in thought or were disassociated to protect ourselves, or even too young to form a narrative, the physical being has lived through it all. So many times in Focusing, memories have floated into awareness, often pointing to unresolved experiences, they point to places of stuckness that are telling me they needs healing and listening.

“One effect of the focusing process is to bring hidden bits of personal knowledge up to the level of conscious awareness. This isn’t the most important effect. The body shift, the change in a felt sense, is the heart of the process. But the bringing-up of bodily sensed knowledge - the ‘transfer’ of the knowledge, in effect, from body to mind - is something that every focuser experiences. Often this transferred knowledge seems to be part of a tough problem, and it might be expected that this would make you feel worse. After all, you now know something bad that you didn’t know before. Logically, you should feel worse. Yet you don’t. You feel better. You feel better mainly because your body feels better, more free, released. The whole body is alive in a less constricted way. You have localised a problem that had previously made your whole body feel bad. An immediate freeing feeling lets you know there is a body shift. It is the body having moved toward a solution” Eugene Gendlin

Safe and not safe

Stephen Porges coined the term Neuroception to describe how us humans are constantly scanning the world for signs of safety and threat. This process is mostly out of awareness but is essential to life. Safety and it’s lack are something we feel without the use for words. If our bodies have been through trauma or neglect then sensing safety can either be really hard - due to disconnection to the body or super heightened though hyper vigilance. Originally though, our precious body knew what, where and who was safe. We sensed it through the tone of voice, the smile in the others face, even before we had any words. Have you even noticed how you now when someone is faking a smile - that’s neuroception at work! It’s another kind of knowing my dog is very tuned into.

What would feel right

“Your body always tends in the direction of feeling better. Your body is a complex, life-maintaining system. Often, we feel so much wrong that we come to accept those bad feelings as the basic state of things. But it is not. The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be. Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness…Your body, with its sense of rightness, knows what would feel right. The feelings of "bad" or "wrong" inside you are, in effect your body's measurement of the distance between "perfect" and the way it actually feels. It knows the direction. It knows this just as surely as you know which way to move a crooked picture. If the crookedness is pronounced enough for you to notice it at all, there is absolutely no chance that you will move the picture in the wrong direction and make it still more crooked while mistaking that for straight. The sense of what is wrong carries with it, inseparably, a direction toward what is right.” Eugene Gendlin

So bad feelings, whether they are physical or emotional, are not a sign that you have failed or are essentially wrong. They are showing you what right would feel like, they are showing you the direction. I love this! I am sure many of you have had this experience when searching for a new place to live or a new job. You know intuitively what would be right.The way forward is more often than not decided not by a list of pros or cons, but more on a bodily sense of “yes” or “no” We often have to pause or mull things over to access this. I love the phrase “I’ll sleep on it” which points to this conscious processing that needs to happen.

Deeper knowing

Like the trees in the forest, our bodies also know something of the bigger situations that we live in. We are attuned to sense these. In my life as a parent, again and again I have used the skill of pausing and deep listening to feel into what way forward would be right, not just for me but for the whole family. I sometimes imagine the body is kind of networked into a much larger information base than the mind… a collective wisdom even or hive mind. So many times in my practice of Focusing I have received messages that seem to not be “mine” In 2010, after my wife Claire and I had lost three babies to miscarriage. I heard these words from deep inside: “This is not yours to carry.” And a great burden lifted, like the part of me that blamed myself for what had happened just dissolved. The miscarriages were not mine or anyone’s fault. I could put the hidden self-blame down. I still felt sad but no longer burdened and self-blaming. I was and still am blown away by where that message came from. The words were formed in a way I would not speak and brought such kindness and compassion. I imagine it to be like the forests collective wisdom speaking back. Wise words from the collective unconscious.

Our body lives in many situations, and I sense we can feel the collective troubles we are in. During the latest US elections there was an uptick in anxiety dreams around the world. Maybe our beings are not just reacting to trouble but could also offer fresh ways forwards to these problems, they could show the direction towards what feels good. This seems true on an individual level and on a collective level, if only we could step out of panic and overwhelm long enough to actually sense the body! My experience has been that through Focusing or deep listening, doorways open to many dimensions of life beyond the individual consciousness. Though then body we can sense ourselves as connected to the whole web of life.

“Your physically-felt body is, in fact, part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people, in fact the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside” Eugene Gendlin from "Focusing"

I hope I have evoked something about what the body knows, so I want to say a little about how to listen.

There are many approaches as well as Focusing that offer access to these realms, and within Focusing, there are many paths, so I want to try and speak to the essence of what the process is: We pause, we be curious, we listen freshly and without judgement and we receive. In in a way it’s very simple. The body is nearly all ready to speak, it’s just finding a way through the left brain narratives and analysing. It requires us to let go of what we know, hold compassionately all our inner judges and worriers and listen deeply - like we would we would with a friend who wants to say what’s up but needs a spacious and non judgmental listener to enable the process. all our body wants is space to be heard.

If you want to find out more about what the body knows, then join me for a free webinar at 10am BST on April 10th (it will be recorded for anyone who registers). Or feel free to get yourself on the waitlist for the audiobook of “The Way of Curiosity”