Unruly bodies

A post about how we can sometimes feel betrayed by our bodies

I’ve been having trouble with my hands this week.

A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with a kind of autoimmune arthritis. Since then, I’ve been coming to terms with what this means for me and my capacity to move. While I’m still learning new things, and can do many movements in my forties that I couldn’t do in my twenties, I’m getting used to the fact that some of my capabilities are waning.

Yesterday, I noticed that I was having trouble lifting a saucepan. My hands refused to keep a grip on the handle until I wrapped it in a tea towel. I was left thinking about my grandmother’s hands, and the special kitchen equipment she had to use as her hands folded in on themselves under the influence of her arthritis. I looked at the swollen lumps at the end of my fingertips and wondered what time and old-age have in store for me.

Chronic illness is interesting in the way in which it forces us to attend to bodily sensation while simultaneously distancing us from our selves. My arthritis has created a strange sort of distrust in me - pitting my sense of self in opposition to my body. I approach a task thinking that I know what I’m capable of doing, but soon find that my body is in revolt. My hands are inflamed. My toes are swollen. My wrists fail. I am no longer my body, because my real body is in the past, when I could hang from two fingers off a crimpy climbing hold, or move with ease from a day’s work in the studio into the intensity of an evening martial arts class. This arthritic body doesn’t feel like me. My real body wouldn’t fail me like this one does.

Age and illness comes to us all. But I’m unsettled at how difficult it’s become to practise some of the somatic principles that I’ve been advocating for most of my professional life. I’m aware that to mistrust my body is to mistrust myself, but that’s hard to believe when I forget to eat lunch on time, my joints swell up, and I’m forced to go to bed at 6pm. This can’t possibly be me.

It’s weird how much of our lives are spent in daydreams and fantasy. Wanting to be somewhere else. Wanting to move beyond ourselves and occupy different bodies in different places. Bodies that fit our passing fancies. Thinner bodies. Stronger bodies. Taller. Shorter. More mobile. More articulate. But transformation is never so simple or immediate. Dreaming is only a very small part of becoming more capable or changing how we feel. We also need to deal with real.

So, recently I’ve been trying to make friends with my inflammation. I’ve been trying to listen to the buzzing in my joints. Instead of tuning out my symptoms in order to get on with the things I want to do, I’ve been trying to pay attention to the specifics of how I feel. I’m also trying to rid myself of the fantasy that paying mindful attention to my autoimmune condition will make it magically disappear - allowing me to get back to being myself.

I’m not sure what I’ve learned so far about my unruly body, but I’m starting to allow for some of the unruliness to come into the foreground, in the hope that it might teach me something valuable. Only time will tell.

In the spirit of all this, this week’s lesson is about attending to unruliness and interrogating the nature of sensations that we often ignore. It’s a lesson that invites you to deepen your engagement with sensation, so that you might find ways of reframing your attitude to pain and discomfort.