Keeping body and soul together

The embodied imagination

A couple of weeks ago, I did something out of character. I accepted a new friend’s invitation to be curious about her work as a dancer and somatic movement therapist, and to experience a one-to-one session with her. This emerged from a conversation in which I failed utterly to understand what she meant when she explained what it is that she does, and what she hopes to evoke in people during such sessions. I just couldn’t seem to make any sense of the words – and, for clarity, I’m sure the problem here was all mine. It’s likely the residue of the best part of my first four decades in life, during which I found the idea of ‘listening to the body’, in order to shed light on psychological processes, quite mystifying. I’d always believed (encouraged by my mother, who did not always seem to mean this as a compliment) that I was strong and unbreakable, and I didn’t know any other way to be than to just push on through, even when every cell in my body seemed to be screaming for me to let up a little. Wasn’t life just about holding it all in, holding it all together when everything seemed to be designed to pull you apart? About clenching your teeth and swallowing down the rage and just getting on with the fucking job? The only times when I’d ever really bought into the notion that my body might have something to tell me about how to live were when something clearly was no longer strong and was actually about to break – or when, once or twice, something sort of did.

Although I’ve rectified much of that lack over the past couple of decades of – well, for lack of a better word, let’s call it soulwork – in some ways, nevertheless, as I said to my friend during the session, I’m one of those souls who isn’t entirely comfortable with physical incarnation. I love being in the world, and the vivid sensory experiences and frequent physical pleasure that comes along with all that. The moment you lower yourself into a hot bath, the first sip of milky morning tea, good sex, the feel of the wind in your hair and the sun on your face. But I find it hard to stay focused on being in, and paying attention to, my body in order to diagnose problems that I might not consciously be aware of. I was taught to reason things through, not to feel my way through them. I like to question, to think, to wonder, to intellectualise, to formulate hypotheses and gather disparate pieces of information into novel, game-changing syntheses. I do have a vivid imaginal life, but sometimes I feel as if it’s disconnected from my physical, everyday reality. Drawing the two together is a piece of work, and it’s a piece of work that, since developing an aggressive form of lymphoma during the pandemic and the physical trauma of the treatment for it, has become a big priority for me.

Back in the day, though, I often found myself unable to imagine what such a bodily awareness might actually look like. Which is a terrible thing, really, because I have also long believed that the body is, quite literally, a soulmate. In other words, it’s not a mere vessel for psyche: it’s a collaborator, a co-creator. It’s the great love of all. I also hold firmly to the notion that the experience of being in the particular body we have, and of all the things that might happen to it, is a major part of our learning and our growth as we walk through life. It’s intrinsic to the whole journey. And though it’s very far from perfect, I’ve always had a decent enough body, and a mostly healthy one, and no-one has ever harmed it – so what on earth is this discomfort with it all about?

It's common enough, of course, in the world today – and in men as well as women – but it’s not my intention here to paint a picture of all the ways in which we suffer from feelings of separation from our physical selves. What I’m interested in is how we can piece ourselves back together. Many years ago, I found comfort in the work of analytical psychologist Marion Woodman; she wrote about women, about anorexia, about addictions, about our addiction to perfection, about all of the ways in which we sometimes might fail to feel physically real. The body, Woodman suggested, informs the psyche just as much as the psyche informs the body. She believed that illnesses can sometimes happen when ‘the body refuses to play host to the soul’. Her work, her response to such issues, was grounded in precisely the conundrum I was trying to solve in myself: how it might be possible to bring body and soul together.