These are two stories that are connected in ways that I could not have imagined as they were both happening, which was in about a two week time span.
Journaling
When I met Craig, I was in the middle of the biggest clearing of my life. My house was utterly empty except for things I used day to day and found enjoyment in. There was so much space and it was a beautiful thing.
But in the garage there were a few boxes that were like energy black holes. They contained about 45 full journals from over 20 years of writing. I knew they had to go. They were repetitive and I found them, frankly, embarrassing as I was moving past the need to so closely examine, over and over, the same wounds. (That work was important as I was doing it.)
I threw them out. It was too much to burn in a small city with rules about such things. When they were gone, I could feel another clear space in my life and it was good.
Fast forward and I’ve been trying to get back into journaling. I’m a writer. It’s good to brain dump.
But over the last couple of years I just can’t. No matter how I tried to approach it, it wasn’t working.
Every time I sat down to journal, thinking about how full my brain felt and how much I had to say — how much I wanted to say — I would put pen on to paper and within a few sentences feel this overwhelming bodily exhaustion. I was lucky if I filled a page.
Knowing how I do that it’s important to be writing by hand to get the full somatic/trauma-informed expressive arts therapy benefits of journaling, I kept refusing to try it a different way. (I am so freaking stubborn.)
But I finally gave in. I was desperate to start journaling once I got back into talk therapy. It is so important to have a space to track things.
So I got an app (Day One). I can use it on any of my computers or devices and it syncs across them.
And lo and behold, I have been writing like mad. I’m on day 31 of no days missed and some days I write twice.
Peony Bodyparts
My students in Columbus are, of course, very new to me and my methods, and it has been a joy to go on this journey with them. It’s like learning and understanding and really seeing my processes with new eyes.
One of my students, who is a therapist herself so she’s trauma informed, said to me one day out of the blue: Bodyparts are my favorite.
Now I love Bodyparts. I love it for the concrete way it gets you into your body and ready for more. I’ve always seen it as a logical and needed sort of “warm up.”
I don’t think anyone has ever told me it’s their favorite part of class. There’s so much to a Peony Somatic Dance class that is … well, freaking fancier or even plain old weirder.
The somatics of it all
I was talking to Deb Globus about the journaling issue because she’s the Queen of Journaling, and she said something that was such a huge wake up call.
I will paraphrase but she said, “So writing by hand was putting you into nervous system overload… thus the exhaustion, and by typing, you got rid of that aspect but you can still benefit from getting all the words out.”
MY. GOD. THAT.
THEN…
I asked my student why she loved Bodyparts so much and again paraphrasing:
“Because I can explore my physical body but not get too deeply into the emotional stuff right off the bat…”
Again… Bodyparts (like typing a journal) removes some of the somatic intensity of the work, and that allows us to get some of the best parts of these tools without dysregulating our nervous systems.
What this might mean for you
Sometimes we really can go at things too directly and too hard.
It’s truly a lot of what the Peony methods are about… I mean them to be gentle and I mean them to be modified in ways that make them appropriately gentle to each person’s needs.
But still… we think, THIS IS THE HEALING WORK! GET AT IT!
Then our bodies send us messages that it’s too much, which we often read as STOP.
But instead of stopping, we really need to just reevaluate and see how we can take things down a couple of notches.
The work is good and it deserves our best effort. But we also deserve self-compassion and patience.
(If you’re having an issue like this and need some help creating the “notches down” approach, don’t hesitate to write to me.)