Ever since my first creative writing class and an exercise
called the Taboo Journal, I have been fascinated with the power of memory held
in the body, and the way our stories define us. The story I tell myself is, as one well known psychologist and
author puts it. I have stored memories, hurts, traumas, griefs, and blocked energy
in my shoulders, my belly, my ovaries, my pelvic area, my broken wrist and
strained right knee and god knows where else. Clarissa Pinkola Estes has a
quote somewhere that wherever we press on the flesh of the body, a memory
surfaces....Healing through writing has always been an important tool for me.
As a writer and facilitator, this has led me to lead
workshops using journaling prompts to write the body, and have a conversation
with body parts that want me to shine a light on their neglected story. In one exercise,
I named one breast Famine and the other Abundance and wrote a poem for each.
I had a dialogue with my vagina about what colour the wall
paper in her room was, and what kind of furniture would be in there (red
velvet, of course!). When I broke my right knee skiing, just on the cusp of
menopause and a roiling mid-life transition, it gave me permission to take a
lot of quiet time for thinking and writing about the connection between my body
and my mind. I wanted to know why I broke my knee, was it significant? Was it a
symbol for me needing to stand up for myself and ask for help when overwhelmed?
At the same time, Louise Hay’s book and a few others came to my attention –
giving me a kind of lexicon of the body-mind connection. A key resource was Dr
Northrup’s exploration of the female body in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom.
Mid-life brought up some more intense body wisdom and
learnings. I was mothering two hormonal teen age children, while facing my own menopausal
angst, as well as writing, teaching and volunteering to organize events. One
particular project had become too large and unmanageable, but I didn’t know how
to step down without looking unreliable and disappointing the others. My shoulders
and upper back began to ache so badly that every night I needed a heating pad
to fall sleep. When I finally made the decision to step down, my body aches
disappeared. This happened at least twice, when I was over-committed to outside
projects. I began to pay attention and listen
to my body more earnestly.
Recently I’ve been taking some online writing courses
specifically centered on healing and releasing old family shadows. It has been
very enlightening, to learn how the trauma and pain in one generation can get
passed down to the next, until we become aware of it and break the cycle. Another
course used the Hero’s Journey as an outline, and urged me to enter the cave of
old griefs and hurts, and face the Dragon guarding my treasures and dialogue with
him. During that five day class, I wondered at the marvelous ways my body was
humming, buzzing, aching and releasing. Energy was moving, just by answering
journal prompts and using my imagination to enter that dark cave of old beliefs
about my “story”. Reading Women’s
Intuition has further bolstered my faith in the embodied guidance and wisdom
from within. (https://www.amazon.ca/Womens-Intuition-Unlocking-Wisdom-Body-ebook/dp/B00466HMJG)
The story I tell
myself is....This is my old story: I was brought up the eldest of eight
children (born in 10 years), in a Catholic family, and became the responsible
one, the Mother’s Helper or Little Mother, out of necessity. My mother was alcoholic,
and I stepped in to help out, putting a certain burden on my shoulders at an
early age. This lead to a pattern of valuing myself externally in my life – the
need to always feel productive, purposeful, and valuable by giving and doing,
and almost never allowing myself to rest. My body had to force me to stop
sometimes. I look back now, and see that
in my twenties I had become addicted to the high of self-less service in my
spiritual life, finding great satisfaction (but also exhaustion and stress) in
being always on call, evenings, weekends, and whenever there was a need. It was
for a good cause but my body craved rest and a more balanced lifestyle. Once I
got married, I threw myself into studying, going back to school full time, being
an A student (overachiever that I am), then having two babies while doing my
Master’s degree over several years.
Bringing up two children, born twenty months apart, was a
wonderfully fulfilling role to play, and at the same time I was studying
creative writing, teaching part-time and working on a master’s thesis, which
became the book, Little Mother. I needed to explore motherhood: my mother’s alcoholism, my childhood, and my
own birth journal while I was pregnant. I wrote poems about breastfeeding, sex,
and the mothering overload. Writing the body was a life-saver, once again, and
it helped me make order out of chaos. But becoming a mother was also my
Waterloo. My wolf-mother instincts had been awakened, my hearing and eyesight
were keener than ever. My nervous system went into overdrive; it was hard to
sleep, hard to share the parenting roles when babies only want their mommies, even
with a willing partner. That brought me to therapy, where the psychologist
kindly said, you have taken on another mothering job with teaching. I was trying
to be the perfect mom, you know how it goes. I ran up against my own human
limitations, and more body wisdom.
Menopause, that other womanly rite of passage, threw my body
into hormonal chaos and sent my heart and mind onto a rough rollercoaster of
ups and downs, highs and lows. Some days, I felt like I was going crazy –
shrieking at my kids about crumbs on the counter. Mild depression swung me on a
hook for a while. I was saved again by the writing. I started a blog,
interviewed other women to find out if it was the same for everyone, researched
and read a ton of books, and finally wrote my own, The Tao of Turning Fifty. Since then, I’ve given lectures on the
mid-life transition and written a few hundred blog posts and articles. (http://msmenopause.blogspot.ca/)
My life has been a search of that mysterious answer or clue
to what ails me....for instance, a frozen shoulder, shortly after my book came
out, prevented me from working on the computer for any length of time. It took
five years of journaling, osteopathic treatments, shamanic journeying and finally I felt I got to the bottom of
that shoulder issue. I was in a workshop
exploring the Inanna myth and down in the underworld meeting Erishkegal when I
realized that the pain in my upper back was from the good girl archetype
tightly wedged between my shoulder blades! Some very simple exercises from a
physiotherapist helped me strengthen the back muscles. Now I sit at a desk with
better ergonomics, and a good height for the keyboard. Plus, my adorable shitzu
Mollie forces me to get up and take walks, and take a break from the computer
regularly.
After the wild mid-life transition, in my sixties, my
continuing curiosity led me to take classes to help find my inner child artist.
I have rediscovered a love of artistic expression with SoulCollage and Art
Journaling and once again, been catapulted back into the body, into the wild
joy a child’s body feels while finger painting, drawing, or cutting up bits of
images and pasting them onto cardboard. Time does not exist when I am in
creative flow, and I stop feeling those aches and pains. I am grateful for the
wise body guidance I receive, when I listen to it, and I want to commit to staying
close to its wisdom every day.
Your story has a
surprise beginning says this collage from my art journal, with a naked woman
riding a white horse, facing backwards. Yes, it is a surprising rewrite. For
instance, I have loved singing and music all my life. Where was that in my old
story? The story I tell myself now is different from the one I have been
telling myself all these years: eldest daughter, little mother with an absent
mother, carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. I have found my joy
in the magical child, the story teller, the little girl who sings to the
flowers, la petite fille qui chantait aux
fleurs.
Embodied wisdom, the body’s wisdom, is still something I am
exploring. Creativity and Flow have become my go-too therapies. When I am stuck
in the writing, I immerse myself in making collage, in playing with images
instead of words. I am learning to speak the body’s language – it uses imagery,
metaphor and symbols. Myths and the imagination emerge from the collective
unconscious, as Jung taught, in the same symbolic language that speaks to us through
dreams, in poetry and art, in our body’s intuitive knowing... Now I know that anything
is possible.
See my website at www.jenniferboire.com
for a free excerpt of the book, The Tao of Turning Fifty, and to register for
my latest class offering, Her Journey, the Heroine’s Quest at Mid-Life.
