Ripples of Feeling
What ripples can feeling, of attending to and noticing within, create on the wider world?
One of the things I reflect a lot on is the radical, healing nature of Biodynamic Massage. I’ve recenty been reading Rae Johnson’s ‘Embodied Activism’ and I’ve enjoyed it a lot and it’s provided some good food for thought so figured I’d share it with you.
How can somatic practices, such as Biodynamic Massage or embodied movement modalities, help our relationship with ourselves but also with friends, family and the wilder world?
Embodied awareness is the way back home - intimacy with where and how we are right now, with what is happening and how we are meeting it. My intention is to lead you in the heart of your life. Inside your body, where everything happens - within a quality of listening rather than knowledge, of feeling rather than reaction - Martin Awlyward
Rae Johnson talks about ‘Coming To Our Senses’ and a little about Percepticide - a term used to describe the mechanism through which oppressive social forces require us to deny the truth of our senses in the face of chronic or pervasisve threat. To dull our senses. This can happen on an every day level too - through how we are brought up as children, reducing movement and staying still, being quiet, keeping our eyes on our work; of denying our connection to nature, to denying the pleasures of the physical body; to our workplace environments, to capitalism and colonisation and cultural trauma.
Reclaiming our feeling selves can bring us back home. Increasing our ability to sense within, to listen to our bodies and feel how it moves through the world, is so helpful so that we begin to listen to who we are in our bodies and have a range of capacity for feelings and sensations. Growing our ‘somatic bandwith’ as it were involves ‘becoming more comfortable with feeling, witnessing and expressing a wide range of embodied emotions and sensations’. It also means ‘exploring and reenlivening those places in our body where we experience numbness, emptiness, or lack of feeling…[it] offers us more choices in our body about how we respond’ to internal and external situations. This can include calming and settling responses but it can also be about staying with our full embodied expreince - in all of our emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
“Considering that one of the most amazing consequences of opporessive social systems is violent disconnection - from ourselves and each other - then it follows that healing those rifts must also begin with the body” - Rae Johnson
In turn we then may also be able to increase our embodied empathy for others - of imagine what it might feel like in our body to experience what they have gone through.
Being with ‘our complex, messy, and sometimes painful bodily sensations’ allows us to ‘be with others (and all their complex, messy and sometimes painful feelings’ too. ‘Especially when tempers flare, or misundersandings rise, being able to be fully with ourselves without abandoning the other’ or, indeed, being fully with another without forsaking ourselves can lead to greater understanding, more honest and resilient relationships.
There is something in the relational aspect of Biodynamic Massage that speaks to this - it cannot be experienced on our own. There is something so powerful in being in the presence of others - in therepeutic group work or where we tell our story to someone else for the first time. Of course so much depends on how well the group or person we are revealing ourselves is able to listen attentively, to not respond to fix or solve. Yet revealing ourselves to other people can make us more available to ourselves, Rae writes. It can increase our empathy for others. It can help reclaim forgotten or abandoned parts of ourselves and connect those places to the world.
The society that we live in often insists that we should be utterly independent of each other, not reliant on each other at all - which cuts us off from our humanity. We are formed from bodies, shaped and molded in relationship to them. So a sense of healing so often occurs in relationship to others too.
Further reading and quotations are from: R. Johnson, Embodied Activism; Engaging the body to cultivate liberation, justice and authentic connection. North Atlantic Books 2023.
Biodynamic Massage
Do get in touch if you would like to understand a little more about Biodynamic Massage. You can learn more about it using the link below but a phone call is often the best place to start to see if its right for you. From there you can come for a consultation to understand a little more and experience this type of therapy.