Trusting Body
Turning towards and staying with when the going gets tough.
You know how when you’re deep in the thick of a major shift, how hard it can be to believe there’s another side? I’ve been in that place for the last 17 months or so, a liminal place with many unknowns around what lives beyond this moment of change, of continuous change, both individually and collectively.
Below you will find some writing, for context, and also a recently expanded upon piece of writing first written some years ago when I was really in the thick of navigating the aftermath of trauma and abuse and the impact on a body/ spirit/ heart. It’s from a larger manuscript called Assaults + Rituals I have been working on and editing more intentionally lately.
Forever a student of the body, for the last 17 months, I’ve been in an Epstein Barr reactivation and what my doctor and I both think seems to be long covid. In addition to these, in the fall of 2021, my dear pup Lou died unexpectedly. Within 10 minutes, in a fit of grief and rage after the 6am call that she had passed, I’d fallen down the stairs, shattering my 5th metatarsal. A very traumatic surgery full of lack of consent and anti-queer treatment followed by three months of being unable to walk left me both deeply aware of my body, and the limitations, but also deeply exhausted and desperate to get outside of my body. 6 months after this surgery I was told was my best chance at healing, the metal plate in my foot broke! Broken heart, broken foot, broken plate— NBD LOL.
The fun doesn’t stop there though. About a month ago, through bloodwork I learned my thyroid is also off— it’s looking like I’m also navigating Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune thyroid condition. I’ve begun treating it as such, cutting/ limiting trigger foods and alcohol, limiting relational stress, upping supplements, vitamins, and herbs to address the imbalances before I consider additional treatments. It is very clear my body is keeping score, that my body needs to be centered.
On a good day, it feels like an invitation into deeper care for my body.
On a harder day, I sink into how I knew this would happen, how so often those who experienced abuse in childhood and beyond go on to experience autoimmune conditions (just two of mannny studies), body on a never ending loop of responding to danger. I am also not convinced that all three of these manifestations of imbalance aren’t directly related to an asymptomatic covid infection I must have had sometime in 2020 or early 2021. The curious part of me has been researching the shit out of all of this and indeed, research is showing connections between it all, dominoes in a row.
For a very long time, I’ve been acutely aware that autoimmune conditions might already be happening in my body. It was clear to me while it was happening but the triple trauma I experienced in the fall on top of my longer history of abuse and trauma on top of the overwhelming amount of uncertainty and stress brought about by covid and continued social and cultural violence— yeah, it’s a lot for a body. Hashimoto’s is known for erupting alongside an overwhelmingly stressful or traumatic time.
Those of us who have tried to find “answers” in “western” medicine know how challenging it can be. All the more reason to re-learn how to deeply listen to our bodies. I’ve spent the last 12+ years fully committed to addressing my own trauma history working with herbs, breathwork, psychedelics/ entheogens, a somatic therapist, creative writing, acupuncture and so much more. And still, this life is a spiral and it’s clear I’m being invited into another layer of my healing so that I can be even more present for myself. I also know that navigating these kinds of body ruptures with patience and compassion makes me a more wise, resourced, and skilled facilitator.
I am no stranger to chronic illness— it’s been something I’ve navigated in various ways for most of my adulthood and most of my work I’ve offered has been in relationship to it, in learning to reach for more aliveness. For me, a name or a diagnosis has always both given meaning as it simultaneously diminishes it. I’ll be taking some time to find meaning both within and beyond the dominant narratives and institutions.
I’m being asked to trust what my body is communicating. I’m listening.
Slow down, my body is saying. And wow I would love to but how does one without wealth in this lifetime, not to mention lack of generational wealth, slow down? How can we listen to our bodies when the demand of capitalism also requires us to keep doing, keep showing up? How can we listen to our bodies and slow down when we actually love and feel resourced by our work? I’ve been deep in these questions the last couple years and now, action is needed.
After having an astrology and tarot reading with a much trusted elder and through talking with my girlfriend and astrologer Rose Blakelock, it is clear I am in the last gasp of a very intense Pluto transit— I am in a time where I have to understand that the guilt and shame I feel around slowing down is deeply rooted to the abuse I’ve experienced in my childhood and adulthood. Can I allow myself to rest? Can I understand I, too, deserve rest? Can I trust that my value is inherent beyond what I can provide to others?
If you are nodding your head and resonating, can you, too, allow yourself to rest? Inch towards believing you are allowed too? When is it too much? Is your body asking for something different? What does rest look like for you under the constant demands of late stage capitalism?
What I am going through is not unique and in fact, is very much a condition of these late stage capitalism, 2+ years of a global pandemic times we are in. I wonder if you are in a similar place too, trying to relearn how to meet your body in a new place?
I am someone who has felt deeply in service to the collective for my whole life. It’s such an incredible gift to serve and support incredible humans in my day to day as a sliding scale herbalist and breathwork facilitator. But this moment is also about allowing myself to have more needs met as well. For me, some of this means more meditation, more time in the garden, getting to bed earlier, prioritizing time with friends and family, taking all the herbs and supplements to see what can shift before medication, and returning to just simply being with my breath.
But it also means returning to creativity— finding ways to translate these communications from my body, finding ways to trust my body.
Thank you for being here to read with and be in relationship with these explorations.
Content note: trauma and violence.
In gratitude,
Jennye
I want to do work from the site of the body. The angry mouth. The huge mouth. I want to write the revolt. I want to write the revolting.
— Kate Zambreno,Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write
I’m thinking about survivors’ bodies as weapons turned back on ourselves. They, our bodies, have been used against us, used to harm us, have been split right down the middle, turned inside out. I remember hearing at some point that rape is particularly difficult to get over because it is one of the few “violent crimes” that people live through.
Often we don’t die. Sometimes we do. We are forced to stare right into the face of potentially dying; our body knows this and responds accordingly; we are left with having to do the work of reminding our bodies that not everything is deserving of a crisis response as we turn our bodies into something we can trust again.
As survivors, there is a deep, intuitive knowing about our bodies that is often out of the scope of what is considered to be “real research” (and by real, I mean funded research out of some institution). There is an embodied knowing that our bodies hold onto the trauma for a lifetime and even beyond, passing down trauma from generation to generation, that illness manifests in bodies of those who have experienced extreme forms of ongoing violence. The “real research” is minimal, though it has recently been growing, and the medical industrial complex is forever trying to turn emotional and physical pain into madness. But survivors know.
Our bodies bloom right into collapse, grow into a host of health complications, many of them chronic.
How do we find our bodies outside of the violence, when they’ve been manipulated on a cellular level? When they’ve absorbed toxicity? When the world around us is engulfed in toxicity, in violence— interpersonal and structural? When it’s the root system that our blooming bodies birth from? When our bodies decide the best route of action is to attack ourselves (my dear and wise friend Elizabeth Bishop recently reflected back to me).
Our bodies were not made to bear the weight of someone else’s fists, words like fists too. We remember the shape— our bodies remember the shape. Our bodies don’t know how to take hold and then release; violence slips into our bones. It stays with us. Our bodies keep track, hold on to it.
People are always surprised to learn that I had insomnia at seven years old. That I had kidney stones that needed surgical removal, at seventeen years old, followed by at least three other times in adulthood. That I would faint in church, on the lacrosse field, while lifeguarding. The digestion issues. The pinworms. There are the days I can’t stay awake. There are the nights I can’t sleep. The chronic exhaustion and tiredness. Tearing my hair out right at the roots, strand by stand. There is something in me that builds to a critical mass, ‘til it shuts my body down, blocks my ureter, takes anxiety to epic peaks, risks full collapse in a desperate search for release, to be heard.
On alert, stay awake, don’t sleep, don’t slow down.
Trauma put down roots in the body, refuses to release until it finally does.
A pain without end.
The expectation of a “full recovery” often eluding us. A hopeful effort to “get back to” and “before”. There is no “before” to return to. There is now. Our fractured, bleeding, inflamed bodies, limbs, organs are an honest reflection of the fractured, bleeding, inflamed body of the earth. We were never separate— those of us tending to our bodies because our bodies demand it— we know we are mirrors.
And so, we make do, we learn, we adapt, we reimagine what living looks like, our bodies holding the collapse until they can no longer hold it and the flood spills out everywhere everywhere everywhere.
To try and cling to an able body is to be constantly failing. The degree to which each of us will encounter disability is, of course, varied but the truth remains— from birth to death, our bodies change, fracture, shift utterly altered by our environments and experiences. How little control we have, really, swirling in a life of uncertainty until our spirit leaves our bodies.
Survivors of sexual/ interpersonal/ relational/ familial violence know what kind of toxicity bodies can hold. I welcome other people that are holding all the hard stuff, hold space, help them remember that they can put some of it down, release a bit, even just for a moment. My body knows it to be true. I am indebted to the people who have done this for me. To have a lover hold you while you're naked, wrap their arms around you and cradle you like you're theirs, tell you it's finally time to put some of the weight down— in that moment they promise safety. And you can believe it enough to try.
This is noble work. This is radical presence. Both the offering and the receiving. This is being open to connection after the world, as you knew it, tried to cut you off from it.
Can we listen to our bodies, even when their communication is just a whisper? Before it becomes a scream?