Loving my Parts

Healing and Creating as I listen to the wisdom of my body.

I didn’t get the Presidential award for Physical Fitness in Middle School. It pissed me off. I knew myself as an athlete. I’d been taking pride in playing with the boys at recess since the 1st grade. I was fast and strong and had great hands with a basketball. But I couldn’t touch my toes in one of the challenges and therefore was ineligible to receive the highest award! Arrghhhh. I can still feel the frustration as I write this as a 41 year old. I lived my life with the story, “I’m just not flexible.”

In 2019 I started engaging in therapeutic medicine work, or psychedelic assisted therapies. It was a time in my life where I needed some guidance and support, around my marriage, and my career, and ya know, what the heck I was doing in life. One of my dearest friends and colleagues sat with me and the medicine as I began to have experiences I couldn’t explain; a cramping in my right pec that when touched set me into a huge emotional release. Around that same time, another dear friend introduced me to the Strozzi Institute and their embodiment and somatic practices. Teachers would say things like, “We don’t center to feel good. We center to feel.” As I began to let myself feel (the good, the bad, and the ugly), my body did indeed start to speak to me.

I had perused The Body Keeps The Score a few years prior, and understood it intellectually. I felt things in my body that I couldn’t explain. My curiosity about what my body was holding and trying to tell me increased. Why are my hips so tight? Why do I sometimes disappear during sex with my partner, who I feel completely loved and safe with? I was beginning to feel the echoes of experiences I didn’t even remember. That shaping was beginning to reveal itself more and more.

In March of 2024, my husband and I got married, again. It was a vow renewal of sorts. A threshold crossing into the next chapter of our marriage. One in which I proposed to him and was whole-heartedly saying yes to exactly what our relationship is, and isn’t. We had decided a year earlier not to have kids, officially. He had a vasectomy. (It should be noted that I passed out during the procedure. He did just fine. While his balls were being poked and prodded, I woke up to a nurse bringing me water and ice).

As we said no to some things in our relationship, we began to get clearer on what we were saying yes to - each other, the healing that comes with our partnership, being of service to community, deepening into our soul’s longing and creative expression.

It was during this time that my partner sat with me in a day-long medicine journey. It was my first time being held in that kind of experience by him. And it was big.

A few hours in, as I returned to laying down after a bathroom break, I was suddenly transported to a memory from childhood. I was very young. At a church camp in the Redwoods. There was a bathroom. And a man. And violations of my sovereignty. There was fear, confusion, and shame.

And suddenly my body was shaping itself into the very survival shaping that I had started to discover in years prior; a part I would come to call my bracing part, a shape little Laurie made to try to keep her body safe. My partner was there as the memory unfolded to hold my hand and remind me to breathe. My dog Dax was there to curl up with me and place his head on my heart.

This memory came, seemingly, out of nowhere. But the more I thought about it in the months following the more I knew it came as I continued to work with my body, instead of against it. And my body had been giving me clues my entire life. I started to understand the way my right shoulder curls in and contracts. The way my left groin and hip flexor curl up to meet it. I began to newly relate to this bracing contraction that has never left me no matter how much yoga I practiced or how many massages I received. I doodled this part of me and started working with it, honoring it, and asking for its wisdom.

Since that day last March I’ve had to call on many other resources and professionals to support me with the energy that had been trapped. Therapists. Body workers. Friends. My husband. Beyoncé. Florence + The Machine. All of them have been critical in supporting my healing. In helping me shed shame I’ve carried with me for so long. In helping me reclaim my pleasure as my birthright. I just kept asking my body to speak to me, and it did and still does, if I’m willing to slow down, feel, and listen.

I just keep moving, breathing, and listening. I’m doing this during yoga daily. I used to hate yoga! I hated anything that reminded me I wasn't flexible, because it put me face to face with my undiscovered bracing part. But as I've worked with parts of me I was previously suppressing, which is basically my entire pelvic area, I've found the more I can feel.

Movement is medicine! Duh! And it makes sense that it’s taken me a while to remember how to do so in a way that works for me.

I saw this reel on Instagram with Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps The Score. He shares about how Yoga can help people treat their relationship to their body. But how it can also be super agitating for those who have a hard time being in their body… how someone who is a childhood SA survivor can be triggered by happy baby pose. He apparently has a whole chapter in his book on this.

So I’m continuing to work with my movement and my breath and to let the parts of me that need support know I’m with them. That I’m grateful for what they did for me in that moment and how they protected me. That we can soften the bracing. All of this has been hard work. Nuanced and complicated. Confusing and irritating at times. But also healing and liberating.

Every time my Yoga teacher says, “Focus on prioritizing the depth of breath, not the depth of the posture,” I’m reminded that I can’t stretch these parts into submission, no matter how hard I try. They need to be heard, validated, and supported with a whole variety of things. Basically they need to be felt and loved.

As I’ve been on this healing journey, I’ve also been on a creative journey. As I’ve shed shame over what happened to me, I’ve found new access to pleasure and creativity. A new willingness to put myself and my thoughts out there. Kim Krans says “The Healer’s mission is to move through the comfort of forgetting, through the veils of ignorance and denial, to reveal the radiance that already exists.”

This radiance has been in me all along. As has the creative and expressive impulses that felt really big and scary to my parts, who for so long, have been bracing and trying to keep me safe.

I’m discovering there are many things I want to create. Books. Screenplays. Connection. Love. I now feel willing to feel my creative energy, which was definitely being protected by my bracing part. Shame and fear clamped down on both my erotic and creative energy at that Church Camp when I was a youngster.

Allison Russell sings in her beautiful song Nightflyer about strength and resilience in the face of trauma…

“Came back out with my gold and my greens, Now I see everything. Now I feel everything, Good Lord, What the hell could they bring to stop me, Lord? Nothing from the Earth, nothing from the sea, Not a God Almighty thing”

Lizzy Jeff collaborates with Londrelle in the song Love on your Body, singing,

“Casting spells with this love for my body

Ever since I press play, I've been healing my body

I've been feeling the energy, healing the inner-me.”

Which leads me back to the healing power we all have within us, to deeply listen to our parts, to heal, and to create beauty in this world.

So off I go to continue to listen to my body, my parts, and the wisdom they hold, as I continue to unwind the contractions that are no longer serving me, and create the beauty and love I long to see in the world.