My skin talks a lot. It goes on and on and on about everything and nothing and most of the time I can’t even grasp what it’s telling me.
– You don’t know what happened to me the other day. Unbelievable!
– What?
– This crazy thing! Crazy things always happen to me. Like have I ever told you about that time…
– Wait. What happened this time?
– Crap, I totally forgot.
– Which one?
– Both. Actually, what were we talking about?
My skin dries, acts out, reddens, swells. It says it needs something, it shouts something is wrong, but when I ask what that is, it refuses to answer.
With time, I finally started to learn its language. And at first I found it manipulative. It’d often become greasy when it needed fat. It dried out when I moisturized it too much. It reacts with an excess of what it’s lacking. If not manipulative, it’s at least contorted.
Then I started to see this paradoxical reaction in other things as well.
My neck has a history of being stiff, tense, and, as a consequence, sore. In my head, this rigidity translated into “too much strength and little mobility” — like those people who lift a lot of heavy weights and the strength in their muscles makes it hard to bend and fold naturally. As a response, I’d move it around its axis over and over, in the hope to “loosen it up”. However, the more I learn about the body through yoga, the more I understand that my stiffness was asking for strength and support (sthira) and not for ease and openness (sukha). My neck was asking me to heal compression with compression.
Before I continue let me add a halfway disclaimer: body and mind don’t communicate in just one way. We can’t apply what we learn to all instances in which something is off. This is a common tendency: finding something that works or gives pleasure and doing it to solve any issue we encounter. It saves us the time to think but it rarely leads to anything good. So if your neck is stiff, consult a professional.
When in table top I often felt wrists and hands burdened by too much weight. Yet, I’m not overweight and I didn’t think I had weak arms. It was (not so) surprising to find out that what was actually weak was… my legs. My arms had to compensate to support me, but they were never the issue in the first place. This example is slightly different but it’s saying the same thing: “It might seem like here is the problem, but you have to look there”.
The body, just like the mind, is often not literal. It speaks with metaphors and hyperboles. It’s full of paradoxes and has no clear lines and distinctions.
In moments where I felt I should have had more, periods in which I harbored fantasies of ownership and possession, in which I needed reassurance of what was mine, it turned out what I needed was to give. Not to wait for better moments so I could be generous but be generous while having nothing — or what seemed like nothing.
I could:
- Recognize and accept what was foreign, when I knew I had some immunity against invasion
- Be intentional, when I learned how to let things happen
- Believe my identity is clear, once I understood it exists within social dynamics
- Travel, once I felt at home
This in itself teaches us nothing more than another way to interpret the signals and symptoms of our organism — which is already a lot —, a more “yes this but also this” kind of approach. But if we zoom out just enough to see the bigger picture, it tells us that rushed, forceful and automatic responses do little for the issue and little also for our sense of control, while promising to do a lot for both.
I’d have missed my opportunity to communicate well if you finish this post thinking “Ah, let me add this to the list of methods to try when I want to fix things.”
Let the take home message be: answers are not always so obvious, solutions can’t be sought through repetitive and literal strategies. A curious observation is needed to find the unusual and uncommon, which are, it turns out, quite usual and common when it comes to humans.
Empatherapy 