Fight

Two weeks ago, on a cool, sunny morning, I was walking through my small town on my way to meet with a client.

I was focused on my breathing - how slowly do I need to walk for my breath to remain steady and quiet as it moves through my nose? - when a dog came out of a yard, wagging its tail. Black and white, short-hair, coming up maybe knee-height, maybe a little higher.

I couldn’t see an owner, but there was someone sitting in their car nearby and I thought the dog might be headed there. I stood tall and talked firmly and with friendliness before the dog continued behind me down the alley and I thought little more of it.

A half a block later, the dog returned it. This time, it was growling and I could feel a sense of panic arise. My hands were empty. How does one get an aggressive, ownerless dog to go away with empty hands?

The dog circled me, growling. I spoke to it, this time more firmly.

~ ~ ~

It circled me again, still growling, and before I knew what had happened, I felt its teeth sink into the back of my leg, just below my knee.

I whirled around, frantic. The dog was still growling, still hovering. I had no idea what would happen next and there was nothing near me - no stick, no rock. I yelled. I yelled simply because I was hurt and I yelled to scare the dog and I yelled for help. In the meantime, I remembered I was wearing a backpack and I swung it off one shoulder and started swinging it in the direction of the dog, still yelling.

The dog trotted off down the alley toward the direction from which it had come.

~ ~ ~

What the hell had just happened?! I was stumbling, hyperventilating, my insides quivering, tears running through my mascara, as I continued on toward my client, checking frequently behind me to make sure I wasn’t being followed again.

Now I had my stainless steel water bottle in hand, removed from the side pocket of my deep pink backpack, ready for use in case the dog returned. I knew instinctively that I could win a fight with a dog a lot more easily if I had an object at hand and I could see with absolute clarity that I would bash the dog’s head in before I would let it bite me again.

~ ~ ~

And this, my friends, is when I realized something healing had happened to a very injured and very essential part inside me.

I was willing to fight.

I was able to fight.

I was willing and able to fight with my body.

~ ~ ~

Like many of us, especially women, I carry a lot of freeze in my body. That is how I have primarily survived the painful parts of my life. It is also why I have such a strong tendency toward physical manifestations of trauma: I know very well how to store them, but storing doesn’t render something powerless and so they show up over and over again in various forms.

Although I am comfortable in anger and take loads of action in my life, when actually threatened, I am actually much more likely to collapse and seek resolution through my collapse, the familiarity of the freeze impressing itself upon whatever life throws at me. Specifically, for as long as I have been noticing such things, my arms have been without somatic power, lying dead on the table while I have this bodywork done or that energy work done.

~ ~ ~

But this cool, sunny day showed me something different.

My deep, primal instinct kicked in and I fought back with my body. I used my arms, I used my voice, I used the whole of me to create a better chance of safety. Importantly, I had that moment of knowing that I could kill that which threatened me.

How different this felt from collapse!

~ ~ ~

For at least four decades, I have carried the experience of being over-powered in my body, the idea that I am powerless. This is the result of childhood sexual abuse, yes, but also of being a woman in a culture that is often dangerous to women, and of being a human living in systems that are structured to remove our embodied power.

I do not mean to put it all “out there” - it is I who has not been able to find her ability to fight, her ability to flee with power, but I do mean that the experience is a conditioned one, both personal and impersonal.

~ ~ ~

I cannot tell you exactly why this shift happened when it did. Why now? But I can point to two recent choices I have very intentionally made that have led to fundamental shifts in my sense of power.

The first is that I have begun studying voice again, after two decades of mostly not singing following an idiopathic, presumably psychosomatic vocal injury in my 20s, while I was singing with a chamber chorus in Philadelphia. My current voice teacher is deeply attuned to the psycho-emotional realities of vocal freedom and I am just as likely to cry in a lesson as I am to sing. In the weeks leading up to the attack, I’ve had various breakthroughs, more and more of my true voice coming through with so much power as I’ve shed years of choral training and years of compensation. This is something maybe I’ve never really experienced before, despite the many years of singing that came before the injury.

The other is that I have just started boxing lessons. It was in that second session, while the somatically-oriented instructor guided me in hitting the pads my husband was holding for me - left jab, right cross, left jab - that I felt my first overwhelming wash of power and I wanted to crumple to the floor in tears.

And why boxing? Because I kept getting the inner guidance that I needed to learn to fight, that fighting was one of the last great pieces in this phase of healing that has been going on for six years or maybe forever.

And why singing? Because I kept getting the inner guidance that I needed to return to singing, that singing was one of the last great pieces in this phase of healing that has been going on for 20 years or maybe forever.

And because both sounded like absolute, pure pleasure in the body.

~ ~ ~

I sometimes feel like I am learning the same lessons over and over again, and I confess I am often a poor student and I do not always like to keep learning. Nonetheless, the more I learn to listen, to heed the inner call, to attend to what the body is asking of me, the greater my capacity to live well, to live freely, to restore the primal instincts toward survival and pleasure that reside deep in my bones and want to be fully expressed in the world.

~ ~ ~

I do not know the precise calls you need to heed in order to live fully in the world, but I do know that there are many ways to get there and that I have helped countless others find their own freedom. If you’d like to book a (no-cost) call to explore working together, simply contact me and we’ll get you scheduled.

With so much love!