Releasing Narrative

My body worker is running a firm hand down my IT band, and it hurts so much I feel myself trying not to cry.

So I cry.

It's not even a real cry, just the sobs at the beginning.

The IT band loosens up, becomes much less painful, as soon as I let myself make whatever sound wants to come out, breathe whatever way I was taught meant "dysregulation," when I drop my fear and resistance to leakage from my eyes.

It happens *immediately.* Pain like this does not survive my willingness to express it.

Pain like this is stored from when I wasn't willing or able or safe to express it.

Back when someone said "you'd better not cry, or I'll give you something to cry ABOUT."

Isn't me crying evidence that I have something to cry about? I wondered this even then. Another thing that wasn't safe to express.

Here, under the hands of a caring professional, it IS safe to express, and I do.

The first time I cried, he did my very favorite thing, seemingly on instinct. I call it compassionate indifference, where someone simply allows the expression and does not engage with it or form their own feelings or judgments about it.

When I moved through it, he encouraged the expression and offered that I might speak to it if I wanted to.

I told him the truth—the somatics is all of it for me. I dropped away the need to tell a story a long time ago, and the stories dropped themselves away in time. It's another kind of bewilderment, where rather than getting spun up in a story, my body feels intense sensation without even making up a story about "why."

Dream shadows flicker, small memories and flavors. Ah, yes. I am willing to witness it all. I argue with none of it, I embrace it all, and that is where the specifics drop away, because the panic inside me doesn't have to explain itself to be valid and welcome.

I know there is no comfort in ideas of what this is about. I know there is tension, emotion, sensation in my literal physical body, right fucking now. I know that movement, vocalization, pressure, positioning, and stillness are the way to meet embodied sensation.

This practice of narrative-free expression has released me from pervasive anxiety I used to experience everywhere I went. There’s always more to go.