When life (or your pet) barks in your face
Life barking in my face
Stories of Somatic Transformation #5
.On the day of this photo, I had been in bed for days with severe migraine pain and felt scared of the pain and lonely. I dragged myself out of bed to take my dog Clarke out and to shift my mood. I stopped to take a cute selfie with him, but then he turned to me and started barking, which made the migraine much worse. “Oh great, I can’t catch a break,” I said to myself, as I headed right back to bed. I felt defeated and like everything was going badly, which is an experience I’ve had many times in my journey with chronic daily migraine.
When life (or your pet) barks in your face, how do you respond?
For me, in that moment and in many others, I felt angry with my body for not cooperating with my life plans, irritable due to days on end of physical pain, helpless in the face of frequent medical system challenges, and heartbroken by the loss of my career and social activities due to chronic illness. When things aren’t going my way and also when I witness or experience injustice, sometimes I feel resentful and hardened. My breathing gets shallow, my jaw tightens, and I find myself saying, “Why is this happening? I don’t like this. It’s not fair.” Often I then feel more distressed and eventually, my shoulders slump, I feel resigned, and I think, “Bad things keep happening.”
What I have learned through studying somatic coaching is that most people react automatically to stress and pressure in ways that may or may not be helping us. We fight what is happening, dissociate from our experience, or just get very small. Our reactions may be in our thoughts and emotions, but they also live in the structure of the body, in our posture, the tightening of muscles, places where we get still or numb, etc.
Buddhist spiritual teacher Pema Chodron writes,
“We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid or we can let them soften us. To stay with that shakiness-to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge…getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic - this is the spiritual path.”
When I am able to pause, take a deep breath, notice the sensations of anger, fear, or despair in my body, and stay with feelings that are arising, I am given the opportunity to practice inhabiting my body and making friends with my inner experience. This is not an overnight project with linear improvement, but rather a lifelong practice. Occasionally, I catch a glimmer of something remarkable when I am able to relax my body around anger, heartache, or physical pain. I feel relief and even gratitude for being able to feel, and I think, “I’m so glad to be alive.”
So how about you, what do you do when things aren’t working out for you? Please enjoy this guided audio Somatic practice to explore this question.
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