Learning Body Language

I rely on my brain to explain the world to me because sensing the world is so..much.

It's why it seemed reasonable to use my brain to sense and feel instead of my actual senses and feelings. My brain became a filter, a barrier, a buffer. It's much easier for me to explain my feelings in thoughts rather than describe them in... feelings. Emotions don't make sense to me.

Senses, feelings, and emotions don't make sense to me. They make thoughts.

The thing that comes back to me all the time and amazes me is: the way I learned how to be a grown up in the world happened when I was a little kid. My baby kid self and my senses, feelings, and big emotions were not appreciated at home or at school. It felt like I was me, and I was holding a dramatic unpredictable rodent no one would take the time to soothe or teach me how to deal with their intensity. So the rodent was in trouble a lot. I was in trouble a lot. Consequences didn't make sense to me if you weren't going to actually teach me why what I was doing deserved them.

You know what isn't helpful when you're sensing and feeling a lot? Yelling. Anger. Teasing. Ridicule. Asking if I want something to really cry about. Being laughed at.

I remember, I was so sweet and tender, and also so unwieldy and it felt like when I ran I was trying to pound my feet straight to the center of the earth because my legs felt so strong. I always wanted to be taller. I would color so hard I would break the crayon and then color so lightly that there was hardly any color. I loved the special occasion of wearing pink foam rollers to bed because I loved the way my hair curled all weird and wild when I took them out right after I woke up. My mom would wrap pieces of my wet hair around the rollers and snap them shut. At bedtime I would carefully place my wet rollered head on my pillow and wake up in the morning to the miracle of dry curled hair. Oh! I loved the way my hair would spring! and boing! when I unwound it from the roller. I can feel it, the wonder of the awkward curls, the way the foam roller was all squished in the middle from having my hair around it, the bobbing swing of my hair around my face.

Sensing. I am trying to learn the world of that again. Writing from the place in my mind that is a sense of rather than a telling. Living my life in a way that feels the way rather than dictates what to do. Learning body language.

This takes a lot of trust, a lot of trust I like to think I have but I guess I do sometimes and sometimes I don't. I know how to think...I don't know how to feel, to hear my senses. To know what they are telling me. I'm walking up to the border of what I don't know- again and again- and pushing myself past the edge a bit, even when I don't think I can. I just go ahead and try. Be patient.

It isn't easy. The world is so big and so loud and so demanding. I stop and try to hear my body and instead I hear my thoughts, thinking. I'm trying to get my body to speak through my brain, to let her get a word in edgewise. The anxiety of taking a pregnant pause to listen for a wisp of a body whisper makes me edgy, and edgy makes me unable to listen. I get impatient. I try again. Maddening. I lay down on the kitchen floor at the end of the day while dinner cooks just to do something different.

Lately my dream has been living away from. Away from the interstate that runs right behind my house. Away from so many people, away from the energy of all the power lines it takes to run the city I live in, away from all the cars cars cars, away from the trees missing their middles because of the power lines. I often wonder what I would be like if my system had less environmental demands. Could I hear my body language then?

What if I woke up when I woke up, to no alarm, and it was peaceful. Bucolic. If I could have my windows open. If I went out to the garden barefoot to pick strawberries for breakfast. Sat on the porch in the morning sun to write my morning pages. Did yoga on a patch of flat grass. Had my office on a screened porch, with room to pace and stretch, with a cozy chair and a desk. I go rambling in the woods for lunch, or for the day. Only drive a car once a week, or once a month.

I feel like all the environmental over-sensing has fried my sensing system. I long to hear my body language. To know what my body is asking for, and to give it. The way the world is set up- we can't even just answer nature when it calls- we have to find a bathroom. If you have to fart you just hold it or hope no one knows it was you. We wear clothes and cover up our bodies- or don't cover them and our bodies become objects. We put our butts in seats at school and at work when the natural world is out there for us, just waiting for us to remember we are animals.

It all feels so...rude.

I'm pretending I'm little again. Seeing if I can be a new again- a human being learning how to sense the world around and within me. Doing it with the autonomy of a grown up. Like a second childhood. Is that really what mid life is all about? Starting to go backwards, back to begin again? Taking off the scars and silences of growing up, the armors that prevent us from knowing simple things like what hungry and thirsty actually say, what more complex things like safety and rested really feel like.

Most of all I want to get free, this seems to be a theme right now- being free. Get this shit off of me. I want to know what being alive in a body feels like, sounds like. Not sound as in noise but sound as in knowing. My body is understandably hesitant and skeptical, and my brain is smug and overconfident- assuming it gets all the attention, as usual. It will take some time to come to a new agreement.

One way I'm encouraging this is by listening to what my body says and then going along with it, no matter what my brain says. When I'm out running and my body says walk I walk. When my body says ok I can start running again I start again- no matter who is around to see. I'm trying not pushing myself around in my yoga practice, instead I'm asking my body does this feel good? is this enough? a little less? a little more? just right? ...I let her take the lead. I'm trying to get up to pee when I have the urge instead of ignoring it, holding it until I just can't anymore.

Just noticing what my body is doing or saying and believing. Without having to have a reason.

There are so many ways I do things just because they are the ways I've done things. But...what is my system actually like? I love the possibility of understanding that. Discovering I'm AuDHD has been the key to giving myself the freedom to try doing that, going way back to what started happening when I was a kid and redoing it.

Omg my brain thinks. Who has time for that?

Omg, my body says. Who doesn't?