Back to the Body
Today I head out to start my first project here in Nepal. I will be heading out to 5 different rural districts to create, set up and run a two-week program for adolescent girls who have been identified as either high risk for or survivors of sexual violence, forced prostitution and trafficking. During this short time in each district, I will deliver a combination of life coaching sessions and Dance Movement Psychotherapy workshops to support these girls. I will be focusing on the facilitation of a sense of agency and body ownership as well as skills to help prepare these girls to live empowered and economically independent lives – skills such as goal setting, self-care, teamwork and leadership, and embracing creativity.
The past few months of carting back and forth between different cities and states around the US - waiting for the visa gods to decide my most recent visa fate – have been both nourishing, as I have had a chance to catch up with family I don’t see regularly enough, and also taxing. In the process, I realise I’ve become very wrapped up in my head. And now off I go to work in an embodied[1] way with a collection of young women who speak little to no English and may not have the capacity at this point in time to feel very embodied themselves. It will be my responsibility to communicate with them with few words, and to hold for them the weight and concept of embodiment, as they take steps to slowly embrace it themselves. Those who have experienced trauma often feel their bodies are not their own, or that they do not have permission to use it as they like. Too heavy a focus on embracing the body at once can be overwhelming, while ignoring it perpetuates the problem. I must have a constant sense of my own relationship with my body and a keen awareness of how I am imparting that to the girls. It’s time to get back in touch with my own body, and my best tool for that is movement:
As I finish packing a few clothes, supplies to keep me clean and healthy in rural Nepal, and a library’s worth of reference books, I have started to feel a bit overwhelmed by this project that is unlike anything I’ve undertaken before. Fighting the urge to ignore the nervous sensation in my stomach in order to only feel the strength I am ‘supposed’ to model for these girls, I give in to the complex mix of emotions I am actually having. As I allow myself to move through this, I feel vulnerable. I keep circling back to two arm movements: one that involves a sense of enveloping or hugging into myself, and another as if lifting some imaginary weight to carry over my head. My arms feel weak and unable to manage it, and so I bend my knees and engage my whole body. And sure enough, my arms remain over my head, and I do not drop this imaginary thing. And I know that as long as I don’t lose sight and sense of my own body – it’s strength and equally its vulnerability – I will find the tools to support these girls and myself.[2]
As I question what possible strength I can impart to these girls who have experienced and survived so much more hardship than I can possibly imagine, I must continue to find my way back to my body, my training, and my own self-care. I am lucky to have been born into the circumstances I was and raised in the family I have. And the opportunities I have had as a result of that good fortune have given me a different version of strength than these young women have had to show. That is what I have to offer these brave young women.
And with that, I would like to wish my mom a very happy birthday today. Her love, strength, support and guidance have given me the tools that I hope to share with the girls here Nepal. I love you, Mom.
As always, if you'd like to contribute to funding this volunteer experience, please click here. Thank you so much to those who have donated!
[1] I use the terms ‘embodied’ and ‘embodiment’ to describe a sense of “‘being in’ and developing a relationship with our bodies” (Allegranti, 2015 Allegranti, B. (2015) Embodied Performances: Sexuality, Gender, Bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan., p. 2).
[2] At times in this blog – as in life – I will have no better way to describe my experience than in my embodied response, a description of my sensations and movement as I ‘move through’ ideas, concepts or thinking. This is a practice I embraced in my DMP MA course, and is inspired by the work of Beatrice Allegranti. These excerpts of embodied response will be written in italics.