another lens on healing

The California poppies are blooming in the front yard. They remind me of my mother's mother, Grandma Jan, or GJ for short. 

GJ had a habit of speaking about her body in the third person.

She’d say things like, “I’d really like to go but my body is saying no.”  In her presence, it was 100-percent acceptable to speak to the needs of one’s body, as in, “my body needs a nap” or, “my body needs a little treat.”

To be fair, I took advantage of this as a teen. I’d say things like, “I’d like to eat these peas, but my body is not up for it." But even if she suspected I was scapegoating my body, she never questioned it. The body always had the final say.

Growing up, the way GJ spoke about her body was a kind of inside family joke.  “Oh, what do GJ and her body have to say today?” We held their relationship as an attention-seeking quirk. Why did her body have so many needs?

It is only now, looking back at the wonder she invited me to, that I recognize my grandmother as my first somatic teacher.

GJ showed me over and over again that the body deserves to be part of the conversation -- that when we make room for how our physicality communicates with us, we are making room for our inherent wholeness.

My grandmother suffered from a chronic illness that for much of her life made her lethargic and allergic to many foods. It would have been easy for her to consider her body a failure. She never knew when something would make her sick.  

She also had an exquisite relationship to pleasure.

Her garden overflowed with the audacious and the exotic. She subscribed to a gourmet chocolate club that delivered monthly boxes of treats. She loved to play card games and board games and really anything we could make into a game. And she loved her body. She cared for it like it was one of the many blooms that confettied her yard. 

To have a body, even one that was failing, meant to continually open to delight. Her insistence of joy, even amid the difficult, was an insistence of her completeness. She was not in need of fixing, she was arrived: complex, sometimes grumpy, but unwaveringly in partnership with the full kaleidoscope of her humanity.

GJ showed me that healing is not about becoming something, but about allowing who we already are.