How do you know who you are and where you are? Do you define yourself with your age, your looks, your job, your dreams, your relationships? Do your body sensations factor into your identity? From the time we are in the womb, we develop a sense of our own individual body and all of its parts, which we call the body schema. It’s a felt sense of the body parts, how they fit together and how they relate to the environment around us, including other people. We know the general size and shape of our body, its boundaries, and that it is ours and not someone else’s. We feel the pull of gravity, knowing that the ground is under us. Our body schema includes proprioception (feeling our posture and the body moving) and interoception (feeling inner sensations such as our heart rate, heat and cold, thirst and hunger, digestion, pain and pleasure, sensuality). We also have a personal picture of what our body looks like to others—not necessarily an accurate one—and this is called our body image. But how do we know this?
Paul Schilder, in his book The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, writes:
We do not know very much about our body unless we move it. Movement is a great unifying factor between the different parts of our body. By movement we come into a definitive relationship to the outside world and to objects, and only in contact with this outside world are we able to correlate the diverse impressions concerning our own body.1
Our body schema and body image are dynamic, always affected by experiences and changing throughout life. Adolescents typically go through intense fluctuations in their body image, as societal pressures, physical changes, and hormones put the pressure on. Perhaps the way you thought of yourself as an adolescent is different from the way you see yourself now. Perhaps even now as an adult, you have external pressures that cause you to judge your body for its appearance. For those whose body image has become largely negative, some intervention can help to redefine and relearn oneself in an authentic self-supporting way. This intervention can be a combination of psychotherapy and bodywork. Self-awareness—both conceptual and embodied—needs constant renewal. The promise of bodywork is to help us to update and refine our body schema and body image as we go through life. We gain a deeper and more nuanced self-awareness of who we are, and more capacity for self-regulation and self-acceptance.
The body schema begins to form in the womb. After birth, infants learn about their world through touching, exploring everything around them with mouths and fingers and toes. Touch is food for the nervous system; we learn from it and get feedback about ourselves and our boundaries through touch. This strong influence of touch continues throughout life, often unconsciously, as we interact with our world. As part of your day, you probably handle tools and objects that blend with and extend your body schema. If you drive a vehicle, use a computer mouse or a tennis racket, play a musical instrument, or stir a soup, you are extending your body to include an object, and thereby extending your body schema into action. You learn intuitively from that interaction. Like these other helpful objects, the balls become a part of your body schema as you work with them. You can use them to learn about your body in a unique and very effective way.
Human touch is rich in emotional communication, and how we experience touch emotionally can vary tremendously. When infants are handled lovingly and their nervous systems learn to trust the touch of others, the pattern is set for touch to be a pleasurable and soothing part of their physical experience throughout life. Loving parental touch and gentle physical guidance as the child learns basic motor skills like rolling over, sitting up, and walking help to build a positive body schema for the child. But for those children whose early experiences of touch are threatening, painful, or nonexistent, physical touch becomes frightening and something to be avoided. One result of this early fear is for the body to armor itself and carry tremendous muscle tension as a protection. Shoulders stiffen, the spine stiffens, and interoception is gradually eroded. When this armoring continues for years, a person’s body schema is diminished, and the bodily experiences that might offer joy and satisfaction become dangers instead.2
Manual therapy in a professional and safe setting can gradually help to rebuild a healthy body schema. Massage therapy is a valuable modality that has not yet taken its rightful place in the modern health care system. But if massage seems threatening, or feels like an invasion of privacy, or is not available, working with the balls can be a good first step in relearning to enjoy touch. You can choose balls that feel safe and appealing, not intrusive or threatening. The balls are nonpersonal, nonsexual, and playful, providing a touch interaction that can help rebuild a healthy body schema, and with this a sense of living more fully in the body, knowing its boundaries and its pleasures.
Dianne, an artist, had pain in her neck for so long that she became fearful of any intervention or contact with that part of her body. She held it stiffly, which compounded the problem. Gradually she learned to trust the ball as something she could control, and use to help herself. On days when her neck was particularly sore, she’d choose a very soft ball for a gentle intervention. On better days, she could address the tension with a firmer ball. She says, “One big problem with injuries is that you start to feel antagonistic toward your body. Doing the ballwork changes your relationship with your problem area because you find that you can work with it gently, and good changes happen.”
What kind of instruction did you get as a child about posture? When I was growing up, we were just told to “stand up straight,” but never told what that really meant. It seemed stiff and arbitrary to me. In my adult life as an avid mover, dancer, and yoga teacher, I have expanded my understanding of “good posture” to include much more than the static military posture implied as the goal when I was young. To me, good posture is aligning myself in the best biomechanical and expressive way for whatever I am doing. It’s hardly ever “straight,” but it is “up” and it is dynamic, not static. Gravity pulls us down; our challenge as two-legged creatures is to lift ourselves up and avoid the tendency to collapse. Strength is required, but it’s not brute strength. An inner expansion, which goes along with a deep breath, is the best way to start to lift the spine out of a slump. When I work with students who say they want to improve their posture, we usually start with the breath, and with a suggestion of opening from the inside.
Once that inner expansion has started to happen, the next step is to soften patterns of outer tension that pull us down. If you sit at a desk all day, the muscles and fascia on the front of your body will shorten, pulling the spine into a rounded shape. The back muscles then adapt to that shape and tighten in response, so you have tension in both the back and the front. You can stretch and attempt to reverse the pattern, but only with extreme effort. Ballwork can gradually release the shortened and stiff muscles and fascia, so that achieving a taller, more open posture is not only possible, but easy and natural. Once the soft tissue is more even on the front and the back, you can do yoga or conventional exercise to strengthen the necessary supporting muscles to maintain the new posture.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the fascia in the body is connected from top to bottom, back to front, and side to side. Changing our posture might not be as simple as pulling our shoulders back. We may need to address hidden tight areas in several parts of the body that are causing a restriction in the fascia. The balls provide an entry point into the web, a way to begin. As one part releases, we follow the web to gradually and sequentially release enough so that standing tall is effortless.
Morrie is a professional musician whose spine is kyphotic, which means that her upper back is rounded and her shoulders curve forward. She also has osteoporosis, a condition of low bone density with increased risk of fracture. Posture is important for Morrie, both to get a good breath for playing her clarinet, and to avoid a vertebral fracture. She finds that the ballwork and yoga have helped her improve her posture, and she has greatly reduced pain in her neck and shoulders. She says, “I feel stronger and I’m much more aware of my posture.”
Research shows that postural patterns can affect and possibly even create our mental state. Experimental subjects who were instructed to maintain postures of collapse or protectiveness reported feelings of depression and stress.3 Our moods and our posture, or more broadly our body carriage, are interwoven in a dynamic system that is open to change from either direction. The cycle might go like this: If we are feeling happy, the body is energized, and movements are smooth and easeful, which in turn supports our lighthearted mood. On another day, we may feel depressed or scared. Then the body goes into a protective mode: our muscles tighten, our posture becomes distorted, and that physical restriction becomes an expression of our mood while also perpetuating it. The mind and the body are in a constant dialogue and dance. Body awareness practices like Bodymind Ballwork can help us to navigate these mood and posture interactions more skillfully. Feeling anxious? Check in with your body and breath. Feeling stiff or achy? Check in with your body, your breath, and your inner voice.
One way to check in with our interoception—our inner sense of subjective presence in the body—is with an inner dialogue, also called our internalized voice. Think for a moment about whether you have an inner dialogue, a way of checking in with yourself throughout your day. If you do, what are its contours and themes? Do you talk to yourself with judgment, criticism, or disapproval? Or are you an encouraging coach for yourself? Does your body have a voice in the conversation? Do you find fault with your body, or berate it for giving you pain? Do you ruminate about the causes of body problems? Do you compare your body with other people’s bodies? Do you listen to what your body has to tell you? If you are feeling tired or irritable, does your body have a message for you? If your neck hurts and you are short-tempered, can you see the connection between those two states? Do you see your body as an ally, or an adversary? A burden, or your very own self?
I believe that we develop our inner dialogue over our lifetime. It is influenced by our family and by the culture we live in, the education we receive, the work that we do, and our goals for ourselves. I often ask students what they were taught about self-care while growing up. For many of us, it’s the usual short list: eat healthy food, get exercise, get enough sleep. Rarely is anything taught about the value of interoception or embodied self-awareness—the ongoing process of dialogue between your mental and physical selves. Without an authentic subjective connection with ourselves, the conglomeration of stresses that life brings takes a bigger toll.
Of course, this inner dialogue is colored by memories, both conscious ones and unconscious ones. Many of the writers I refer to in this book have described these two kinds of memories, calling them explicit memories and implicit memories.4 Explicit memories have to do with autobiographical, narrative, and factual details (where you grew up, what you did for vacation last year, how to cook an egg). These memories are strengthened by repetition and can help us navigate the practical aspects of life. Parenting books advocate talking to children about the sequence of daily events in their lives as a way to increase their ability to sequence their thoughts and create a context for memories that will help them learn.5
Implicit memories are those from sensory and emotional experiences that we may not consciously recall but that leave an imprint. We store implicit memories throughout our lives, but especially in the first eighteen to twenty-four months, when that is the only kind of memory being formed.6 Examples include knowing the faces of family members, recognizing the smell of a favorite food, or being scared of the power of ocean waves. Other examples involving personal interactions might be the feeling of shame when scolded by a stern teacher, or the feeling of love and trust when cared for by a loving parent. These memories form the substratum for our sense of who we are and how the world works. That doesn’t mean that they define us—we have agency for re-creating ourselves in every moment—but that we carry these implicit memories that could influence our current experiences.
In yoga, implicit memories are referred to as samskaras. Samskaras are the imprints from our previous experiences that affect our current life in the form of beliefs, habits, and tendencies. They run the gamut from positive to neutral to negative. What’s an example of a samskara? Some might call it an instinct or a desire, like always wanting to eat a sweet dessert after a meal. Another example is a mental/emotional pattern, like distrust of lawyers or doctors because of a previous bad experience, or the tendency to romantically bond with a certain type of person. Samskaras can also show up as our physical habits. Perhaps a lifetime of playing basketball leaves a positive imprint of pleasure in quick, light movements. A life spent doing hard physical labor leaves the imprint of tremendous muscular strength but also tremendous fatigue. Years of sitting still at work might leave an imprint of immobility that comes to be the norm. In each case, a repeated physical state or movement becomes a habit, which then become our posture and movement style, which then become our biological and mental structure, and the cycle begins again.
In 1998, child development professionals coined the term “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs.7 The theory states that difficult circumstances in childhood create deep-seated changes that carry through a person’s life, long after the stressful situation has outwardly ended. The stress might be a onetime event, such as the death of a parent, or it might be constant and long-lasting, such as an abusive or mentally ill parent, physical illness, or extreme poverty.
When a child faces chronic and unpredictable stressors, their developing body and brain become routinely flooded with inflammatory stress chemicals. This flood alters the expression of genes that control stress hormone output, triggering an overactive inflammatory stress response for life. When these changes occur in genes that should regulate a healthy stress response, a child’s inflammatory stress response becomes permanently set to “on”—and the homeostatic mechanisms that should turn off that stress response don’t work. These epigenetic8 changes can predispose an individual to lifelong inflammation and propensity for many adult diseases. There is also evidence that the epigenetic changes like these can be carried over from one generation to another. In one experiment, for instance, mice were exposed to a stressor and a simultaneous smell of cherry blossoms. Future generations from those mice had abnormal stress responses to the same smell without exposure to the stressor. What your grandmother had to deal with in her lifetime may still be resonating in your consciousness!
When you work slowly and mindfully to explore your body sensations and movement with Bodymind Ballwork, you will gradually build an understanding of how conditioning and implicit memories have created your body schema of today. With repeated practice, you come to trust the safety of the balls and the inner journey that is opened up by embodied self-awareness, and you can make changes. Emotions and implicit memories lodged in the tissues of the body begin to dissolve, with or without making themselves known to your conscious mind. Experiences of the past may bubble up unexpectedly, offering you the opportunity to know yourself more deeply. You may find that you have the choice to let go of some of the conditioning that holds you back from your full expression. But if there are complex factors that disconnect you from your body, reconnecting might seem too risky. In the next chapter, we’ll outline some ways in which interoception and the development of a healthy body schema may be hijacked.