Tapestry of the Body
The body holds memory. It holds energy and holds emotion. Patterns form from the experiences we have in life weave into our being. This is how I see the tapestry of the body, as this woven landscape of patterns, beliefs, energies, emotions, points of pain, points of joy, and everything in between. These memories live in our bodies.
The energy and the emotion that we felt within those memories and those points of time exist within our being. They live as an energetic and emotional imprint. They live as a cellular memory often beyond the memory of the mind, beyond the cognitive understanding.
This felt sensory experience lives as a sensation in the body.
Often, we conceive patterns, behaviors, beliefs, and identities in our preverbal years before we even can speak from childhood, life experiences, the world's collective beliefs and narratives.
Yet, it is ‘life’ that is imprinting us and influencing us.
Our external environments, the experiences we have, the ups and downs of life, the disappointments, the joy, the celebrations, the love, the grief, and everything in between it's all part of the human experience… and it lives on in the body.
These moments leave an impression on our being and we begin to operate and live our lives from these imprinted experiences.
These moments and experiences in time imprint us deeply and they become woven within, and they become a place where we experience life from, a lens that we see the world through.
The body has its own unique wisdom and its own unique experience of relating with life, the world, relationships, and how we interact with life.
Moments in Life
We can often recall joyful, happy, full, love-filled memories when we listen to a song It brings back a flood of memories that fill our bodies with warmth, and excitement. You feel that moment all over again.
Maybe you smell a certain smell like food cooking or a fragrance, and it reminds you of a time of travel, being with a family member, or a person that brings your heart so much joy and love. You experience that moment all over again.
However, it is important to explore the opposite of these joyful memories. The polarity of those moments. There are moments in life that bring us sadness, contraction, despair, or upset. We can recognise that they too live on in the body.
Whenever a moment later in life touches the feeling of those past emotion or reminds us of that experience, that feeling awakens inside of us. The joy arrives when you smell the food that your mother made or the pain and the sadness arrive when an uncomfortable moment is being re-lived.
When you experience something that reminds you of that later in life, it too triggers and revokes the memory of that experience within your body. In the moments that we experience pain, upset, and discomfort, we are often not well-equipped to understand and process this. We are often not able to hold space for our feelings, sensations, and emotions that rise through those experiences in life.
We store these memories within our being. We hide them within our inner world.
They get pushed and locked into the shadows of our psyche, but they also exist and live in the physical and energetic realms of the body. They manifest as tensions and tightness, contractions and closures, and an unwillingness or fear of opening the heart to love.
This can feel like a physical ache or pain in the shoulders as burdens have been carried. It can feel like a knot, tension, or a bubble of anxiety that constantly lives in the belly. Maybe the root of the body is disconnected from the earth and this feeling of being ungrounded and unsettled is always running in the background.
These are the ways that the tapestry of the body shows us the experiences that are stored there.
The experiences that we have held and trapped and locked within our being, create a lens of perception that is rooted in history. This is not to say that the experience you have had is not true, but often this historical pattern plays out in our current reality when the situation we are in is not the same.
We perceive the threat or the experience as the same. We see it through the distorted, blocked, or trapped lens of the body. The energy and emotion that's been stored in the body for a very long time.
We have these experiences, these feelings that rise from within. Maybe it's a feeling of I do not feel safe, even though we recognise that we are in a safe situation in an environment with a safe person. The feeling of unsafety is there, it is real and is echoing in the background.
This is the history of the body repeating its cycle, repeating what it has to say.
The experience that we had way back, still lives energetically and emotionally in the tapestry of the body. It's still deeply woven in.
It is as if these moments in time, get frozen into the body. They get locked and trapped and they create these distortions and energies that distort our perception of reality in the now.
I see this as a great tapestry within our inner world. All of our life experiences are these threads that are woven to create this tapestry of life.
Often, we can begin to explore what threads serve us now and what threads have been woven into this tapestry. These threads may need unraveling, unwinding, and releasing or removing, so we can live from a different place and experience life differently.
We can begin to explore these threads through conscious practice, through embodied practice, which is what I refer to as embodied alchemy.
We can begin to unravel and unwind the woven stories, beliefs, identities, and experiences that have been tightly bound inside by arriving at the body through conscious practice and embodied awareness.
When we experience the ideas, and beliefs that we have woven and stored through somatic experiencing, we can begin to unravel them. We can begin to create some space around them and begin to question:
Is this even true?
Is this true for me now?
Is this the reality?
Is this the reality I desire to create, to live from?
How would it feel to unravel some of these tightly woven parts and give space for something new?
If this belief or identity or way of being is no longer true for me or non-serving, what would I like to weave in?
What could I bring into that space when I unravel and unwind the story of the body?
I welcome you on a journey into your body to relax and unwind your inner world and your woven tapestry to explore with curiosity and to soften deeper into your being.
You can read more about the unraveling and unwinding of the tapestry in the alchemy process.
With deep love,
Rebecca x