'How Do You Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body?'

Love your softest, most painful self every single day with reckless abandon.

Garden of caresses (1960), Jane Graverol

Hi Polly,

I have found a lot of solace and resonance in your column and books over the last 10+ years. I am very grateful for this, thank you.

You often talk about getting out of your head and into your body, and I feel like I really struggle with this. I am a male in my late 40s with a son who’s in his last year of high school, and an 8-year-old second marriage. I am very anxious and have a low sense of self-worth, though I am (surprising to me) quite successful in my career. I maintain a healthy work/life balance, eat well, and am pretty active, despite chronic lower back pain. Over the last 5 years I have seen multiple physical therapists and personal trainers. This has helped in that I can generally do the activities I want to, but the back pain has never gone away. Once or twice a year I seem to re-trigger it and have to slowly rebuild back up to my desired activity level. Thankfully I’ve learned that this consistently works, and I feel a lot less despair than I used to when it happens. I’ve also learned not to push myself so hard -- if my body seems to be saying “I don’t like this”, I stop, rather than try to “push through.”

I blame my chronic pain on constant muscle tension due to unprocessed childhood trauma. My trauma doesn’t feel very special, but I believe it’s real based on the resonance I’ve felt reading books like Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know and Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD. The latter discussed how bullying at school (what I experienced) doesn’t necessarily have a lasting impact if you have support from family or other loved ones, but it can have a huge impact if you don’t. I had no emotional support growing up. My house was cold, physically and emotionally. Big feelings weren’t allowed. If you were going to express big feelings, you had to go to your room and be alone. I’ve thus associated big feelings with abandonment and loneliness.

I’ve done a lot of work on this. I’ve been seeing a therapist monthly for over 10 years, I worked very intently through Kristen Neff’s Self-Compassion, I attended a mindfulness self-compassion workshop, I was in a therapist-facilitated emotional wellness men’s group for over 5 years, I’ve belonged to a 12-step group for the last year. I’ve learned that I need to stop trying to fix myself (you have helped me a lot with this). When I feel emotionally overwhelmed and get lost in obsessive thinking, I tell myself my only job is to accept where I am. I’m starting to remember in these moments that emotions don’t last forever, that they will shift without me having to fix or change anything. I believe that all this work has contributed to my marriage being in a very good place right now.

I believe that grieving the emotional support I didn’t get as a child and all the consequences that has had in my life is the pathway to self-acceptance and feeling good about who I am. My hope is that this will allow me to let go of the tension I feel I’m constantly carrying. Due to my extreme discomfort with big feelings, I find it very difficult to allow myself to feel this pain, I have a very strong instinct to suppress. My hope is that just sitting with things as they are is “good enough”, that maybe for me, for right now, doing my best to let things be okay is processing my grief.

But I don’t know how to get into my body. I have been doing mindfulness meditations for many years, sometimes very consistently, other times less so. When I do, and I try to connect with my body, I notice tension everywhere. In my face, jaw, neck, shoulders, lower back, hands and fingers, glutes and hamstrings, calves, feet and toes. It’s not particularly enjoyable to be in touch with my body. Is this another thing I need to accept? That my body is in constant tension, and that this is okay? Sometimes I wonder if my body is telling me it wants to run, but I don’t enjoy running, and my body doesn’t seem to either. This belief/hope that my chronic back pain will go away once I properly grieve doesn’t really help me be okay with where I am right now. Do you have any advice here? How can I make friends with my body?

Thanks so much,

Out-of-Body Experienced

Dear OOBE,

What a great name! Oobe!

I read your letter this morning as the sky transformed from dark gray to white to pink to blue. Maybe that’s why your letter made me cry. Or maybe I recognized so much of myself in what you’ve written that I wanted to say to you, “I understand this so well.” Not exactly groundbreaking words that would knock you down and blow you away with their poeticism or insight, but lately that’s what I have in most situations: sturdy words that sound common, basic bitches dressed up in work boots, ready to grapple with whatever comes next, unembarrassed by their simplicity, unashamed of their confidence that they can build something that makes a difference.

No one I know is like me. No one comes to their job with nothing every morning and tells themselves, “You are good at this, even though that’s not how it feels every single day.” And very few of the writers I know (mostly to their credit!) simply open up their everything drawer, take something out, and then say, “Let’s use this fucking dental floss and this hand of a frog puppet I sewed fifteen years ago and never got rid of and now it’s in a drawer with some canceled credit cards for reasons I can’t even explain.”

I’m not saying I’m a genius, or that I’m just an disorganized slob, or that I’m a glorified basic bitch who thinks she looks cute in work boots so she’s started to wear them everywhere. I am a little of each of these things, but my point isn’t about how I am or how I seem or what I want to be or even how hard it is to do what I do. My point is that I don’t know how I’m going to do my job at any given moment. I don’t know what I’m going to pull into the picture to help me. And honestly, I don’t always believe that I’m doing anything that’s unique or useful or worthy of my audience.

What I do believe is that, no matter what the fuck I am or what shape my thoughts and emotions take on any given day, I have to start. I have to start and see what happens. I have to start and trust wherever I wander. The more trust I have in my wandering, the better things tend to turn out. My wandering usually shows me something new. I start typing and I’m fumbling through my everything drawer and even though it all looks like junk that my professional organizer friend would advise me to throw away immediately, I need to pick one thing up and COMMIT TO IT.

I think that’s where you are right now. I think you need one thing that you’re willing to commit to, even though no one gets it, even though it makes you embarrassed, even though there is no one like you in your life, NO ONE, who is forced to find a thing and look at the thing and just embrace a thing for no reason without understanding why. No one else has to focus and remember what they wanted and loved and longed for as a kid in order to enjoy and accept and protect huge parts of themselves today.

Okay, fine, lots of people have to do that! But they might not have to do it at the same intensity level that you have to do it. Your heart and your spirit and your soul and your body require a level of devotion that you yourself might not understand or feel or appreciate yet. In other words:

YOU NEED A LOT.

These words are a prayer, not a curse, not a confession, not an admission of guilt. You are capable of a lot and you need a lot. You are bright and expansive and generous and you are also small and ignored and in pain. You’re anxious for more right now, in my opinion. You’re telling me all of the dutiful work you’ve done (and listen, seriously, mad respect for that work, for your thorough study and exploration of all possible options!). You’re saying to me: Don’t start from the very beginning, because I have been through a lot with this pain puzzle of mine. I appreciate how honest that is, and I hear you, and to be clear, I’m not an expert like you’re an expert in this area. All I do is get up in the morning and look for something and then pick it up and run with it before I even know what the fuck it is. This puts me in my body. I use my head, sure, but surrendering to whatever I start with gets me out of my head, too.

The bottom line is: I need a lot. Every single day. I have to give myself a lot of things in order to thrive. Today I’m walking on my treadmill desk (I recommend this, it mostly cured my neck pain years ago, and it tends to realign my posture and improve my balance in ways I can’t quite explain). Then I’m going to swim laps for 30 minutes at 10 am because that was the only time slot I could find (I recommend this, it helps on so many levels, I have always hated swimming and now it’s what works the best for my mood, my energy, and my knee pain). Then I’m going to shower at the pool (used to hate this, now I love it) and go to therapy (avoided this for years, now I love it). Then I have to rush home and write for a few more hours, then make a lasagna for my family dinner tonight (used to encounter this as a burden, now I slow down and enjoy the process more).

“Well, Jesus!” you’re thinking, “All you’re saying is that you’re some basic bitch housewife type who thinks she’s special because she backed into a weird self-help career! You’re like a dumb broad who put on some work boots and then named herself BOB THE BUILDER!”

I want to protest – I have written four books, motherfucker! I’ve been writing professionally for 30 years and I haven’t lost the spark, you ignorant toads, you naysaying puffletwats! – but your impression isn’t that far from the truth. I don’t know that much. I am no expert. I am not a shiny guru who repeats the same basic tenets like gospel.

But that’s true for me because I need more than that. I don’t start from zero every day because I have nothing, but because I WANT TO REINVENT THE WORLD EVERY DAY. I want to start from nothing and crawl and become confused and then find myself running and then suddenly, I believe in where I’m going and before you know it, I’m flying.

So let’s go back to the frog hand. Years ago, I was a TV critic but I was getting very bored with TV, so I convinced my boss to let me make puppet parodies of TV shows. The website I worked for was getting into video, so my boss said sure, do it, go for it. I made a bunch of videos with my digital camera, very primitive, edited them on my Mac, didn’t know anything and didn’t have to know anything, and wrote the music for them on my guitar a few times, even. And eventually, because I am who I am, I started to think “This puppet thing is my passion. But my two stars, Hen and Bunny, were crafted by the Manhattan Toy Company, and I can’t get into a legal thing with them. I need to make my own puppets so that I can eventually license the pattern to those puppets to places like the Manhattan Toy Company and then I’ll make enough money to do whatever I want and I won’t have to watch 60 hours of TV every week anymore.”

So I started sewing puppets. My puppets were hilariously bad and that was part of their charm. I loved my puppets. I was good at making weird voices and I was good at making fun of TV but sitting still each day in my free time and coming up with more characters and committing to the puppet thing always felt kind of stupid. I was a natural puppet lover and editor and puppeteer in my own limited way, and I was a natural comedy writer, and I felt more proud of these efforts than I did of my criticism. But it also felt delusional.

I loved puppets because I would sit in my room alone making my bears talk to each other when I was little. I loved puppets because I was very lonely as a kid. I was in love with the idea of hand-sewing a whole world of little friends. One night, I had a dream about singing to a room full of stuffed animals and puppets who were my only friends. The song went like this:

My friends don’t play the banjo

‘Cause they don’t have any hands

I woke up feeling so sad and also so good. I woke up knowing who I was and also feeling very, very sorry for who I was, and sorry for the version of me in the dream, who was so much like a small child. It felt amazing to wake up feeling so many things, but it also made me feel isolated, it made me feel like No one else is like this. No one else has tidal waves of sadness inside their heart that knock them down. I also felt that I wanted to write music more often, and that I could write a whole musical and that was my truest talent, for sure, but I would never have the time or the money or the faith in myself to do that.

Here’s what I want you to know, Oobe. First of all, your name is Oobe. That’s like the name you’d give a teddy bear. You’re like one of my friends who can’t play the banjo and have to listen to me playing guitar and singing instead. Sorry about that, Oobe, but you’re right there with my stuffed animal buddies now, so I love you the way I love them.

So listen, Oobe. You’re lovable.

Your needs make you lovable. Your pain shaped you into someone soft. Your softness means that you’re easy to embrace, and it also means that you turn against yourself for being soft. You turn against your softness the way I (often, even now!) turn against my softest urges, my most embarrassing half-talents, my most ridiculous passions. I am a person who should be sewing an army of stuffed friends and puppet friends, for sure, absolutely, always, and I should be writing them songs every single goddamn day. Even though I am just a dumb bitch in work boots, I’m also that earnest, sad, lonely girl in the room full of googly-eyed, lovable best friends with paws that can’t grip a banjo correctly.

What’s even worse is that I’m old and I’ve probably told this story before at some point, because I’ve been returning to the same pain for decades, asking what the hell it’s doing there, asking why it’s so hard for me to truly join the living and accept that I am a mediocre chump who needs to walk and swim laps every day just to be upbeat.

But that’s not how I see myself, even when I’m not in some grandiose state of mind. I don’t need fantasy or grandiosity to love myself now. I don’t need to imagine that I’m all-powerful or that I am incredibly talented or that I’m hot. I am just a person, ridiculous and soft, but I know that I when I commit, I make beautiful things.

But I have to commit. That’s my struggle every morning. That’s the work I’m meant to engage with.

I NEED A LOT.

When I accept that, when I own it, when I show it to others, when I give it to myself, when I live it, that’s when I can commit to sharing EVERY SINGLE THING I HAVE with LITERALLY EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE.

I can share. I can build and share. I can see myself as lovable, which means that I can see the whole world as lovable.

You, Oobe, don’t understand how lovable you are. You need to throw yourself into something you don’t understand, in order to strengthen your blind-faith muscle. You need to practice believing without hoping for more. You need to live inside the pain of belief, feel how the pain of existence transforms into joy, feel how the agony of tension is actually conviction. You are being asked to commit to your own heart without understanding what’s there. You’re being asked to commit to your weakness, your softness, and your never-ending needs.

Stop being a leader and be a follower more often. Commit to following. Be a soft muffiny bear with paws that can’t grip a banjo. Play the goddamn thing anyway, badly. Commit to being ridiculous. Find a way to take a goofy shape and live there for a minute. Choose something absurd. We are all ridiculous. I am your ridiculous icon of clumsy precious self-important conviction. Be like me. Commit to what you are, once and for all, right here and now.

I have no promises about your pain. All I want to tell you is this: Tension subsides when you honor exactly what you are. I know this from experience. The more you love what you already are and always have been, the more soft and relaxed you will feel. So take exactly what you are given every morning, including the pain, and run with it, or walk with it, or swim with it, or sit with it. Love your pain like it’s an angry baby. Do what it asks of you. Be what you are. Love Oobe, above all else. Oobe deserves love, with or without pain, with or without hands, with or without the answers, playing or not playing the banjo. You are made from love, and you have so much love to give, so much more than is showing right now. Show it. Commit to that. Live in this uncertain nothing moment and give Oobe every last drop of love you have.

Polly

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Thank you for being you, every last Ooby one of you!

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