This is a limiting space, a frozen one, one where your specialness has been whipped back by other forces – once outside of you, now they are within. Sometime, somewhere, something was scary. It frightened you and you moved. You went where no one could get to you. Often, not even you.
Shocking events can take us up and out of our experience. We erect postures of protection in response to what disturbs us, a very wise and self-protective mechanism that also freezes our bodies in time and squeezes them with structures so tight that our minds float away, lofting above a barely tethered body, like a balloon.
This, called dissociation, provides an advantage – moving awareness out of our body reduces the feeling of pain. Yet, in moving out, our range of life experience is restricted: narrowing the experience of pain also narrows the experience of pleasure. If you float, you fly above what’s human, what’s visceral. Your life can just blow by as you watch it from afar.
And far away you might be, locked in a mythical prison, held back from real communication or contact from others. Or perhaps you’re trapped in a castle tower. A tomb? Spring is here and we all rise again. When the time is ripe, you can find space between the plates, the cracks where hot air flows. You can live; you can animate your being. You can start to drip with glimmers of feelings, allowing your body to absorb the waves that float in and out of you. It’s your right, your privilege, to move.
First published on Lindsey’s blog, Waking The Image, on June 10, 2013.