How to use the body to connect to suppressed emotions and hidden stressors.
How my allergy symptoms disappeared.
A personal story of allowing a non-cognitive, somatic based approach to suppressed emotions.
September 5th, 2023
A few days ago, my nose was running like a faucet. I was sneezing pretty violently throughout the day. If you have had allergies, you might understand the miserable feeling. It's not pain— it's a constant, low-grade discomfort. It's relentless. It's exhausting. And it makes you cranky.
I was walking my dog in the afternoon, with very itchy inner nostrils, when I ran into some neighbors.
"It doesn't make sense”, I shared emphatically. "I specialize in the connection between body and emotions. And I can't understand this".
"I don't believe in that stuff," the most cynical of the two neighbors offered, "You are just allergic to a pollen. That's it".
Walking away, I noticed my frustration, sprinkled with a sense of victimhood. I felt powerless, at the mercy of my allergies. I could have taken an antihistamine, but they usually make me feel worse. Also, I am fascinated with my mind-body connection, and I always wait one more day to try to deepen into it, as long as it is bearable, as long as it is safe. But I was reaching my breaking point.
"It doesn't make any sense," echoed in my mind. I was acutely aware that on some level, it did make sense. This time of the year had an emotional charge.
When I was young, September meant buying school supplies, which came with a sense of dread in my guts. It premised the entry into a cold, dark winter, and I perceived it a a slow death, a loss of meaningful connections.
It meant long, exhausting classes, a filled brain atop an unhappy body. I liked to learn but I felt unhappy. I remember the ever-present drizzle, rain beating on windshields on afternoons that looked like nights. The weather in the medium-sized city near the northern border of France, where I grew up, matched the cold, damp feeling that sunk into my heart. No light outside. No fun inside. A heavy stillness fell like thick snow onto the house, locking things in place, onto a quiet routine. I found it suffocating. My parents descended within themselves, becoming internal. The house fell silent, except for the ever-present TV after dinner.
Summer meant that my parents were together more and seemed more connected, their mood lighter. The family had more coherence. Body expanding, not retracting into the cold. The sun allowed me to play all day, be outside, move freely, bathe in the ocean, and soak up some luminosity, my skin free from too many layers of clothing.
Could these memories cause my body to overreact to September's pollens?
Also, in the present, this early September 2023, I must admit that I can be feeling sad and a little abandoned. My son started his sophomore year last week. He is all the way across the country out in Connecticut. On our last call, he shared his excitement at decorating the single room he scored this year: His private space for the first time in his life. Private, not under my roof. He is growing up.
Could this be an emotional stressor on my body that enhances an already present allergy sensitivity? It’s an hypothesis. But I only had a faultfinding, mental construct of it. If you accept the idea that the body remembers past difficult emotions and stores them in a language of sensation until more resources are available to cope with and digest them, then, it could be.
BUT I WASN'T FEELING THE TRUTH OF IT IN MY GUTS, IN MY BODY.
That night, the sneezing was violent and uncontrollable. My mood was dark. I was irritated with the symptoms and was irked with my gripe attitude. I was tense, alright. But I was still set on believing it originated outside of me, something I had to fight. I decided to give it one last chance. But honestly, it was it's first actual shoot. Let go. Allow. Be creative.
"Com'n Anne," I rallied myself. "This is your job and your passion in life. Try something else for real". I needed help. I went and gathered my body-mind books. A- Allergies. I looked through the index.
"What is difficult to accept at this time of the year?" The book asked.
"..related to something we are not accepting, or that awakens a memory anchored in our emotional history", It lectured me.
The book had an example of a boy being sad when school ended because it meant losing friendships.
"How predictable and useless," My rational brain interjected. Denial is always a good first defense. But I had committed to digging in. So I stayed with it. Sometimes, we have to ninja around our rational brain to get to a less judgmental, more creative and maybe wiser, more open, loving part of our brain.
"Body," I voiced out loud, turning my attention inside to my chest, heart, and tissues. "I love you, and I trust you”. I placed my hand on my heart.
"I respect you. I know you are trying to tell me something".
Deep breaths help, and so is pausing to land this effort.
"I promise I will do my best to listen to you in your own language."
I aloe myself to feel the solemnity of this pledge. To reinforce my intention, I took an extra five minutes to mother this body of mine. I rubbed small amounts of buttery-rich propolis lotion onto the many small scabs I had gotten from scratching mosquito bites. Another irritation that wouldn't heal. I opened myself to bring extra nurturing and loving to the oiling of the scabs. This is how I would care for my baby, my kid, especially if I sensed they needed me to pay attention to them.
I lay in bed. Evenings are great for connecting to the subconscious. As I drift into sleep, it becomes palpable. My consciousness stands at the edge of the forest, where it can glimpse at the wild creatures that live there. I allowed the irritated, angry, reactive inner lining of my nostrils to speak. I encouraged the gunky-feeling tissues on my swollen eyelids to express themselves. I let my hands be heavy on my chest. And I allowed my chest to expand up into the little warm weight of them. I dove inside my body — The pain that was actually there.
AND THIS IS THE TURNING POINT. This is the moment that needs to be slowed down. Because it is tender, and in real life, it happens fast, if it happens at all. It’s vulnerable, so we often rigidify against it.
—The pain that was there, underneath the cloak of irritation. It turns out, if I allowed myself to stay open, keep my heart loving and my body mellow, that I felt sad. I felt small. And I felt very alone. These were not thoughts, and my rational brain would have objected to it with several coherent points. These were emotions felt in the body. And to me, it feel like energy currents flowing through, moving, like rapids.
Free at last from its shackles, the pain started moving through my body. Emotion is energy in motion, they say. Something welled up from my tight chest to the corners of my eyes. They got watery. The flow of moisture helped free more of that dry, resisting, gritty feeling.
"Ooh- boy! Here it comes!!". Opening the psycho-somatic floodgates can be scary — But this was not my first rodeo. I have gotten help from many talented therapists and somatic healers. Let it cycle through, and it subsides. At 51, I have learned that nothing lasts. Everything settles eventually.
I fell asleep with wet cheeks and a peaceful heart beating under my cupped hands. I woke up the following day very clear. I didn't sneeze at all, even when I stepped outside. My nose had stopped running altogether. My head felt clearer. My eyes still feel odd, but the rest of the allergy symptoms —gone.
I believe it is because I talked to my body and listened. As a holistic practitioner, I don’t claim that I can and will alleviate physical symptoms. Your physician can and will help alleviate them, a lot of the time.
I do claim, however, that I know how to guide people connect with their body at a deeper level. It’s not a science, as we unfortunately cannot quantify many aspects of the holistic approach (i.e: The quality of connection felt with the practitioner, the quality/texture of the electric field between client and practitioner, and how a perceptive practitioner will gather crucial information from this field, which can help bring awareness to very primal experiences in the clients life, and subsequently bring corrective experiences in the present). It’s an art, not a science.
Finally, I claim that if some emotional conflict is showing itself as sensations in the body, integrating the experiences might help alleviate some amount of stress and tension in the body, which may free energy the body needs to self-heal from external or physical stressors.