Returning Home to Our Bodies by Abigail Rose Clarke

Author:Abigail Rose Clarke [Rose Clarke, Abigail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623179397

When I think of my grandfather, there’s a feeling of safety and security. He died when I was very young, so most of my memories of him have me sitting on his lap. When I think of him, I can feel a warm, secure presence at my back. The smell of onions and woodsmoke tickle my nose, and the corners of my mouth turn up in the very beginnings of a giggle because he was an expert at pulling silly faces when only I was watching. My grandfather was not an uncomplicated man; far from it. But I had the benefit of knowing him only at the very end of his long and complicated life, when his rough edges had been worn down. I got the very sweetest parts of him, and my body remembers this, even almost four decades later. To me, he is safety, a certain calm in the chaos that often permeated my grandparents’ home. I don’t even need to taste his rice—just a memory is enough to bring all this back to my body, because the body remembers.

In a similar way, my body can remember joy, even when I am not presently joyful. I can remember the sweet weight of my goddaughter in my arms when she ran to meet me after we spent several months apart. I can remember the butterflies of my first crush. I can, of course, also remember the wretchedness of fresh heartbreak, or feeling I have been ripped inside out at the loss of a friend. The body carries it all. The body remembers.

The idea that the body remembers stored traumas is, rather thankfully, nothing new. Books like Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score have given us a collective understanding of PTSD to such a level that it has now entered the world of memes, and practitioners of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing remain present with people as they process through the felt experiences of trauma and loss. What I am offering is a bit different than that, even as I acknowledge the cultural sea change these men have offered, and certainly as I recognize that any approach to felt, embodied memory offered by a white Westerner is almost inherently borrowing or appropriating from Indigenous practices.

We know the body holds embodied memories of traumatic moments. You just explored various ways to remember joy and comfort as embodied sensations through the explorations of memories, like those of favorite foods. This, to me, means the body can also imagine feelings of the future, pulling the future into the present. This is different from the visualization so many New Agers of questionable morals peddle on the internet, claiming that if you can see it and feel it you can manifest it; as the meme says, maybe you manifested it, maybe it’s white privilege. I am pointing to the way our bodies can be a compass and guide through the felt sense of the body. Rather than continuing to imagine a better future,

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