When she says ‘I’ve forgiven him’, her physiology tells another story. Her knees turn inward slightly, her arches collapse, and her throat throbs. There is a gleam in the eye.
As she lies on her back, I take her leg in my hands and rotate it gently outward, with the knee bent. This is a vulnerable position. Somatic memories of this movement often involve sexual encounters.
At first pass, there’s the initial resistance, and then a complete disconnection. The leg becomes merely flesh and bone in my hand. The way it perhaps was during some sexual encounters in the distant or the not so distant past… half present... perhaps indifferently acquiescing instead of truly desiring. With her eyes closed, she’s hardly aware that I’m moving her at all. Someone is doing something to her.
‘Breathe into your leg,’ I suggest. ‘Feel your leg fully. You know, this is a vulnerable movement. Get a sense of that. I’m going to go through it a few more times, very slowly. You’re taking your body back now.’
‘Back from what?’ she wonders.
‘That’s the question,’ I answer. ‘You tell me.’
‘Back from him. Back from every man I ever gave myself to without really wanting to.’
She’s crying now. The muscles are shuddering, and releasing. The foot bucks and kicks. Suddenly, the leg takes on a different quality. It’s lighter; more alive. I feel new warmth in my hands.
‘I’ve never felt that before,’ she whispers, blinking eyelids processing new anatomies.
I play the role of the masculine in this encounter. Her body is learning how to trust mine, and how to trust the masculine in the process. To get there, much needs to be forgiven. It is a delicate process.
As an intellectual practice, forgiveness is a slippery concept.
The mouth lies constantly. The mind convinces itself of outrageous fictions. It doesn't matter how scandalous or absurd the story is when mind is the judge, jury, and executioner. It's a rigged game.
The body never lies. A skilled practitioner can see and touch issues that the client isn’t even aware of, and guide them into that awareness. It’s like holding up a mirror to the vast, ineffable ‘self.’
Our goal isn’t to merely reconnect the leg. Reconnecting the leg awakens the pelvis and all of the digestive and sexual organs. Our goal is awakening; enhancing aliveness. Our goal is expanding intimacy, and deepening love.
Notice that we almost all carry residual 'traumas' we'd never considered traumas before.
Later that night, she goes home and makes love to her partner in an embodied way, for the first time in her life. As she relays it to me, her eyes are ablaze. She hadn’t known what was possible before. Now she’s opened a whole new frontier… the waning art of rising to the touch with a fullness, and touching in the same way.
In a world full of vacant stares, empty promises, and detached bodies, the final frontier isn’t the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space… it’s the body, and the consciousness trickling or surging through us all in this and every moment.
Love and flow,
Steven