Shame & Bodywork: A Persistent Problem
How to Be a Normal Person Who Practices Bodywork.
In the early days of my training and teaching, there was nothing like getting together with a group of Alexander Technique teachers to make my neck hurt like hell. Just being around other colleagues would produce this needling, pestering narrative: my posture was crappy and needed correcting. While politely pretending to be interested in others, I was filled with anxiety, shame, and the Sisyphean responsibility of having to yet again nudge my errant body parts back into line.
In this essay, which I wrote several years ago but never published, I explore some of the traps of being a ‘bodyworker.’ From friendships and acquaintances, I began to get a sense of how pervasive shame was among workers in the wellness field. I found this troubling (and a bit of a relief since it was definitely my experience also). Shouldn’t shame be part of what well-being purports to address?
The Perception of a Thriving Bodywork Practice
A number of factors make bodywork an uncertain livelihood, to say the least. While the hourly wages may seem high, it’s hard to fill one’s schedule consistently. Income is fickle; when clients are sick or on vacation, we don’t make money. There’s little job security; studios open and fold, class schedules change. While there are many benefits to being a bodyworker (nourishing your well-being daily, wearing tights at work), there are few “benefits” in the traditional sense.
As body workers, we have so much riding on the perception of our success and flourishing. To show that you are struggling in your business, whether it be to potential clients or even your acquaintances and family, might imply you are not that good at what you do. After all, the marketplace assigns value accordingly, right? Once my calendar accidentally flipped open in front of a student and I was mortified that she could see how many blank appointments I had.
It’s not hard to start a business (thank you, SquareSpace), but it is hard to make one succeed. There are tons of body workers out there.
So how do we differentiate ourselves? For better or for worse, we often sell our practice with our own well-being. We are the success story. It’s a version of the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally. Does the prospective client want what we’re having?
A ‘Better’ Version of Ourselves
Given that many of us need more clients (perhaps with a degree of quiet desperation), there can be a slippery dynamic that emerges when we interact with current and potential clients. Do we embody enough of the qualities of tranquility, mastery, joy, (insert your preferred adjective here) that our clients are looking to obtain?
Given the competition, given the precarious state of our industry, who could blame us for feeling some pressure to show our clients that we really do have a special skill? And we do have a special skill. But shame has a sneaky way of distorting our practice, however noble our intentions. We can confuse the treasures we learned in our training and work experience with some magical ability to completely control either our experience or that of our clients.
I entered the Alexander Technique to help my chronic pain and though I recovered a great deal, I still regularly experienced pain. I had been taught that the more organized my body was, the better experience a student would be apt to have. However, my internal experience was anything but organized. My arms and neck were spasming, my mind was overcome with waves of anxiety and dread. I worried, what could a student possibly gain from me?
I was flooded with shame. This shame added an oil-slickened quality to my experience as I felt compelled to flee this uncomfortable and raw moment. Looking back, I could have simply acknowledged the dynamics of the situation. “Yes, I am in pain. Yes, I am tight. Rather than trying to pretend, how can I work with this reality just as my student wants to learn how to work with their tension and pain?”
Instead, I sometimes took cover and taught “by the book,” parroting phrases and ideas I learned at school, though it didn’t feel authentic to me, or even called for in the moment. I would lob phrases at the situation like: “Let’s think more upwards” or, “Add the thought of back lengthening.” There isn’t anything inherently wrong with either of these suggestions; it’s more that I sometimes used them to fill the space of my uncertainty and fear. My internal reality seemed too awful and off-track to acknowledge. Shame had moved into the driver’s seat.
What Shame Does to Our Clients
Our own fears about whether we are good enough, or whether our clients will come back, can trigger powerful habitual responses which have disastrous effects on our work. As I did then, we can disassociate from our clients during sessions by becoming preoccupied with the accusatory narrative in our mind. We withdraw and engage in a mental conversation about how crappy we are, imagining the student never coming back. In this case, our normally subtle and wonderful bodywork becomes like working on a car – mindless and automatic as we cut off from our humanity and theirs.
It’s also likely that our teaching will get stuck in a narrow, risk-averse rut since we are no longer connecting with creativity and spontaneity, but rather trying to limit our risk and exposure. In short, our perceived inadequacy (or lack of godlike control) can crowd the healing experience for us and the client. We may push them to have a “good” experience to reassure them (and ourselves) of our worth. This might lead us to become fixated on a release or breakthrough which, at worst, could cause an injury. Or, at a minimum, we fail to be present with the student since our observation skills become subsumed by our desire to extract an awe-inspiring, here’s-your-money’s-worth kind of change.
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, there is another disservice we do to our clients when shame drives our work. We armor ourselves with technical proficiency: our perfect posture, our 100% confident diagnosis of what’s ailing them. By burying our uncertainty, we only reinforce a self-hurting view of the mind-body and health. We communicate to our clients (without knowing it, of course) that well-being is about trying to be different other than how we actually are. It’s not about embracing our self, it’s about bracing against our self.
We know more than anyone that the body is not just a machine, and yet when we suppress our own interior experience, or reject it as being “too much” or not good enough, we deepen a cycle of self-hurt and shame. When I was teaching those first couple years, I wasn’t allowing myself to be how I actually was. I thought teaching the Alexander Technique meant ascending into a rarefied form of human existence, where I didn’t make mistakes and where I shouldn’t feel pain and uncomfortable emotions.
We, as body workers, shouldn’t be less human or have flatter interiors than other people. If anything, we should feel more human, more in touch with the changing and ultimately ungraspable stream of emotions, sensations, and thoughts that flow through us from morning to night.
The Tough Part: Being Soft (to Ourselves)
So here’s the tough part: we actually need to lead with our vulnerability. It may feel more secure to be the steel-eyed yogi who always eats and drinks (green juice) wisely, or the massage therapist whose body is always in good working order. However, if we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times, “Healing is a journey.” We probably even believe the adage. And yet, it’s uncomfortable to reveal to clients that we, too, have not finished our journey. To do so, might seem like we have less to offer than another bodyworker who seems like they’ve got all their shit together.
But if I could throw this question back: who would want to work with a bodyworker who can’t honestly and compassionately acknowledge where they are on the journey at any particular moment?
How to Pull Back the Curtain
Remember in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her compatriots finally get to see the Wizard, and as they are pleading with the seemingly all-powerful Wizard, Todo tugs back the curtain to reveal an old man desperately cranking wheels and levers? Trying to keep up his illusion of seamless control, he blurts out, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
My advice for body workers is to pay attention to the man (or person) behind the curtain.
We might hope that we can continue to extract releases or make adjustments without ever having to reveal vulnerable parts of ourselves.
Yet, if we truly believe the body has wisdom and intuition, then why not really pay attention to what comes up for us while teaching and working?
Here’s an example: let’s say I have my hands on either side of the student’s skull and I’m wanting to elicit a lengthening of their spine and release of their neck muscles. Meanwhile, “nothing” is happening. It’s just a tall guy holding onto someone’s head.
ALERT! ALERT! The first thing that happens is that I tense up and my mind quickens. My breathing gets more constricted. The temptation is to disconnect from my body and try to muster some tricks from my teaching bag. How can I immediately fix what’s going on?
A general practice that can be customized is:
Welcome: Rather than single-mindedly grasp for a fix, I can welcome what I’m experiencing, the mix of bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts. This act of welcoming helps ground myself in the body (even though it’s scary). I’m not strategizing. I’m just here – in the confusing present. If you don’t actively welcome your internal experience, you’ll likely push the inconvenient stuff away.
Acknowledge: Next, I acknowledge what I’m noticing. I might choose to actually say out loud to the student, “Okay, I noticed that when I was getting really focused on lengthening the spine my arms started to tighten. Let’s see what happens if we include our breath in the picture.” Or, I might just acknowledge silently that, for instance, my arms are hurting and I’m feeling anxious.
Be Open: Maintain openness (i.e. not having to control the next moment). “Let’s see what happens if we don’t have to know what’s going to happen next.”
Usually, before I can even finish saying this sentence, there is a dramatic physiological change in the student and myself. Just by recognizing that I’m stuck, rather than trying to hurry past, the stuck place dissolves into openness and energy. However, this isn’t a checklist. I have to be conscious, I have to want to know what I’m experiencing. I have to drop the bag of teaching tricks and resources and just be for a bit. This feels like walking into a restaurant in my underwear.
Even though I felt more ease and creativity when I welcomed and acknowledged my internal experience (either to the student or just myself), I was sure my students hated it. After all, doesn’t the student want some virtuoso with their hands? Not some ordinary human with… you know, habits. Yet, I’ve received precisely the opposite feedback. Students are relieved that they can acknowledge their stuckness and that I acknowledged mine.
It’s true; we take a risk when we come out from behind the curtain. Yet, more importantly, we invite our students to make mistakes and not hide anything from us out of fear or shame. Obviously, as a teacher, this is ideal. We want to teach the whole student, so when a student feels safe and un-judged we actually have access to the whole person, not just their alignment.
When Not to Correct
Making corrections or adjustments is the bodyworkers’ bread and butter – lowering shoulders, tucking the pelvis, restoring flow to a blocked area. Yet not everything can or should be corrected, starting with what we experience in the present moment. Shame causes us to try and correct our experience, to cover over our perceived deficiencies and desperately reach for our perceived strengths.
We can’t change or correct or improve the present moment because it’s already here. It arrives birthed and whole, like a glistening egg. That doesn’t mean it’s not painful, embarrassing, and disorienting at times – I often feel that way. However, it’s important to remember that no matter how technical the adjustment or procedure, we are still only creating conditions to allow healing to emerge.
Peacefulness, vitality, and muscular releases occur unexpectedly at times during a session, like catching glimpses of a beautiful doe between the trees. Then it runs away when I try to pursue it too aggressively. While the techniques of our practice may be clearly laid out, at some level we, as body workers, are all trying to coax a mystery. Where does healing come from? What causes well-being?
In my experience, that mystery, and our patience, skill, and humanity around it, are what our clients are paying for. In the meantime, I’m trying to fill those gaps between my lofty expectations and my imperfect body, between the people who could use my help and my incomplete calendar, with presence and compassion rather than shame and judgment.