Borrowed things
Understanding with my body, and Irish hedgerow bingo
I’m on holiday in West Cork, on an island which I borrow a few times a year as somewhere to love. I am a very small part Irish - one-sixteenth, to be precise: my maternal great-great grandmother, Mary O’Driscoll, came from Toormore, near Schull. When we come here we stay in a house my grandparents bought in the seventies, a place I first came to as a baby and one I know every inch of intimately: the salty, musty smell as you open the front door, the pines by the water, the sunny room with the blinds that spring up too fast, the lichen that grows on the branches.
My fifteen-sixteenths majority can’t claim this land as home, so instead the way I feel about this place is based on profound familiarity, and joy and gratitude for what it offers. This is not my land, and when I’m here I feel I’ve come home to something.
As I walk along the road I let my eyes rove the splendid chaos of a West Cork hedgerow in August. Yellow gorse tick purple heather tick dark red fuchsia tick orange montbretia tick purple blackberries tick endless green ferns tick. The hedgerows drip with rain or bask in the morning sun, the smell is indescribable. Within their layers live a collective of insects, field mice, birds hopping to peck berries, multitudes of interrelated activity. Everything is connected to something else in a big or small way. It runs wild, a place of abundant aliveness.
An osteopath who once treated me talked about a man she’d worked with previously who had also been battling anxiety and whose body reminded her of mine. She said he was “quite strong, taut, like a board. I said to him, your body is not a board. Your body is a hedgerow.”
My mind didn’t have much idea of what she was talking about and also my eyes sprang with tears of recognition. My body understood something about what she said, it longed for something. I had been only too aware of the effect of anxiety on body, how it had made it retreat and tighten and brace, and I wished so much for the freedom of a wild home, without worry, ego or vigilance.
The most debilitating version of my anxiety is health anxiety, which involves a lot of thoughts and worries about my body. An element of my self-administered treatment has been about trying to catch anxious thoughts and suggest other ones to myself, to tell a different story. Another part is doing activities that I know are helpful, like exercise and meditation and connecting with people, and reducing the things that no longer work, like excessive alcohol, late nights and working too much.
These are all perfectly sound cognitive/lifestyle strategies, ones that have helped me to an extent, but which also have limits. For one thing, this attempt to always do the right thing can feel like really hard work on my already depleted system (I wrote about this in a previous post - feeling stressed about my stress levels, and trying to deal with it in a stressful way). They don’t embody the freedom my body yearns for. And trying to change my thoughts can feel like attempting to correct a thought problem with more thoughts.
Rather than making myself do things because they’re good for me - following an stream of endless wellness advice, which is such an exhausting endeavour and involves a strong attachment to outcome - I’ve been trying to lean in and listen to what my body wants to explore in that moment. My body tells me interesting things. It tells me that when my body swims in a lake or the ocean, it has never felt more alive, has never felt more like a body. It tells me about the possibility of my body - its function or its power, the absolute miracle of it - and sometimes its limitations or the things I can’t control. In the 5 Rhythms short movement practice I’ve been doing, the way my body has moved has surprised me - movements that don’t seem to come from me, and very different depending on body part, as if my feet have something entirely different to say than my hips or my hands.
When less weight is given to what’s going on in my mind, other parts of me have a chance to speak up.
My mind can hold me back, tells me that I should stay away from experiences that might be hard because they’re new, unappealing or frightening. But my body sometimes wants to go at least a little way out of its comfort zone, for example, putting the shower on cold, going for a run in the rain when I’m tired and would rather not, going to an event by myself when so much of me wants to stay safe on the sofa. My body has this wisdom because it’s had the experience of staying small, and it knows that smallness begets more smallness. There is a will to expand, and keep expanding. In this way, my determination to keep going, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, feels dogged and makes me proud.
Sometimes my body requires something kind and slow and easy and soothing, like sitting in the garden or having a hot bath. Sometimes it wants something “unhealthy”, like alcohol and chocolate or staying up late (whoah there!) In this hedgerow there is care and risk, play and rest. It’s a practice, because I’ve been used to doing what I think I should be doing. It’s a different kind of listening, and I am still a beginner.
These actions appear to create a different relationship to my thoughts. It feels like a subtle shift in the foundations of the place from which worries take root and grow, rather than leaving the source material fundamentally the same and trying to change the net result. Feeling different in my body helps me feel different about my body. I am surprised at its capacity, and by how much I sometimes expect from it. I still have anxiety, I still have worried and dark thoughts that consume me, I am still frequently rendered stuck and small. Part of my work, as I see it, is accepting that this is, and probably will be, maybe as long as I’m here. But I think - and it may sound small but it holds optimism for me - the episodes are shorter, and I come back from them more quickly.
When the thoughts come, I’ve been trying to tell them: you can be here too, there’s enough space. It feels like there is better dialogue between the multitudes within me, between the ferns and the thorns and the flowers and the birds, the ecology of my self. I suspect it helps things move through and change more quickly, all the parts that struggle for space, where some elements are more powerful than others.
An Irish friend talked recently about the optimism/avoidance common on this island, about the propensity to say, “ah, it’ll be grand!” as the ship is sinking. This sounded wildly appealing to me, stuck as I was/am in worst case scenarios. Negative bias sometimes needs someone to nudge you and ask, what if it turns out ok? I don’t know which person passed this pattern of fear down to me, which island it hailed from or how many bodies it ran through, but I know how much our bodies can hold onto, and how much damage unchecked patterns can wreak.
And I know how hard change is. But also I know it’s possible, even if we only turn the needle on the dial the smallest amount. Maybe anxiety ran in my ancestral line, maybe it was my epigenetic destiny. And maybe there things that I can pass back, because what do we ever truly own? Perhaps there are elements that can be sent into the past or out into the ether, down into the body of the damp earth or out into the cold water, before the fresh tide rolls in another story.