I have a craving, I can feel it, it’s like a demon snake dragon with spiked tail whipping, fangs and eyes, the scales of it. I’ve had it since I arrived here in France, this house that sits on a crystal mountain brings out the truth in everyone including me who is made of its walls, who is encased in it. I’ve wanted to smoke and drink, connect is it what it is, I remember this feeling from the old days when I did just that, take myself off with a bottle and spliff and blank screen to divulge and indulge and be completely whole in consumption. This urge, this driving to connect. When I began somatic experiencing, in the very first session, the place I came was here, the swimming pool where underwater I saw a being drawn by William Blake in its sinews, the exactitude of its muscles, the way they were long and thin and binding. This creature with arms and legs longer than human, thinner, more muscular, was crouched in suspension of water, turning slowly with weightlessness, its knees up to its ribcage, held by see-through arms, holding itself to itself and it was red, like rusted iron, like old blood. A pain body made real to my eyes, I knew it as that as I saw it and swam next to it, watched it unfurl and swim away, a something made of me, come out of me. I’ve been seeing it again, the memory of it when I swim in the actual pool, not projected when eyes closed I’m in the hands of the therapist but in real time here. I see it, the memory of it each time I go underwater. Have I talked about somatic experiencing? Not really, I mean to, it’s so delicate, so personal of course. That creature that was pain filtered, that had become full, that swam away contained the blood, it was a function of my being, is a function for these emotions and sensations which can kill you in the end. I imagined a new filter like changing one under the sink, and the process begins again. The somatic experiencing – that is lifting trauma from the body, that is letting the body speak directly to the therapist – it has taken me to familiarity with the multiple worlds within worlds. These things existing all the time, my coffee, this desk, on holiday, a craving, holding all of it at once, or at least moving through it without causing a breakage, is an art I must talk about, try to talk about here. I try and sit still and notice.
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The noticing is hard work.
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