When I started seeing a therapist for the first time, I entered the work ready to talk. I came to therapy relatively late in life—I was in my late thirties—and I’d spent decades thinking and ruminating on everything I’d been through so far. I came prepared with insights, themes, plots and subplots, and as far as I can remember, I believed my therapist was there to help me sift through the material, assemble the facts as we knew them, question the half-truths, reject the misapprehensions, and help me put things back together in an order that would finally make sense.
In other words, I came in with a goal and a plan for how to get there. But in the first few sessions, I found myself thrown off course by the questions my therapist asked—like where do you feel that in your body? And, more vexingly, she would invite me to pause—take a moment and breathe. Where did I feel that? I had no idea. And wasn’t I breathing? Surely I was. I wasn’t sure what to make of what I was being asked to do.
Up until then, it had never occurred to me that my rational mind and my whole self might not be one and the same thing. I made sense of my life by thinking about it analytically, writing things down, talking things over. In a word, I was an intellectualizer. Maybe this sounds self-critical, but I don’t mean it pejoratively. It’s just that I’d always understood things by thinking about them in a detached way.
Where do you feel that in your body? I don’t know. I have a body?
Things take time. This isn’t a story about a moment when I suddenly grasped the connection between my body and my mind, because I don’t know that there was a single moment when this happened. But, looking back now from where I am—therapy school graduate!—I can see that something shifted along the way.
As a therapist, I often see things through an existential lens. Irvin Yalom wrote that we live in constant negotiation with what he called the four “givens of existence”: that we die, that we are free, that we are ultimately alone, and that we must make our own meaning. Or, more simply, it’s us versus non-being. And this world undoes our existence in so many ways. Not just our bodily existence—we’re mortal!—but all those other ways that we declare our presence in the world. Our freedoms to live where we want to live, choose partners whom we want to choose, and openly be the people we know ourselves to be.
If it’s us versus non-being, part of my role as therapist is to help my clients find a way to experience their being in a way that helps them believe that they really are there, feeling, experiencing, living. Capable of change, and capable of making changes. And, in my experience, the pathway to that understanding doesn’t run through the rational mind so much as the body. When I ask that irksome question my own therapist asked me—where do you feel that in your body?—it’s an invitation to step out of the mind and into the embodied self, the self that is physically in the room, the one who feels a shift in the emotional temperature before the thinking mind registers it.
Not everyone is ready to be in their body. Sometimes our lived experiences alienate us from our physical selves, and it can be triggering or destabilizing to be invited to sit with our body. That’s okay. We can move slowly.
For me, my own therapist’s questions must have shifted the needle over time, because now I catch myself checking in with my body when my thoughts start to spin. The other morning I did that thing we know we shouldn’t do, but we do anyway—I checked my phone right after getting out of bed, even before making coffee. Sitting in the bathroom, I drifted down half-awake down an infinite scroll of bad news stories and, almost immediately, my thoughts grew anxious, and the existential worries predictably emerged—how can I live in a world where everything seems so dire all the time?
There do you feel that in your body? Oh. Yes. Right. It’s a tight, urgent feeling in my chest and my stomach. Okay. Sit with that. Is there anything that feeling makes you want to do?
There was. I made a coffee and walked around my block. The air was cool on my skin, and birds sang. The coffee was hot and smelled beautiful. I was present, I was there, in my body. It didn’t change the headlines, but it helped me feel like I could carry on in my day.
