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How to bring the anthropological enterprise into the soma, that specific internal experience of the human body?
―Fieldnotes, June 4, 2019
Ethnography starts with immersion in settings, experiences, and people. For me, currently, such immersion proceeds from the rubbery tread of a lavender-colored yoga mat. I wonder if it is possible to engage our interior experiences of our body as a kind of “somatic anthropology.” Might I conduct an ethnography of the inside of my body, to seek the stories and experiences of my own internal bodily being?
I find this question agitating. Interestingly, the root of “agitate” from the Middle English agitat borrowed from Latin agitāre is to set in motion, to move, drive ahead, arouse, or disturb. It captures the forward thrust of airline travel and the ah-ha moment of a new thought, discovery, or insight. The story begins at the onset of this agitation.
I am engaging the possibility of turning anthropology’s methodology to the soma in order to understand more vividly. Could it be that everyone is an ethnographer of “the field” of the human body? I’ve come to understand that these somatic experiences are never devoid of anthropology, in all its rich capacity to agitate human stories and meaning. The tales we tell ourselves and each other—particularly about the body—create meaning, lasting and naturalized.
Soma on the move
Agitation begins when we are just about to do something.
What’s the beginning of the story? What happens when we move our bodies with the attention to the internal experience of that movement (soma)? What is anthropological here? Mostly anthropology has reminded me to practice and deepen the act/capacity/phenomenon of noticing.
―Fieldnotes, June 3, 2019
I begin by focusing on what has come forward in the experience of movement. First there is a sense of preparatory movement―muscles in a state of persistent low-level contraction. In some places in my body (my abdomen, quadriceps, and pectoral muscles) the muscular contraction is a more acute bracing, gripping, or holding. This feeling of being just about to do something is an agitating feeling. Then there is a fluidity or release even in fully making a movement, stepping out wider and lifting my arms parallel to the floor into hatha yoga’s Warrior II pose. I notice that the preparatory movement of low contraction or bracing relaxes as I engage a fuller movement. Yoga is supposed to be relaxing, but in this state of anthropological attentiveness on my yoga mat, I find that being still is definitely not as relaxing as moving. Getting myself into Warrior II is much more fun, pleasant, and relaxing than staying in it. It’s much harder to notice anything once I am in the pose. Is it actually easier to move than to be still? What’s the story here at the beginning of the story?
After three falls, two spinal disc herniations, and one impinged spinal nerve, I’ve become very protective of the layer of my being commonly referred to as “my body.” This protective comportment is habitual. Before coming to my yoga mat, I brush my teeth and suddenly notice my shoulders hunch and my upper back curves, my abdomen tucks in, my abdominal muscles in a low state of consistent contraction. None of this is required to get my teeth clean. I even reach for the toothpaste with my upper body curved inwards, the back of my neck contracted, and my head carriage leaning forward past my body and over the sink. I move my shoulder blade away from my spine so that I can reach the toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and still maintain this comforting hunch. But ultimately, it’s not comforting at all. My neck hurts, my shoulders end up tight and painful, even my lower back gets sore. And my hip flexors get angry, triggering the same muscle spasms in the big muscles of my legs that occurred during my disc herniations. A scary reminder. So, I hunch even more. None of this is particularly conscious.
Now that I am studying yoga and somatic movement, I start to track my comportment, my bodily sensations, my movements. My skills as a cultural anthropologist seem commensurate with this new noticing of the inner workings of my body that my yoga teachers call interoception.
Entering liminality
Sometimes I have the wherewithal to ask myself, So, what would it feel like to notice the energetic field from your tailbone to your crown?
―Fieldnotes, June 3, 2019
I feel my feet more firmly planted on the floor. Or if I’m sitting, I notice my sit bones making contact with the chair. I can even press my feet and my sit bones down a little bit to get that sense of connection to the chair, the floor, the earth. Usually there’s a heavy sigh. Suspiration. And… everything is softer. Wow. The back of my neck is softer, my shoulders have glided down, my lower back is eased, my abdominal muscles are softly engaged. This is so much more comfortable! Why don’t I do this all the time?
When you fall, you engage the most powerful parts of your nervous systems. There are parts of our bodies that are designed to protect us, to keep us alive, and they don’t always turn off when we decide we might be done with them. While I think the worlds of somatic health care practitioners can get scientistic, I have also learned more about the inner workings of my body in these last five years than in all the 52 years before that. And it’s not just that I was ripe for an anatomy lesson. This engagement with interoception as a regular practice, brought me into the body directly and clearly, in a way that I had never experienced.
And I still get scared. Last autumn, when muscles in my right leg and hip started to spasm again, threatening to lock up, I called on my yoga therapist. She didn’t persuade me not to be scared or reassure me with platitudes; she brought me back to the mat and to movements I was familiar with. She guided me slowly, softly making the movements smaller, visually connecting parts of my body that had become disjointed from fear. In the process, she used the word “balm,” and I began to cry. Tears running down the sides of my face as all the muscles in my legs and hips softened. No more spasms. She showed me that I could take care of myself. That I could soothe and care for the wounded parts of myself.
In polyvagal theory, the ventral vagal system engages through connection with others. Others who share their vagal system with you through their facial expression, tone of voice, eye contact. You know you are safe when the person or people near you are smiling, speaking in soft or easy or fluid or low tones of voice, making engaging eye contact, perhaps even offering a light touch on the hand or arm.
That session with my yoga therapist and teacher occurred over Zoom. I couldn’t see her eyes sparkle, but I could hear her voice―steady, kind, full of compassion, but not particularly emotional. When she said the word “balm” it was almost an afterthought. As she spoke, I wasn’t even looking at the computer screen, just listening with my gaze softened and my eyes sometimes closing. But there is resonance. From her house five miles away to my little quarantine home yoga studio and office. Through a laptop. Technology mediates but doesn’t control the connection that allows her ventral vagal system to resonate with mine. And perhaps this resonance is also built from memory. I remembered her eyes sparkling during yoga therapy sessions before the onset of pandemic restrictions, her hand on my shoulder, her voice asking me as she applied light pressure, “Can this soften even further?” Even now as I write this, I experience that softening.
In the liminal space
Quiet the body (posture, breath, progressive [body scan style] relaxation)
Quiet the breath (low & slow, awareness at the nostrils, sense withdrawal)
Quiet the mind (concentration, mantra, “witnessing”)
―Fieldnotes, June 4, 2019
On the first day of the three-day therapeutic yoga workshop, I find myself laying down on a heavy rubber yoga mat laid over a sparkling clean hardwood floor. My knees are bent, my feet flat on the floor. I am with a group of 10 women, representing every decade of life from 40 to 80. This particular training is not oriented towards turning us into yoga teachers. It’s called SomaYoga CPR and it’s a sort of emergency medicine approach to yoga. We are all tired, in some degree of pain, and have spent swaths of time in our lives in the service of others. We are teachers, nurses, social workers; we are mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties; and we are lesbian, bisexual, and straight. We are mostly white, mostly middle-class women with $300 to spend on a three-day workshop in this northern Minnesota town.
Our instructor cues, “Close your eyes or soften your gaze. Sense where your pelvis is in relation to your spine. Notice the curves of your spine―where is it touching the mat and where not? Sense your breath flowing. Arch your low back a little. Soften back to neutral.”
“Wait a minute,” I think, “What is neutral?”
She mentions a sense of comfort, but before I can wonder what comfort feels like in this position, other cues from the yoga instructor: “Press your tailbone down into the mat. Notice your lower back muscles contracting. Now release that contraction, slowly and consciously soften those muscles.” I follow along and suddenly notice that the fairly consistent pain in my lower back has disappeared. I didn’t know I could do that; interesting to consciously contract and then consciously release that contraction, to soften the muscles that I didn’t even know I had. Now she cues us to tuck our tailbone upwards by curling the pelvis, softening the low back, and drawing the navel down towards the spine: “What do you sense as you open up these glands and tissues?”