Transcriber: Yến Linh Reviewer: Nika Kotnik
I’ve spent my life with words.
As a clinical psychologist and an author. I live in the world of words.
I help people use words to articulate their thoughts or feelings,
to tell the stories of their most important experiences.
So I was not prepared when my life led me to a place,
where words were no longer helpful.
I lay in a hospice bed.
My body alongside
the cancer ravaged body of my once big and strong father.
And I felt him take his last breath.
And for a time,
words couldn’t get near what I was feeling.
And then six months later.
I walk out of a meeting.
I look down at my phone and I see four missed calls from my mom.
Four missed calls in one hour is not good.
My mom was calling to tell me the worst possible news.
That my brother,
my little brother, Dave, was dead.
And upon hearing those words.
I crumble to the ground and lay in the dirt in my backyard.
Instantly transported to a place beyond words.
As a psychologist, I've long known intellectually, academically, clinically.
That our bodies hold our traumas and our griefs.
But it wasn't until the traumatic loss of my brother to suicide
and my father to a cancer that I really understood.
And I felt within my body, like every cell inside of me
was flooded with grief.
And they didn't know how to hold it.
I was looking for a way to integrate this new reality.
A reality in which my dad and brother are dead.
How do I integrate that into my head and my heart and my body?
And then it came to me. I needed to move.
And I did something very unusual.
As a 40 something non dancer, non gymnast,
carpool driving mother, who, as a psychologist, sits still for a living.
I joined the circus.
I did say circus.
(Laughter)
You're wondering how that happened, which is a really fair question.
I’d been doing some yoga, and the yoga studio where
I was practicing was offering an aerial class.
You know, the thing where they have the fabrics that are hanging from
the ceiling and people climb up and they roll down.
I’ve seen it like in Cirque du Soleil. And I thought, “I’ll try that once”.
I'm not really a big fan of heights.
And so I go to this class and there's
a bunch of 20-somethings who are super fit, and I’m just like,
I’m in the wrong room.
These are not my people.
And the class was actually terrible.
The fabric squished my belly and it was hard and it would squeeze my arms.
It was hard to hold on. I didn’t really like being upside down
and I didn’t like being up so high.
And I went home with bruises and I thought,
“Well, I’m never doing that again.”
But in the days that followed, something about it kind of kept talking to me.
It was almost like in that class was the first time
in a long time that my inner turmoil matched my outer experience
of feeling disoriented and upside down and uncomfortable and under pressure.
And there was something that made me feel like I need to keep doing this.
And so fast forward. There comes a day.
When I climb all the way up to the ceiling
25, 30 feet in the air,
and I wrap the fabric around my body
and I use it to spin down and I feel like I’m flying.
And I noticed something in that moment.
That I was feeling stronger.
I was feeling better. I was getting better.
I was no longer in the dirt.
I’m doing it again, though. I’m using all of these words.
Would you like to see it?
I’d like to show you a little piece of this.
And it's not quite like the circus that you see under the big top.
This particular piece is my body’s story of grief.
So it’s slower and heavy and effortful. But I’d like to share it with you.
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
If you’ve known trauma or grief, you know that it’s not just sadness.
That there is, with this kind of loss and anguish, a fierce,
fiery anguish that comes with anger, it comes with disorientation,
it comes with a desire to scream and fight against what’s happening.
We don't have a lot of spaces in our society
for grown ups to express that kind of an emotion.
But my areial practice gave me
the space to explore those kinds of feelings and my body.
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
I'm so glad that I had this practice that helped me to hold these emotions,
but also to integrate them,
to bring them inside of myself and come to
a place of feeling some kind of cohesion within myself
to let Grace become part of me.
To let these stories become part of me.
And to see them not just as traumatic, painful, raw,
but also as a source of strength and a source of beauty
and a source of something that eventually could teach me about joy and play
and feeling whole.
This last piece depicts that part of the journey.
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
My guess is that you have known your own anguish too.
Maybe it's depression or anxiety.
Maybe the grief that follows the loss of a loved one or a job
or a relationship that you loved.
Have you considered movement? I think it’s helpful.
One of the biggest mistakes
I think we've made in our modern society is separating our bodies from our brains
and our minds.
We are integrated beings, and I think the recovering from grief,
from trauma is a full body job.
But we don’t talk about that very much in the therapy room
or the psychiatrist office. And that needs to change.
Movement is a core part of mental health.
When our bodies are overwhelmed, when our words fail.
Movement is a tool that can carry us,
that can help us transform our pain into our joy
and our brokenness into our strengths.
Thank you.
(Applause)