Companioning the Self.

On the knowledge of the body.

The body has a magnificent way of knowing what’s coming for it.

This is not a surprising statement—all my therapists and writing teachers said as much. During my first grad school experience, at Brown University back in 2003, the professor of a Life Writing course I’d enrolled in, Jody Lisberger, read a series of essays I’d written about my mother. At the time, my mom was very much alive and bossy. This was a decade after my father’s death. That spring semester, most of my writing was about my mother. I wrote an essay called “Bad Hands,” about recognizing my mother’s aging. She had terrible arthritis, so much so that when she went to shake hands with someone new, she had to frantically say as she reached toward them, “Don’t squeeze hard, I have bad hands.” The essay studied her hands, her fragility, reflected on her care for my father in his dying years, and then it took a turn toward a study of my own hands—how I feared that I would someday suffer the same fate as my mother with arthritis, and how I wanted, more than anything, to have “good hands,” a kind of pledge that I would step up to care for her when I needed to. At the end of the semester during a final meeting, Jody discussed the collection of my work and held “Bad Hands” in her own hands. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the essay, actually didn’t know that there was anything I could do with it. I knew it wasn’t done. Jody said there was likely more on its way. “Your body will know what to do when the time is right.” For years I thought about that phrase. It sounded prophetic, sounded wise, even thought I didn’t understand what she meant.

I picked the essay up again in 2009 after my mother died. This time I re-read it with a kind of shock. That essay had seemed to predict what was coming for us: her death—just six years later—my responsibility for care, my grief. All the parts about her having the bad hands, about my desire to have good hands compared to the reality, in the aftermath of her death, of recognizing that I had the best hands I could during her dying months. Did I have “good hands” in caring for her? The jury is still out. I wrote a book about it.

In any case, the body knows, is what I’m saying.

Early this year, I was driven to take a course on becoming an End-of-Life Doula. Okay, fine, yes, literally everyone is going to die, no surprise there, but now in the aftermath of some heartache, I can see that perhaps my body knew what was coming for it. By which I mean to say, not death exactly, but a kind of death. Loss, anyway.

For eight weeks, I learned about how the body begins to shut down because it knows its leaving. I learned about how we Doula companions can lean toward the grief that’s coming for clients and their family members. I learned about how we can use all sorts of healing modalities to allow the often-devastating feelings of sadness to come forth. I learned about how grief lives right alongside love.

This week, raw with sadness, I saw an Instagram post with some poetry about how beautiful our world is. One of the lines was: we can smell rain before it arrives. It was a reminder that there are systems and energies out there communicating with us that transcend language, and the body is one of them. The Earth body that sends the scent of rain, the Creative body that sends ideas, and our own bodies that send us signals about protecting ourselves and staying open, even and especially during the times when grief feels like it might swallow us whole. But of course, it means we have to listen to our bodies. Talk with them. See what messages are inhabiting us and where they’re living in the body. For many years I was numbed to my own body—-chemicals and childhood wounds will do that to a person—but slowly, slowly I am returning.

And now with all these Doula skills? I can be a companion for myself. Leaning toward my own sadness, holding my own hand, playing music for myself, doing my own life review—-in all the same ways that I might companion a dying client and their family. Did I do this Doula course for others? No, for sure I did it for myself. I wanted to be an active part of this transition for a client leaving their earthly body. I wanted to support a family through the separation.

I did not once think I could be my own client.

But my body knew.

What’s in your body these days? Where are you feeling it? What kind of companioning do you need?