Episode 23: I can't stop thinking about these gems.
my three favorite insights from our conversations about trauma-informed training
Over the past month, Lisa and I had conversations about trauma-informed movement training with four experts in the Bay Area that I have come to trust over the years:
As we wrap up this series on trauma and movement, I want to share three of the gems I’ve been treasuring. These are the insights I find myself returning to, mulling over, and trying to incorporate into my life. I’d also REALLY love to hear what stuck with you. What did you find yourself nodding along to? Sharing with a friend? Pondering the next day? I’d like nothing more than to read about it in the comments.
Here are my three big takeaways from our conversations with Ceri, Erica Gibbons, Patrick Barnes, and Erin Gilmore.
One: Movement is a Laboratory for Experimenting With New Forms of Self-Regard
I find myself wanting to spend time with this idea that movement practices – fitness, yoga, training, sports – end up being laboratories for experimenting with new forms of self-regard. Training is a place to notice and then play around with how I talk to myself. How I treat myself. How I get myself through transitions. How I (do or don’t) acknowledge my evolution. I liked the way therapist Erica Gibbons said it, “It's not just movement for the sake of ‘getting fit.’ It's really about a deeper connection to self, to spirit, to ancestors, to the physical body, to the body of us being in this wild world.”
Of course lots of things in our lives can serve as laboratories for building new forms of self-regard. Long-term relationships. Creative practices. Travel. Each lab has its own strengths. These conversations provided rich examples of what movement, in particular, has to offer. Movement practices seem especially good at helping us wrestle with our relationship to certain aspects of human existence – precarity, injury, illness, and death, but also power, agency, strength.
Erica shared a story about using running to connect to her power after experiencing a deeply hurtful microaggression at a yoga studio. She said:
I'm a long-time runner, and running is so beautiful in that it's just so solo. [...] I come back to a movement that's just for me. Nobody, no other human around, can really help re-empower me after moments where I'm like, “Wow, that didn't feel right!” I feel if I give it too much power, it can easily make me feel disempowered. So I want to come back to myself to reclaim and center and ground.
When I was in the early stages of eating disorder recovery, powerlifting and strongman gave me a chance to practice a new relationship with size and power. I joined a powerlifting team because I found it helpful, at that time, to be surrounded by women who were trying to get bigger and stronger. Strongman training helped me feel how fun it is to want to be huge, to want to have the mass required to pull or lift or carry huge things. I’m going to write more about this next week, but if you can’t wait, check out Julia Turshen’s writing about the healing properties of lifting heavy things:
I found it comforting to hear how many people started using movement as a laboratory for experimenting with self-regard after noticing that they had been fueling their training with self-hatred for god knows how long. Apparently I’m not the only one who thought I was taking care of myself when really I was being an asshole! Yoga teacher and divinity student, Ceri, told a great story about the moment she realized she might want to change the way she was treating herself. She was in a yoga class and noticed that she was rolling her eyes. She said:
What really crystallized for me at the beginning was that I would roll my eyes. I would be like, “Wait, don't tell me I don't have to do this pose. Don't tell me to back off or go gently. Don't laugh while you're teaching yoga.” Like I was so, so not ready for it. [...] It was just such a good experience of saying, “Wait. The very moments that we were like, blowing a raspberry about something someone's saying to us are probably the moments we should look twice, and maybe bring a little bit of humor and space to that.” To say, “What is this reaction?” It may be the very medicine.
Patrick Barnes, an athlete, dancer, and coach, had to radically overhaul his routines when he realized he was no longer willing to use self-hatred as a path to discipline. Yoga teacher, Erin Gilmore, described a similar challenge. She said, “I think I'm trying to rewire that urge to show that I'm good enough via these harder, more intense choices that I'm making. [...] I'm really trying to stop doing what I have done, which is self-hatred disguised as self-care.” When I was editing the transcripts for these conversations, I noticed that anytime someone said some version of this in the interview, I’d ask them how they did it. What, exactly, did you do when you realized you wanted to stop treating yourself like crap? How did you do the rewiring? Once you realize you’re in a laboratory and you can try to find a new way to treat yourself, what’s the right way to run the experiment? Okay, there are no repeatable steps that work for everyone, but based on our conversations, it does seem like some of that work has to happen with other people and some of it has to happen alone.
Two: I Need to Train Alone and With People
Maybe you just read that sentence and thought to yourself, “Duh. Of course, Kelly.” Okay, fine, this might not be a big ah-ha moment for you, but it was for me. I needed to be reminded that part of my work as I engage with a movement practice is to pay attention to when I want to train alone and when I’m ready to work with teachers or peers. That’s one of the things I have to ask myself as I experiment with new forms of self-regard. Is it time for people? Is it time for no people? I wasn’t consciously aware of the alone/together dial as one of the things I like to adjust, and I wasn’t explicitly aware of the motivations behind adjusting that dial.
So why, exactly, does it help to be around other people sometimes? Both Ceri and Erin mentioned how powerful it was to be in the presence of yoga teachers who modeled a way of treating oneself that was heretofore unfathomable. Sometimes you don’t know what’s possible until you see it. Erin told us a story about a transformative experience she had in the middle of a workshop for trauma-informed yoga:
I did this training. I remember that one of the women who was leading it taught us a chair yoga class. So you're quite literally sitting in a chair for most of it. And the way that she spoke to us, it makes me feel so free and accepted every time I think of this moment! It was such an outstanding experience. Because I felt free to really listen to myself, and the energy that she brought was like this endless stream of motherly love. Like just the most divine, feminine, pure embrace was her energy. And I just, I cried through the whole entire class just feeling like, “Oh, this is acceptance? You've got to be kidding me. This feels amazing.” And so I went back to my classes with that as my guiding light. [...] It shocked me to setting a new standard. And that's why I can cry touching back into that moment. It's so profound because it's like opening a new universe. You couldn't conceive of being that gentle and that kind to this body and this person that it is shocking to the system that that exists. And it really did help me set a new standard and set a new course on how I want to regard myself.
Sometimes what we need is a teacher whose voice can replace the self-hating one inside. Other times, what we need is to be with our peers – to have an experience with someone who also shares our identity. Training with other people can offer opportunities for co-regulation. Erica explained the power of co-regulation in a story about a boxing class she attends. She said:
There's something that I love about boxing [...] the encouragement to release air and make an audible sound with that is so cathartic. And it's also cathartic when I hear other femmes and other non-cis men around me breathing and expressing themselves. I just went boxing this morning and there was a Black woman nearby me and she was going hard. I could just feel this place of focus and presence. And it made me wanna box more fierce and forceful. It was such a special thing that I can't access when I'm watching, maybe, a boxing video on YouTube. It’s almost this place of co-regulation. To be co-regulating with other people who have similar identities, it's like, ‘We're out here, right? We're doing it!’
Finding skillful teachers who can guide us and classmates who get our lived experience can be life-changing. But every gym is not full of transformative teachers and like-minded athletes. Often they’re booby-trapped with racism and fatphobia and other forms of systemic oppression. There might be days, months, seasons when we train alone because we need a break from all of it. Folks might choose to train alone because:
They don’t feel like dealing with anti-Blackness today.
They don’t feel like trying to appear neurotypical today.
They don’t feel like filtering out all of the anti-fatness that pops up in this gym.
They don’t feel like being around people who seem really threatened by deviations from the gender binary.
A training space might not be teeming with reminders of your marginalization, but it might just be too (literally, metaphorically) loud. Sometimes I choose to train alone because I really need to pay attention to what’s happening inside me. I have phases when the kind of deep listening that needs to happen can’t really happen when there’s a lot of outside noise. As Erin Gilmore described her process of unlearning self-hatred, she mentioned that she turns off the leaderboard when she does Peloton classes at home. She explained, “I'm like, listen, I'm just trying to take care of myself. Do I really need to be top on the leaderboard in these apps? I turn off any and all of those indicators that are trying to make me compete. I'm trying to stop competing with myself and other people and just be a goddamn person that just shows up and just tries to go for a little bike ride.”
Training alone can also be helpful when we want a break from being perceived. Patrick highlighted how training alone has been an important part of his process of unmasking. And Erin mentioned that exercising alone provides respite from people-pleasing. She said:
I feel a bit freer when I'm alone. It feels like a nice private time. Because I know I'm such a people pleaser, and because I'm on the other end of it so much, I try and look pleasant when I'm in someone's class, which is so insane to say out loud, but I try and have like a hint of a smile so that I'm like, “You're doing amazing. I like what you're doing. This is good.” And so when I'm at home, I can just kind of relax my face and roll out of bed in my pajamas. And, you know, I don't feel any type of performative energy when I'm at home, which is nice to turn that off for someone who feels like they've got to be on when they're in public. It's nice to be able to just relax my face and look how I look.
My conversation with Patrick about his experiences growing up in ballet studios reminded me that being perceived feels different depending on the discipline. Each movement practice teaches us to look at the body in particular ways – to read it for correct and incorrect performances of class, gender, and race, more or less enlightenment, dedication, or talent. Maybe there are times in our lives when it doesn’t help to be perceived by eyes that have been trained to look in a particular way. After spending many years managing a yoga studio and being really involved in yoga communities in the Bay and in Phoenix, I took almost 10 years off from practicing around other people. I was too aware of what my body looked like in space, too aware of the correct and incorrect alignment of each pose. I needed a break from thinking about how the teacher and other students might be seeing me. During that same period of time, I had less difficulty being in powerlifting or strongman spaces. I didn’t do as much self-objectification in those spaces, and I had an easier time with the norms around body size and “proper” movement there.
Three: Might as Well Get Creative
I’m also feeling really grateful that, throughout the interviews, there were repeated reminders that this whole process works better if we’re willing to be creative. Creative experimentation is a key part of this process of building new forms of self-regard.
There’s no way to skip the experimentation part. We have to try stuff. And it’s probably best to get creative. Creative freedom in this context might feel like regression – getting weaker, losing hard-earned skills, or meandering instead of making PRs. The interviews reflected over and over again that this kind of permission to experiment allows unexpected things happen:
Ceri signed up for divinity school.
Erica listened to an elder healer and found herself in a boxing gym.
Erin discovered that variety is valuable in and of itself.
Patrick picked up a kettlebell.
As Patrick has tried to rebuild a relationship to discipline that doesn’t rely on self-hatred, he found himself experimenting with different commitments. Daily journaling. Daily barre work. Daily stretching. When those didn’t quite stick the way he wanted them to stick, he learned something about what he actually likes about training. He likes doing things that feel physically challenging. He likes to feel his body working in an intense way. So he found a daily commitment – 500 kettlebell swings – that’s physically challenging but it isn’t logistically challenging! He has the bells at his house. He can do the swings whenever, wherever. He doesn’t need a lot of space. He doesn’t need a special outfit. And if he’s ever feeling sick or injured, he can easily adjust the level of difficulty by picking up a lighter kettlebell. He’s been consistently logging 500 reps a day, no self-hatred required.
The conversations also reminded me that we have access to a wider range of options in our experiments if we flatten out our hierarchies of movement. (I’m not terribly proud to admit that I have behaved as if running is more worthwhile than walking. Yoga is more evolved than a pole dance class. Zumba isn’t serious exercise.) Flattening out hierarchies of movement doesn’t mean I have to actually try everything. I have no interest in snowboarding or ever setting foot into another one of those barre-inspired workout classes. But I’ll have a better time finding a path that works for me if I don’t let unacknowledged bias keep me from doing something that I might actually like doing. For example, it turns out that I love pole dance classes, and they were really helpful during the years when I couldn’t stand being in a yoga studio.
Erica ended her interview with a profound reminder of what’s at stake here as we flatten hierarchies, experiment with new practices, and learn new forms of self regard. She said:
I also want to be mindful that it's not that certain kinds of movements have more value than other kinds of movement. [...] We have the opportunity and the power to practice what kind of movement feels right for us. And I feel like that lens is important for me to remind myself as I am of the nature to get sick, to get old, to die. And with that, my body will continue to change. And I want to really honor where my body is today, where it has been and where it will go. And really I'm open to the changes that happen over time.
If we’re lucky, we’re going to change – to run this experiment – over and over again for the rest of our lives. And if we’re really lucky, we get to call up teachers like Erin, Ceri, Erica, and Patrick when we need some company.