Written by Jack Blackburn
Words can be friends bringing practitioners and clients together. Our words and our client’s words can make more conscious the interactions that happen through touch. Words can be messengers that bypass tissue barriers. Words can companion the sensations that arise from the body. Words can help retrieve information buried deep within the body. Words can elicit feeling tones that help the client listen. Words can be codices that help us translate the language of the body. Words can lend coloration to changes that occur as awareness grows. Words can be comforts and supporters in places of pain and fear. And words can be trail markers as we mutually discern the path of the session.
The central assertion of the article is that verbal interactions that relate directly to bodily responses are helpful in releasing holding patterns and are essential to educating our clients. Bodyworkers know from experience that the body doesn’t lie. We also know that most verbal therapies rely upon communication that is not rooted in felt experience in the body. Bodily sensations, unless they are pleasurable, are considered irritations and punishments. Most people carry stories about their bodies into a session. Learning to feel and listen to the sensations of the body, we encounter the emotions, thoughts, and experiences associated with feeling, sensation, and insight.
Part of our role is to companion our clients as they discover that their body did not betray them or that their body is not the source of their guilt or fear. In fact, the body is a good and loyal servant to each of us – it reflects back to us exactly what we are dealing with internally. It is a communicator extraordinaire. If we feel love, our body gives us signals that feel wonderful even when accompanied by pain. If we feel anger guilt, or fear, our bodies reflect those emotions as uncomfortable sensations. As bodyworkers, we are constantly listening to the language of the body with our hands and from our informed experience.