Content Warning: reference to abuse and trauma.

Shakira was not wrong when she said that her hips don't lie, and neither do ours. Of course, not in the sense that she sings in her song but in the sense that the stories of our lives are stored in our body or, as Bessel Van Der Kolk said, "The Body Keeps the Score", the title of his famous book on trauma in the body.
This week I tried, for the first time in many years, a zumba class. I wasn't looking forward to it but it was the only class being offered and I didn't feel like working out alone. So I decided to join the class. For the last three years, I have been immersing myself in the world of somatic trauma healing and this past year I have been taking yoga classes from my community college. I'll get back to this in a bit. The zumba class, though, made me noticed that my body was moving differently. Specifically, that my hips seemed lighter, freer than they had ever been.
Like many Latinx/ Mexican women, I love dancing. I love playing music while I do chores with interludes of cumbia and salsa steps when the right song comes up. But I always felt that my movements were funny. Dancing, my body never seemed to move as graciously as I envisioned it in my mind. Eventually, I noticed that my hips seemed frozen, they wouldn't move as much as I wanted them and my legs seemed to be doing all the work. I'm sure this recollection is a bit exaggerated but not untrue nevertheless. But this week, in that zumba class, my hips were swaying from side to side rhythmically and in tune with the rest of my body. This was something new to me and it made me realize that the emotional stress that I had released from my hips was the reason why my body could now move in this way. Bodies, all bodies, are wonderful. Literally, full of wonder in their abilities to move through the world, to exist, to adapt, to change, and to heal. I know there is still more freeing of my body in store for me but I am enjoying what I have been able to regain so far.
Before this could happen though, I had to work with my body. Just a year ago, my body felt stiffer than ever. My first semester of yoga helped get rid of that stiffness. Now, I had tried yoga, and other exercises, before without much success to keep a consistent practice. I learned, not too long ago, that if you grew up with trauma and, if you experienced physical abuse, that exercise: the sweat, the adrenaline, the movement, can actually be triggering to a dysregulated nervous system. That was me. But I did not understand the workings of my body enough and the how trauma impacts our nervous system to work around the discomfort I experienced in my attempts to move my body more.
The training on somatic processing of trauma I engaged in gave me the understanding and the language to speak about my experience. It also gave me tools to soothe myself and to access my resources better. This is important because that understanding allowed me to navigate the discomfort I found in my yoga class better. I was in a better position to understand what I was experiencing and to tend to whatever came up with care, tenderness, and compassion.
Our hips tend to be a place where we hold a lot of emotional tension and stress. While some people may struggle with hip pain or stiffness due to reasons unrelated to trauma, for those of us who have being victims of abuse, that stress can reside in our bodies, and in our hips for a long time, until some sort of movement allows us to release it.
In yoga, there are specific poses to open the hips, and when you lean into them, you may release a stored emotional response to an event. This can be very difficult to process, but know that it is normal. You may feel sad after a session or you may have flashbacks to a past event. Similar experiences can happen with other somatic practices: a massage, dancing, conscious movement, shaking, and others.
While I am speaking from my own experience, working as a chaplain gave me the opportunity to witness how trauma was stored in other people's bodies. I witnessed how touch would release stories of past traumatic events. Please note that I am not trying to generalize, I have learned how wide and broad the human experience is, but what I am sharing here though, it's still true for many, many of us. Those of us who, for a good chunk of our lives, were out of touch with our bodies, for good reasons, because at some point we learned, maybe at a very young age, that existing in our bodies could be dangerous. Therefore, we learned to exist more in our heads; rationalization and intellectualization became the tools that allowed us to survive. That is, it was easier to live in our heads than to connect with the experience of a body that had been abused. I say this with compassion; I hold a whole lot of love and tenderness for the mechanisms we used to help us survive difficult experiences. When we get to the point where we can look back at our lives and realized the ares we need to heal, it matters that we can still express gratitude to our past selves who did what they could with what they have to get us through a difficult time.
Our hips and our bodies don't lie, they indeed keep the score of our lives' experiences but they are also designed for healing, survival, and wholeness. Our bodies, for the most part, are doing everything possible, at all times, to get us to a place of balance and wholeness, to get us to a place where we can thrive.
In our healing journey, we will come across a trapped emotion released during a massage, physical therapy, a long walk, a challenging yoga pose. We may experience a release of the emotional stressed stored in our body without even knowing it; like feeling sad all of the sudden without a specific reason. Our bodies want to heal from the moment they are injured. When we go about life, keeping ourselves busy, and jump from one task to another, we may not give ourselves and our bodies the time needed for healing. Nevertheless, our bodies strive to move towards it.
Wherever you are in your healing journey, know that it is okay. The progress is gradual and this is not a competition. At the end, the goal is to find the means and ways in which we can live a life that is not constricted by the wounds of the past, to live a life of wholeness. When I say that our bodies, and our hips, don't lie, what I am trying to say is that our bodies are our partners in this healing journey; they hold important information and wisdom that can help us move forward.
When was the last time you checked in with your body? What has your body been telling you? What is it asking of you? As you listen to it, do so with kindness and compassion and whole lot of gratitude, for the ways in which your body has kept you alive. Who knows, one of these days you may find yourselves swaying to the sound of music, the ocean, the wind, and realize that there's a new degree of freedom that you get to enjoy now.
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