Bodies, Soft Animals & Wild Geese

discovering aliveness and love through the body

If you haven’t ever encountered Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese, I encourage you to take a moment to click here to read or here to listen, be with it for a time, and then come back to this.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves…” Mary Oliver

I have met with this poem — and specifically, with this line — before. Likely I’ve met it many times and to be honest, I don’t think I’d ever given it a second thought. I would like to think that’s because I can be unsentimental though it probably just went over my head. Yet, a couple of months back I was brought to this piece again and this time, it hit different. It resonated deeply. This time, those words felt as if they were harmonizing with a process that I was now squarely inside of and with a part of me that hadn’t been accessible before. Cliche incoming: it was as if I was encountering (I-Thou style) this poem for the first time. I was affected.

From inside of this resonance, a question emerged. It wasn’t new. It was one that I had been in for quite a while but that begged new perspective. How is it that I know what this soft animal of my body loves and how it is that I can come to find out? Indeed, this is one of the questions (now more eloquently put) that brought me to the path of somatics.

I started on this path with a knowing that there was more to learn and uncover in my body-based work with clients. I have stayed on because I have been, and continue to be, profoundly changed. The questions I encounter on this path are powerful. With them I am invited again and again to go deeper, and further. What does the soft animal of my body love?

Once I’d chosen to step into an intentional somatic process, I couldn’t unknow/unsee/unfeel the lifetime of sediment that had been built up around and inside of my body. Layers that have blocked any attempt to answer this question. Sediment that had made it impossible to feel and to know the truth of what the soft animal of my body loved, longed for, and needed. There was so much conditioning, so many narratives, some many unconscious ways of being that I’d picked up that had enclosed me (the real me) and numbed me to what was truly my own.

But it wasn’t hopeless. My process and practice have offered me a path forward. On it I am learning how to connect with what I love through actions that intentionally enter me into relationship with my body in new ways — ways that center my good will, attunement, compassion, curiosity and openness. That is, openness, to my own aliveness.

I am learning that embodying my aliveness does not always feel good just as embodying love does not always feel good. Yet that in order to know what I love I must be available to feel what I don’t, or, more importantly, I must be available to feel love’s other incarnations: longing, grief, and in the words of Mary Oliver, despair. I must be available to feel the fullness of my aliveness and all that comes with it — the good, the bad, the lovely.

In Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown shares how their somatic path has brought them to the knowing that “how I spend my life is my decision, based on all kinds of data coming from my body….We get to have boundaries. We get to have longings and articulate them. We can begin to imagine a society coordinated around honest, clearly articulated longing.” A reminder that this question is for all of us. So, what does the soft animal of your body love? And, how do you know?

If you are curious as I am curious, I invite you to journey along with me. Here I’ll be sharing more about my own process, the resources that are supporting me along the way (i.e. books I love, podcasts and newsletters that are speaking to me, and plants that I’m partnering with), what I’ve been creating (recorded practices, the writing and textile projects I’m tinkering with), and ways to work with me inside of my 1:1 practice. I would love to have you.

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To get us started, I’ve recorded the short body scan practice below to support us in taking the time and space to ask questions and in deepening the somatic awareness we will need to answer them. Happy practicing.

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