The Body Politic

For the last year I’ve had plantar fasciitis, crippling pain in one or sometimes both of my feet.  I’ve woken up of a morning, hobbling to the kitchen before I start my daily regimen of stretches and strengthening exercises.

I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do: I’ve seen physios and massage therapists and journaled with it.  I’ve stayed low-impact active, with yoga and swimming and cycling. I’ve worked on my neck, my back, my hips and all the tight connection points which may be helping inflame that band of fascia across my feet.  I’ve even learnt how to move my ankle after an old injury, in a way my mind-muscle connection couldn’t comprehend at first. 

Yet, this morning, I was still in pain.  It’s come a long way – no doubt – but I won’t lie, it’s also driving me mad. 

There have, however, been some improvements of late. I’ve been working with a new myofascial therapist, and starting to release some of the chronic tightness in my hips and low back - and with it, fascinatingly, a whole range of insights, emotional and physical, into what’s led me here:

• Years of bracing; a difficulty to trust + preparing myself for what I saw as the inevitable (failure, rejection, hurt, loss…. insert state here).

• Unfelt, tucked away sadness.

• A fear (ironically?) of standing on my own two feet. Not of being independent – something I’ve always fiercely sought – but of backing myself and stepping out of the shadows. 

• An intense few years of high-level stress; growing a business, grieving my sister, caring for an elderly mother, moving continents & countries, getting married, visa applications, long-haul travel, starting over with friendships and community and networks and… breathe.

Now all of this isn’t to say there haven’t been immense blessings the last few years – there have; so many.  I honestly love so many aspects of my life – and, yet, like so many of us – I have a nervous system conditioned to high levels of stress, and patterns that run through my values, beliefs and actions shaping how I show up in the world.

 And patterns of course that also play themselves out in my body, causing my muscles to tense and tighten, my plantar fascia to become achy and inflamed. 

But - as you may have heard me say before - between self and world is a mirror.

The World lives in us, as much as we live in the World.

We often see the mind and body as separate; and to be clear, I am not an expert in somatics or the relationship between mind-body, rather a keen integrator. But like much in this world, they’re not separate, isolated subjects with neat divides.  The cartesian split probably helped serve many scientific advances, but complexity theory will teach that everything in this world is interconnected.

The stories that have been living in my body; of distrust, of the inevitable have led to my literal bracing. 

 I say stories because the reality is, they are; life is filled with uncertainty, but uncertainty contains as much possibility for beauty and wonder as it does fear and scarcity, and so much of how we inhabit the world isn’t just about what happens but the understanding or meaning we make fromwhat happens. 

We are narrative driven creatures and stories are how collectively, for hundreds of thousands of years, many of us passed down knowledge, ideas, history, wisdom and all kinds of teachings.  Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we shift and shape and share our ideas about it, and how we shift and shape our identities of ourselves.

And we organise around stories collectively; stories with central figures (and us and them), with a need (economic, community), with a moral arc (a good and a bad or a right and a wrong), with sometimes a higher figure/s or deeper purpose (religion, spirituality). All these stories infuse how we relate to each other and the world. They become the soil from which we grow our systems, our relationships, our investments, our capacities. 

Many of the stories we organise around collectively – the ones that live in the heart of our economic and political systems – often circle distrust and fear, much like the ones that lead to my bracing; a survival of the fittest type mentality that means there must always be an enemy, an other, a person or people that we must always be wary of in our quest for safety.

(Now there’s a fine line here in talking about these stories: we do live still in the world as it is. And the world as it is can often be a violent place, with very real suffering, horrors and injustice, and very real threats and dangers.  As much as I may wish, we are not (yet) a world of actualised individuals healing deep traumas and seeding new possibilities.)

But the stories we organise around still seed what comes next.  Living through some experiences of trauma, and the resultant stories of distrust I carried, seeded my bracing, which contributes to my pain and inflammation, which creates further distrust of my body and more problems.

So the work is in managing the inflammation and pain and working to relax my fascia and muscles.  It’s in working in the world with what is.

But it’s also in new stories, ones that taste of what could be; stories of trust, movement, connection, ease, listening. 

And much the same way, we need this work collectively.  We need to recognise the ways our dominant collective stories live in us, so that we may get free.

Because the stories that shape our economic system – of scarcity, of insatiability, of the cartesian split of mental and matter and the ‘lifelessness’ of our world – are playing out in our body. The manifest in overwork, urgency, exhaustion, overriding your needs for rest and pleasure, a feeling of disconnection, of never quite doing enough, of wanting to reach ‘the place’ you never quite reach.

The stories that shape our relationship to spirituality and inner work mean they’re often no longer practices not for insight, healing or actualisation, but tools for productivity, excellence, achieving, greatness, leadership.  Fitness where you must smash it, leave everything on the floor, ‘hit’ the gym, push harder is not (for me) a story of bodily joy and care, but extraction.

The stories that underpin systems of supremacy – of domination, hierarchy, win-lose, good-bad, right-wrong, of the other and our separateness, of dog-eat-dog –  are also often alive and well in our relationships, shaping our collective capacities.  They manifest in office or organisational politics, toxic competition, failed collaboration, apathy, staying small, unmanaged or unexplored conflict, passive aggression, and disconnected silos.

And the stories that shape our relationship to the earth – of separation, of matter, of extraction, of lifelessness – also live in the way we work, in how we treat our own inner resources; demanded creativity, extractive working patterns, burnout culture, premising our belonging on our output, forms of physical and psychic violence.

The world lives in us. It lives in our values, our beliefs, our mindsets, our relationships, our bodies; and for many of us – those who long and work for a more just, more loving and more regenerative world – we know the work to be done in the muscle and fascia of our body politic, in the world as it is.     

But we must also uproot the way these stories live in us. 

Because probably all of us have learned at some point, whether from a system, a family, a culture, that there isn't enough: enough safety, enough recognition, enough love, enough room, enough trust. And we bring that story into rooms with us. And so does everyone else.

And through this, whether a story of not-enoughness or anything else, systems of harm – systems many of us are trying to dismantle - reproduce themselves; not through policy or force, but through the ten thousand tiny moments that we act within its story or energy.

It’s why so much of the work begins with Getting Free. 

Because we can’t journey to the world as it could be when we’re still unconsciously recreating the world as it is.  We can’t do the deeper work of imagining and seeding new possibilities, without uprooting the patterns that shape our possibilities.

Just like I must learn to stop bracing, and start trusting – and to stand on my own two feet – we must learn how to recognise the stories that keep us where we are, and Get Free.