This week I begin to speak about my recovery in front of audiences for the first time in my life. Though in the past, I have spoken about violence and using my narrative as a healing tool, I have never stood up in front of an audience and fully owned my life and my journey as my own. This particular speech is designed to teach young adults and teens about mental illness and reduce the stigma around it - essentially saying, "Anyone can be going through something at any point. Mental illness looks like all of us, and we all struggle in our own ways." I have been given this unique opportunity through my work with The Minding Your Mind Foundation, which has embraced The "I Am" Project and my personal story of recovery as part of their repertoire - their toolkit for spreading healing through personal journeys.
Last night, I practiced my speech in front of an audience that consisted of my husband and my friends, one of whom is a teacher that has greatly influenced me in my own healing. I felt very nervous. I'd shared this speech before with my sister, with my speech coach, and with one of my friends - but this was my first step into opening it out further into the world. When people ask me about what I've gone through, I always try to gloss over the details, to protect them from the pain, the terror, and the suffering in my story. I especially am weary of speaking in front of my husband, who has lived part of the story with me, and has witnessed the pain. Whenever I speak in front of a teacher, I am aware of my own vulnerability and the truth which is quite simply - my recovery is ongoing. It is a hard reality to stand if for me, as I have spent most of my life creating two realities - the "good" external reality and the inner turmoil that I lived with day to day.
I take my audience on a ride through moments of my life where I learned and practiced negative coping mechanisms, where I learned to know myself as "bad" and learned to swallow my emotions. The ride is a roller coaster with steep climbs out of difficult situations and deep drops into relapse, anguish, and despair. At the end, I bring them to the story of recovery, and how I have learned practices that now guide me and strengthen me through every day. After I finished speaking last night, I got perhaps the most useful feedback I've gotten so far -
"But you don't tell us HOW these tools helped you heal. Why was yoga helpful? What did boxing do for you? How did you start meditating? What exactly about Zumba actually got you over the threshold towards better self-care?"
They were right. Though I go into detail about the pain, the suffering, the anxiety - I don't tell my audience how I found each tool, and how I incorporated it into my life. When I tell people about The "I Am" Project workshops and the types of tools I guide my students through, they often ask me, How did you decide to do this and how do you know it actually works?
In addition to the growing research about the benefits of meditation and mindful practices in every day life, the tools that I use in the workshops have emerged specifically from my own journey. I tried many keys to burst open the locks on my heart, to free up the pain that was held in my body, and the one that finally started to twist held one word - help.
Recovery began, like many do, on a couch. In my case, I had to sit on a series of couches before I found the one where across from me sits someone who teaches me to talk to myself with kindness and compassion. The first step in my journey was learning how to talk again - learning how to use words to treat myself kindly, rather than using them to berate myself and judge myself for my pain, my anxiety, and my need for help and healing. I learned the notion of "positive self talk" through exercises that allowed me to shift the perspective through which I talked about myself.
For example, instead of saying
"I want to be a good person but I am struggling and still engaging in my eating disorder - I can't get through the moments where I feel triggered."
I began to say,
"I believe that I am a good person, and I am still struggling with how I cope with pain in my life. I am learning how to be gentle with myself in the moments where I feel triggered."
Infusing the language of compassion into my mind was, and sometimes still is, a challenging practice. I have held so many negative beliefs about myself and my body for such a long time, that learning to view myself as a work-in-progress became a challenge, and an important step. My writing has accompanied me through every practice in the process. In 2008, I started to give my story a voice. I put pen to paper and my fingers to the keyboard and allowed the words to flow into memories, images, and eventually chapters that told my story of struggle with mental illness, abuse, and eventually my path towards recovery. This is is how writing, a tool that I'd turned to during my whole life truly blossomed into a healing tool. Every word that poured out of me created space in my body where I'd previously been holding the memories of pain, sadness, and a lot of fear. I felt very empty without these words taking space in my muscles - and really started to feel how I had been using my physical body as an envelope for pain and self-harm.
So here's the question - how did these practices begin to help me?
By 2008, I had already been practicing yoga for a few years and had found my first type of meditation in the diving world. When I found myself completely embraced by the silence of being under water - hearing only my breath going in and out, I had my first encounter with a moment of piece. What changed then? What made these turn into true healing tools? I began to write about them. I wrote about every dive, and wrote about yoga class and began to notice that I was even starting to narrate my own emotions to myself during class. In one such narrative, I heard myself saying
"wow, my body actually has the strength to hold me up in this pose. That's amazing."
Connecting with my physical body has allowed me to access more moments of healing - but more importantly, self-understanding. Carrying a pen and notebook, I entered the boxing gym and wrote about each step, each punch, each exercise and how feeling present in myself during a 60 minute class translated into maintaining that sensation throughout the day - and especially during moments of struggle. When I entered the dance studio, I found myself faced with another tool that terrified me - the mirror. Not only would I have to be conscious of the way I spoke to myself in class, how I moved, but now I would have to witness my body's awkward journey as well. Every step of the way, I wrote about it. I wrote about every moment of awkwardness, and pain, and fear, and frustration, and the desire to give up - but finding within me the energy and strength to continue. As I continue my journey in healing through my practices and my teaching, it is a thrill share it through The "I Am" Project classes and the blog.
By speaking, I am accessing more parts of myself that have needed healing, and that have not been heard. As part of her feedback, my teacher told me that I still appear affected by some of the story I am telling - and in truth, I still am. The emotions that young me felt - the fear and shame - the crushing self judgement - are very hard to admit to myself, let alone to a crowd of people. The more I speak, the more I am able to access the true "HOW" of how every tool came to be, and why it matters to me to teach it to my students. I hope to, as I start to speak in schools and continue to to teach, to also write more about each tool. It is exciting for me to step through this door into a world I haven't yet explored - yes I know the tools have helped me, but now, I really, finally get to talk about how.
