WORKING WITH YOUR ARMS - BY MARGERY SEGAL
The notes below are reprinted from the December 8, 2024 edition of Margery Segal’s “Whole Body Recovery Notes” - I thought it was very helpful and a lovely written piece. We are old friends and happily Margery gave me permission to reproduce these notes.
Here is a link to her website - https://www.wholemovementcenter.com/ and you can sign up to get more from Margery at the bottom of each page in her site.
Body Recovery Notes #1
Working with Your Arms
Did you know that after a mother is forced to leave her baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, she’ll go back to her room and her arms will ache?
They call it "Empty Arms Syndrome".
The desire to hold someone is completely connected to our heart.
Your arms and your heart are connected through meridians-the heart meridian to be specific. This heart-arm relational connection ignites when we want to care for someone.
Or to push them away.
Or to crawl towards them.
Or to comprehend another’s pain.
We know the meaning of things, the way understanding lands in our hands and curls up in our palms. We get succor from the impact of our own desire to help. We witness the relational world through our upper limbs contracting and ascending.
I sit with people all day as a psychotherapist. I watch them clutch and un-clutch their hands. Watch their mouths twist and their arms hug themselves. I see them reach forward imploring. I see their one hand ascend skyward for just a moment as they describe something from their past-they just can't quite put their finger on. They know it's significant, so they reach for its meaning. And it either comes or eludes to them, but their hands know the texture, the quality, and the weight of its significance for them.
If we pause there, inside the sensation of the arms and listen-they can discover its message for them. Often an ache in the arms is about a loss of someone. Or the loss of an aspect of them that is cherished. Or even more common, the loss of one's-self.
Most people who work with me come to me because they have lost an aspect of themselves. And they want to reconnect foremost with themselves.
Our arms can ache with longing for the sensation of being alive in our own body.
And our arms don’t want a self-improvement program.
“I ache right now!
I don’t want to wait until I improve myself to connect with myself!”
And they don’t need to.
All the information is already inside them.
If they are willing to learn how to access their body.
If they are, we start with tuning into their felt awarenesses right away.
We dive into the mystery of the bodies’ non-verbal sensational modes of communicating.
And I notice how their body is responding as they're talking. And moving.
Remember the mother at the beginning of our story whose arms ached because her baby went into the NICU? If you met her, you might not know her arms were aching- her arms likely, would just be hanging by her sides lifelessly, collapsed, folded, weighted and leaden in her lap.
Then if you asked her,
“How are your arms feeling today?
Have you noticed anything?”
And if you got her to tune in to her sensations of her arms, while giving her the proper support for a woman whose heart has just been broken, you might find that she would initially report signs of shock, and then a sense of uselessness, and then the symptoms of the pain of someone whose baby's been torn from her breast-the breasts that live just in front of the heart.
And in that next moment, a great grief might engulf her-bringing her hollow hands to her face that she now buries in tears. The hands of the same arms that can lift a car off a child if needed---are aching uncontrollably for the absence her child.
This mother was me.
And this mother could be every woman I work with who seeks out help to reconnect with themself.
What stories do your arms tell you?
What is your body story?
Wishing all well in this season of fading light.
As the light recedes in the winter solstice-we can instead, go inside for our illumination,
Margery
PS: After the grief giving of the arms comes the making of something new..
