When former Goop executive, wellness coach and author Elise Loehnen had an underground drug-induced therapy session, she realised she had spent her life ignoring, or suppressing, the signals her body was sending her. When we try to bury our bodies’ hungers, rumblings and appetites, she says, we begin the process of abandoning ourselves …
A few years ago, I filmed an episode for a show on Netflix in which I lay facedown on a table while John Amaral, a chiropractor, held his hands above my body and manipulated my energy field like a puppeteer. Reflexively and without control, my body responded with movement – it wanted to go in a wave but consistently got stuck at my lower back, with my butt stuck up in the air. It was painful and I couldn’t force my body to relax. “Make sound,” he coached me. “You have to make sound. Let go!” I couldn’t. What emerged from my mouth sounded like a weird, extended fart. I could not release, nor could I convince my body – arms undulating like a lunatic – to let the clench go. As cameras moved around us on the tables, I stayed contorted, wondering when it would end, what I needed to communicate to my body to make it go flat again. This was a reminder of a lesson I had only recently learned: I don’t have control over my body.
A few weeks prior, I had done an all-day MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session with an underground therapist. The idea is to take two doses of medicalgrade Ecstasy – spread out over two hours – put on an eyeshade and headphones, and go inside your body. The entire session lasts eight hours, though it feels much faster. It is a therapy marathon, and many people who have done it equate it to years spent on a couch. The MDMA mutes your amygdala, which control the fear response, so you can access subconscious memories without feeling triggered or retraumatised. The therapist sits quietly, holds space, and lets you talk, writing things down to be processed later – there is no prompting. The first sensation I felt was a loving warmth, moving from the top of my head slowly down. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in my body,” I called out, eyeshades on. That was the sensation. It felt like an overwhelming truth. It made me cry. Then, after recalling an early sexual trauma, my body began to move – my legs shook up and down, my hips vibrated quickly, and then my back arched, and my shoulders rolled furiously. This happened on a loop, for hours, like a great unwinding. The therapist helped me stretch, but the motions returned, taking over my whole body as I released whatever was trapped inside. I felt passenger to the motions – the “I” of me was powerless over their expression. While it felt good to get it out, it was strange to not know where it came from, or what it even was; what was unravelling, uncoiling, loosening inside of me felt like years of trying to control and silence my body. It was as if the cork had popped out of the champagne bottle or as if, like a gazelle, I was shaking tension out after narrowly escaping a cheetah. To the therapist, I kept repeating the mantra: “I’m me, I’m not my biology.” In that moment, it felt like the wisest and truest understanding I’d ever had.
Part of the trauma I had suppressed in my body involved feeling pleasure when I consciously didn’t want it. I realised I had always felt betrayed by this, deeply ashamed by these mixed signals – a voice saying no, a body saying yes. But in that moment on MDMA, when I was both loving and holding myself, I connected on a deeper level to the fact that my body was its own entity, not fully under my dominion. It would do what it would do. It had its own language. Yet I had never tried to talk to it, or to listen. I had ignored its attempts to communicate for years, leaving it stuffed with shame and other bad feelings.
I know that when it comes to what my body wants and needs, I should do a better job listening. I still don’t know how to properly feed myself. I often catch myself skipping meals because I get busy or stressed…hoovering chips into my mouth because I’m starving or running late.
After several hours of unabated movement, my therapist helped me stretch again, and this time he asked me to attach what was happening in my hips to sound. And for the first time, I was able to let out a minor – yet long – noise. It sounded like the angry mewl of a newborn baby – not from my voicebox but from somewhere deeper inside. As I let it out, the movement in my body slowed. But I knew that was just the beginning.
Years later, I’m still working with my body, trying to understand what it’s saying when I feel pain, upset, hunger. I sit quietly until it speaks. Before, I didn’t know to listen, so I ignored the distress, letting it crouch in my hips, my jaw, my lower back, my heart. Sometimes, when I’m quiet – meditating, in yoga class, asleep at night – my body starts to move. I just let it happen, let it unspool. “Sorry, sometimes my body just does its own thing,” I offer to the strangers on the mat next to me. The other night, my husband was startled awake and jumped out of bed, thinking there was an earthquake: nope, just my legs going nuts next to him.
I know that my body will express itself, whether I will it to or not. And I know that when it comes to what my body wants and needs, I should do a better job listening. I still don’t know how to properly feed myself. I often catch myself skipping meals because I get busy or stressed, or I stand over the kitchen sink, hoovering chips into my mouth because I’m starving and running late. I’m only now learning to talk to my body, to understand where we’re the same and where it has its own intelligence. My body tells me I need to slow down, or sit and chew. I’m often in such a rush I forget to taste, missing one of life’s greatest pleasures: being present at a meal and holding flavour on the tongue – letting the body smell and savour.
Therapist and physician James Gordon has worked all over the world helping groups address trauma. He has a toolkit for addressing trauma locked in the body, from soft belly breathing to drawing, to chaotic breathwork, to shaking and dancing. All these practices allow long-ignored emotions to emerge so they can be metabolised, integrated. He talks about the impact of trauma on digestion, how when we eat compulsively and quickly, enzymes don’t have time to break down our food and we swallow air, leaving us bloated and uncomfortable. To slow down, he recommends putting a piece of fruit and a piece of dark chocolate on a plate and then meditating. As you breathe, he instructs you to notice what comes up – memories, prejudices, where your eyes are drawn, your feelings about the food. Then you bring whichever piece you choose to your nose. You smell it, touch it, close your eyes, roll it around your mouth, and then chew very, very slowly. “Time after time, people realise how little they taste, or appreciate, or are even aware of the food they’re eating, and how fast they ordinarily eat. Many people who’ve been traumatised become aware of the anxiety that has accelerated their eating and denied them a full portion of pleasure,” he offers. The practice becomes a map for how to eat every meal: slowly, mindfully, while attending to what you feel – particularly what feels good.
Our Best Behaviour, The Price Women Pay to Be Good (Bloomsbury Tonic, €12.20) is out now.