Back in My Body

My soul, do not seek eternal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible.
― Pindar

This past week I took a nine-day Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course with the National Outdoor Leadership School. I’ve loved the outdoors for a long time, and over my five years living in San Francisco, I began backpacking by myself or co-leading trips more and more. The WFR course had been on my list, but it’s hard to sign up for nine days of classes during your precious three weeks of vacation.

Much of the course provided context and detail for things that common sense can tell you. For heat exhaustion, put someone in the shade and give water. Make foot checks a silly and general part of the day so that participants point out a hotspot before it becomes a blister. Stress is a reaction to change—when we are in the wilderness and everything is different, things like the weather, our diet, not knowing what to expect from today’s hike, and more can move a person from eustress to distress (see snapshot of the Yerkes-Dodson Law). It’s good to recognize and ground ourselves in these pieces of wisdom.

The biggest new learning for me was around major injuries—possible spine injuries, dislocations, broken bones, and major bleeds. I learned how to stabilize and provide basic life support in catastrophic situations by practicing on other people, and of course, being practiced upon. Over the course of the nine days, I lay on the ground with fake blood on my forehead while other students stabilized my spine, took my vitals, carefully noted my medical history, and treated my “broken bones” with traction in line, splints, and slings and swathes. I received the Head to Toe exam, the Focused Spine Assessment, wound closures and dressings, ankle tapes, and more.

I loved being a learner again. As a principal, I felt that I was expected to have answers to most situations and dilemmas. As a facilitator, I bring subject matter expertise to the sessions I lead. And as a Wilderness First Responder student, I sat at desks with other students ranging in age from high school student to parent of a college kid, with professionals from soil scientist to financial regulator. It was so much fun to be in a situation where I could connect the discrete dots of my experience through a unifying understanding of the human body and its responses to stress and trauma.

I also found that when I was supposed to have a broken elbow, I got fully into character, babying that side, clutching that elbow to my chest, and flinching whenever my rescuers touched it carelessly. After the scenario was over, I’d come inside for the next lesson, put my elbows on the desk, and immediately recoiled when my “injured” left elbow touched the surface. How ridiculous, I thought. But then it occurred to me how much this course had to teach me about the relationship between body and consciousness.

I’m re-reading a trilogy from my childhood this summer, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. At one point the children in the story meet angels, who reveal to them that what they long for more than anything is to have bodies again. Over the course of the trilogy, the story invites the possibility that our connection with the rest of the universe is not through an Almighty in the sky, but through our tangible flesh, our sensory experience of the universe, our breathing, eating, and touching the natural world. Perhaps the force that animates all of us is a desire to participate in, and preserve, the physical world around us.

These threads of meaning have led me to a renewed contemplation of my body. The messages I perceived as a child and young woman were these: my body is a machine that allows me to implement the intentions of my mind. My body is an asset that others find appealing. My body must be pushed to achieve its full potential. My body was a resource, deployed by an ingenious and strategic mind. This implied subjugation can be found in the Christian religion, among other Western doctrines. After all, it is our body that remains inanimate after we die, our spirits ascending to heaven. Theologian Clarence Larkin depicted the “Threefold Nature of Man,” with the body being the outer layer, the shell that contains the conscious soul and enlightened spirit. Throughout the Bible, we are encouraged to eschew the temptations of the flesh, “carnal desires,” and instead harken to the higher purpose of our spiritual calling.

And how many of us have experienced anger at our bodies? I can’t fall asleep. I’m getting a pimple! I am not recovering as fast as I thought from surgery. I have horrible period cramps. I’m getting old. In fact, I’d say this desperate frustration we feel when our bodies don’t respond to our control is one of the unifying experiences of being human.

So often we take these experiences as being limiting, defeating, frustrating. And yet I think my life changed when I added up my inexplicable cystic acne, which arrived a few months after I moved to San Francisco, and the stomach pain I’d developed a few years later, which descended on me both in moments of conscious anxiety and when I wasn’t expecting it. This pain would not be concealed or medicated. It caused me to change my diet and then change my life.

When my coach Eve first taught me the tool of the Body Compass just a month after I ended my fourth year as a principal, I could hardly register the responses from my body to the questions we put to it. I couldn’t discern when a message was coming from my chest or the back of my head or my hands. I wasn’t sure how to interpret the pulse quickening and the flutter I sometimes felt below my solar plexus. I experienced input overload as the messages from my mind jostled with the reactions from my body.

I gained more clarity when I slowed my expected pace of decisions, removed some of the pressure to figure out what I would do next or to build a strategy for my next career move. I learned that the Body Compass could help me decide what would be required for my physical healing, my emotional recharging. Over time, I began to find that my body has much to tell me about the right choice in life’s open-ended, complex situations. I began to realize that not every decision has to be justified with reasons A, B, and C. I gave credence to my love for the outdoors, realizing that being out of service was a way for me to be present with my soul, that moving up a mountain actually gives me the space to relax. These days, the Body Compass is the tool that many of my clients say made the biggest difference in their ability to understand and engage in confusing, complex decisions. It’s about tuning into the way you feel, regarding it as not purely coincidental but rather as a fundamental source of wisdom as we try to calibrate towards our purpose here on earth.

I’m ending my travels in the west with a few days of hiking with my aunt Lucretia. Yesterday we hiked Pioneer Cabin, a beautiful loop that climbs up piney switchbacks to a view of the Pioneer Mountains, where a small cabin used by skiers in winter takes in the most idyllic mountain view. We did this hike together in 2019, a few days before I started my fourth year as a principal at Summit Public Schools. This time, as we hiked, reaching the top as a shower of raindrops released the petrichor scent from the earth, we talked about where we were then and where we are now. How ending my time as a principal and moving to the east coast had changed my life, how the death of her mother was both a tragedy and the end of nine years of grueling caretaking. We didn’t call it this, but we were acknowledging the ways we’d recovered from distress during COVID, how forced isolation had in fact bumped us back to a state of calm, and how we were now, with travel and other life changes, returning to a state of eustress, with unspoken resolutions not to fall over the inflection point again.

We tried to remember whether we were moving faster this time, whether the uphill after the cabin was quite so long. We took in the wildflowers, the sage grouse, a herd of elk, the rolling clouds, the fragrant smell of moisture soaking into the dry earth. The rain fell lightly on us for the rest of our hike down.

I felt the wet brush of grass on my bare shins as we walked down a ridge. I felt fortunate for the places my body has taken me, a sort of grateful cherishing for the things I will not be able to do forever but I can do for now. A huge part of our task as humans is acceptance. This has been hard enough for me, and for others I see around me—an uncle recovering from major surgery, a friend sacrificing personal for professional goals, a WFR classmate resenting corrupt systems in her field of work. And behind the acceptance is perception—an enormous amount of truth and goodness that is waiting for us, inside our own muscles, nerves, and flesh.