HOW WORDS LAND IN THE BODY
Words are powerful. They carry backstory. They have their own personal history in each person who hears them, reads them, writes them, and speaks them.
Words are suggestions for experience. Most often we agree on general definitions. We look them up in dictionaries when we want to know what they mean. We recognize them in different contexts. We create a reservoir of how, when, and in what tone we experience them being used. In this way we build a unique relationship to each word.
But what does a word truly mean? Is your soft the same as mine? We agree on a range of experience, but perhaps the soft I’ve experienced and that I feel as I think of soft is similar, but not the same as yours. Maybe mine is puppy belly soft and your soft is pillow or moss soft.
We build a primarily unconscious resource of felt experiences in relationship to each word, even to the little traveling words like to or from. They all have emotional kickers and a field of reference. They also have resonance with other people’s use of that particular word.
Sometimes, and especially with people from other cultures, a word can mean something quite different. I think of all the years I heard Tibetan lamas refer to Mind which I interpreted in my Western cultural definition, not understanding the cavernous philosophy that lives within their speaking of that word.
I think of being given the suggestion to soften. I lay on my back softening my tissues and felt how different it felt than being given the suggestion to yield. They feel different although both words carry in them the idea of releasing tension, acknowledging gravity, and lowering muscle tone. Soften may be included in yield for some, but not for others. We each carry a unique physical response to hearing words and finding them in the tissues of our bodies.
Our tissues contain our words, those spoken to us and the ones we speak inside to ourselves. Our cells have been responding to and encoding verbal communication for as long as we’ve been here.
An Experiment: This is about noticing, internal listening, receiving information from your tissues. As you follow these choices of things to do bring your attention to how your body feels. Does one particular part of your body resonate or feel a particular way? Do you feel it more locally or globally in your body? Does it stay in your head or on your tongue? Do you feel it in your heart or your belly or your foot?
Choose a word.
Say it our loud. Feel the internal responses in your body.
Say it internally. Notice again how your body feels.
Think it. Experience how your body responds.
Is it different each time or are there similarities?
Choose other words to play with and notice differences in emotional/physical responses in the body.
An example: When I say the word bye as in bye-bye out loud my hand wants to get involved waving. When I say it inside it settles in the top back of my lungs with a kind of heaviness. When I think it, (which is hard, I have to stop myself from saying it internally) I feel it more in the emotions of my facial muscles.