Inheritance #2 Doing “well” in the age of Wellness

Some people experience panic in the chest. For me, it’s everywhere. I feel like an insect trapped in a spider’s web, the threads around me hardening as they tighten. I'm beset by fears, some crowding around me, others skulking in corners, slipping out of reach when I want to bring them out and name them.

My cancer diagnosis is recent. The fear and panic are not. They’ve been with me all my life, to a greater or lesser extent. It came to me a couple of weeks ago that I fear living inside my own mind more than I fear any treatment I’m anticipating. Not a lot of people know this about me, because I function so well. I’ve lived this way for as long as I can remember, and functioned anyway.

All this is in preparation for telling you how well I’ve been doing, and why I want to put pressure on the very idea of doing “well.”

A week after my surgery, during the time when I would normally be teaching Feldenkrais, I took a brisk walk up the hill near our house. I ran into one of my students, and realized how strange this must look. Would she even believe the surgery had happened? “I’m a walking ad for Feldenkrais,” I said, and we both laughed.

Let me emphasize: if I had not been feeling pain-free and energetic that day, I would have toddled around the block instead of attempting a big hill. But I knew I was well enough, and I enjoyed every step of that walk. I had been using my Feldenkrais background to adapt the range-of-motion exercises I’d been given by the physiotherapist. Short version: I rested more at the beginning. I did less than what she told me to do. Then I found ways to allow movement instead of making it. I never “stretched.” I found space. A week after surgery, I was walking tall.

I’m also handling the diagnosis “well,” even handling the panic “well,” in the sense that I’ve been able to figure out what helps and what doesn’t. What helps is to move, and often that means walking. I don’t want to move; I sometimes believe I can’t move. Sometimes I say: “Move!” out loud. And I do it. I have to fight the sensation of being encased.

It helps to move mentally, by writing. I try to put whatever is going on into words. Or I write about other things. It doesn’t matter. Sense-making, period, is therapeutic. I have to force myself to do it, but then I’m back. I’m me again. No longer consumed. That’s not new, either. I even force myself to write through migraines sometimes, as long as I’m not laid out completely or actively throwing up.

I’m no influencer, but I know someone, somewhere, might look to this blog for examples of how to live (and write) with anxiety or migraines or cancer treatment. I would like my experience to help people. But I don’t honestly know if pushing through resistance is the right thing for you, in this moment. And nor should I.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind more people in my classes. Please join! But what I really hope is for my students to be able to sense for themselves when they need to stride up a hill and greet their neighbours, and when they need to crawl back into bed. When they need to write, and when they need to cry or eat chips, or binge Call the Midwife. When they need to find a calming breathing pattern, and when they need a dose of Lorazepam, and how to combine the two, if that seems right.

All I can do is describe what years of practice have given me. They have helped me trust that there are possibilities beyond what I am aware of in this moment. What seems impossible now may not be, in thirty seconds. Knowing that creates a tiny space between me and those overwhelming thoughts. I can begin there, and create more space. I do this based on many practices I have pursued over the years: Feldenkrais, the courses I have taken at the Jacoby/Gindler Foundation in Berlin, and my long-term studies in voice with Fides Krucker to name just a few.

I can’t talk about them all here, but let me start with Feldenkrais (which is infused with all the others at this point, anyway). It entails noticing things that are normally beneath the level of consciousness, slowing down automatic thoughts and actions, making choices where you don’t feel you have any. It’s also about continuing to learn, and be curious at times when that might not seem possible, making the best use of what you have, adapting to circumstances. Working within constraints. Being aware of breathing. Everything I need right now. I’ve been doing this for forty years. It’s part of me. I turn to it before I even know I’m doing it.

Historical study is also part of the picture. My research considers a long tradition of practitioners whose work fed into what is often called Somatics. (What is Somatics? Well you might ask. I'll do another post on it.) I research their lives and work and writings. My main area of study is the Berlin-based practitioner Elsa Gindler (1885-1961), but I also look at her context, at the types of conversations that were happening while she did her work.

This summer, I thought I’d be travelling to Germany to learn more about Gindler’s teachers and students. They practiced while their country was being bombed from the outside and ruled by fascists within. They needed to learn ways to function, to avoid succumbing to panic, but also to fit their practice into small spaces – physical and temporal. Instead of travelling to peruse documents, I’ve been exploring how past and present connect. I’m learning about panic-intervention through immediate, lived experience (thank goodness, in peacetime and [relatively] secure in my civil rights).

But my work also involves thinking critically about mind/body practices, and living with a “big” diagnosis brings to the fore a lot of difficult aspects of the culture in which – like it or not – those practices tend to live, namely: “Wellness.”

Just like writing, this field calls for me to be an entrepreneur, and that means having a platform. I need numbers: subscribers to my newsletter, students in my classes. I’m a salesperson, and my product is myself. I can combat that paradigm all I want. Still, I know it: my own best advertising is my confident and youthful stride.

But Wellness often ignores social determinants of health. I’m doing well because I'm disciplined and thoughtful and have been engaging in helpful practices for a long time. I’m also white, a boomer, and married to someone with flexible hours, a manager’s salary, and health benefits.

Medical series like Grey’s Anatomy promote the expectation that medical doctors will overwork and undernourish their bodies, that they’ll lead deeply dysfunctional lives. Wellness practitioners, on the other hand, are expected to be in exceptional
health: glowing, ageless, unassailable health, to have unreproachable habits and picture-postcard lives. If “The Work” is not easy to grasp, the focus moves to our biographies, and that often means telling a story of self-healing from an intractable disease.

This is taking me to an ugly place: the question of why I got cancer to start with. I try not to go down that road, or if I do, I quickly remind myself that this is something that one in eight women experience. I drew the short straw. But it’s treatable, and that’s what counts. Certainly, my various practices are helping me cope, but they were never going to prevent it from happening in the first place.

I chose to teach Feldenkrais because to me, it's a form of embodied critical thinking, but I can’t ignore the context of Wellness where it tends to land. And when it comes to illness, “Wellness” culture has a lot to answer for. It’s important for practitioners (and by that I mean both participants and teachers) to know about our professional inheritance, just as I need to have extra mammograms because my mother got breast cancer at an early age.

Wellness disciplines often claim omnipotence and omniscience. This tendency can be hard to pin down, because it is seldom written out in quotable words, so I tend to pounce on the moments when I do see it explicitly stated. Here are just a couple of examples. In researching the history of somatic practices I came across a description of “Clinical Somatics” by Thomas Hanna, founder of Hanna Somatic Education® and an important figure in the development of Somatics. (That term again! I promise, I'll do a post). He writes: “An authentic clinical somatic educator is one who so clearly sees what is the case that he can predict with accuracy the overcoming of a specific malady.” Hanna Somatic Education®, he concludes, offers “clarity and predictive certainty" (10).

Friends, in case you’re in any doubt, NO ONE has clarity and predictive certainty when it comes to illness. But does the tone of grandiosity ring a bell? Does this attitude infuse the words and actions of a practitioner you know? Or the atmosphere of a training program, a studio, a practice you have tried?

In still deeper history, meet Richard Ungewitter (1869-1958), nudist, raw food advocate, anti-feminist and antisemite. He was a great fan of the Nazis but ultimately took them to task becuase they believed in vaccinations. Ungewitter is quoted (and translated) by Michael Hau in his marvellous book, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany.

"The state of the feeling of absolute health, which knows neither the fear of catching cold nor the fear of becoming infected, can be called the pinnacle of well being. A certain health joyfulness [Gesundheitsfreudigkeit] has developed, which leads to an absolute confidence in oneself, so that one can predict with absolute certainty that one will never be sick again" (25).

Do you recognize this tone? Just google 'health’, or ‘wellness’; you’ll see many websites promising joyfulness, well-being and above all, confidence. For a price. You might see terms like “radiance,” or “glowing.” The word “control” often appears. Check out the ad copy for this longevity and wellness clinic, for instance. There’s an element of mania to it, threatening to flip to its opposite when illness inevitably appears.

Ungewitter may have been extreme, but he was part of the Lebensreform movement, a predecessor of today’s Wellness. Individual practices, and practitioners, may disavow extreme ideas, at least in what we explicitly say, but we have to take an honest look at the roots of this culture. The image at the start of this post is by Fidus, an artist deeply involved with Lebensreform. It's called Light
Prayer. It's a beautiful image, but it makes me wonder: What (and who) gets pushed aside when people worship light?

The extreme example in our own time is Bryan Johnson, who claims he can evade death entirely. It’s easy to dismiss Johnson as deranged. (Also, not that healthy after all – see "inevitable" above.) But I think all of us, especially practitioners,
need to look carefully at how we participate in the culture that supports him.

I wish they had some equivalent of mammograms for that! Oh well, at least there are primary sources. Let’s read them.

References

Hanna, Thomas. “Clinical Somatic Education:  A New Discipline in the Field of Health Care.” Somatics, vol. VIII, no. 1, Autumn/Winter -91, pp. 4–10.

Hau, Michael. The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social
History, 1890-1930. The University of Chicago Press, 2003.