How is pain central to ShapeShifting?
ShapeShifting is about your body and the story it has to tell. One of the most powerful parts of your body’s story is the pain- both physical and emotional- that it remembers from its encounters with the world around you. Your body is the repository for all of your pain; it senses and remembers what your conscious mind cannot and will not; these experienced and remembered events terrify your conscious mind. The result is that your conscious mind has closed off a uniquely intelligent and powerful part of you. This hidden part of you is an essential part of the real you. These events of pain are woven into the sensory, nervous and muscular systems in your body. When that pain is recognized and released through your physical movement, it becomes the source of truth and great energy. It floods the body with a new orientation that eventually seeps into your conscious mind. We can express not just the real truth but the painful truth.
Because your body’s remembered and expressed pain is so powerful it also becomes the most effective communicative vehicle as well. Other bodies recognize this pain and are also set free to express their own stories of pain. This dialogue between our bodies happens at a preconscious level where our bodies are free to tell their stories through movement.
By allowing our bodies to go to the pain that they remember and express it, we are healed. The fear and burden is removed because the trauma is relived and survived. The more we reveal, the more we heal. If we really listen to our body’s pain, we become new creatures. Our conscious minds will finally get a chance to see these moments again and again and slowly remember and embrace them through the movement of our bodies.