I will always remember the first time I tried shaking in the studio. It was a grey Sunday morning, and I stood in the middle of a spacious dance studio with floor-to-ceiling windows. The grey, muted sunlight blurred into the grey marley flooring, merging the outside and the inside space.
With SOPHIE’s BIPP blasting out of the surround sound speakers, I let a full body shake emanate from my core. For the first time in my life, I intentionally let my flesh bounce and reverberate. There was something mesmerising about the way the skin on my thighs and the backs of my arms rustled around my bones. Memories of shrinking myself rattled around in my body, as I convulsed, stomped, and thrashed myself through the greyness.
By the end of BIPP, the shaking had organised itself into rhythmic punching and jumping. Even in the punching, the force of the recoil shook the flesh on my body. I kept going, like a snapping rubber band, song after song, sobbing, punching, and kicking at faceless ghosts for an hour.
Something in my body shook loose; something only my cells remembered. The external shaking subsided and I fell to my knees, still shaking internally. I stopped sobbing and felt as if my skeleton had clicked into place. I curled into a child’s pose, with my elbows tucked under my body, and cheek resting on my clasped hands; savouring this newfound sense of connection and wholeness. I knew that I would have to keep shaking and get to the bottom of what I had just let loose.
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I began dancing when I was three. I used to dance around the house non-stop, so my parents put me in a classical ballet class – why do grown-ups see a child moving freely in their body and decide to shove them into one of the most rigid forms of artistic training available? I did my time in classical ballet, and it opened up an entire world of movement and artistry. I moved on to modern dance when I turned 18, and later to improvisation and somatics in my mid-20s.
As I was learning to teach creative dance to toddlers, I discovered the work of Anne Green Gilbert, Creative Dance for All Ages (2015). She writes about shaking as a way to activate the vestibular system in the body. The vestibular system is the part of our inner ear that gives us a sense of balance. It helps us feel our weight and position our body as we move. And it gives us information to understand intuitively whether we’re right side up or upside down most days.
Academics might try to make it really complicated and talk about ‘tensegrity models’ and ‘brain signals’, but experiencing the vestibular system can be a joyful, childlike experience. You can try waking up your vestibular sensing now. Try spinning around a few times, then stopping abruptly to balance – on two feet, or one, if you’re up for it. If you really want a challenge, spin then balance with your eyes closed. What does it feel like to experience your mind and body working overtime to keep you balanced?
For bodies carrying trauma, it may be overwhelming to become aware of all that bodily feedback.
I remember an exercise, from Gilbert (2015), I used with young children to play with this sense of weight. I would say, “let the space shake you”, and the room would fill with jello-y little people bouncing around and giggling. Then I would say, “now you shake the space”, and the room would be full of powerful arms and hands reaching into space, and giving it a vigorous ‘TAKE THAT!’ It’s a gorgeous, hilarious way to see children interacting with their inner and outer experience of gravity. I think about this element of being in and out of control often. Mostly, when I look back at this time in my life, I think about how I coached children through this, but never tried it myself.
Later still, as I began to teach adults, I stumbled upon the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a book called Sensing, Feeling, and Action (1993). Our bodies are constantly receiving input from the outside world, creating sensory feedback. For bodies carrying trauma, it may be overwhelming to become aware of all that bodily feedback. BodyMind Centering (BMC) speaks about how trauma can restrict and bind, creating knots where there used to be free-flowing information. One way to (re)discover the sense of free flow is to tap into the fluid sense of our internal organs, or as Bonnie would say, “the mind of the organs” (Bonnie, 1993). Our organs move without us having to tell them. Even now, my stomach is moving bits of breakfast around and using liquids to break down nutrients. When we embody our organs, moving with sloshing, splashing, and squishing qualities, the hope is that we can begin to make unconscious activities more conscious. Through this, perhaps we can invite new rivers of awareness to flow.
In BMC workshops, this would look like a room filled with gently rocking and swaying people, their eyes closed to focus inward. We were encouraged that getting in touch with internal happenings could bring about external expressions, but the room generally stayed serene and nearly still. I remembered it again as a whisper, “Let the space shake you…now you shake the space…”
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Throughout my movement journey, my nervous system has done its very best to keep me safe. When I’m in distress, and I can’t flee, my body is very good at going into a freeze response. It’s common for many survivors to experience the freeze state, and sometimes people develop a ‘frozen torso’. Panic, resignation, and rigidity go hand-in-hand to create a locked state of being. Shaking may happen here, but it is from intense muscle tension; muscles held so tightly that the effort is what shakes us. It’s no wonder that so many survivors also have trouble with digestion; there’s just no room to be soft and move food around properly.
Peter Levine (2010) has a profound quote describing trauma survivors being “disembowelled”. It may feel dramatic to some, but it’s spot on to me. So much tension and distress in the torso, at all times, becomes overwhelming and, in my case, an avoidance of the internal. Coupled with a hypervigilance to my external surroundings, there simply was no energy left for me to think about what was happening in my body. Where I could be feeling substance and vitality, I often feel an empty pit – there’s also the impact 20 years of ballet training had on my already frozen torso.
To this day, I still struggle with body scanning in my torso. It can be too much to feel my softness. When sketching body mapping drawings (Andrea Olsen’s work is a great reference), I very rarely draw my organs. Trauma is still knotting bits of myself off from my awareness, tying me up from feeling freely. It wasn’t enough to gently rock my way into finding free flow, like Cohen suggested. I had to shatter the ice cube. So, I finally tried shaking.
Shaking myself silly is one way to feel this kind of afterglow.
Levine tells a story about an impala in the interview referenced below where he expands on the physiological origins of trauma. In the story, an impala has an epic dash away from a cheetah and escapes, then nearly immediately goes back to peacefully grazing. How can a creature return to calm after narrowly escaping death? Levine notes that just before the animal can relax, they have an intense bout of shaking to get rid of excess energy from the nervous system. Apparently, shaking can take us back to homeostasis. I figured I would give it a go, and I found that trauma created knots in my nervous system; knots that I had left long forgotten.
My first experience with shaking started out as very empowering and pleasurable, but ended in a very different place than the impala in Levine’s story. I experienced first hand just how easily pleasure can tip into distress. My nervous system was activated outside of my conscious control. Whether we need energy to play or we need energy because we are afraid and may need our survival instincts, our autonomic nervous system wakes up the sympathetic branch – the part that responds to stress. Excitement therefore creates a similar somatic response to stress and fear. It’s easy for survivors to feel the excitement tip, because the body has coded that kind of nervous system input as dangerous. My sympathetic nervous system was mutilated by this traumatic event. Shaking pushed me to that blurry edge of playful liveliness and fighting for my life.
So, how do we know when to stop letting the space shake us? And when to start shaking the space again? How do I go back and forth between letting my history shake me? And saying no to allow myself to take the reins in my history?
I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out.
Maybe it’s about taking time to yield and let the vibrations settle. If I’m constantly shaking a snow globe, I can’t enjoy the glittery scene. Maybe I still need to establish safety in my body. I do know that there are days when I feel safe enough to acknowledge the active, fleshy, aliveness of my structure. I also know that shaking myself silly is one way to feel this kind of afterglow. For now, I’m going to keep going back to the grey blurry dance studio on grey blurry London days. I’m ready to blur the edges of control and chaos, of excitement and distress, because I am confident that I can bring myself back.
— Dylan Reddish
References
Gilbert, A.G. (2015). Creative Dance for All Ages. Human Kinetics.
The Creative Dance Center. (n.d.). Brain-Compatible Dance Education & BrainDance. [online] Available at: https://www.creativedance.org/brain-dance/.
Cohen, B. B., Nelson, L. and Smith, N. S. (2012) Sensing, feeling, and action : the experiential anatomy of body-mind centering®. Third edn. Northampton, MA: Contact Editions.
Olsen, A. (2004) Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy. Lebanon, NH: UPNE.
www.psychotherapy.net. (n.d.). Peter Levine on Trauma Healing: A Somatic Approach. [online] Available at: https://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/interview-peter-levine#section-releasing-trauma-from-the-body [Accessed 10 Jul. 2024].
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