The Body as Storyteller
By Lucia Capacchione, Ph. D., A.T.R.
Our world sees physical illness as an enemy: something to be gotten rid of. No one wants to be sick or in pain if they can help it. Whether we have an acute condition or chronic one, our first reflex is to make it go away. The body wants health. We want to feel good. Our natural instinct is toward health. And never before in history have their been so many methods for removing symptoms, deadening pain and treating all kinds of maladies.
But what if the illness doesn’t leave so quickly? What if it is considered a life-threatening disease, like cancer? Or a chronic one, like Muscular Dystrophy or Arthritis. Maybe there is long-term treatment to endure. Or perhaps the medical professional cannot diagnose the condition.
My own experience with a mysterious illness that doctors misdiagnosed and were unable to treat was this: illness is my teacher. I discovered that there were treasures to be mined in the midst of fear and physical pain that came with my illness.
What, you say? How can illness be a teacher? Illness usually hurts. It can debilitate us, or both. It sometimes leads to treatments and medications with side effects worse than the original disease. That was my dilemma when facing the mysterious condition mentioned earlier. I was thirty-five, a professional woman, divorced, the mother of two young children. The doctors didn’t know what I had, but my gut instinct told me the complete fatigue that sent me to bed for weeks was symptomatic of a serious disease. If we didn’t get to the bottom of this, I knew in my heart that I would die.
After scores of visits to specialists at an HMO, taking all kinds of medication (to no avail), I stumbled into a discovery that would save my life, change it forever, and give me the greatest gift I have ever received. I am speaking of the revelations that emerged in a blank book. It was a sketch book that I turned into a personal journal. On its unlined pages, I gave my body a voice. I allowed it to speak to me, to tell me its story and eventually to heal me.
That sketch book that morphed into a personal diary has led to hundreds of volumes over my lifetime. I later called it my Creative Journal. On the unlined pages of this Creative Journal I found myself drawing and writing my feelings, dreams, experiences, memories, questions, concerns and my true heart’s desires. The art in my journal bore no resemblance to the work I did as a professional designer and graphic artist. It was child-like, primitive and full of feelings and symbols I could not understand.
When I expressed myself in my journal, with complete honesty and without holding anything back, I felt better. It happened every time. Eventually I fully recovered from my illness (later diagnosed as an illness in the family of lupus) and found my life’s work, which included teaching the Creative Journal method.
Upon becoming an art therapist (after careers in art and child development), I noticed that clients and students with chronic and serious illness were flocking to my work. I showed them what I had learned about talking with my body and finding inner wisdom there. Invitations to teach at pioneering cancer support centers, like the Wellness Community, began pouring in. This was all happening in the late 70s and early 80s when the idea of cancer patients sitting around telling their story was revolutionary. It was an honor and privilege to be part of that early movement to give patients and their illness a voice. It was empowering for all of us.
The most effective way that I have found to let the body speak its truth is through drawing and writing. The body actually becomes a storyteller. First we draw an outline of the body with felt pens or crayons. An unlined blank book, sketcher’s diary or notebook are best for this work. Talent in art is absolutely irrelevant here. We’re not making Art, but diagramming our bodies. These silhouettes usually look like Gumby figures. That’s fine.
The next step is to color inside the body outline indicating any areas of pain or discomfort or even pleasure. This allows us to create our own inner map, an X-Ray of sorts, showing our sensations. We translate them into colors and shapes. An inflamed area might be colored red or orange. A cold body part might appear as blue. Numb areas often show up as gray or even black. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Colors choices are strictly personal and individual. Follow your instincts. Find the healer within.
The drawings look child-like. That is the whole idea: to feel our bodies the way we did as kids. And to express what we feel both physically and emotionally using the language young children use: drawing and coloring.
After we draw the body sensations out into the body map we then have a chat with each body part that was colored in. There are four healing questions that I have come up for getting to the inner truth buried under pain and illness. The questions are asked with the dominant hand. The answers are given with the non-dominant. This opens up the right brain emotional centers and seems to help us access physical sensations more readily. It is a whole brain approach that yields amazing answers.
This dialogue must be done on paper, writing with both hands alternately, in order to get the results I have been seeing with clients for thirty-five years. It cannot be done on a computer or in your head.
The Four Healing Questions
Who or what (body part) are you?
How do you feel (physically and/or emotionally)?
Why do you feel this way? (What caused this?)
What can I do to help you?
There is an optional fifth question to ask if the answer to it doesn’t emerge automatically (which it often does). The fifth question is:
What are you here to teach me or show me?
I invite you to embrace the Inner Teacher that lives within pain, illness and discomfort. Your body has so many stories to tell, so many feelings to share, so much wisdom to impart. It has so many answers waiting inside to be heard. There are treasures buried right inside you own body. Uncover them!