Body Memory: An Exploration of Individuals' Understanding of Personal Grief and its Manifestation in their Bodies

Grief: n. 1. Deep mental anguish, as that arising from bereavement. 2. trouble or difficulty. 3. Annoyance or frustration.

Body: n. 1.a.The entire material or physical structure of an organism, especially of a human being or an animal. b. The physical part of person. c. Corpse or carcass.

Memory: n. 1. The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience. 2. Persistent modification of behavior resulting from an animal's experience. 3. computer science. a. A unit of a computer that preserves data for retrieval. b. Capacity for storing information. 4. The capacity of a material, such as plastic or metal, to return to a previous shape after deformation.1

In June of the year 2000 I was in a plane crash. I have no recollection of the moment of impact or of ever being aware that the plane was crashing. As far as I can consciously recall, in one moment I was sitting on an airplane chatting with my father, and in the next, I was underneath the airplane, trying to understand how I got there.

Two months later, my mother was pushing me in my wheelchair outside the hospital walls for some fresh New York City air, and the wheels hit a crack in the sidewalk. The physical jolt sent my body into a mental and physical state of panic; my body tensed, I shut my eyes and flinched, my stomach dropped, my chest tightened- and yet in the next moment my wheelchair was safely over the crack and we continued on our way. It wasn't until a year later that I recalled this moment and understood it as a reflection of my body's ability to remember an experience that my mind never consciously allowed me to understand.

My interest in body memory guided me into an encounter with Leeny Sack, a former member of Richard Schechner's Performance Group in the late 1960's and early 1970's. She now considers herself both a healer and solo artist, and through our private sessions, she helped me navigate through my body to find different memories and experiences. Through use of breath and subtle movement I discovered a plethora of information concerning the plane crash to which I had no access up until that point.

My knee, which suffered the most severe physical trauma, held entire banks of memories about my leg being stuck underneath the airplane, and my emotional state of fear, panic, and shock. I recalled the sound of the rain, the feeling of the mud beneath my body, the pain of my leg being stuck underneath the plane; all of which was blocked by my body's defense mechanism to shield me from the trauma of the moment. Locating these memories through parts of my body was not only revelatory, but liberating. The safe space created by Leeny's presence combined with my hunger to understand what I'd been through allowed for a catharsis of sorts; a self-awareness previously prevented through repression; an upsurge of emotion that created a state of calm and self-understanding; a peacefulness that was preceded by the tumult of the inaccessibility of this information.

I recognize that most people have not undergone a traumatic experience that demands this kind of exercise in order to unearth pieces of self, but everyone has grief, and everyone holds it in their body. For this project, I was interested to know whether people could locate the place in their bodies where their grief is most concentrate, and why that place is the sanctuary of their grief. Interestingly, every single person was able to locate a single place where their bodies store grief, and yet only one person could explain why.

Perhaps had I talked to each person longer, they would have had time to think more deeply about why their grief is affected by the specific body part that they mentioned, but on first impulse, each person quickly named a body part- everyone's answers clustered around the torso and head- and barely anyone could think of a specific incident that perhaps inaugurated this area as the most concentrated place of stress. Some people with whom I talked more intimately amended their answers to involve limbs and genitalia- thus perhaps the question asked in such a casual space didn't allow for enough time or comfort to answer truthfully. And on occasion, when I told the subject of my story, individuals remembered other pockets in their bodies that contain tension and grief.

Reona Brass, an artist at the Hemispheric Institute, was the only person who could specify a moment when this place in her body became her haven of grief, and it was after our interview that she thought of it. She located her lower left back as her container of grief, and though she couldn't say why in our first encounter, she later came up to me and recalled leaning over her father's grave and feeling the pain shoot into that area of her body.

Alexander Lowen, the creator of Bioenergetics as a therapeutic form and a disciple of William Reich (the founder of Reichian Therapy) writes of areas of the body that can universally function to incite particular emotions. Furthermore, he created a method of understanding elements of self through exploring corporal areas of tension and grief.

Lowen describes Bioenergetics as "the study of the human personality in terms of the energetic processes of the body."2 As a psychiatrist he was interested in emotional processes, and having been trained as a doctor, he understood the correlative physical phenomena involved with each emotion. While much of his work is recorded in case studies and specific evaluations of patients' pasts in a Freudian, psychoanalytic, and what I regard as a rather obsolete style, the fundamental revelatory union of body and emotional state still resonates with me.

Lowen wrote:

When one realizes that 99% of the body is composed of water, some of it structured, but much of it fluid, we can picture sensations, feelings and emotions as currents or waves in this liquid body.3

Such a simple statement explains not only the fluidity of our emotional states, but also why grief can be located in highly specific areas like eddies in a river. Lowen's recognition of breath as a key tool in mapping one's emotional blocks through the body aligns with this corporeal fluidity because breathing is where we get our oxygen, and oxygen promotes blood flow. A direct response to holding one's breath is anxiety and it seems logical that where emotions are blocked, blood and oxygen are blocked, and thus those are points of anxiety in our bodies.

Lowen elaborates on the body's defense system which is the main culprit in causing these blockages. It must be noted that the defense system is necessary in dealing with the world on a daily basis, and though it can ultimately serve to perpetuate grief, it initially creates a manageable way to handle the grief or trauma at the moment that it occurs. I certainly don't fault my body for consciously "forgetting" the moment of impact in the plane crash- I recognize that it was a necessary element in my healing process, but the defense manifested as a block to all emotions, and thus I had to return to the memory in order to fully understand what occurred and gain access to sadness and grief, as well as happiness and joy.

Lowen's layers of the body's defense system from the outside in are as follows:

1.Ego layer:

a.Denial

b.Distrust

c.Blaming

d.Projection

e.Rationalizations and intellectualizations

2.Muscular layer: in which are found the chronic muscular tensions that support and justify the ego defenses and at the same time protect the person against the underlying layer of suppressed feelings that he dare not express.

3.Emotional layer: feelings which include suppressed feelings of rage, panic or terror, despair, sadness and pain.

4.Core or heart: from which feeling to love and be loved is derived.4

For the purposes of this project, it seems that we are dealing with layers two and three; the muscular and the emotional. The question In what part of your body do you hold your grief? can translate into What group of muscles tense when suppressed feelings of rage, panic or terror, despair, sadness, or pain upsurge and you become aware of their presence in your body? Amazingly, everyone was able to locate a specific area.

Though Lowen continues his analysis by universalizing character traits according to different individuals' areas of tension, I feel that it is reductive and I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable labeling individuals as character types. What is significant about Lowen's theory is the biological basis of body memory and consequential emotional states.

My interest in creating this project and using this question exists in the manifestation of the psychological within an individual's physical body. In the short digital video that I created, I chose to splice my interviews with images that, for me, embody grief. Hands wringing a wet rag represents how I imagine muscles tightening under stress. The red that pervades the video evokes the body's interior. The inclusion of Nao Bustamente's performance (the woman rapped in plastic bags filled with water) was particularly relevant because it was a documentation of her moment of trauma (she was in fact having a panic attack during this performance piece). The dual imagery at work- that of the sounds and the bags of water, along with the truth behind it- she was not acting, she was literally experiencing the grief right then and there- coalesced to create a strikingly real image that still resonates with me when I watch it. The sepia-toned anatomy shots of a hand dotting lines on a body represents the literal, physical area described by the interviewee, and is also reminiscent of a surgical opening/extraction of that part of the body.

The containment of grief in particular parts of the body, I would posit, are based on body memory from a past experience. Whether it involves a physical trauma or a heartbreaking emotional moment, our bodies remember a feeling, what incited the feeling, and tries to suppress it in order for us to continue daily functioning. It is when something occurs that stimulates and aligns our emotional state with that physical state from the past that our grief emerges from that particular place. It is through repetition and re-exploration that we can find that place and understand its implications. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, December 6, 1896 Freud wrote:

I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances- to a retranscription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is not present once but several times over, that is laid down in various kinds of indications.5

Everyone to whom I asked the question was able to give a highly specific response, thus reflecting the repetition that had already occurred of a feeling in a particular place in the body. My terse method of interview perhaps didn't allow people the time they needed to retrieve the memory that incited their physical response to grief, and for many, it probably is still a subconscious body memory. As a result of this discrepancy between peoples' awareness of grief in their bodies and inability to articulate the origin of this area as a container for grief, I spliced the clips of people talking with images that for me incite grief. I also expressed the question as a surgical tool; a method of opening up people's bodies to allow for further exploration (thus the imagery of the dotted lines on the body). Moments during the encuentro actually created panic in both spectators and performers, and I used imagery from Nao Bustamente's piece to further create a feeling of panic and anxiety.

Though I cannot come to any grand conclusion about this study, I can say with certainty that the varying responses have incited me to further explore this notion of body memory and how people can address and remember through performance.

1 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,

2 p.45 Lowen, Alexander. Bioenergetics,

3 p.56 Lowen, Alexander. Bioenergetics

4 p.119-20 Lowen, Alexander. Bioenergetics

5 Freud, Sigmund. The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes 1887-1902