I see dead people. Haley Joel Osment’s character in “The Sixth Sense,” Cole Sear, wasn’t the only one. I don’t mean an apparition in a white sheet. We all carry specters with us. Wisps of lost loves, embedded emotions, maybe even fractured relationships that all live in our muscle memory.
This discovery happened not too long ago, as I was deep in a pigeon pose at Modo Yoga in New York City. While contorted in a manner that made my runner hips ache in a good way, I felt the kind of release that sheds more than fascia or lactic acid; I experienced a rush of stored emotions. Feelings and memories appeared to live in my hip socket. I walked home with water leaking from my eyeballs confused, cleansed, and filled with thoughts of the time a man named Steven Johnson held me hostage with a gun to my head
. I rarely think about Johnson or the incident. I’ve told the story publicly many times without much emotion. The trauma I experienced jump-started my running life over a decade ago, when, one day, I decided to lace up. The physical sensation of that run was a moving catharsis.
Up until that recent day in the studio, I hadn’t thought about Johnson—who is currently incarcerated—in a long time. I hadn’t really thought about the feeling of a gun to my temple, my ripped skin, or his clenched fists. Running had seemingly healed those wounds. The more I had recounted that incident, the more it had become a source of strength and resilience.
Our minds are adept at playing defense with habits formed, stories conjured, and traumas forgotten. But our bodies remember. Through movement, we recall those upsetting memories. They’re hidden in the footsteps, dance moves, and yoga poses that we practice. Pushing and pulling our body weight through the world is tantamount to therapy. Akin to dabbling in various canons of psychoanalysis, exploring modalities of movement creates different types of relieving space deep within us. If running was my first form of therapy, then yoga was my second.
Shakira was right. Hips don’t lie. I had a little more to dig out—a traumatic spring-cleaning that I needed to release on the mat. It was then that I realized that when we give ourselves the power to move and the freedom to feel, our bodies will serve us.
My body holds the ghosts of my past, a combination of elevated voices, late nights, and forgotten emotion. Now, I exorcise ghosts with every sway of my hips, pigeon pose and downward dog. We are all invited to dig a little deeper. Sweat is the magic potion.
