Let me show you just how powerful this journaling practice can be by deconstructing one part of my love-note writing journey to make peace with my body.

There is no one-size-fits-all healing program when it comes to making peace with your body. We have such different lived experiences that there’s no way we could expect to heal the same way.

I’ve been experiencing big feelings—the ragey grief kind—since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and I thought you would understand the way jagged snips of memory slice their way to consciousness, demanding attention.

I was drawn to read The Body Keeps the Score because of what I knew intuitively about how the body stores all our hurts and heartbreaks from my own journey to make peace with my body. Dr. Van der Kolk writes, “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.” I had experienced this on a personal level. When I was writing love notes to my body’s parts, often what I wrote about were past emotional hurts that were connected on a visceral level to my physical body.

I took a Women’s Studies course in college, where I experienced one of my first “awakening” moments. Yep, your math is right. I spent years, decades really, in the Awakening stage.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to wrangle my memories about the most vivid events that sparked my awakening. Because I tend to write the stories that are the loudest when I sit at my desk, this retelling will not be in chronological order.

Part 1 – The Dream