In hindsight, I was doubly — maybe triply — screwed.
My parents’ marriage, before it ended, ran on calm, level-headed discussion with almost no visible emotion. My mom comes from a long line of analytical New England Jews — thoughtful, brilliant, sometimes a little cold in the way that matched the weather. Both my parents worked in mental health. So it’s no surprise I learned early that the safest way through anything painful was to detach, stay rational and analyze my way out.
From the outside, that looked like maturity. People praised me as a child for being thoughtful, composed, and “beyond my years.”
But inside, I was completely disconnected.
It’s no wonder I can’t remember anything before age 13.
Not the ten moves between houses and across the country.
Not most of my childhood with all its joy and terror.
Not those first relationships with friends and family.
I wasn’t present for any of it — not really. I was thinking my way through a life I wasn’t actually living.
Every so often something would crack through the shell: a prolonged fight as a relationship fell apart, a scene in a movie that hit too close, a moment of grief I couldn’t outsmart. But even then, I didn’t understand what was happening. I just knew something in me was trying to get out and it was terrifying.
Therapy was the first place I learned to name any of this. Will helped me learn the words and I could finally talk about patterns, attachment styles, reactions, childhood, all of it.
But talking wasn’t the same as feeling.
I was starting to understand my life, but I still wasn’t living it.
A nasty breakup had me back exploring new therapeutic techniques. Nothing wrong with talk therapy and my experiences had been transformative. But I knew there was some deep bedrock work that needed excavating in my psyche.
Lonny Miller looks like a surfer, tall with long blonde hair. The first time I met him it was actually for couple’s therapy. My ex Morgan and I saw him once, he immediately told us that we needed to decide if we were going to work on this or not. I took a walk and came back to tell Morgan that I wasn’t in it. But during the resulting breakup Morgan said, you really should keep seeing Lonny.
Somatic emotionally focused therapy was totally different. We’d start sessions with physical exercises, tapping bilaterally and saying the body part out loud. Me tapping my left shoulder with my right hand and vice versa, feeling like the biggest idiot in the world, “Shoulder, shoulder, shoulder” and then working the way down my body. And then we talked about how emotions start in the body, and how people (especially men) are so bad at knowing what they’re actually feeling. For example how excitement and fear can feel the same in the body, the tightening of the chest, the elevated heartrate. But if you can’t tell the difference it could all be called anxiety by the brain.
We even reviewed a color wheel but for feelings, just to see how much overlap there was. I learned that when I was asked how I was feeling and I said “I don’t know”, that needed to be a trigger for me. I was supposed to say, “Stop, I don’t know yet. But can you sit with me for a minute while I figure it out?” Even to this day, writing that still brings up emotions for me. The idea that someone, anyone would want to help me see myself honestly.
At the same time Buddhism was coming back into my life after years of turning away from it. I had moved down to Venice and after meditating by myself for years I wondered if a teacher and Sangha (community) might be helpful. Also because I’d just gotten dumped and was trying this new thing of not immediately frantically looking for another woman to distract me from myself. It turned out that there was a mindfulness teacher right down the street. Noah and our journey together is a whole other story but one day during guided meditation a guest teacher said something that brought the entire somatic therapy journey home.
“Your entire body is consciousness”
I started sobbing. It was the moment someone perfectly articulates the thing you’ve been trying to name forever. I think it must be like learning that the word ‘love’ exists.
As I kept practicing — in sessions with Lonny, in daily sitting, and eventually on longer meditation retreats with Noah — the truth of that line reshaped everything. I began to see how quickly my body reacted before my mind formed a single thought. How often I left myself in moments of conflict. How much of my life I’d tried to manage instead of inhabit.
I didn’t suddenly become calm or wise or emotionally fluent.
But I finally had a direction.
A way back into myself instead of away from myself.
That’s what I try and help men do now — not become perfect or endlessly composed, but learn how to stay with themselves long enough to understand what’s actually happening inside them before the old patterns take over.
Your entire body is consciousness.