The Memoir of My Body

My soul experiences existence through my body. As my body, I feel the energy of the universe pulsing through me, entering from my pelvic floor, moving up the spine, through the chakras, into the heart, into expanded awareness and vision from the third eye and transcendence in consciousness.

All because of my body. It houses me and my Beloved. It is my vehicle, my house, my companion. It is my experience, my art. My story.

This is the memoir of my body.



When I was six-months old I was admitted to Dover General Hospital in New Jersey for a spinal tap. I had a high fever and the doctors didn’t know why.
“There is something toxic in her bedroom,” test results showed.
My father found the culprit in the Shell pest strips used in 1967 to catch flies. It’s long, brown curl was emitting nerve gas, hanging next to my crib. I was in an incubator for a week.

“You almost died, baby Sparky Patti,” my mother said, retelling the story many times during my life.

There has always been this low-level anxiety within me. I noticed that anxiety subsided when I was rolfed in the psoas. There was no longer any upward pulling tension. I was grounded. I was safe.

A recent New York Times article explained how some babies are wired for anxiety and grow up as anxious adults. But it’s that anxiety that makes them such good workers. Controlling their environment, planning ahead. Ready for anything. The yoga sutras say that even the sage feels fear. So I knew fear from the very beginnings. My body entered the world anxious.

I had always thought it was because my mother was the wire monkey mother. That famous Harlow and Harlow experiment about how monkey babies who were held by their real mothers were well adjusted. The wire monkey’s who got a mother that was a bunch of wire with terry cloth on it turned out sort of normal, and those with only the wire monkey mother were psychotic.

My mother didn’t touch me much. If I leaned forward to hug her, she would resist, saying that she was afraid that I would “pull on her earrings,” and rip them out of her ears. The only time I remember her holding me was when I was about 6 and I had an earache and was crying and she held me and rocked me until it was time to go to the doctor appointment.
Although she gave me books and religiously took us to the library, my mother went to her own stack of books and she never read to me. My older sister by six years, Nancy, taught me how to use my fingers to flip through the card catalog and search the metal stacks for home making books. I read by myself.

My father’s body was always wracked with pain. He was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp on Java during World War II. No he is not Jewish or Japanese. It was the Dutch East Indies experience under Japanese occupation. That whole experience was still in his body, the post-traumatic stress, still in the muscles, that were always tense and giving him severe migraine headaches. The dark-orange prescription bottles of heavy narcotics overflowed on his night stand, rolling under the bed where somewhere he lays incapacitated for days in the dark, a washcloth over his eyes and the whole world shut out.

I would massage his upper back. His neck and shoulders. I gave him Indian head massage, like Babu, the Javanese nanny from his childhood, who could pull the hair in the right spot and relieve a headache, or give some Jamu for his health.

In his head massage, I imagined pulling out the pain, pulling out the memories, the snakes and tigers, volcanoes, airplanes and gunfire, death and violence. The death of his father – he starved to death at a Mitzubishi forced labor tin mine outside of Tokyo. We know the story by heart, for my grandfather’s picture watches from above my father’s bed.

"Shake out the pain from your hands," my father instructed me. It didn't leave my body. It just lodged itself in my heart.

Still, today, as I sit here and write this. I feel his body memory. The fear, the pain, the expectation of disaster. Of a mother blinding you with the light in the middle of the night, threatening to cut your hair off with scissors because you dared to groom the dog. And you thought she wouldn’t find the evidence buried at the bottom of the kitchen trashcan.

I am aware of some grief, some deep and distant collective wail. All the families who have suffered a body trauma, be it through war, cruelty, insanity, domestic violence - there is that anxiety in the body, pulling you up and out of the body, away from life. But it's a part of life that is raging on inside you. The shadow, begging and wailing and crying to be seen and loved and not denied. So we look at its story. We look at the story in the body so that we can see that the Devil is truly God's most beloved, and be at peace.