The radiator in the studio starts up in the second week of October with a sound like a wrench dropped down a stairwell, and whoever is sitting in the chair across from me jumps, every time, and then laughs, and then, almost every time, their shoulders stay up. That half inch is what I watch for. The jump is the nervous system doing the job it exists to do, and the half inch that remains after the laugh is the part that has been there longer than the radiator.
Someone comes in from a job downtown and sits and tells me the week was fine, and while the word fine is still in the air the shoulders rise and the breath goes shallow and the right hand finds the left wrist and holds on, and none of this is something she is doing, in the sense of having chosen it, so much as something that is happening to her, and it began before the sentence did. The body is ahead of the words, which is an ordinary observation rather than a mystical one, and it is the whole basis of the way I work.
Hakomi, the method I trained in, has a name for what happens next, and the name is mindfulness, though what it looks like from the chair is plainer than the word. I ask whether we can slow down, and when she says yes I ask her to close her eyes, or to let her gaze go soft on the floorboards, and to notice her shoulders without changing them, and here the session turns on a distinction that takes people a while to feel, since the ask is to find out what the shoulders are doing rather than to relax them, relaxing being a way of getting rid of the information before we have read it.
“What are they doing?” I ask.
“Holding,” she says, after a while.
“Holding what?”
The radiator ticks and the chair creaks when she shifts. She does not answer right away, and the not answering is the part I would most like you to understand, because in that silence her shoulders are consulting something that her sentences do not have access to, and when the answer comes it tends to arrive in the body first: a tightening, a wetness at the eyes, a breath that goes somewhere new. Then the words, if there are any, and sometimes there are not.
This is where I might offer what Hakomi calls a little experiment. I tell her I am going to say a sentence, and that her only job is to notice what happens when she hears it, not to agree with it or argue with it or perform a response. The sentence is short: “You can put it down now.” We wait. Her shoulders drop an inch and her breath comes all the way in for the first time since she sat down, or her shoulders rise another half inch and her jaw sets, which is just as useful, because it means some part of her does not believe it is safe to put it down, and that part has reasons, and the reasons are nearly always older than the job downtown.
What the shoulders already know, in the cases I have seen, tends to be this kind of thing: that a certain voice in the house meant trouble was coming and being small and braced was the way through it, or that getting the work done before anyone asked was the price of being left alone. They learned it when she was not old enough to decide anything, and they have kept the arrangement faithfully for decades, through jobs and apartments and partners who had nothing to do with the original terms, because nobody ever came back to tell them the terms had changed.
I want to be careful here, because this is a coaching room and not a therapy room, and I am a coach, not a therapist. When what the shoulders are holding turns out to be something that belongs in therapy, the old harm itself rather than the habit it left behind, I say so, and I help her find someone licensed to work with it. I stay in the chair across from her while she finds out what her body has been doing without her, and I offer sentences, and I watch, with as much warmth and as little agenda as I can manage, which is the stance the method calls loving presence.
She walks out with her shoulders roughly where they were when she came in, because one session does not undo an arrangement that old. What is different is that she now knows the half inch is there and has asked it a question, and the next time the radiator bangs or the manager’s name comes up in a meeting, some part of her will notice the shoulders going up and will have, for the first time, a choice about it.
So, wherever you are reading this, notice where your shoulders are without moving them, take one breath, and ask them what they are holding, and then, before you have the chance to make something up, see whether an answer arrives on its own. If one does, that is where a session would begin, and if nothing comes, they are keeping it for now.