Letting the Body Speak

By Shae Hadden
Bio

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My very first job was as a nursing assistant in a chronic care hospital. At the tender age of 14, I donned my starched nurse’s cap and white uniform to spend several hours each day tending to those who could not care for themselves. Natural processes critical to the body’s survival—eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, moving, breathing—had become a moment-by-moment challenge for many of the people we cared for. Most had lived in this state for innumerable years—there were few new faces in the wards and even fewer visitors during the two summers I worked there.

The thing that struck me most about the patients’ lives was the silence—the absence of any sounds of life emanating from them. The few exceptions were the ‘babblers’. The music teacher who sang a music only she could hear and who conducted the world with her hands permanently wrapped in bandages to protect them from the damage she inflicted on them. The 50-year-old man confined to bed and paralyzed from the waist down with a libido that wouldn’t quit. The 90-year-old lost in her drug-induced dreams, having endless conversations with people from her past. These three were the only ones speaking on an entire floor of patients.

This loss of voice was to me the saddest part of growing old. I was studying singing in high school, exploring my voice and just beginning to express myself, and this summer job was a way for me to afford the extra music lessons I wanted.

Many years later, I still remember those summer days on the ward. For me, of Life’s many pleasures, few compare to the sensual experience of speaking and singing. The coordination of breath and sound, physical action and release can be as enticing as the synchronicity of simultaneous orgasm. The movement of air through rapidly oscillating vocal chords is a movement so basic to our functioning as a living organism as to be almost primal in nature. As one ‘tunes’ one’s self to the experience of singing or speaking, the resonating of sound waves in our flesh and bone creates an excitement and pleasure, a greater sense of aliveness and a heightened awareness of self.

Rigid, contracted or tense bodies affect the sound, constricting the natural flow of air and limiting its resonance. People confined to limited movement—or limited conversations—lose the unthinking connection between breath and sound. Their voices lose vitality and ‘presence’. Over time, they eventually end up speaking in hushed voices or not at all. Once one stops letting the body speak, it takes a conscious effort to restore that connection between thought (mind), breathing (body) and self-expression (soul).

As we grow older, we need to keep communicating, to keep sharing our selves, sharing our wisdom. We need to flex and soften our bodies, open our hearts and minds, to resolve the chronic bodily tensions that result from physical misuse or lack of use. Only then can we experience the full release and pleasure possible in self-expression. Only then can our full voice be heard. Only then can we share the essence of who we are.

In doing so, we can stay connected with others and engaged in life. With speaking, there is no limit to the amount of pleasure we can experience—at any age.

Written by eldering at Health
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