Baby Nemesis

This week I wanted to write about how we can use bodywork to protect ourselves from taking on unwanted emotions. I had some unwanted help.

I'm writing this sitting in an aluminum tube 30,0000 feet above the Appalachian mountains. As I looked down at the lumpy land I ponder how interconnected we are. We are constantly exchanging information, emotions, and ideas with one other. We are perpetually programming each other's nervous systems by what we consciously and unconsciously share with each other. I'm helped with these thoughts by a disgruntled baby seated in front of me. She is upset about being abducted from the earth I presume. While her frustration is not wanted it is reasonable. She is adept at expressing her displeasure and stealthily passes her emotions to the distracted people around her. Before I even consciously realize there is a crying baby I become irritable. I take on all her emotions of anger, fear, and helplessness before I recognize her as the source of my mental clutter. Congratulations baby, you successfully hacked into my nervous system. But we still have 4 more hours on this metal bird. That's a long time to maintain control of my nervous system.

Now before I continue I want to acknowledge the baby as a worthy adversary. She is a fierce diaper-clad warrior intent and fully capable of making everyone on this plane feel the same degree of annoyance she feels. To underestimate her skill as an emotional propagandist would be a costly mistake. She has the advantage of being closer to instinctual realities than I am. However, she lacks tactics at this game. To quote Sun Tzu from The Art of War "know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster".

What I know, and this baby does not is a colloquial understanding of mirror neurons, I know by just by making googly faces at this baby she in return will instinctually make the same faces at me. I also know that whatever gestures we mammals make with our faces, whatever poses we hold in our body will summon a corresponding emotional state. We can tell if another human is angry or happy just by the way they are inhabiting their physical body. This is what we base all our communications on and what allows us to form a complex social group. I use this knowledge against my nemesis the baby.

So when I make silly googly faces at the baby I know she will likely mirror my facial expressions. It may take a minute but if I am persistent she will eventually start to mirror what I am doing. When this happens she will start to experience the emotions that correlate with her silly googly-eyed face. As soon as this happens I will have won a victory with this baby.

So, why am I on some ramble about having an energetic dual I with a high altitude baby, something most normal well-adjusted people would not associate with massage, bodywork or health. Well, I bring all this up to illustrate a common pattern found throughout life. We are constantly picking up and throwing down emotions that are not ours. If we aren't paying attention when we walk by angry people we can easily become infected with some degree of anger. Often our bodies natural tendency is to mirror back the physical gestures and poses of those around us. We then are open to taking on the emotions that those physical poses summon from our emotional body. We do this with all our emotions of course, not just anger. The more we are aware of this process the more control we have over what emotions we pick up and which ones we don't.

Massage can make us more attuned to how our emotional and physical bodies are entwined. When we release muscles that have been tense for long periods we often release emotions that were present when those muscles first froze up. Not that this always happens, but it's fairly common. Through massage or conscious movement practices, we gain more a realistic perspective on how we are holding our bodies. We can learn where we are tense, weak, or injured. We can become more aware of how that is influences our emotions. We can make connections between our sore neck and anxiety for example. Being able to do this provides us with the self-knowledge Sun Tzu deems crucial to survive the battle. And if we are all connected and we are constantly influencing and infecting each other's emotions, should we not do what's in our power to have some defense against unwanted emotions?

Anthony Bruni