Pulled Into the Center of Belonging

Samantha Wallen
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read

I am a walking wound and just realized it.

I read an email from a friend saying she couldn’t get together after all. It’s been three months since I’ve seen her. We’ve talked maybe once on the phone, exchanged a couple of emails and texts, and I consider her my best friend. The first sting was that our tentative plans for Thursday weren’t going to work because she forgot it was her husband’s birthday. The second was that she didn’t know when something could work because her schedule was so busy. The final sting was the mention of her one-year review with our spiritual teacher. I too had started out as one of her students and then was “let go” so to speak. She suggested I go work with a somatic therapist because I needed more than she could provide in a once a month hourly spiritual meeting. Plus funds were tight for me. I couldn’t do both so the best option was to spend the money I would’ve paid her on having someone else help me get into my body. So I did. I spent 9 sessions lying on the floor in her office tracing the sensations of my body.

The line in my friend’s email, “it’s my one-year review” came at me like rubbing alcohol on a gaping wound. I felt left out. The sting stretched on for miles outside my body. The ache was pure isolation.

Perhaps it all stemmed from that time in the Small World Preschool when someone said something mean and shoved me right out of belonging and into the hell of separation. I don’t remember who it was, or what was said. All I know was that I was cut off, pushed out, told I wasn’t right. I was desperate to get back. I was desperate to have every four year old in that small room reach for me, to see me, accept me, to bring me back in to wherever it was I’d been before I was cast out with a word. I sat at the group table in a plastic chair and felt hallow in my chest, an emptiness sucked away all the tears that wanted to erupt from my eyes. Tears of course were the first response of any wounded child and somehow mine were gone.

How were the kids to know my pain without tears? I laid my head in my arms down on the table, inhaled the fumes of industrial cleaner and I licked my index finger excessively and dabbed it into the corner of my eyes, hoping that was enough to make my eyes appear to glisten with fresh tears so that someone, anyone, could see the my hurt. It didn’t work. No one noticed. No one came to rescue me.

Perhaps if someone would have seen my fake tears and come over and brought me back in, it might have changed the course of my life. Instead my body took in the cold, hard truth that we are alone. I developed a constant feeling of being on the periphery. Left out. All of my life I’ve been waiting for someone to see my tender aching and reach for me. It’s happened. My husband did it, my kids too, some friends. And yet the longing stays. I still wait. I still hover on the outside waiting to be pulled in.

Even four year olds are skilled at the art of isolation, exclusion, and this gets us in prime shape for a life of consumerism, becoming good workers, people pleasers because we’ll do everything in our power to belong, to never go back to that feeling of complete and utter isolation that struck us for the first time. Our bodies carry the memory.

This is what I discovered as I lay on the floor and the somatic therapist placed her palm on the top of my foot and held it there. She reached for me and something began to heal.

Was that moment at Small World the moment connection was replaced with separation? It seems being human is the ultimate separation. It comes with being born. The baby body leaving the mother body she inhabits. To be pushed out. No one escapes it. Our bodies carry the memory.

Our bodies also carry the memory of connection.

I deleted the email. I stopped waiting. I reached my hand down and placed it on the top of my foot and said, “I see your hurt,” and I pulled myself into the center of my own belonging.


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100 Naked Words

Est. May 2016. 100 vulnerable words, one day at a time. Every day.

Samantha Wallen

Written by

Founder/CEO WriteInPower, poet, writer, book coach, social justice disciple, steam-punk time traveler tending to where value, core wounds, and brilliance meet.

100 Naked Words

Est. May 2016. 100 vulnerable words, one day at a time. Every day.

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