Speaking in tongues
The body as metaphor for a major shift of focus
As a writer I have an intimate and deeply satifying relationship with words. And coming from both a bloodline of teachers and a family where verbal communication was considered very important, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I am a fluent speaker.
I love good conversations. I am hardly ever at loss for words. When I observe links between decisions or actions and their underlying emotional currents, I also have the language to portray what I observe, turning what lives beneath the surface into visible and understandable concepts for both myself and others.
I honestly thought language and I had no issues at all.
Turns out I was wrong.
Last week I had a moment when I thought life as I knew it was about to end. Brushing my teeth, I discovered a strange patch on my tongue. It resembled a benign mouth ulcer, only it was twice as large and painless. It looked like something that wasn’t supposed to be there at all.
I fetched my husband, whose medical background comes in handy at times like these. In our seventeen years together I have never seen him truly worried about any symptom I come up with, except perhaps during one especially agressive asthma attack a decade ago. This is not suprising. Medical specialists are as a rule confronted with the most severe cases all the time; they don’t take moderate ailments very seriously, however uncomfortable those might be if you’re suffering from them. One of the first things Chris ever told me was the saying Shoemakers’ wives go barefoot, doctors’ wives die young. Talk about a romantic start of our relationship… It was a joke, of course, up to a certain extent, but at the same time I was warned not to expect any pampering from him.
So now I showed him the patch on my tongue, apologizing beforehand that, as usual, it was probably nothing but I still did want him to have a look.
His reaction frightened me. He did not laugh this one away. To the contrary, I had never seen him this worried. He started checking things on his smartphone, and after ten minutes looked at me with a combination of graveness and emotional helplessness that made my heart miss a beat and said: “I don’t know what it is. But I think you should see a specialist as soon as possible.”
I have been preparing for a moment like this for years. I’ve done my bucket list homework a long time ago. So even though Chris and I were both numb with fear right then and there, I had no sudden epiphanies about how I had put a part of my life on hold and now it might be too late to ever live it. To the contrary, I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. Only: I didn’t want it to end. If anything, I felt I was just getting started.
The next morning, Chris arranged a speed consultation with a dermatologist at the hospital where he works. The very soonest she could see me was a week later. That was pretty soon, all things considered, but it still meant I had to gnaw my way through a full week of uncertainty.
That first day after the discovery, I tried to keep despair at bay by doing the only things I could: I allowed my feelings to flow, I used them as fuel for writing to an image Jurgen had provided me with earlier, and I reached out to my network for support. My sister Elin came over that evening. She was the perfect person at that moment.
We have both been trained, you see, in reading the body as a metaphor for deeper, underlying processes of the mind and soul. But it’s always harder to read your own, especially when it’s an emotional and potentially threatening situation, so I was very glad she volunteered to come over, and we had an inspiring conversation.
What do I mean with ‘the body as metaphor’?
Very often a physical symptom can be interpreted as the visible, tangible aspect of a bigger, underlying process you are working through. Although there are some broad outlines of interpretation, there is no real list of physical symptoms that correspond with emotional or psychological qualities. Looking at the symptom as a metaphor means feeling your way through any possible associations or analogies (e.g. ‘what is it in your life you are incapable of digesting right now?’).
Understanding the metaphor is no magic wand for physical healing. By no means does it free you from changing unhealthy habits, seeing a physician or taking prescribed medication. It is not a scientific system and it is very personal and subjective, but used wisely it holds a lot of knowledge, and it can tell you about the bigger picture of your life and provide strategies of dealing with underlying causes or deeper layers.
So what was the metaphor concealed in that scary patch on my tongue?
It didn’t take Elin long to come up with the following interesting suggestion: I should talk more.
If you’re thinking this sounds exceptionally stupid, I can’t blame you. Only to me it really isn’t.
She is right. I have been ‘holding my tongue’ for as long as I can remember.
But didn’t I just write that I am a fluent speaker?
I am. Only not about everything.
Take a look at the two photographs above. In the first one you see the external setting of the puddle, the mud and some decaying organic material. In the second you can see the clouds as they appear in the same puddle. Both pictures are taken from the same spot, seconds apart.
I’m oversimplifying things a bit here, but you could say I have always been a very fluent speaker in the sense of photo #1. Sharp enough edges, concrete reality, with all the elements of creativity and psychology that I am at home in included; but the deepest layers of my vision and my heart remain hidden in the water. I wouldn’t speak of them, hoping, however, that they were visible without me having to draw them into focus.
Of course they are not.
One of the necessary tasks of the maturing to do the soul’s work, according to depth-psychologist and soulcraft guide Bill Plotkin, is to step into situations from which old protection mechanisms have kept you far away up to this moment. It’s about shedding those mechanisms altogether and walking into that which you fear.
So I have to start doing in real life what I have done in photo #2: I have to make that deeper, undercurrent part visible as well — even if I risk losing focus of everything else that was clear before.
But haven’t I been doing that already? What else have I been writing about since February?
Your written words are crystal clear, Elin said. Some of your sentences have the strength to pierce hearts and souls. But this is about more than writing. It’s abouts coming into your full power, and growing into all that you can be. And that means also using your voice. Speaking up. Singing. Saying things out loud.
I never realized how truly frightning I find this until I let the message sink in and felt the truth of it.
Pearls form around pieces of dirt or grit in the oyster. Perhaps I have turned to music and writing because I have somehow always felt saying things out loud is so frightening.
It can be as simple as saying that I love someone. That I am grateful, or scared. It can be as complicated as decribing my path towards Soul and Spirit,or how I truly experience the world and our purpose in life. Not in writing. But out loud, face to face.
It invariably means baring a very tender, vulnerable part of my inner sensitivity without armor or disguise. It means risking ridicule, rejection and judgement.
When Elin went home that night I was much the wiser.
This was one hell of a challenge, and an urgent one at that. Regardless of what that ugly patch on my tongue turned out to be, I knew I had a challenging task ahead of me.
I accepted it.
Not two days later I noticed that the patch on my tongue was rapidly increasing in size. It didn’t look better at all, but at the same time I knew this was in fact good news. No tumor would change this drastically over such a short periode of time. This all but ruled out cancer.
The changes continued in the course of the next few days. The patch grew larger but at the same time seemed to be fading. By the time we made it to the dermatologists’ office the next week, it had all but disappeared.
The doctor confirmed what we had begun to suspect: this was an auto-immune issue, more precisely a bout of lingua geographica (commonly known as ‘geographic tongue’), a phenomenon that will cause the tongue to discolor and show patterns like the one I had. The symptoms come and go and usually don’t need to be treated. If you google it you can find enough pretty pictures to spoil your appetite for the rest of the day, but as you can believe we were both very relieved.
I left the doctor’s office with a deep sense of gratitude. I thanked my body for its clear but altogether benign message. I would take the challenge seriously and face my fear.
Who knows what will happen when I drop my protections at last, and allow the words to flow from my mouth, gushing from some deeper source?
One day, perhaps, you’ll find me speaking in tongues.
