Throughout our training, Angel and Richard have talked a lot about an idea called "completing your self-image". I've always known it has something to do with figuring out who you are, but it never became actually clear until about 3 pm today when Angel told us a story. I love it, so I'm going to share it here.
One day, when she was in kindergarten, Angel raised her hand to write down the answer to a question on the board. Her teacher had her come up to the board and he walked to the back of the classroom to watch. When Angel reached the board, she panicked at being in front of the class and froze. The teacher was apparently having a bad day, because he got so mad at her for raising her hand and then not answering the question that he threw a wooden chair at her. It hit the board next to her and shattered. Looking back on it, she sees that as a day when her self-confidence shattered along with that chair.
Many years later, during her own Feldenkrais training, she was in Haifa, Israel finding some peace from the city (she was completing the last part of her training in Tel Aviv). She found an open field to sit in and think, and saw a tree across the field that looked like it had blackened leaves. Suddenly a grenade went off in the distance (common occurrence there), and the tree that had appeared to have blackened leaves now looked like a tree with no leaves, because hundreds of blackbirds had been scared by the grenade and abandoned the tree. Over the next few minutes, all the birds eventually returned to the tree until it looked like it had black leaves again.
Watching all of this, Angel realized that that's what "completing your self-image" means. It's picking up all the little pieces of yourself that flew away when something traumatic happened to you. It's letting go of the leftover trauma and making space for all those original pieces to fit in again.
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