Surrender in service to your body

I have never been a person who felt particularly connected to their body. I mostly imagined myself existing in the amorphous confines of my mind. My body, relegated to its functionality, was nothing more than an adorned tool - beholden to my bidding. 

In the end, we broke up on a walk at the reservoir. I’d since wondered what aspirationally cinematic instinct pulled us to choose the only scenic spot in Manor House - only to tear our own hearts out. In the moments after we tearfully agreed to the split, my body felt completely suspended in space. Those months leading up to the break up were like being strapped unwillingly into the drop tower at a theme park. You know the ones that hurl you into a dance of up and down, sending you in slurries of thrill ranging from panic to wild ecstasy - but mostly nausea. At the reservoir, the ride had reached its apex and the carriage locked us into the stillness of resignation. We said our goodbyes, set our terms and said “I love you.” When I walked through my front door later that day I heard the carriage lock release: the climactic drop. My heart raced. My breath followed. I sat. Stood. Paced. Cried. My body, the fool—it thought it was dying. 

Eventually I understood - I needed to burn away at the riot of cortisol and adrenaline surging through my body, locked in its cataclysmic dread. I opened up YouTube on my laptop and typed four letters: “HIIT.” If anything, I learned just how hard it is to cry while doing burpees. 

This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the ways in which heartbreak tears away at the membranes separating body and self. This time I knew to call a friend; who came clutching a Tesco meal deal knowing I was unlikely to eat it anyway. This time I knew to steer clear of drugs and alcohol; numbing substances that proved themselves ineffective to me by then. I knew about the dull ache in my muscles. I knew about the chest pain that would have me on all fours. I knew every beat to my appetite’s vanishing act. I knew, and yet my “knowing” would not have been enough to evade any of it. In deep and primal corners of my body old wounds fester and fossilize into “personalities”. Loss, heartbreak, betrayal; the kind of forces that rip us open and erode once-vital parts of ourselves. The kind of forces that I have been desperate to assign meaning to in the hopes of transmuting them into lessons that’ll usher me into an era of becoming. Give me that “post-breakup glow”. 

Every time I’ve been heart broken I’ve come to realise that I am beholden to my body (my body is not beholden to me). In grief I feel like I’m simultaneously becoming and un-becoming all at once, blurring at the borders of being into something that feels frighteningly greater than myself. The same is true for when I am in the throes of loving. When my body melts to curl around another in dozens upon dozens of intimate acts that sink into muscle and become reflex. CS Lewis says that grief comes from suspense, “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual.” Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it: careers, friendships, rented flats, the furniture inside them. 

During sleepless nights I used to concentrate on his breathing, anchoring myself to the rhythm of it by way of meditation. Pretty soon I started doing it unconsciously. A part of the routine that I’d fallen into through the repetition of evenings spent tucking my body into the grooves of him and letting the day slip away in synchronized exhales. I enjoyed learning his quirks and unconscious habits. I’d wear each one like a badge of achievement making sure he knew that I knew them, even if he didn’t. A quiet promise that he would always exist beyond his own comprehension (or lack of it) because I would be there to witness it; to hold every little whimper of his existence as precious enough to record in memory. Occasionally the rise and fall of his breathing would suddenly freeze during sleep, only for a brief moment but definitely enough to notice. I realised that as soon as I moved my arm, which took its usual place draped over his chest, his breathing would resume sooner than if I hadn’t moved it at all. I found that I started doing that unconsciously too, a call and response reflex that said, “I’m here, I know you.” 

I don’t know what to do with it all now. All of this knowledge I’ve been keeping folded safely into the dimensions of my body that ache in the grief of its obsolescence. And in the liminality before knowledge fades into memory there is tremendous pain. I mean that very literally. Beyond the metaphor of heartbreak, there is overwhelming physical pain. That night, his disclosure of the truth fractured something. I felt no gradual unfurling, no merciful fade into acceptance. As if a muscle, never conditioned to stretch without breaking, had suddenly snapped. I felt every impulse spasm, writhe and spill from me. Over the next few weeks, I tried everything to sever myself from the pain—pesky like a hydra—only to be punished two-fold for my efforts. I’d begin to ignore messages from worried and well-intentioned friends. I couldn’t sleep at night. I was barely able to eat more than a few mouthfuls a day. I would show up hours late for work. On a night out with friends I polished off almost two bottles of wine on an empty stomach. A friend flung me onto their back and carried me precariously into the safety of their home. Retching and crying on my hands and knees in the middle of Bethnal Green High Street I was asked to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10. The next day they told me I’d answered “10.” 

The only thing that now pacifies this violent unravelling, and the internal judgment that accompanies it, is the literature that tells me it’s apparently very normal. It's often said that grief is the price we pay for love, and as it turns out, my body's chosen method of payment is by starting a dumpster fire within itself. A stubborn and defiant response. Astrology enthusiasts would say it's the Aries in me. Researchers would say it's a clinically normal response. When examining the brains of heartbroken people researchers find that the same brain areas associated with physical pain are triggered when they think about the person they’ve lost. "Your brain reward system has been activated again and again by this person, so you feel lost. [...] People talk about their worlds being shattered and they are, because everyday life has changed," says neuroscientist Dr Lucy Brown. 

I still find myself dreaming about him—vivid dreams that feel like portals to versions of us in alternate realities. When I wake up, I feel leaden, my heart throbbing. I still find it painful—a reliable repercussion of yearning. But now, I routinely practice yoga. It is the first thing I do every day. Every morning, I choose—with increasingly unwavering intention—to transition into the version of myself without him, sinking deeper into a body that feels both love and pain. I concentrate on my own breathing, anchoring myself to its rhythm by way of meditation. This time, I am listening—surrendering in service to my body.

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Akinna Aquino is a versatile Producer, Writer, and developing Film Programmer working across short films and arts events.

@akinnakinna