One of the things I find myself needing to say again and again, to clients and myself, is “bypass your brain.”

I use this in a particular situation.

This is when the body is speaking, through images, sensations, or movement, and it doesn’t make sense to the brain.  Or it makes too much sense, and we don’t want to acknowledge it!

Either way, my answer is to bypass the brain. 

It’s gonna be there.  Screaming about how absurd or stupid this whole thing is.

Fishing metaphors mixed with indigenous lore mixed with intellectual thought.  And at some point, it becomes too much for your brain, and it wants you to stop.  But this is when we keep going.  Allow the brain to fuss in the background, because brains are going to think.

In the meantime, we can delve into the strangeness until it becomes the most true thing in the world.  For in that truth is healing.

That’s not to say that we take it all literally, certainly not!  But these things often come up when we’re working on things that we don’t have an intellectual memory of, or it’s just too big to look at in comprehensible ways.

The body is speaking in whatever language it needs to to process what it’s working on.  The best thing we can do is allow it.

Sometimes, we can recall those images or sensations and allow them to accumulate meaning as they helped us through.  I still fondly hold on to some of the weirdness that came up for me in processing, because it helped me remember and integrate some tough stuff. 

Stuff I wouldn’t have been able to work through explicitly.

So I embrace the weirdness, and I suggest to my clients that they do the same.  We aren’t here for our brains- that’s what psychotherapy is for.  We are here for our bodies!