Body Journal · Personal reflection
I was ten years old when my spine began to develop scoliosis.
The scoliosis progressed quickly. By fifteen, a doctor told me that if it continued developing at that rate, I might eventually end up in a wheelchair.
From very early on, my relationship with my body was one based on pain and work.
I did corrective exercises. I stretched. I strengthened. I wore a Milwaukee brace: a rigid structure fixed around my pelvis, with metal bars rising along my torso to a ring around my neck. It was painful, restrictive and impossible to forget. My body had become something that needed to be corrected.
There was, however, an unexpected gift hidden inside all of this.
A doctor suggested that dance might help my scoliosis.
So, at ten years old, I began to dance.
What started as an attempt to help my spine became one of the great passions of my life. Eventually it became my profession. In ways I could never have understood as a child, the thing I began because my body was considered problematic became one of the things that saved my life.
A body to fight
As the scoliosis became more severe, surgery was proposed. It would have been a major intervention, permanently reducing the mobility of my spine.
I decided not to do it.
It wasn’t a simple decision. I knew I was taking a risk. But I had grown up in a house where books about the relationship between body, mind and emotions were part of the landscape. Reading You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay introduced me, long before I could fully understand it, to the possibility that the body might not simply be a mechanical structure.
Something in me wanted to find out what else might be possible. I became deeply interested in healing.
And so began a search that would occupy much of my life.
I studied movement obsessively. Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, stretching, yoga, postural work and many other approaches entered my world. I studied naturopathy. I enrolled in medical school. I received massage, bodywork and other treatments. I learned anatomy. I learned how to mobilise, strengthen and stretch my body.
All of this helped.
My spine remained extraordinarily mobile despite its deformation. I was able to train in professional dance academies and develop a demanding physical practice.
But beneath all of that work there was another relationship with my body that I understood much less.
I was fighting it.
Pain was something to overcome. Limitation was something to push against. Sensation was often something to ignore.
I became very good at this.
And gradually, without quite realising it, I became less able to feel.
The body I didn’t want to be seen
Scoliosis was not only painful.
It shaped the way I saw myself.
The rotation of my spine created visible protrusions across my back and ribcage. I experienced them as deformities. I felt ugly. At times, monstrous.
Somewhere inside me, the shape of my body became entangled with the belief that I could not be desirable or lovable.
So while I was becoming extraordinarily physical through dance, I was simultaneously moving away from my body.
I could perform with it. Train it. Discipline it. Analyse it.
Feeling it was something else.
I increasingly lived through my intellect. The body became an instrument I knew how to use rather than a place I fully inhabited.
It took me many years to understand the difference.
From medicine to art
My search eventually brought me to medicine.
I wanted to understand healing, and medicine seemed like the obvious place to look.
But after some years I realised that what fascinated me was not primarily the technical knowledge of anatomy, pharmacology, pathology or surgery. Three years at the University of Naturopathy had opened another perspective, but that too did not completely answer the question I was carrying.
I wasn’t yet able to articulate what I was looking for.
I only knew that healing seemed to me to involve something more.
Eventually I left medicine and moved towards the place that felt closest to that unknown territory: creativity and artistic expression.
I studied choreography in Amsterdam.
At university I could finally make my own research the centre of my work. One of the questions underneath that research was already the question I am still asking today:
What happens when creativity is applied to somatic and healing methods?
My artistic work took me into very different worlds and experiences. I worked with people living with Parkinson’s, older people, children and communities.
I wasn’t making art therapy. I was making art.
Yet transformation happened through the artistic process and through its transmission.
Something could begin in one state and become something else.
A limitation could become material.
A gesture could become communication.
An experience could become form.
Something deeply personal could move beyond the individual and reach another person.
I began to understand transformation through creativity.
But there was still a part of my own body that creativity had not reached.
When I stopped trying to correct my body
Much later, my search brought me more deeply into somatic work.
I began studying and experiencing forms of bodywork, breathwork and trauma work. Touch became important. So did the nervous system. So did the relationship between muscular holding, emotion, memory, protection and sensation.
This changed the question.
For most of my life I had been asking:
How can I change this body?
Somatic work gradually introduced another question:
What is this body doing, and why?
That difference was enormous.
I began encountering areas of tension not simply as structural problems but as parts of a living system.
Instead of immediately stretching something, strengthening something or trying to make something disappear, I became interested in listening.
What happens if I stay here?
What sensation is underneath this tension?
What happens when I breathe?
What does this part of me seem to be protecting?
What wants to move?
Through deep bodywork and myofascial work, something happened that profoundly challenged what I believed about my body.
My pain began to change.
Then my physical structure began to change too.
Areas of my ribcage and spine that I had experienced as essentially fixed began reorganising. Slowly, the shape of my body changed.
I don’t understand this as a miraculous correction of scoliosis but as part of a deeply personal process of embodiment and transformation. Alongside changes in my physical structure, other persistent symptoms, including depression and chronic IBS, gradually disappeared.
What mattered to me was the discovery that the body I had understood as fixed was far more alive and responsive than I had imagined.
And as the physical and physiological structure changed, other things moved with it.
Emotions. Sexuality. Intimacy. Boundaries. Trust. Pleasure. Connection. The capacity to feel.
It became increasingly difficult to say where the physical process ended and the emotional one began.
Healing stopped meaning getting rid of pain
For much of my life, healing meant moving away from something.
Less pain.
Less curvature.
Less limitation.
Less fear.
Today I understand it differently.
In my personal experience, healing has increasingly become the capacity to enter into relationship with what is already here.
Sometimes that relationship produces less pain. Sometimes it produces physical change. Sometimes it asks for grief, anger, pleasure, rest, movement or a decision I have been avoiding.
And sometimes it does not produce the change I wanted at all.
The body is no longer simply the object of my healing.
It has become the compass that guides me through life.
This is also why, over time, healing and spirituality have become difficult for me to separate. Not because I understand healing as something supernatural, but because listening deeply to the body continually brings me into questions of meaning, relationship, presence and identity.
And strangely, this process feels remarkably similar to the artistic process that fascinated me as a choreographer.
Creativity does not necessarily begin by knowing what something should become.
It begins with material.
A sensation.
A movement.
An image.
A question.
You meet it. You listen to it. You enter into relationship with it. You allow it to affect you.
And through that relationship, something begins to move.
Perhaps this is the deepest thing my spine has taught me.
For decades I tried to force my body towards an image of what I thought it should be.
Healing began to change when I became curious about what it already was.
I no longer think of healing primarily as correcting the body.
I think of it as entering into a creative relationship with life.
And allowing what is already here to move.
When there is movement, there is flow. There is vitality.
That flowing vitality, whatever form it takes, physically, emotionally or creatively, is what I continue to seek in both my personal and professional life.