Dear Body.

An ongoing conversation.

This blog is told from my own lived experience, because I will not speak, nor can I speak from yours. Yet I know that my story is many people’s stories and what is storytelling if not to find ourselves in each other? What is having a voice if not to use it?

Selfie by Jenn Forgie

For those who prefer to listen to this blog, you can do so below.

And if I push back

Warn you to dare not cross these lines

Spitting and spewing my repulsion

My rejection of you.

Who have I made myself

But the enemy?

~ Jenn F

I’m not a somatic coach, a breath worker, a massage therapist or any kind of registered Body Worker.

But I am a woman with a world of lived experience running from, turning toward and learning how to build and be in compassionate relationship with my Body.

From my current vantage point, I am more than qualified to be the one who breaks the cycle of my body as enemy. I am more than qualified to declare a cease war against this Home that is my Body.

I’m sharing these words with you because I know and I continue to observe that we are either running like hell from our bodies or trying to find our way home and perhaps somewhere in these words, you’ll feel seen or heard. At the very least, not alone.

When I reflect on my life and the last several years, I see that I’ve been on this homeward path both personally and professionally for a long time. It is as though I have been following breadcrumbs, if we want to work with the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, except that our lives aren’t fairy tales.

My non-fairy-tale life has been a journey of recovery from sexual, physical and emotional abuse and the impacts of that on my brain and my body. It has been a journey of discovery and thriving in creativity as an artist, a playwright, a storyteller, a guide and a facilitator. It has been a sometimes treacherous, seemingly impossible tending to a complex inner landscape, weeding neglected gardens, disrupting roots of harm to then accept my role as caretaker of this ‘land’.

To cease to be the enemy who made an enemy of her.

To instead choose to get myself on a path of forgiveness, kindness, compassion. A path I could only have discovered because of those breadcrumbs laid by whomever that showed me where to find that therapist, and that healer, and those mentors and take this step and that step…and when they were ready to release me, my backpack full of new healing skills, the awakening of my own light and the dreams of my heart, I continued the journey with courage and hell-bent commitment to keep going.

This required me to learn to understand the language of my Body.

Now, when my Body speaks to me, I listen where I used to reject. I soothe where I used to harm. I care where I used to not care. I breathe where I used to hold and I love where I used to hate.

Please hear me when I say that nothing in the choice to turn towards home was easy. And I’ll never ‘get there’ because, as I’ve come to understand, it really is, as they say, ‘about the journey and not the destination.’

Let me share a little story.

I was laying in the dentist chair, recently, feeling ready for my tooth extraction. In early December that same tooth was sending searing pain through my jaw and up the side of my head. It was determined a week later that I needed an emergency root canal. Unfortunately, it was discovered during the procedure that my tooth was badly cracked down the middle right to the bone.

So, there I was in the most comfortable dentist chair ever, feeling ready and feeling a little righteous about that calm, cool readiness because ‘Hey, I’d been through a root canal, a tooth extraction was nothing. Right?’

Well, sort of.

As I settled in, my dentist began injecting the freezing and…I began to tremble.

It always starts in my stomach area. Deeply in my core where it then ripples subtly outward, barely noticeable to anyone but me until it reaches my hands and the tremble becomes a shake. Pretty impossible to miss unless I’m grasping my own hands hard, trying to control it.

Let me share with you that for as long as I can remember, I’ve been referred to as ‘high maintenance’, ‘too sensitive’, ‘over the top’. So much so I came to believe it was true and I became quite skilled at deflecting these judgements with some finely turned self-deprecating humour.

I lifted my hands and spoke with my thickly frozen mouth, “Look at my hands.”

“Are you okay?” my dentist asked.

“Oh yes, this is just me. I’m high maintenance,” I sloughed off, to which we laughed but what I felt inside myself was shame.

I had just minimized my Body’s experience. Dismissed her voice.

I did not go to self-punishment like I used to.

I caught the old habit-go-to and I felt the impact of it and then I used the entire dental procedure to turn inward and care for my Body.

Because that is the practice I’m committed to but like all practices, we slip up and the ‘work’, if we can call it (I prefer to call it My Devotional Practice), is to listen and if needed, to say…

Dear Body, I am sorry.

My body was taken from a very young age at the hands of my abuser and many times over many years, by different abusers and the best I could do was abandon it.

Run from the land, burn the land, reject the land.

Until I learned to stay long enough to begin to call this body Home.

So, whenever there is a hint of old abandon that swoops in before the words come out of my mouth, as happened when I joked that I was ‘high maintenance’, I take a breath.

It’s a layered and complex journey to stay and then name our Body as Home. We face and hopefully heal our traumas and subsequent dissociative, maladaptive habits. We change through aging, endeavor to accept; we navigate social expectations and the patriarchal smoke that still smoulders. We call for the wise woman inside, the crone, the elder and hope she’ll find us.

We begin to listen for the language of our own bodies not as some kind of enemy morse code problem to be decoded and solved but as nuanced communication from ourselves to ourselves.

You don’t have to have read The Body Keeps The Score or When The Body Says No to know that your Body has ways of speaking to you.

We just have to listen and be curious about what it’s saying to help ourselves move through our fear and resistance.

For most of my life I was afraid of that tremble that would evolve into a visible shake. Afraid of its power. Ashamed of what it made me look like: weak, too sensitive, too much, unregulated, pathetic.

I hated my body. The whole damn thing. So, I tried hard to hide it. Pathologize it. Punish it.

A near impossibility when you live in a physical world and actually begin to realize you need your own Body to be well, to move through life, to feel and express you creative self .

It’s been a long time since I have learned to sit with my Body. To let her speak as much as possible and when I trip up, I apologize.

I write to her. I sometimes give the ‘voice’ of my pen when I journal, to her.

Dear Body, I’m listening.

This Homecoming all started with a willingness to try. That was all I had and then I called in the support and guidance I needed.

It has been the hardest and most loving journey of my lifetime; returning to my own Body. Reclaiming her, respecting her, understanding her language.

The tremble is, “I’m scared.”

I’m here to soothe her. Imperfectly, intentionally, devotionally.

I believe in this for you too. This reclamation, this listening and this return home.

A friend recently shared a video from Instagram of a woman who was a speech and language pathologist who also practiced reiki. In the video she is sitting with her 6 year old client who is holding in a lot of emotion and not speaking.

She sits on the ground with him.

She gives him space.

She speaks softly to him.

She tells him he is safe.

She validates his feelings, offers her hand, hold his when he puts it in her palm.

My friend said, “The way this woman is reminds me of how you are with animals, Jenn.” A beautiful compliment to this animal lover and advocate.

But what I thought when I saw the loving care she offered this boy was this:

What if we could sit this tenderly with our own Bodies? What if we could listen with this much patience? What if we could love ourselves Home?

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Journal Prompts:

If you could offer the voice of your pen to your Body, what might it say to you now?

If you could ask your Body anything, uncensored, knowing it will listen to you, what would you ask?

I offer these prompts to begin or perhaps deepen your conversation with your Body who is, along with you, ever-changing, ever-growing and dealing with the unfolding of life within and around you.

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You are invited:

This May 8-13, 2026 I am leading my creative, expressive journaling in-person retreat for just this kind of inward care. It is called Tending The Fire Within.

This is not a technique-driven workshop. It’s not about learning to journal “better”.

It is a retreat designed to remember who you are and welcome yourself to be who you are now.

To tender the inner fire that you already carry.

Your voice. Your creativity. Your truths.

Expressive journaling is our way in.

A week together to slow down, listen inward, experience in community what burns within and wants to spark alive.

You can learn more in the link below. I hope you’ll come explore with me.