March Newsletter

This month, we are offerd a free art therapy workshop : Workshop: How to Create Real Change In Your Life: When Awareness Alone Isn’t Enough.

In preparation for the webinar, I have been thinking a lot about blocks. How they can exist in our system, unknown and unchallenged, quietly preventing us from achieving what we want. And how, with some work, what seems impossible can become possible.

When I was 14, my friend and I started a zine. "Anthem for a Doomed Youth" (catchy title, don't you think?). It was the early 90s, and our community was analog. I was young and angry and had a lot to say about the world. We worked on our first few pieces. I gave mine to my friend to read overnight and waited. No phone call. The next day at school, I asked them about it. "I didn't think it was particularly interesting or entertaining or well written," they said.

These words hit me like a gut punch. I was humiliated, and that was the end of my editorial career.

The idea that I wasn't good at writing was planted so deeply in my brain that I actually forgot where it came from. I simply stated it as the truth. I didn't write anything personal (only research papers) for almost 30 years, until I started blogging and writing this newsletter three years ago.

Even then, I was hesitant. I was explaining to a friend why I was having trouble getting started. "I'm just not a great writer," I said, not expecting much of a response. I mean, she had only read my text messages; it's not like she could argue with me. "That's ridiculous," she said dismissively. "Writing is just thinking, and you are a good thinker."

I paused, letting the words wash over me. I do like to think, and I share my thoughts freely — why couldn't I also write them? I felt a warm, melting sensation in my chest. I relaxed my shoulders. I started writing.

And the thing was, I didn't need to be great at it. I just needed to give myself permission to do it at all. What had been impossible suddenly felt easeful. I could figure out the rest.

Isn't it amazing how a single comment from a fellow 14-year-old can shape what feels possible in your life 30 years later?

In my 30s I decided I wanted to run. I had asthma my whole life and I just "wasn't a great runner," so I had never really tried. After some very short, very slow runs I began to build confidence. I remember the first time I ran four miles on the treadmill, how triumphant I felt. Then five. Five miles had seemed completely impossible six months earlier.

Then I got sick. A bronchial infection bad enough that I needed a nebulizer and steroids for months. The doctor from the walk-in clinic asked if I had been outside. "Yes, I've been running." "No," he chastised me, "you can never run outside again, and you probably shouldn't run at all with your asthma." A few months later, at my annual physical, my regular doctor agreed, also pointing to my arthritis. "Why would you do that to yourself?"

So I stopped. Until the pandemic, when gyms shut down, and like many of us in NYC, I was desperate to get outside, to move, to have novelty. I started running again, carefully, each day getting home wondering if I was going to make myself sick, have an asthma attack. I was fine. I worked my way around the Prospect Park loop, then a little more.

That fall, a friend was mourning the NYC marathon, cancelled that year, which would have been her 12th. I was telling her how impressive that was when I heard myself say it: "I could never run a race." The admiration and the closure arrived at the same moment, almost as one thought.

"Of course you can," she said. "You just need to train for it." And before I could explain why I could never possibly run longer than a few miles at a time, she said, "I have asthma too."

Again, something stopped my automatic response. Disorientation, then an expansion in my chest. And for the first time I let myself really go there, crossing the Verrazzano, running through Brooklyn, the finish line in Central Park. Maybe I could. And much later, after years of training, I did.

On the surface, this could be a story about believing in yourself. But I think it's more fundamental than belief.

There was a story of "no," but underneath the story was a well-worn physiological response. A constriction. A pit in my stomach. Fear. Resignation. These weren't just thoughts, they were grooves, worn so deep by repetition that my nervous system traveled them without being asked. Not ideas I was having, but a route my body already knew. This is dangerous. Stay small. Don't try.

What shifted, both times, wasn't that I suddenly believed something different. It was that I felt something different first. A friend's offhand certainty created a crack in the wall. Through that crack came a new sensation, an image, expansion, possibility, safety, before my mind had even caught up. Only once my body registered maybe could I begin to imagine a different story.

This is why insight alone so rarely creates change. We can know something is a limiting belief and still feel it as truth. The body needs to experience a new possibility to sense that it's safe before it will let us act differently. Cognition follows sensation, not the other way around.

The research on mental imagery backs this up: your brain activates the same neural pathways whether you're vividly imagining an experience or actually living it.

Think of something you've told yourself you can't do. Don't just think it, locate it. Where do you feel that certainty in your body? Is it a tightening in your chest? A heaviness? A familiar closing-down somewhere?

Now ask: is that a fact, or is it a very old feeling?