Get Your Stinking Paws Off My Body

By Jennifer Moorman Bolaños

Tiffany and I traveled via car for eight and a half hours into the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania. She had been there before. I had not.

We must have been the first to arrive because we found ourselves greeting the other participants for the holotropic breathwork weekend. The newbies gravitated towards us, and we quickly became a group.

The morning of the blue full moon in Sagittarius, I would be the first to breathe. I would have two sitters. I allowed myself to enjoy the extra presence at my side.

The music started and I went in quickly. I allowed myself to scream as I had been feeling the pent up tension of coercion against my body. This session was feeling more somatic to me, not stuck up in my brain and thoughts. I allowed that to be as I listened to the music, stretching and moving through my feelings. I felt the urge to use words—to let my body say what it had felt. Could I? Could I scream out into a room full of strangers the words I had wanted to say all of those times, with all of those men?

I was on my knees, feeling the full power of my rage cursing through my body when I yelled, “Get your stinking paws off of my body.”

“Fuck you.”

I heard a man in the room respond with a “Fuck you” of his own.

I yelled it again “Fuck you.”

Rushing to the surface of my consciousness was disappointment, betrayal. I thought of all the times when I was excited to meet someone new. I had wanted to move slowly, sweetly, to get to know and be known by someone. I didn’t want to be touched so quickly.

“Don’t touch me.”
“I said no!” I screamed into the room full of strangers.

Moving too quickly for me, it wasn’t on my time table.
“I said no. I meant no.”
“This wasn’t a game to be played.”

“Fuck you.”

“This is my body. Mine! Mine! Mine!”

‘Never again’, I thought, as I made my way to standing. ‘This body is my body.’

I never stood up in holotropic breathwork before.
I stood and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
I was a warrior, holding my scepter high as I rode my fire horses into the future.

My body.
Mine.

When I was done screaming my rage out into the room full of strangers and also beyond them into the world, I lay back down on the mat.

Women came.
They surrounded me.
It was then that we donned our masks and we danced around the fire in sacred ceremony. It was explained to me that we as a society have no rituals for releasing trauma from the body. For most people, it gets pushed down into the body causing trouble—rage, with nowhere to go. Rage that causes people to become perpetrators—perpetrating that which happened to them onto others. Or to initiate war—to kill others in the hopes of finding peace.

These women danced with me, as they showed me how badly we, society, needs ritual. Rituals to release the rage. Rituals to cleanse our souls, rituals to remind ourselves that we are one.

After the dancing, more women came. This time they were mostly women from India, ornately dressed. They sewed my body back together, taking my lower half and sewing it to my top half. They let me know that hating one part of me made me so disconnected that it was necessary to sew me all back together, that it would take time to heal and to be gentle with myself. That is what my body needs the most.

‘I am my best lover,’ I realized. ‘I am the one who must care for me, listen to me, feed me what I want, and nuture my little girl inside. It is me, not someone from the outside. The others are only allowed to enhance what I have already given myself. Never again, will I have a lover who harms my beautiful self.’

I reached up to the heavens to hold my mom’s hand. As always, she was there. After, when I sat up in an easyin easy pose, I was surprised when she was right there across from me. She laughed and let me know that seeing her didn’t always have to be the hand from heaven.

My brother, Randy, was there. He appeared to me as he looked right after high school, young and fit. My sister, Marti, was there. She appeared to me as she looked while I was living with her, beautiful to me. She was gregarious and full of vigor—life force!

I asked her why she appeared that way.

She, my sister, had a photo of herself, taken as a teenager.
She had given that photo to anyone she dated and signed it Mrs. M, even as she no longer looked like that.

Marti let me know that she could appear anyway she wanted. That on the other side, she no longer had the illusion that thinness and youth was better. That appearing the way I remembered and loved her was better.

I asked her how I was going to be able to be the grandma instead of her, how could I make it right for her daughter? She let me know that there is no perfection in being a grandma, that I would be Auntie Grandma. She let me know that I must be me. That her daughter must be who she is, no pretending, no masks, to just be ourselves and everything would be as it should be.

I had my sitter take me to the bathroom. Then I rested. I believed my vision was over. I would just wait for the music to be done.

Quickly, I found myself at the top of the steps where my childhood sexual abuse had occurred. I realized it was not rape, per se. It was more of a situation of extreme inappropriateness that led to childhood sexual assault.

I had visions of my mom, my step father, and us three kids in various levels of undress hanging around the house, and snuggled in bed together. I also saw my naked baby butt, knowing that I was left unprotected.

I had a sense that my step father and I were alone up those stairs, in that bed. He did not rape me. He distracted me with television, using my body, feeling his way along me, with his hands and his fingers, exciting himself in the process. As he ejaculated, he probably didn’t think he did anything too wrong, but also making sure he told me shhh, not to tell.

My patterns make sense, allowing men to touch me when I do not actually want to be touched. I was trained as a young child to endure what others want to do to my body. I was also keenly aware that my head said ‘no,’ and yet my body responded.

How many times had the adult me told myself that ‘I might not be in the mood, but I could be talked into anything’? So many times. I did not understand this confusion, this separation from mind and body.

I also did not understand the deep rage I felt for being touched, coerced, ‘made love to’ when I did not want it—any of it.

I had felt no, said no, and yet I was easily talked into letting a man, men, use my body for their own gratification, almost a tool to beat off to.

Now I understand, and I weep. I weep for Jenny, the little girl who did not know or understand what was happening to her body. I weep for the woman, Jennifer, who repeated the pattern over and over until breathwork gave her the lens to look inward and see the truth.

Never again.
I am my best lover.
I am safe now.