Pain body, pleasure body.
This essay was originally written on January 24, 2024, on numerous pages of my journal. I was living in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, and teaching both Slow Flow yoga and Sensual Dance weekly. I was also walking and biking everywhere, swimming in the Caribbean sea, and engaging my own embodiment practices. I’d developed inflammation in one of my knees, and, through this physical pain, was guided to face my relationship with pain as a whole at that time in my life. When writing this essay, viscerally as I did, hand to paper, I remember being very emotional, crying at some parts, and feeling the fire course through me as I gave life to truths and experiences that had been sitting or floating in my psyche for decades. Now, in September 2025, reading these words back, I certainly remember their origin and how it felt to write them, but the emotional charge is low-to-nonexistent. This is the self-healing power of radical truth-telling, especially through the written word. I hope you enjoy Pain body, pleasure body.
January 24, 2024
At this time in space, in this state of my consciousness, I recognize within my relationship with my body the fear of dying and the fear of being fully alive. I'm writing this now because it is time. Because another way of existing wants to lead life.
***
I was a gymnast from very early on in my life, until probably 8 or 9 years old, so using the body for the body's sake has always been natural to me. Looking back, it doesn't surprise me that I now have a deeper education on the body's anatomy, functions, interconnectedness, and cycles. Back then, though, it was just me and my almost front handsprings, my rolls, backbends, and cartwheels. I loved throwing my body around, yeah, maybe getting hurt, but feeling like rubber to the pain. Resilience in this game.
In one gymnastics practice, there was a new teacher. She was young. I remember looking at her sideways; she felt disembodied. I felt her lack of authority and remember wondering if she shouldn't have a supervisor or something watching her as she shifted the group of us young kids over to the rock wall. This is a day I will never forget. I was ready for that rock wall. An adventurous backyard, in-the-mud kid, I was always ready to climb something and build a fort. The teacher strapped me into the harness. This teacher was also a white woman. I remember being self-conscious as she strapped me in, like not wanting her to touch me, or better yet, not wanting her to not want to touch me, so trying to make myself shrink and move on to climbing the wall.
Whether I struggled or not, I do not remember, but I made it to the top with an inner sense of triumph.
On the first note down, I grabbed a rock shaped like a door handle. “Perfect," I thought. “Easy to cling to."
Too easy, apparently, because that door handle rock turned downward, causing my hand to slip and for me to lose my grip. The harness I had been so insecure about was also apparently insecure about me, because instead of bouncing in the air down the fake rock mountain in the gymnastics studio, I fell from the top of the wall all the way down to the floor and directly onto my back.
Thankfully, on top of mats.
Thankfully, I am alive and thriving to write about it.
Though I felt it deeply, something inside me wouldn't let me be indignant, rageful, toward this young, white teacher, who I felt was so unconcerned about my safety that I ended up in excruciating pain. That's probably the age I learned the word “excruciating", too. I mention that this guardian was white so much because that is a significant detail in my psyche. In my memory. It is a detail my body has remembered and carried along with me throughout the years of embodied practices—basketball through middle and high school, massages, pole dance, yoga classes and teacher trainings. Since that incident decades ago at the gymnastics studio, I knew I would have to rely on myself when it came to ensuring the health of my body. From that young age of under 10, I didn't even feel I could trust white doctors. What I'd perceived: cold hands; cold, dead eyes looking through me but not being present with me. Where was the love? The warmth?
From the time of my adolescence, I kept truths of my embodied discomfort to myself in many ways, as many of us do, for fear of not being nurtured back to health, not being genuinely held. At some point in my young psyche, I acquiesced to the idea that pain would be a constant companion along this journey of life. Physical pain would always be around. My parents' professions in pharmaceutics, my mother's hip pain, my father's hypertension, were all evidence of this.
In the basement of a house we'd lived in were boxes the size of a spacious cat home full of over-the-counter drugs and pharmaceutical beauty products. My siblings and I would take our pick of the creams and ointments, leaving the drugs for those who needed them. There would always be a need. If not there in the home, then back in Nigeria, where, apparently, everyone was sick with something, soon to die.
These are the young messages I picked up around relating to pain, relating to the body. Had my immigrant parents ever felt the need to swallow their concerns about their physical health for fear that prodding white fingers and eyes wouldn't really help them? Would strap them into some treatment plan lackadaisically, send them on a journey up a rock wall, and watch as they plummeted into further pain and despair? These are the thoughts that have been at the back of my mind, front of my heart.
***
Ironically, or Divinely, in 2021-2022, I received my training in yoga from a white woman. The decision to train with her came from the same internal place where all my intuitive decisions originate. It was an online training, so I didn't need to worry about her touching me. I was there to receive knowledge. To ground myself in something sacred that my body seemed to long for.
My yoga teacher emphasized a compassionate approach to practicing and teaching yoga. She taught the cohort from the spiritual space out to the embodied space. She taught from a place of love and devotion, and physical, embodied experience. That told me that maybe her body had been through some things, and that yoga was a way to love herself back to safety. I didn't have the words for it then as I do now. And because the written expression of thoughts is so powerful, I now see that having opened myself to learn from my yoga teacher, I experienced a full-circle moment. In some ways, what my teacher demonstrated through her focus, approach, and transmission was that we are in the position to nurture ourselves—through presence, through listening, through feeling.
Knowing a bit about her story—a young woman leaving the home at an early age, having experienced family dysfunction and depression, then becoming a mother—I can see a larger sense taking shape about the necessity of self-nurturing in one's life, from my teacher's perspective.
***
Though my own mother has always (gratefully) been in my life, in my adolescence, I missed the comfort, care, and embodied safety that epitomize nurture. And that feeling extended into my adulthood. I call my mom, she's there. I need her, she shows up. But remaining in her arms for an embrace? I know my time limit before I start to get uncomfortable. Before I start to feel unsafe. From where did this self-protectiveness originate?
When I was a child, before I grew into what is now my adult stature at 6'1" and 175lbs, more or less, I was given beatings for misbehavior. Always on the buttocks or hands. Always painful. Always a pathway into escaping, retreating into my inner world where no one could touch me.
The fundamental question I'd ask no one during showdown floggings was: “Why? Why is this the way?"
And now, with a more developed mind, “How am I going to live an honest relationship with you, parent, if you punish me for my behavior?"
Our behavior is gold as children. If we tune in and watch, if we really listen to the behavior of children, we see that they have genius emanating from them. We see the way they process and play and begin to make sense of the world and themselves and relationships around them. So, on some level, I began to associate my exuberant expression (yes, fiery and mischievous at times) with punishment. With punitiveness. With violence. And when violence has come from my own mother's hands, how can I truly view them as a home space?
The home should be a space of refuge. It should be a space of peace. The space where I access Divinity and create more sacredness to live in that frequency.
A home is no place for violence or distrust.
A home is no place to dishonor the body.
***
Part of the journey of recognizing my full experience in my body is recognizing that my body is an extension of those who came before me and those who live alongside me as bloodkin. Bloodkin born of violence, potentially into violence, or within systems of abuse, neglect, exploitation, undernourishment, and lack of nurture. Of course, this is only part of the story, but a part my pain body seems to want to learn from.
My mother could only beat us to the end of obedience because it was the way she knew how to rear children, a firstborn and rearing children since the time she herself was a child. My father never beat us. Or maybe so infrequently that I don't remember it. And maybe, in the agreement my parents made, people of a different time and culture, the father wouldn't beat the children. That would be too violent. It wouldn't look right. But the children would still be beaten. If necessary.
So I perceived a threat of violence perpetually looming within the house. Beatings were the pinnacle, but the violence also existed in the threats to confiscate access to pleasure, games, toys, friends; yelling whenever something wasn't done to code or rule, when things were scattered across the house. Four children close in age—what does one expect? As a kid, in solidarity with my siblings, I had fun sometimes disobeying my parents' rules. But also as a kid, and then as a teen and young adult, I composed myself in a certain kind of way to be able to get on in life without my parents if necessary. Ironically, I'd somehow used their tools—the tools that they'd learned along the course of their lives and immigration—to make it in the world.
Since I'd learned to be punished for breaking rules from young, when I finally left the house in my young adulthood, I sought punishment, and even created my own punishment for not following rules. I would use my natural sense of discipline against myself and abstain from certain pleasures to somehow prove to myself that I could “fix" the situation. That I could indeed be “good". Be pure. Or, I'd overindulge to the point where my indulgence was a punishment because I ate so much I couldn't breathe, or I walked myself down a rabbit hole in a distorted romantic or sexual relationship that I couldn't feel myself anymore. And then I would commence the process, the backtracking journey, of fixing myself. Of not being “bad".
Here's where perception is key. In my life practice now, devoted to my wholeness, devoted to my highest, most authentic soul manifestation in this incarnation, I am on a journey of “pureness", so to speak. But a different kind. “Pureness" to me is simply authenticity—it doesn't engage with the binary of “good" and “bad".
Trying to “not be bad" is continuing to focus on the bad. It is living in avoidance rather than living in connection with. And in living in avoidance, I am ironically living in connection with that which I desire to avoid. That which I desire to avoid is simply that which desires to be met—to dissolve the tension of avoidance and live with the warmth and embrace of connection. Encouraging. Life-giving.
***
My life these days is a reclamation of my playfulness, my pleasure, the parts of me I'd considered “bad" or mischievous. Instead of living covertly, trying to cover up that of me which does not dare to play by the rules, that of me with her own unique intelligence, that of me which follows wonder and awe, I choose to embrace myself, wholly.
One of the things that can happen when one begins embodiment work is that feelings, stories, memories, and energy get awakened. We start to realize there are connective threads that weave through our whole systems, and touching a point here activates a thought there; or stretching and breathing this way, in this stage of my menstrual cycle, allows that inner story to find completion through my indulgent exhale. This is much like the way bloodkin are created from the same physical and physiological source material, and when one engages her personal healing, her ancestors are also freed from emotional bondage they likely couldn’t articulate.
After a few years of deepening into my authentic embodiment journey—and dancing painfully and curiously with the psychological, somatic, and soulful elements of my awakening—I have settled into a space of operating from self-compassion. Returning to what my yoga teacher intended. And for me, this is because of the pain. And it is because of the pleasure. I yearn to experience more pleasure in my body, in my senses, in my experience of life. And so I know I must be willing to sit with, to honor, the pain I feel.
How can I claim the pleasure without the pain? It is the pain, or the absence of sensation, that eventually makes sensation, and even pleasure, available for embrace. It is this polarity that is the foundation for life's inherent music.
The journey of intentionally embracing myself, and embracing my pleasure, continues with self-nurturing and self-compassion. I choose to understand and recognize what my formative nervous system was primed for, and consciously meet myself with softness, grace, love, and the penetration of intention and presence that tells me I am living my truth; that I am safe to live this truth; that my life and my embodiment need look no other way, and that I may always slow down and get low; down to the floor; into the Earth; listen deeply and not exert at all.
I am reminded that all is okay, though I experience pain, and through this acceptance, pleasure is possible. Where pleasure is possible, I feel gratitude.
