Finding your animal body with Avni Trivedi
This is the second in a Q&A series available to paid subscribers of What Do We Do Now That We’re Here. Know someone who might like this newsletter? Forward them the subscribe link here.
I first met Avni Trivedi years ago, when I went to her osteopathy practice for a stubborn running injury. She is a women’s health and pediatric osteopath, birth doula, zero balancer, and non-linear movement teacher. In addition to all of that, I think of her as the person who started to get me out of my head.
Avni was also a source for a story that remains, to this day, one of the most successful I’ve ever written — at least if you judge by the random emails I still get about it. I think the reason this story resonated with so many people is the same reason why Avni’s work is so special: It teaches you something that, deep down, you already know. It teaches you how to fully inhabit, and indeed feel good, in your own body.
Of course, there is a whole industry devoted to “feeling good in your body.” When connected to something like the climate emergency, it’s easy to hear that line as a kind of trite and capitalist self care argument: “You can’t save the world if you don’t take care of yourself!” But what I’m talking about here feels deeper than that.
As climate reporter Emily Atkin wrote recently about her own bout of professional burnout, “the rationale I’ve used to burn myself out is the same rationale the fossil fuel industry uses to burn up the planet.” So many of us are on unsustainable linear trajectories — ones that, upon closer inspection, perfectly map onto to the world we are so dispirited by.
But here’s the thing: I am convinced the world would change considerably if more of us started doing what people like Avni teach and practice. We would start acting like human beings with connected bodies, minds, and spirits — not disembodied productivity machines who service themselves with an ever-growing array of apps, pills, and coping mechanisms.
We would start making decisions and shifting our lives more in line with how our ancestors lived. We would rest more. We would understand that things are cyclical. We would stop building lives that require us to get on airlines to escape those same lives. We would have more room to feel our emotions, and we would listen and respond to the physical symptoms that arise when we’re not dealing with them. I think you can agree that a society where people — leaders, parents, teachers, CEOs etc — did that on an individual level would look very different collectively.
Avni taught me that that journey all starts with paying attention to how you move.
Rosie: How do you respond to the idea that the way we move affects the way we think?
Avni: Everything that’s alive moves. That idea of sitting in a cubicle and not breathing and not moving — that’s not life. When we’re moving and connected with our bodies, the access we have physiologically or endorphin wise, all of those things. I think it’s a big reason why lockdown wasn’t as bad for me, because I could actually raise my energy.
I often say to clients, if you have children, do your movement practice in front of them. When you become an adult, you become restricted in what you do and you become more sedentary and movement is more controlled. That’s just not a way to live. Whereas the freedom of how toddlers explore, I think we’re meant to be like that. We’ve just conditioned to numb everything.
R: At our first session years ago, you said something that’s always stayed with me. After hearing about my lifestyle and associated aches and pains, you said it sounded like all of my movement patterns — indeed my entire posture in life — was linear. Your advice was to move more laterally rather than this constant forward motion (running, walking, striving). You meant this in terms of a movement practice, but it also struck me as a larger metaphor. At that time, the brain-driven idea of who I wanted to be was totally disconnected from my body, and my body was not happy because of it — which, of course, was why I was in your office. Did you mean for that advice to be so expansive and holistic at the time? How do you come upon those kinds of insights when you work with people?
A: What I imagine I meant was that you were not moving outside of the lines. There’s precision and focus and direction, but then sometimes you need mess. Like a creative process, it can’t be polished from the get-go. In a session, I’m listening to people as they tell their story and then I’m also comparing that to how they are on the couch, in a physical sense.
I work a lot with the feet. What’s your relationship with the ground? Are you settled, let yourself be held? Or do you contain everything? You know when you say “dipping your toe into something” — to me, it’s very literal, it’s not just a figurative thing. You can feel sometimes someone is being tentative with their toe, they’re not really trusting the ground beneath them.
You can match what someone is saying. Sometimes it doesn’t match. Sometimes people say “I’m happy at work” but I’m feeling something different in their body.
On a really basic level, I like to work with the idea of expansion when something feels good, settled, calm, and something we’re drawn to. And contraction when it doesn’t. So I just listen to that. Even when it’s a romantic relationship, or a house, or anything. Often we’ve learned to not feel that on any level.
R: Right, I’d go so far to say that most people in our culture have lost the ability to feel into that. Which is a problem, because being integrated in the body and brain helps us make more human decisions — and by human decisions I literally mean decisions that put us on a path of how we should be living. Not this ambition-driven, linear capitalist insanity that’s bad for us and for the planet.
A: The Continuum Movement from Emily Conrad has this idea that we hand our bodies over to capitalism and then we’re under control. So the first level of autonomy is to have that physical autonomy. But when you’re living at a capitalist pace, you can’t feel. So you can’t make those better, more human decisions because you’re numb. Or you’re in trauma.
R: Can you describe the kinds of people in your office? I’d love to know the common physical manifestations of “living life at a capitalist pace?”
A: Really common stuff would be upper back, lower back, jaw, headaches, neck pain. There’s a physical reason: sitting at a computer or driving too much. But then when you talk about it more, there’s things like [feelings or emotions] not getting expressed or never switching off. So it’s the lack of embodiment that affects the symptoms.
Some people are working in industries like advertising where they work super hard and then they come to see me with the intention of “fixing” things. But I’m always saying, “don’t rely on me to do that for you. I’m not in charge of your body.”
The people I’ve worked with over time have gotten better balanced because I’m quite tough love. There are other osteopaths that offer quick fixes, but I don’t do that. I’m much more interested in people who use the insights that they get, who feel how they feel after a session, and want to keep on feeling like that for themselves.
R: I’ve been reading a lot about mind-body dualism. This antiquated idea that we have brain problems and body problems, and they’re thought of as totally separate. The whole structure of modern medicine is based on this framework. Everything that’s outside that framework — even something as simple as your repressed emotions can manifest in physical symptoms — is seen as quackery or unserious.
A: Right, a lot of people who’ve had that awakening — that our bodies and minds and emotions are all connected — are scientists who have some form of compassion-based meditation practice. Even the idea that there are the science people and the artistic people — it’s not true.
R: How do we learn how to listen to this? How do we start to bridge the gap between the brain and body?
A: I try to make it really simple. If I were trying to get someone much more connected to their heart and desire, I’d suggest using that when they go buy their lunch, just dropping the brain stuff going down into the body. What do you really want today? Make it part of daily life, rather than something mystical out there.
And on a really basic level, I like to rein it in. When you’re working with something, an emotion, a feeling, a decision: Does it feel hot or cold, does it feel big or small? Even though I don’t believe in it being binary, that helps narrow it down.
There is also this idea in osteopathy of “follow ease.” When you do an adjustment you can move towards tension and bind, or you can move towards ease, and I think people can do ease with themselves. We’re so conditioned: it’s always go for the burn, go for the push. So starting to feel little bits of ease over and over.
R: Right, finding opportunities to do the easy thing. That has taken me years to learn.
A: And realizing that seems easy, but you’re actually undoing a lot. You’re realizing how much effort has been involved all that time
R: Do you find that people can answer those simple straight forward questions, such as “how does it feel in your body?”
A: When it’s done in dialogue in treatment, someone has had that time to arrive in their body. There’s a settling that’s really important before you can feel. If I’m working on babies I have to go into my system before I start.
I also think the language of assuming that you can feel it. It’s innate. The thinking part says “I don’t know,” but the feeling — that’s quite direct. When someone doesn't know, or they’re not sure, they’re in their head.
R: One of the phrases I think about a lot is “animal body.” I guess I got it from that Mary Oliver poem. It’s how I feel, for example, when I’m working in a garden: I’m moving, I’m thinking, I’m breathing and everything feels integrated and no part of me is dominant. I wonder what comes up for you in response to that phrase?
A: When lockdown happened I was struck by how many instinctive things people did: going outside, making things, doing things with their hands. All that stuff where there’s less conditioning. You get to wake up when your body wants to wake up, rather than when an alarm sounds. When you’re more tuned in. Just how it feels to be on the beach or in the forest.
For me, [the animal body] is a connection with nature, but also myself — my own rhythm, my own pace. Not the thing I think I should've achieved that day or what other people are doing.
R: Your connection to yourself is a connection to nature, in a way.
A: There’s the outer nature and inner nature. And interaction between the two. For example, in the winter when it's the holiday season, people are still expected to be socializing. Except it’s winter! So our animal body actually wants early nights and books but we’ve been conditioned that we should be out with glitter and drinking prosecco.
R: I have this theory: Early Covid lockdown was the first step, wherein people started honoring their basic physical needs in a way that the capitalist pace didn’t previously allow. Sleeping more, eating better, no commuting etc. Three to six months of that, and then what happened? All these people started massively changing their lives as a result. The great resignation — in both the knowledge and service economies — moving to cheaper places, ending or starting relationships. Do you think that those deep, gut-level responses that people are having are because they started honoring the animal body, just by listening to those simple needs?
A: Once you’ve seen certain things you can’t unsee it. That’s the case on many levels. I don’t feel good when I’m squashed on the tube. I used to work four evenings a week. That’s not feeling good anymore. Burnout is happening, I’m not thriving. Simply noticing, for example, how differently I feel in my body when I walk to work is a big part of the practice.
I think a lot of people have had that experience where even though there’s this stuff happening for the collective, the fact there’s such individual things going on, it shifts people.
With the animal body, when there’s pain, it says: Okay I can’t do this again. But when you’re softening into [your animal body] you start to be able to ask: What does pleasure feel like in my body? What does relief feel like? What does it feel like when you can breathe? That’s my direction.
My personal practice is more embodied and having more clients that are that way as well. It opens up a whole door. Coming from an osteopathic background, before it was like, “there’s pain and you get people out of pain” and now there’s all the other stuff. How do you get people to feel not just the absence of pain but to feel pleasure in their bodies?
Right, and once you feel what pleasure, rest, relief, and ease feel like on a day-to-day basis, you make different decisions. Because you think “No, I don’t want to take that on. I know it’s going to give me a migraine. It's going to give me insomnia. So, no thank you.” The more people can go that direction, the better off the world is.
Yes, exactly.
You can follow Avni on Instagram and Twitter, subscribe to her podcast “Speak From the Body,” and find out more about her courses, workshops, and one-to-one practice at www.avni-touch.com.
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