Ode to Stretching

& Embodiment

I’ve always struggled to get dressed in the summer. It’s, of course, quite literally more difficult to slide clothes over skin sticky with sweat. But I’m more specifically referring to the dreaded confrontation I must make with my least favorite clothing item of all time: denim shorts. Few clothing articles evoke “summer” as much as denim shorts - save a baseball cap and a ribbed white tank. They’re a timeless and supposedly effortless wardrobe staple, yet I’ve always had great trouble with them. 

Growing up, I was partial to tight, high-waisted, extremely low-cut denim shorts that cut into my belly button and thighs whenever I sat down, leaving red impressions on my skin. As with bikinis, skinny jeans, and any other snug garments, my physical growth naturally outpaced the frequency with which I would purchase new denim shorts as a child. As the summers of my late teenage years rolled around, I found myself needing a new pair each year, as my hips and rear outgrew the previous summer’s pair. Denim shorts required me to confront my changing body. So in my early twenties, I decided to abandon them altogether, opting for skirts, linens, and running shorts in my summer wardrobe instead.

My efforts to avoid denim shorts, in part, allowed me to avoid perceiving myself too closely - more specifically, perceive my changes. Any time I noticed a shift in my body composition, I tucked it away in my mind - avoided thinking about it too closely, knowing the learned thought pattern that could follow. To that effect, I opted for more oversized silhouettes. I avoided taking pictures, at least ones where I’m the sole subject. When passing a reflective surface on the street, I allowed myself no more than a quick glance to detect spinach in my teeth. Likely affected by a growing cultural movement towards “body neutrality,” I chose indifference over positivity or negativity - I tend to favor the grey areas.

But as the winter of 2024 stretches into spring, and I prepare for an impending beach trip, I’m finding myself, to my surprise, actively craving a pair of denim shorts. Not the tight, high-waisted ones of my youth, but a slouchier pair that can be thrown over a swimsuit with ease. I’m all for skirts, linens, and running shorts, but sometimes, the occasion requires the nonchalant and durable refinement that denim brings to the table. 

As I slipped into a pair in a dressing room last Sunday, I felt as though I was seeing another person for the first time. After spending quite some time actively avoiding what I believed to be a constant reminder of change, I was met with - you guessed it - a great deal of change. So this is what I look like? How long have I looked like this? I experienced a sense of novelty. I felt as though I was reintroducing myself to my body, like visiting an old relative who pinches my cheeks, only remembering me as an elementary schooler. There’s a familiarity, but also a semblance of difference, of a shift. As I looked at this stranger in the mirror, my first thought was that she looked surprisingly settled, maturity making her appear more embodied, even though I knew she had deliberately felt disembodied for quite some time. I was struck with the thought that my avoidance had made me something of a bystander to my physicality - to my changing physical self.

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Have you ever sank into a stretch so deep, so juicy, that it’s brought you to tears? That you’ve had to hold back a yelp of pleasurable pain? As a former semi-professional dancer, I adopted a daily yoga practice into my routine post-college to keep my strength consistent and my muscles limber. I sit at a desk for far too many hours a day now. It’s an admittedly bastardized yoga practice that I access via an app on my phone for thirty minutes before work. It features a calorie count and a thirty-second savasana, sometimes set to a pop song. It’s a great accompaniment to my current job and lifestyle, which is much too partial to sedentariness and “wellness” in quick doses.

As I settle into my favorite hip-opening pose Agnistambhasana (otherwise called “firelog pose” or “ankle to knee pose”), I settle my right ankle over my left knee, attempting to make my shins parallel to one another. I sit up tall, take a deep inhale, and walk my fingertips forward on the exhale. The instructor chirps in my earbud that “trauma lives in the hips” and that hip openers require you to “let go” to reap their benefits, and how that’s such a great metaphor for life. Since the yoga class is only an optimized thirty minutes, we often don’t settle into these juicy postures for as long as I’d like to. So afterward, if time and energy allow, I’ll find the pose once more and allow the pain and relief to wash over me for longer.

“Trauma lives in the hips” feels admittedly woo-woo coming from this yoga app, like something I might come across in an Instagram Reel, along with ways to improve my gut health. When I get off the app, and sink deeper into the hip opener than the instructor permits - or into a straddle, the splits, or a hamstring stretch - a hot iron smooths out all the knots in my system, providing undeniable reprieve. I’ll sit in the stretch for a minute, two minutes, and see how much more relief I can reap. I breath, I relish the quiet. The more I sit with it, the more I feel.

When he released The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk brought discussions of physical manifestations of emotional pain to a larger Western public consciousness. Mentally, we suppress, we “forget,” and self-blame - but “the body does not forget,” according to van der Kolk. Thus, he stresses that talk therapy must be accompanied by physical therapy of sorts - The Guardian cites eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, yoga, bodywork, and touch as examples. If the body is storing trauma in its literal musculature, then van der Kolk writes that it needs “experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage or collapse that result from trauma.”

When I sink deeper into ankle to knee pose and feel my hips cry out louder with each passing second, I’m seeking this kind of contradiction. It would be great if my limbs could extend past their physical bounds, if I could strap myself to a medieval torture device, each appendage getting a satisfactory tug. I want to feel expansive, I want my hips to feel like Jell-O. Perhaps if I’m cleansed of my stiffness and soreness and overcome enough of the physical discomfort, I’ll also be able to endure the emotional. Writer

eliza mclamb

writes that it’s comforting to think that “all pain is inflammation” - something real and finite that can be extinguished with the right cocktail of self-soothing and physical-emotional release. It can indeed be dampened, but like a good stretch, to escape pain - and more commonly, discomfort and dissatisfaction - is often to escape pleasure.

Movement - namely dancing and stretching - enables me to compartmentalize my body, view it through a more utilitarian lens. The human body is an imperfect system, operating under imperfect physical conditions - desk jobs, shrinking airplane seats, necks craned over phones - but understanding its collaborative, systematic nature gets me a little closer to cracking its impossible code. If I roll in on my arches while I walk, I’ll get knee pain. If I strengthen my core, I’m also strengthening my back. But of course, my body - as with all bodies - is ultimately unsolvable. No amount of physical relief can prevent me from eventually tensing again. Fully escaping pain - mental, emotional, and physical -  is impossible. But seeking what I think of as “embodiment” - a true feeling of fullness and groundedness in your physical shell - might be the closest thing.

So often, the “cure” for disliking your appearance is centered on the visual, specifically changing your relationship with it. Repeating affirmations to yourself in the mirror until you somehow believe them. Learning to look at your body as a vessel - for your soul, for others. Learning to “dress for your body type.” While such methods are certainly useful, I think we would also benefit from methods of embodiment that don’t involve the visual at all - that might even feel counterintuitive. That involve leaning into physicality rather than avoiding it. By focusing on utility and mobility, rather than vanity. Any good relationship is developed through behaviors that promote connection rather than avoidance. For me, at least lately, connection to my physical form looks like stretching - preferably without a mirror in sight. 

It will, of course, take far more than touching your toes - or breathing or walking or running - to overcome self-loathing. But seeking more pure, rooted feelings of embodiment might reap more long-lasting benefits than trying to salve self-inflicted axe wounds with stares in mirrors and at pictures, and words uttered so repeatedly that we become numb to their meaning. Confidence and control in the time of social media often manifest in unabashedly sharing photos of one’s self or rejecting such photos. Both behaviors feel functionally ambivalent, and more akin to representations of confidence than confidence itself. The representation of my physical self will continue to change in mirrors and photographs over time, that’s something I can’t affect. Trying to mend my relationship with the representation is useful, but ultimately unsustainable. How I’m able to connect with my tangible physical self and its changing parts - directly relating and bearing witness to the pain, relief, and pleasure that spawns across my body and mind - that’s something real.

Existing only in my head comes easy, especially when externalities like my phone spur thoughts - mindless and otherwise - like a slot machine. But, as I stared at myself in the first pair of denim shorts I’d worn in two years, I realized I didn’t want to be a bystander to my body and my pain. I also don’t want to force-feed myself too-sweet bouts of egotism or rule with a cynical fist. I don’t want to look in the mirror as much as I used to, not because I’m afraid, but because I don’t want to feel like I need to. I want to feel settled in myself without the visual evidence, as much so as I can. I want to feel more connected to my physical self than my representational self. Embodied - my whole self filling up my whole body, stretched from head to toe.

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