What the body inherited

Some of what your body carries isn't yours. It arrived before you did.

Resmaa Menakem is a therapist in Minneapolis who in 2017 wrote My Grandmother's Hands, a book about how history lives in bodies: how fear, hurt and vigilance can be passed down not just through stories but through the nervous system itself, across generations. He writes about the history of race in America and about his own grandmother, whose hands had picked cotton as a child and were shaped by it. The research he draws on is real and growing. Experience can leave marks on how genes are expressed, and those marks can be handed on.

The gift of the book is not the diagnosis. It's the practice. Menakem's word is settling. A settled body can feel what's happening without being run by it. An unsettled one reacts first and finds the reason later. He draws a line between clean pain, the pain of facing something honestly, and dirty pain, the pain of avoiding, blaming and numbing. Clean pain hurts and heals. Dirty pain just hurts.

His practices are almost embarrassingly simple, which is why they work. Humming. Rocking gently. A long slow exhale. A hand on the chest or belly. Noticing the feet on the floor. These are the things a grandmother does with a crying child, and they work on grown adults for the same reason: the body settles before the mind does.

This sits in the second month because the gate is Breathing, and settling is the first thing breath is for. Before we work on the body, we calm it. Nobody learns anything in a body that's braced.

I'll add one thing. Finding out that some of your vigilance was inherited is not bad news. It means you were never broken. You were handed something, and what was handed can be set down.