Discover my story, and why I am all passionate about feeling & expressing our human emotions
CONNECT WITH YOUR HUMANITY, TO REMEMBER YOUR DIVINITY
I am an abstract artist, contemporary dancer, a body-mind teacher and proud mother of two grown up daughters. But most of all, I am a human on a Souljourney.
I grew up on a farm as the firstborn of 4 children, with the grandparents in the house, many animals, and all-time working parents. With a highly sensitive nervous system, and my sun, moon and rising sign all in the element of fire, I was feeling so much, so intensely and so deeply. But growing up, like so many of us, I had to learn to control my emotions and store them away. One of my earliest, and the strongest childhood memory is, that I was craving physical & emotional closeness to somebody desperately.
But it never happened, and it drove me into a condition where, by the end of 14 I feared that I could loose my mind. The crowning of my traumatically lonely childhood without emotional or physical closeness to an adult, was my entry into extreme religiosity at the age of 15.
SKIN HUNGER
Only recently I came across a name for the condition I had suffered from, it is called "Skin Hunger" or "Touch deprivation". It was my stigma, the thing I was so ashamed of, because obviously something must have been very wrong with me, if I I couldn´t experience the most normal thing, that all the kids and teenagers around me had in their lives: natural physical contact, embraces, closeness, sexual contact,...So when I turned towards religion, the rigid black and white system of fundamentalist christianity gave me the assurance, that it was good to not have physical closeness, as this was sinful anyway...and of course it deepened my obsession with controlling my emotions, this time under the "will of God".
THE JOY, PLEASURE AND ECSTASY OF CREATING & EXPRESSING
Before that, the one thing that brought me pure joy, was expressing myself, which was as natural to me as breathing. I have been drawing since I could hold a pencil, it has always been my most intimate way of expression.
I created dance choreos in the living room and staged circus shows on the playground, shamelessly using my siblings and the other village-children as performers and audience, always following my guts. Later listening to my favorite music catapulted me into spheres of bliss and ecstasy and occupying myself with fashion made me feel so good.
I took dance classes (modern, ballet and tap dance - my absolute favourite!) at the conservatory since I was 10, classes in electronic organ from 10-15, and was in fashionschool for one year. These passions were my absolute paradise and my safe place. But unfortunately, i didn´t have enough grounding within me to stay in my paradise.
BEING PART OF A CHRISTIAN FREECHURCH HELPED ME SURPRESS MY UNWANTED HUMAN EMOTIONS
At the age of 15 the pressure inside me was so intense - the feeling of not knowing where to go with my fears and my now desperate longing for human touch & connection - that I voluntarily joined a christian freechurch as a way out. From now on I read the bible daily, and didn’t allow anything and anyone else than an exterior, male god to give me good feelings. I begged God, to extinguish my inner Self, my essence, my feelings, as all of that was so inherently bad. It was like an inner suicide, and during this time I splitted myself up in two parts: one that was functioning on the outside, now "behaving", without personal needs, pleasing the adults, and one inner part, that was only existing in the spiritual realms. I stopped dressing in my own signature style, and went to school dressed what felt like boring and unsexy. I stopped listening to my beloved music - I had listened to Funk, Soul, Blues, Rock, Pop, and everything you could dance too, and it meant the world to me. Now I listened to christian worship music instead, something I would never have listened to before. At least I didn´t give up dancing, but painting and drawing was the next thing I would let go. I had built my own cage to survive, and at this time I didn’t know, that it would take me decades to get myself out again.
After graduating in fine arts, I started studying contemporary dance. On the outside, I made it look as if everything was normal and "under control“, but I remember well, that during my first Ballett lesson in the university, my new director and teacher shouted out: „Christine, you’re all crooked!“ Little did she know, that she described not only my back, but my deepest & truest inner state. Perverting and twisting my feelings, brainwashing and gaslighting myself was my daily business. To this day, I was 19 now, I had not experienced physical & emotional closeness to a human being. Of course, I had friends, in school, my dance classes, in bible studys and church. I always had friends. But I never allowed myself to fall into an embrace, to show my real emotions, my pain and loneliness. I felt too ashamed. I was perfect for being the listener, the very mature-for-her-age counsellor, the emotional caretaker. I had perfected the emotions-control, and everything in and outside of me was under "God‘s will“. I was marching through it like a soldier.
THE BODY DOES NOT LIE
Only then, my body started to „make“ serious problems. That was the reason, why I started to study the AlexanderTechnique after my dance diploma. At that point, I couldn’t move without pain anymore, had several serious issues, and I knew I had to deal with it. Learning to sit, stand and walk consciously and from scratch, as you do in the AlexanderTechnique, felt so right.
CALMING AND NOURISHING A FREAKED-OUT NERVOUS SYSTEM
Despite of the physical problems, studying dance was already a softener for my tight nervous system, as I had so much conscious physical contact with my colleagues and: the floor. Studying the AlecanderTechnique was even more like heaven for my nervous system: the gentle, slow and soft work, and even more conscious physical contact with my colleagues saved me. During that three years, I was able to soften my rigid thinking and strict religious beliefs, and calm down a lot. Right before starting with the 3 year AT-training course, I married a fellow christian artist and bore my first daughter at the age of 23. After graduating as an Alexander Teacher I had my second daughter, and I started to teach AT in my own practice. When I was 27, a tragic death happened in the family, that made me all of a sudden face, that my belief in the christian god was merely built on Angst, and I left the church. My own natural spirituality, a deep sense of interconnectedness, that had awakened in me before the church years, had fortunatly never left me.
HEALING = CREATING NEW NEURONAL PATHWAYS
The following years were filled with raising our children, teaching AT, exploring how to integrate the technique into contemporary dance, and performing as a dancer. In all of this it was my personal priority to heal myself: I constantly practiced somatic healing work through the Alexandertechnique, dancing, the Eyebody-Method (the art of integrating eye, body & brain), breath & voice work, my deep & dedicated inner work-processes, and I went to therapy. Nevertheless my childhood trauma was still breeding inside of me. I had lost my passion for drawing & painting years ago. My marriage was unhappy, I was craving for real intimacy and love, and ours was a hard love. And although I loved giving AT lessons very much - 80% of my clients were artists, it also felt bad that I helped them to become even better artists while my own art was stored somewhere deep down. It felt as if I betrayed myself to some part. I was so far away from expressing myself naturally like I did in my childhood, and it felt as if it slowly made me sick. In the end, it all circled around the one thing that I was afraid of the most: my deeply buried REAL emotions. It is perfectly possible to do mind-body work, teach dance, perform in other peoples pieces, films, fotoshoots, even do your own pieces, raise children, be a spouse and a family manager, without being in contact with your own real emotions, your true self. You can be a perfect emotional-caretaker without access to your own feelings. But there’s...
...ONE THING YOU CAN´ T DO WITHOUT ACCESS TO YOUR REAL EMOTIONS: CREATE ART, THAT YOU ARE PROUD OF
After ending our marriage and the following very difficult years for my daughters and me, with one of my kids having a life threatening illness, I couldn’t sleep anymore and didn’t know where I should take the strength to go on with my life. I came to what seemed to be a dead end - realising, that I had never experienced anything close to a safe bonding, to give me the grounds from where I could develop like a healthy human being.
But, I know that I was only able to fall that low, because in the meantime I had met my soulmate. (How this happened is another amazing story...) As I was finally feeling deep heart & soul-connection in a nourishing, safe & close relationship, I was more and more capable of facing my childhood-wounds.
During this time I came across an amazing work called "Healing the mother wound". I began to connect with my inner child, and when I looked inside, little Christina was always painting. So big Christina started painting again.
I slowly recovered, finding the grounds to carry my weight right inside myself. The safe bonding I was longing for all my life - I found it right inside myself. The permission to feel all of my feelings - I give it to myself! The safe space to be ALL of my true Self - I AM that safe space for myself. I learned to mother myself. And I was so relieved to discover, that it simultaneously taught me how to mother my amazing & expressive daughters, the way they needed it, so that we all could heal.
And: I started to create again, but this time not only with a pencil, nor only with my dancing body, or my body-mind-wisdom, but with everything together. And to my great surprise and joy, what came out of me was all abstract, directly coming from my guts, finding its way onto the paper without thinking, pure Emotion = Energy in Motion.
THE LAND OF FANTASY AND FEELING
In my early years I had always been a little bit sad, that I wasn´t able to grow past the figurative. It had always felt like the abstract, -which I thought came directly from the land of fantasy & feelings, was locked away from me, and I couldn´t get there. Of course, my feeling was right: you need to have a certain stability & safety and you need to feel comfortable with giving away the mind-control, to enter the land of fantasy & feeling. Well, finally this door had opened up...
Writing this story is a personal milestone of me. Only three weeks ago, after another challenging healing session, was I finally able to connect all of the dots. Of course, I left out so much, as this would be beyond the scope. Today I am building my dream life: expressing all of me through multiple mediums, creating art that I am proud of, while having very stable and loving relationships with my daughters, my partner & my close humans.
It is an ongoing process, and I deeply believe a collective one: to connect with the parts in us, that are hiding in the dark, captured in shame, trauma, lonelyness,... all the human conditions we suffer from. Through connecting with them, and bringing them into our own powerful light, we become whole, which is holy, and live our fullest, richest, authentic lives, for the liberation of ourselves - and the liberation of all beings.
Thank you for reading so far! Now you know, why I am all passionate about feeling and expressing all of our human emotions. Allowing ourselves to feel everything makes us rich, it is our human superpower, it ends all scarcity and insensibility, and gives us back our power, so that we can be the change we want to see in this world.
If you are touched by my story, and have maybe experienced something similar, I would love to hear from you, if you feel like it.
