Professor Roue’s Proprioceptive Peregrinations

Or how circus can lead to radical healing

Circus transformed me.

Circus allowed me to find a path from being an anxious person who was always a little too worried about what others thought of me, from operating from a state of high-octane fear in almost everything I did, from being a person who was proud of being a self-hating perfectionist who turned self-denial and self-discipline into self-torture devices, to finally being able to calm down a bit to see how damaging all of this was, to finally calming down more fully to truly see and accept all the love that had always been around me and the beauty life has to offer.

There is a lot more to this story. But it begins and ends with circus.

I first started taking aerial classes in 2010 when I was 38 years old. In 2010, I finally gave in to the undeniable fact that I was allergic to wheat as well as a lot of other things. Before that time, I was suffering from 3 to 4 migraines a week - incapacitating migraines. And I was working far too many hours as a lawyer. That year, I got my dream job as a law professor (still my dream job) and I finally had some extra time just to be a person again. A friend had started a diet eliminating all grain and all sugar. I decided to give it a try, more out of vanity and competitiveness than anything else, and my migraines went down considerably to just 1 or 2 every few months. I started swimming and working out again. I ramped up my yoga practice. And I took my first aerial class.

I was a terrible aerial student. I was not a natural. I had been good at school. I had been good at theatre. Perhaps not great at either, but always solidly good. In the past, I didn’t spend too much time on things I was not already good at, it hurt my ego too much. But, climbing up a silk and trying to tie knots with my feet, in this domain, I was not good.

When I was hanging upside down and the teacher told me to grab the silk with my other hand, I was like what other hand? Do I have a hand? How many hands do I have? Where are they? Are they connected to my arms? Where are my arms? How do I move them? I would get so incredibly lost in my own body - as if there was a long telephone wire from my brain to my limbs that a crew of toddlers with scissors were sabotaging while a group of grandmas were trying to repair the wires with duct tape and string while unsuccessfully distracting the toddlers. In short, I was a hot mess.

I have two distinct memories from my early days. In one, the teacher was trying to show me how to tie my feet to the silks for an ankle hang. I could not process it. She patiently showed me, over and over. Other students were watching. In a class of perhaps 7 or 8 people, every other person did the ankle hang - from watching her demonstrate for me - while over and over and over, I could not. I did finally get it a few classes later, and for a while, it was my favorite skill. But I just could not understand where my feet were in space, whether they were in front of, or behind, the silks, while I was hanging from hands.

In another, I remember spinning at the end of class. I was never good at spinning. Even as a child. When I was 7, I was physically sick at an amusement park after going on a spinny ride and had to spend the rest of the day shaking and green laying on a bench. Despite knowing this, I wanted to feel pretty spinning in a circle and did it anyway. I became dizzy and nauseous. I made it to the bathroom in time to be sick. I laid on the bathroom floor for 45 minutes while the room continued to spin. I watched sparks dance behind my eye-lids in explosive patterns. I finally got up and tried to drive home, and had to stop twice to purge myself and then collect myself, and then do that again.

And despite all this, I was hooked. I loved it. I was obsessed.

And I think part of it was that it reminded me of the pure joy of playing as a child. Of having my weight off the ground. And this feeling of being a child, being held, became even more intense when I started doing duo work. I’ll talk about that in a future post.

My dad throwing me in the pool when I was 10.

Eventually, I started to have a better sense of where my body was in space. I actually, for the first time ever in my 40s, was able to tell my left from my right without relying on outside tells (I have a small birth defect on my ear on my left side - which is the only way I knew my left from my right before this). I continued spinning - developed a tolerance to it - and cured myself of motion sickness - again in my 40s. And I gradually stopped feeling fear all the time. My theory was that in continuing to subject myself to doing terrifying things - drops, climbs, trusting myself in ever more bizarre and precarious positions at greater heights - and then coming down safely to sit quietly on a soft mat surrounded and supported by friends, I was learning to trust myself. Learning how not to be in fear all the time, but only when warranted. Learning to be at peace.

And I am not the only one with this theory. One of my favorite explanations of the healing power of circus is Lacy Alana’s piece in the YesandBrain.com, Circus as a Healing Art, What PolyVagal Theory Explains About Why Circus Works, where she describes in precise scientific language how the body learns to come out of a hyper-aroused state, often caused by childhood trauma (hello childhood trauma!), and enlarge our window of tolerance so that we can spend more time in a relaxed and peaceful state.

Yes, my personal experience had a scientific explanation.

And I started reading further about trauma in very well-known books like Bessel Van Der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps the Score, and many others. I realized that through circus, I had stumbled on exactly what my body needed to heal itself. There was a reason I was so passionate about it, so hooked, so obsessed. My body recognized what my thinking brain could not, that this was something my body needed to do, that this was a path to healing. My thinking brain could not get me there through reason or through justification. This was an outside in path - I needed to reconnect to my body - a body I had spent a life time torturing into submission - to heal my mind. And from there - to heal my spirit.

This is the story I would like to share with you all.

And this is a path I would like for any who seek it, to be able to tread. It is not a straightforward path, nor is it without pain, loss, and grief. But it is a worthwhile path. Come peregrinate with me.