From Wounds to Wisdom

a guest post and prompt from Sarah E. Webb

Nov 08, 2023

Welcome to Writing in Company. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points for you to write about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

I’m so glad to share with you an evocative post and writing prompt from Sarah E. Webb. It’s always a surprise and delight to discover another writer whose words resonate with you. Sarah and I have been reading one another’s newsletters for several months now. She writes beautifully about the gorgeousness and messiness of life, and how writing can help us untangle the knots and reweave the threads of our stories into something we never expected.

Her words below take us from childhood to adulthood, tracing a path of pain, practice, and possibility. I know her story and prompt will have you reaching for your pen to find your own discoveries on the page.

a guest post from Sarah E. Webb

Enormous thanks to Julie for inviting me to write a guest post for her newsletter–I hope you find my story to be meaningful for your own reflection.

It began with a diagnosis at the age of ten: idiopathic scoliosis. A large spinal curve in my left lower back, with a complementary twist behind my right shoulder blade. I remember the orthopedist scrutinizing the glowing X-ray while my body shivered beneath a pilled cotton gown. He took red grease pencils, protractors, and rulers, precisely marking the silvery image like a geometry theorem. In less than 30 seconds, I became a by-product of his external, indelible markings.

I wore multiple back braces for twenty-three hours daily for the next decade. Like a corset, each one imprinted and abraded my skin. My body became a site of intervention, a problem to be solved. I longed to know myself as more than a collection of symptoms, yet I knew no other way. I silenced my desire daily, dutifully stuffing my torso in the plastic and metal enclosure, cinching the Velcro straps tightly across my spine.

While the bracing halted my spine from doubling back upon itself, the curvature never went away. As I grew older, especially in the years after having two small children, carrying them first in utero and then the subsequent balancing of their growing bodies upon the ledge of my hip ignited chronic pain in my lower back.

My initial solution was to do what I had always known: seek a referral to a specialist who would cure me. However, my doctor asked me to consider a different prescription: he suggested I practice yoga, which is how I tentatively found myself on a borrowed mat in a palapa in Mexico.

It was 2004–a five-day escape with my (then) husband to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Five days away from our children. Five days to reconnect. Five days away from the reality that his mother's five-year battle with breast cancer was entering its darker final chapter.

When the class began, I had zero expectations of what would come next. Still, in what had become a tightly managed existence of caretaking for others, I was aware I already was having a unique experience simply in the act of caring for myself.

I can't remember what or how long we practiced, but I do recall the choice to practice and the opportunity to give myself permission to be present. Allowing my body to be purposely guided by breath rather than pulled to the call rather than yielding to others—an act that was already profound.

When I returned to the bungalow I informed my husband, "I'm not sure what happened there, but I know it was significant, and I need to feel it again."

And so, my journey began.

At home, I sought out a yoga studio, and in those first classes as a wobbly beginner student, I cautiously, quietly began to learn a new physical vocabulary of form and shape. Slowly, my body became familiar with the poses of practice. I learned to root my feet firmly into the mat, to flex into my front knee while engaging with the muscles in the back of my leg. I learned to inhale, lengthen my torso, and stretch my arms upward triumphantly.

For the first time, I was a Warrior.

As I learned the poses, I built new muscle memories and questioned whether I might not be as dependent upon the external scaffolding as I had been taught to believe. Through listening and receiving my breath, I became acquainted with the potential of creating internal accountability and a greater affinity to myself. Each pose became a new tool and teacher for me to explore and create a new relationship with my physicality.

From believing that I was a body broken and constricted, I slowly became a body empowered.

Whereas my brace had been my cage, implying structure, my mat became a space of solace, allowing me to expand and explore the fullness of myself. Slowly, I came to believe that there existed more than I knew within me.

The first time a teacher adjusted my right hip in a forward fold, allowing me to distinguish how I could subtly direct breath into my lower back, to de-rotate and internally fill the concave divot, was nothing less than revelatory.

Until that moment, I had associated the same posture akin to the scoliosis screening in PE, in which we were instructed to touch our toes, one in which I always felt shame as I was re-diagnosed in front of my peers, year after year.

And in that moment, I began to let go of the oppressive internal judgment I had carried my entire life. I allowed myself to become more than my symptoms.

While an orthopedist might observe and pronounce my spinal column's twists and bony protrusions as "scoliosis," I did not have to live from that diagnosis.

Everything changed, even though nothing had changed.

For the first time, I could bow and honor myself in strength. My body, what I had perceived as my wound, slowly became my mark of distinction. In celebrating my curves, I began to listen and receive. Trusting and tracing my spine's path as the story of my own embodied wisdom.

I knew little about the pivots and the tacking points that would become my life, but I knew I had to pay attention, show up, and do the work, regardless of the outcome: the process would be the practice and become my song.

a writing prompt

There are moments in all our lives when we hear our story anew to receive it in wonder and delight.

Use my story or Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem The Song as an invitation to revisit your own story.

Nye’s poem begins with these lines:

From somewhere a calm musical note arrives. You balance it on your tongue, a single ripe grape, till your whole body glistens. In the space between breaths you apply it to any wound and the wound heals.

Read the whole poem here: The Song, then write about a time of discovery, a time when you began to know yourself in song.

more about Sarah

Sarah E Webb’s path consists of many stitches, but at heart, she is a storyteller. From the artist studio to the yoga studio, her multi-disciplinary approach considers both spaces as creative, contemplative sites of corporeal process, practice and possibility–from breath to pen, mat to page. Sarah facilitates writing and meditation retreats on Monhegan Island, ten miles off the coast of Maine and is on the faculty of TRUYoga, Rochester, NY.

Read more from Sarah at her beautiful Substack: narrative threads