By Stefanie Cohen

Stefanie Cohen MA, RSME/RSMT has spent decades as a theater-maker, movement teacher, somatic practitioner, improvising dancer, curator, and a fine arts based performance artist. She is a a registered professional member of the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. Cohen delights in the integration of bodily awareness, contemplative practice, spiritual mystery, and creative process. Cohen resides in Detroit. Learn more at somastories.net.

In response to your kind inquiry, ‘Would you be interested in writing?,’ right off the bat, I’ve been transported a few miles, to the outskirts of the town of Discomfort. I stare at its welcome sign. Founded: at the beginning of human time. Population: countless.

I will hazard a guess that I’m not the first, nor last practitioner, in the community who briefly balks at first, if only inwardly, at the prospect of writing this column. Especially those of us who serve as healing artists, therapists, and teachers who daily determine how transparently to share the shaky terrain we often navigate in our own lives. The hard-won insights and the on-going struggles.

Stepping further off of the curb into the street bordering Discomfortville, I accept your invitation and its accompanying deadline, without, quite honestly, having any idea of what I’d write about. Without having figured it all out. Not knowing what it is that might possibly write itself over the course of the month.

Of course, the irony of my squeamishness at not knowing is not lost on me. The majority of my three decades-long dance/movement career has been as an improviser.

In improvised performance, and as an interdisciplinary artist, I regularly navigate the unknowns that can, and should, nudge me out of comfort zones. Making performance or installation work alone, or with my longtime collaborator and life partner Corey, if we already knew what the work was going to look like, what it was going to mean, what it was going to say—even the specific medium through which it would emerge,we simply wouldn’t need to make it. The questions it poses would already have been answered. In some way, it would already exist in the world, if only in our sketchbooks, our bodies, and/or our minds.

As a somatic therapist, I regularly walk with people to their doors of discomfort. I hold their hands as they peer into, feel into, with compassion and curiosity, what their bodies contain—the sensations, the exquisite, surprising, and unique personal images. The places so tender as to have been expertly bandaged and tucked far away. The resilience, the pleasures, and the joy.

Not knowing, however, is up there among the universally lesser-tolerated experiences.

Other notable edges of comfort I’ve negotiatedinclude some amount of physical risk.

As a contact improvisation dancer (a kind of an art-sport born 50 years ago, out of a marriage of post-modern dance and martial arts), I often launch my body into space, into physical contact with other moving bodies. Sometimes I perch high upon their shoulders; sometimes I land gracefully and softly onto the ground. Sometimes I fall. Over the decades of dancing, though I have practiced falling countless times, I still freeze up there at times—making the falls, sadly, infinitely klutzier.

Showing something artistically raw or unfinished creates a metaphoric nakedness.

During a several-years-in-the-making performance art piece Corey and I have created about religion and spirituality, I sing along with the album of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I sing the words of the poem he plays on his saxophone. Among them:

“God breathes through us so completely...so gently we hardly feel it... yet, it is our everything.

Thank you, God.

ELATION—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION—All from God.

Thank you, God. Amen.”

I rub against so many edges of discomfort, here. It feels presumptuous to sing his words. I have rarely used the word God, myself, much less sung it. I am very close to the audience, which I know includes colleagues and friends who are professional singers. My voice is not a saxophone. Much of the music is well out of my range. I’m not trying to sing well—but is it clear that I could if I wished? Could I? My voice cracks here and there….

Literal nakedness:

I worked for years on and off as a figure model. Though I certainly harbor some self-consciousness of my body, I don’t let that stop me from displaying it in this way. Curiously, I discover that I’m more uncomfortable dressing in front of others than in undressing.

And though there are a couple of notable exceptions along the way, in the behavior I experience, the vast majority of the time I am treated with respect, admiration, and gratitude by the artists for whom I pose.

Finally, also with regard to body—navigating the very edge of intense physical discomfort—my most favorite, most triumphant, most deeply embodied example is from a moment in the birthing of my daughter:

Throughout most of the perhaps six-hour labor (to my best recollection), I simply breathed and gently moved my body. Not having known anything about the method of HypnoBirthing®, which I had been practicing, my doula later shared her fascination by my seeming serenity and the lack of my need for her assistance.

At some point, most likely in the throes of the transition stage of labor, as my cervix dilated to its largest, I suddenly feel an impulse to squat down. Equally quickly, I acknowledge inwardly that squatting will make the sensation more intense, and, sensibly, to my mind, I back away from it. A moment later, I hear myself think “Yes. That’s exactly what will happen. And it’s supposed to.” Finally, having allowed myself the option to move away from the discomfort, I am free to choose to lean into it—fiercely, bravely, and with conviction.

Sometime not long after, with support from my midwife, doula, and husband, and from my baby, herself, I push my daughter out in to the awaiting world.

Each of these somewhat heightened examples, however edgy, does not confront me on an on-going basis as much as the insidious, inescapable, life-long imperative of asking. The anticipation of asking sometimes speeds my heart, clamps my jaw closed as though to halt the inadvertent escape of the words. It hangs the “Closed. Come again tomorrow sign,” outside my viscera, diverting blood to my limbs in case my nervous system says it’s time to run.

Asking for help.

Asking to help…especially when this necessitates speaking about some kind of elephant in the room.

Asking colleagues, clients, and students for referrals to my practice.

Asking people to attend workshops, performances, parties….

Asking people to participate in art—much of Corey’s and my work is participatory.

Asking myself what I want.

Asking to change my mind.

Asking, instead of second-guessing.

Asking, instead of expecting, and feeling disappointment later.

Asking for forgiveness.

Asking to be permitted to forgive.

Asking to be paid what my work is actually worth. Asking for rates that sit just outside what initially feels comfortable to request—amounts of money that I would currently have difficulty paying, myself. In so doing, because I offer an economic justice scale, I ask people to honestly evaluate their means and to pay at the top of the scale as they are able.

Asking for support while going through a crisis.

In the not-too-distant past, my body, spirit, emotions, and nervous system worn bare from the first year and a half of the pandemic, I found that I was unable to work. Unable to cook. Unable to think, feel, or cry at times, which is frighteningly unlike me. It took me a while to reach out beyond the couple of closest friends—the ones I have no choice but to lean upon—to a larger community of support. Some people, even, that I hadn’t known for long. When I did so, by email, first acknowledging my awkwardness in asking, I then laid out my requests. I asked for a few meals a week for me and my family; for bodywork, healing, and nervous system support from those who provide it; for prayers for gentle clarity, fortitude, and focus; and for visits, and patience if I found it hard to schedule them.

Though this could, I believe, be part of a much longer article about the inheritance of ancestral burdens, I’ll at least name that the real out-of-comfort zone is asking for help when there’s no crisis. Asking for support, instead of holding on by my fingernails until I’m no longer able. Similarly, not asking for help for fear that what I might experience as crisis pales in comparison to others. In the Olympics of suffering, of need, my name could not possibly be as high on the scoreboard.

People, I believe, truly love to help—we appreciate being entrusted with another’s request for assistance. We appreciate the opportunity to participate. To extend care. And we both love and need, really, to have modeled the permission to ask, ourselves.

My dear friend’s paycheck is a little short. Her daughter’s prom dress needs picking up tomorrow—could I loan her the money? I Cash App her within 30 seconds of seeing her text.

Someone in the community is sick, grieving, recovering from surgery, tending a new baby—will I sign on for the Meal Train? With relish, I launch into action, cooking and delivering the meals.

Our friends need to get to couple’s therapy—can we stay with their kids for the evening? Without question, we’re there, and ready to play.

In my intense hour of need, having reached out to my community, having given them an opportunity to help, they come through, well beyond my wildest dreams. They bring beautiful, delicious food. They send me songs and poetry. They massage my body, tend my energy, and sit and walk with me. They tuck a little money into their meal deliveries. And they hold a loving, confident vision of me until I am again able to hold it for myself.

Each time I ask, each time I surrender a need to do something on my own, I help to illuminate and reinforce the true essence of community. I am an experiential learner, by nature. In an email thanking those who had answered my calls for help, I shared: “I’m perhaps only just now starting to understand that resilience is not about the strength in bracing against adversity… but the capacity to lean back into nets of interwoven support.”

Many thanks, again, Crazy Wisdom. Fully welcomed to this town of Discomfort, I’m so glad to have found it so warm and inviting. I’ll no doubt come visit again, soon.