Ellie Roscher - The Embodied Path: Telling the Story of Your Body for Healing and Wholeness

In The Embodied Path Ellie Roscher guides readers through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of body stories. Weaving together others stories and her own experiences, Roscher offers a vivid and diverse collection of body narratives, tangled with the twists and transformations that bodies endure. Readers will be challenged and changed by The Embodied Path and its powerful, provocative invitation to enter our own stories: the hidden narratives of suffering and strength held within our bodies.

Laura Kelly Fanucci , author and speaker

By turns generous, informative, and moving, Roschers latest is a key offering to those of us who are fully aware that we can do better. Perhaps most important, it is a reminder that we have always been capable of more. The stories here, both Roschers and those of her collaborators, are an entry to the work Roscher gently but firmly encourages us to undertake, for our own sakes.

Yi Shun Lai , workshop developer and facilitator at All-In Inclusivity Workshops

Stories shape the way people understand themselves and the world they live in. Too often, people are made the objects of those stories, used in ways that support harmful master-narratives. Ellie Roscher demonstrates the power of counter-stories. She provides tools and models for re-authoring ourselves and, in the process, changing our relationships with ourselves and others. In this thoughtfully crafted book, Ellie reminds us that writing is an act of liberation.

Lee C. Fisher , PhD, director of the Minnesota Writing Project

As a wellness coach, I have witnessed over and over again how the combination of storytelling and powerful questions can open doors to new, or reclaimed, ways of being that lead us back to the home deep inside us. The Embodied Path is an invitation to begin the journey, and it provides the tools necessary for wayfinding. Full of diverse perspectives, truth-telling, and opportunities to reflect, this book is a must-read for anyone with a body. It started healing something in me that I didnt know needed to be healed.

Heidi Barr , wellness coach and author of Collisions of Earth and Sky

Reading The Embodied Path was like attending a beautiful dinner party with strangers who become friends. I savored these stories and all the ways the telling eludes the trappings of competition and assimilation for the sake of something true and holy. Ellie Roscher hosts these pages with deep care, calling us back into our skin and helping us listen for power differently. Her honor for the teller does not waiver, so I found myself trusting Ellie with my breath and body too. This book is alive, a wellspring of gratitude, and an invitation to notice incarnation everywhere.

Meta Herrick Carlson , pastor, poet, and author of Ordinary Blessings and Speak It Plain

Ellie Roscher is a sage story-keeper and unleasher. Bare, beautiful, and quietly revolutionary, her book unravels our menacing master-narratives about what a body is for and invites us to feel at home (again) in our own skin.

Erin S. Lane , author of Someone Other Than a Mother

Most books just want you to read them, but this interactive book invites you to heal, grow, learn, process your trauma, write your own story, and find coherence in the chaos. The Embodied Path is a brilliant, vulnerable, equity-seeking, cutting-edge exploration of life within our messy and beautiful bodies. Read it and fall in love with your own body, perhaps for the first time.

Dr. Jacqueline Bussie , author of Love Without Limits and Outlaw Christian

The Embodied Path

The Embodied Path

Telling the Story of Your Body for Healing and Wholeness

By Ellie Roscher

Minneapolis

THE EMBODIED PATH

Telling the Story of Your Body for Healing and Wholeness

Copyright 2022 Ellie Roscher. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email copyright@1517.media or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover image: Lizaveta Kadol/iStock

Cover design: Olga Grlic

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8282-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8283-5

For Hanna, Ellen, Jen, and Sally.

Your body stories are brave and beautiful.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Toni Cade-Bambara ,
The Black Woman: An Anthology

The art of embodiment is not new, nor owned by any individual. I honor and acknowledge the teachers before me who sought ways to connect our hearts, minds, and bodies. I am informed by the ancient wisdom of several lineages including Christian monasticism, the eight-limbed path of Ashtanga yoga with roots in Ancient India, and yin yoga, which incorporates principles of Chinese Taoist philosophy.

A few of the names in this book have been changed for the privacy and safety of the participants.

There is a deep wisdom in our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it.

Elizabeth A. Behnke ,
quoted in My Grandmothers Hands

I started gymnastics when I was four years old, inspired by Mary Lou Rettons gold medal performance in the 1984 Olympics. I loved her teammate Julianne McNamara. She had strawberry blonde hair like me. At my first practice, I studied the older girls and followed every directive from the coach. After, while putting on my shoes, I asked my mom, Can I come back tomorrow?

In between practices, my dad got down on his hands and knees in the living room, while I adjusted my hair and leotard like the girls on TV. I rubbed my palms together, took a deep breath, sprinted across the room, and catapulted over my dads back. The imaginary crowd erupted in applause. My endorphins surged. I waved to my imaginary adoring fans and sauntered back to take my second vault.

I was competing by age seven and won the Minnesota state meet in my age group and level at age nine. I practiced fifteen hours a week, traveled for competitions, and dreamed of moving to Texas to train with Bla Krolyi. In gym class, clad in my plaid Catholic school uniform skirt, I pummeled the boys in pull-ups.

Then, when I was thirteen, I fell. While practicing a new tumbling pass the night before flying to Michigan for a meet, I over-rotated and took the brunt of the landing on my outstretched left hand. My elbow dislocated and fractured. Bone chips flew off the joint.

I knew it was serious by the looks of horror on the faces of my teammates and the panic in my coachs voice saying, The bone is trying to break through the skin!

In the ambulance, the shock wore off enough for me to realize that I was not flying to Michigan the next day. My competitive season was over. My gymnastics career might be over. For an eighth-grader with big dreams, these realizations were tragic. I wallowed.

In the emergency room, a team of medical professionals buzzed above me. Someone cut my leotard off my body. The pain was consuming. What I didnt know at the time was that the displaced bone cut off blood flow to my hand. Dr. Gannon, the square-jawed orthopedic surgeon on call, struggled to restore a pulse to my wrist to keep the tissue alive. He eventually manipulated the joint enough to get blood back to my hand, and everyone seemed to settle down a bit. Five shots of novocaine in my armpit numbed my arm and sedated me. I woke up with a bright orange cast and rhythmic throbbing in my left arm.