A captivating woman enters the scene in a red costume that reveals most of her body. She moves as though she has no joints.
Before I saw her, I did not know the human body could flow like water. For a moment, I felt tense. Then I looked at my father sitting beside me and saw the fascination in his eyes. I relaxed again. His gaze felt like permission to enjoy the beauty of her dancing.
Her limbs move with perfect precision, painting a picture, telling a scene, while she sinks into it with full awareness, letting her body take the helm. With complete fluidity and calm, it carries her back and forth towards the truest places, perhaps the most peaceful.
My father later told me she was Samia Gamal.
From that day on, she became my favorite dancer, and her dance in the film Ali Baba became an archive I return to again and again. In moments of loneliness and heaviness, I summon it to remember how a single material body can free me from anxiety and pull me out of the spiral of tension that my profession plays such a large part in creating.
My work as a physiotherapist is built, above all, on touching bodies, communicating with them, and listening to what they might say through pain.
Despite my many attempts to leave the profession and find another specialty, I forget all of them the moment I stand beside someone’s neck, place my fingers at the center of the pain, and read what the body has stored of stories the tongue could never bring itself to tell.
It is enough for me to feel that this body has found, even for a few moments, someone willing to listen to its story rather than silence it. I remember why I chose this profession in the first place, as though the greatest thing I can offer a body is finally to let it be heard.
And yet, compelled by the weight of experiences that seep into my cells without my noticing, I find every pore in my skin searching for a way out.
During sessions, patients often begin to cry intensely, not from the severity of the pain, but from the feeling of stored memories leaving them in the form of pain long held inside.
In moments like these, I understand that my hands are not touching tissue alone. They are passing over a memory that has spent a long time waiting for someone to read it. My hands have learned to read what time has written onto bodies, what it has stored inside every muscle curled in on itself. They seem able to recognise the betrayal one woman endured, the dreams another watched disappear… I have begun tracing disappointment through every tense body, from shoulders sagging under it to feet that have not known rest for years.
At the end of each day, I go to the bathroom and scrub my hands. I watch all those pains and muffled screams disappear down the drain. If I do not wash them thoroughly, I return home with some of the pain still clinging to my hands, creeping towards my heart. Beyond the emotional pain that echoes inside me, my body, too, carries something from every body I become one with.
It happens constantly. I suddenly find my hands trembling for no reason after working with a patient whose body trembles, or I catch myself leaning to one side in front of the mirror, resembling a patient with a curved spine, and realise how hard a spine can struggle simply to appear straight.
I had read about something like this while searching for a scientific explanation for what was happening to me. I came across the work of German choreographer Katja Heitmann and her project Motus Mori Museum, which included an experiment in archiving human movement through conversations with people around the world.
Katja and her team were not asking people what they thought about life or politics. They were recording the particular ways their bodies moved as they spoke: how someone’s lips trembled when they became nervous, how one young man preferred to sleep, how an elderly woman struggled to carry the weight of her body on a fragile foot. The result was a living portrait of bodies.
The surprise came when those movements began, unconsciously, to seep into the bodies of Katja and her team. They did not lose their own bodies; rather, their muscle memory began carrying the experiences of others without ever having lived through them, simply through knowing them.
Working with patients, particularly women, in a clinic specialising in women’s health and pelvic conditions made me realise how experiencing the body as a physical burden can gradually turn it into something unbearable,
until it loses the ability to express itself or its desires, and eventually pain becomes its only language.
Across different ages and experiences, I can see the vast distance between a woman’s body and her spirit. Even women who seemed to have made peace with their bodies often found that relationship fractured after childbirth. It is as though, after such an immense ordeal, the body cannot absorb what it has been through or learn to live with it… as though birth were a violation whose traces remain, the way traces of trauma remain. A body on guard, resisting, approaching touch with caution, as though it can no longer always distinguish between violation and love, between what hurts it and what holds it.
I used to think I was reading my patients’ bodies while remaining safely outside their pain. Then I discovered that every body that passed through my hands was leading me, step by step, back to my own. This box sealed around its own awareness, waiting for me to open it gently and make room for the moan buried beneath so many attempts to forget.
I will never forget the day that patient walked in. She was only twenty-two. Her mother stood on her right, her mother-in-law on her left. She had such a childlike face that it was difficult to believe she was even over twenty.
But who knows? Faces do not always reveal the age of the scars they carry.
She never answered our questions. Instead, the two women accompanying her took turns speaking constantly about her and about her body, as though guardianship had extended even to her pain.
She stared at the floor the entire time, her eyes fixed on some point in the doctor’s office. I stood at a distance watching the scene, a friend beside me, and felt myself suffocating for her. She was curled in on herself. Strikingly beautiful, yet her eyes were completely dimmed. She had been stripped of any authority over her own body. Even the right to express her pain was gone.
From the two women, we understood that she would not allow her husband to touch her. Whenever he approached, she closed her legs into the shape of an X, making them extremely difficult to separate without violently hitting her.
My God. They were beating her while her body was already in spasm. That sentence has never left me. A sharp contraction settled in my chest, as though I, too, were trying to pull my legs together. What absurdity is this? To beat her on top of her pain, her fear, all the shame and disgrace she carried around that moment?
The scene stayed with me for a long time. Ever since, whenever I touch a body locked in tension, I find myself wondering: how much violence might be hiding behind a hardened muscle that resists touch?
The only sentence that left her lips was that she saw “a jinn lover” in her dreams, and that he threatened to burn her husband. Somehow, she had been made to believe that she was “possessed”.
What I heard in her words was not so much a story about jinn as the story of a girl who had been stripped of the authority to interpret her own body. She had come to see its pain through other people’s eyes and to believe that what lived inside her was not fear, but jinn.
Jinn!
I swallowed with difficulty, and my body contracted exactly as hers had. I understood her experience with painful clarity. There is no guarantee that any one of us is safe from such a fate. Violence constantly surrounds us as a tool for suppressing bodies that slip beyond the control of the group.
What horror.
The doctor asked the two angels, Raqib and Atid, who had been keeping such close watch over the girl, to step outside for a while. It was clear that this poor body carried an experience that was terrible and deeply painful. It would take a great deal of work before it could breathe.
In the room beside the examination room, my friend, who was training with me, forced me to listen to Ayat al-Kursi and Surah Ya-Sin, loudly and repeatedly. She swore again and again that she had felt an evil energy. She was certain the “jinn lover” was there with us in the examination room.
She felt something pressing down on her chest until she could hardly breathe. I felt exactly the same thing, but it was not the ifrit. It was the weight of the girl’s body that had spread that feeling through the room.
Three weeks into physiotherapy, the girl’s husband called her doctor to thank her. She had been suffering from grade-four vaginismus.
A genuine shock for my friend in training. The veil had not been fully lifted from her after all!
Bodies do not usually lie. They carry the traces of deep wounds even when memory draws the curtain over old events, or when consciousness cannot believe the traumas we have lived through.
My own body proved this to me.
During my first panic attack, I had no idea what was happening. So many physiological symptoms that made no sense when I was simply sitting still, inside a closed house with no predators in it!
I tried to listen to what my body was saying through the tightness lodged in my throat, but the sound of my heart racing inside my chest drowned out the voice of my feelings. I tried to control my tense muscles, but nothing worked. My body was trying to speak to me about what I had never been able to say.
I once treated a patient with breast cancer who could not accept the removal of a beloved part of her body. My fingers moved in circles over the scar from her right mastectomy while she tried to convince me that it came from an old fall, swearing she had been a mischievous child.
She was lying. Or perhaps she was escaping.
But her body was not lying. Her arm, swollen with lymphatic fluid, was not lying.
I did not need to confront her with her fear or denial. Our bodies knew the truth. It was as though her skin were telling the fingers of my palms everything they needed to know before it could settle. With every movement, I remember a scar I thought I had forgotten, and with it come all my own scars, the ones my body still shudders at when it hears their voice and begins to tell their stories.
The idea that the body does not lie terrifies me.
As a woman approaching marriage, I know exactly what my unconscious holds around that idea. It was written upon my body that it should remain free, not fall into the deep abyss of shame before it had even taken shape. And so I carried it as a clear boundary, as an identity separate from myself, as a heavy friend I dragged with me to school and into the street, where I was supposed to fly.
Only when I watched dance did I forget the weight I carried inside my spirit. Or perhaps it was my body carrying me instead, with the weight of bone, muscle, skin, and organs, and on top of all that, the weight of experience and inheritance.
I watch the ripples of a body and I fly. Watching bodies unlike mine free themselves and move fluidly within themselves gave me freedom. Even when I learned to deal with the past by cutting myself off from anything that hurt me, the memories began returning as nightmares.
That poor little girl now sleeps quietly somewhere inside my spirit, just as that memory sleeps somewhere inside my body. Whenever I try to soothe her, to make things a little easier for her, I put on the record and dance with her to the rhythm of Samia Gamal, freeing her from the contagion of pain.
Perhaps this is precisely why I specialise in pelvic conditions today. Watching women move beyond their traumas teaches me something new about my own body. Every experience I become one with gives my own experience another dimension. It allows me to accept it, even to move beyond it.
And then I am frightened all over again by that moment when I lose the line between my hands and the warm tissue beneath them.
A shiver of being filled with the other passes through me; listening to its contractions, then to the quiet way it lets them go, as though they had all poured into my palms.
The moment passes.
And I begin thinking again about leaving my profession.
