"Body Wisdom"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
November 20, 2005

Let me be honest with you. I want something from you today. My desire is to have each and every one of you leave church today feeling good about your body. That’s my purpose today.

It’s my purpose, because standing here looking out at you, I see so much beauty. You are beautiful. I know that you may believe you have flaws – but what I see is your utter loveliness. And your bodies: big and small and in-between; short and tall and medium height; slim and round and whatever happy medium there is; healthy or injured and aching and compromised; young and middling and old; smooth-skinned or hairy or bumpy or wrinkled; straight or stooped or curved or bent – your bodies are a very important part of your beauty. They manifest your beauty and make it available to the world. And if I can, I’d like to help you feel really good about that.

We live in a world, though, that pushes us to dislike our bodies, to punish them, cover them, inhibit them, deny them in public and indulge them in secret. Western culture is rife with a body-denying dualism that says mind is primary, body is lower than low – the animal part of us, the lesser being, the despised creature whose desires will prevent us from achieving enlightenment or spiritual freedom. A dualism rooted in philosophy and in religious teaching that says the body must be transcended.

But then there’s the raw truth of it, as in Joyce Sutphen’s wonderful poem: “body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you get only one.” This is it – this body, this life, right now. What I'm hoping is that as human beings we can come to know that truth not in a “you only get one body so you’d better stop complaining about it” kind of way, but instead, in the mode of Eduardo Galeano! “I am a fiesta,” says the body. I am a celebration! I am a blessing beyond compare. Enjoy me!

Bodies are necessary – they allow life and growth, including the life and growth of what we might call our mind and our spirit or soul. It is truly impossible to have real spiritual, emotional, or intellectual health unless we take good care of our physical bodies. As the Buddha is reported to have said, “To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”

But I’m not here today to admonish you regarding the usual things we think of when someone says we have to keep our bodies healthy – the usual “eat a low-fat, high fiber diet and drink plenty of water and get lots of exercise” prescription. You already know about that.

No, today, we’re about something else, and that is tuning in to our bodies’ wisdom. That is, our bodies’ accumulated knowledge, their insight and their good sense. For Unitarian Universalists this is a good practice, because our religion urges us to rely so powerfully on our minds. It's also good because each day now we move more deeply into the holiday over-eating and over-doing season – a time when many of us choose to ignore our bodies' wisdom.

The idea that human beings are divided; that we have a soul or a spirit that is in some way distinct from our bodies is a most ancient one. As human beings evolved a sense of self-consciousness in the last millennium before the Common Era, mystery cults arose in Greece which focused on the opposition between mind and body as a way to explain that new experience of self, of consciousness. The idea of the soul, or psyche, as the spirit of the physical body began to emerge, and great speculation resulted as to what the soul was made of, and where within the body it was located.

With Plato, in the fourth and fifth centuries before the Common Era, the soul began to be perceived as trapped inside the body. The body and soul were in mortal combat. This idea evolved, and became the widely accepted belief that the soul would outlast the body after death. In the 16th century, philosopher Rene Descartes shaped the version of body/mind or body/spirit dualism that has been handed down to us – his famous quote, “I think, therefore I am,” or perhaps more accurately, “I am thinking, therefore, I am,” reflected his understanding that his true self was the part that thinks, and that this thinking part was the eternal portion of a human being. The body was the dumb animal, the lesser, mortal part.

That’s the dualism that is so prevalent in Western culture. Unfortunately, it creates within us a fragmentation that often makes us feel very separate from one another, separate from the natural world, and even separate from our own selves at times. It’s the kind of fragmentation that makes it easy to rationalize acts of disrespect, disregard and even destruction or exploitation of the bodies or souls of others.

Body wisdom urges us toward something else: an understanding that what we might think of as either mind or spirit or soul -- or all three -- is an inherent quality of our bodies, not something separate from them.
For here’s a truth: no matter what we believe about body and spirit and mind and soul: body is what we know.

By that I mean that what we experience in life first hand is tasting, touching, seeing, smelling, hearing…. and the deep joy and passion they can bring. We know the physical sensations of pain and pleasure and the knowledge and enlightenment our senses supply.

"Our bodies can be our wisest teachers, our most enlightened gurus. Perhaps it is a headache or backache, slumping shoulders or chest pain, failing eyes or constipated bowels. Almost always, hidden in our wound, is something that will enrich and deepen our lives. … Our bodies will teach us more than we can imagine, if only we will listen.” (from Mark Gerzon, author of the book "Listening to Midlife," in “Spiritual Literacy,” p. 371)

But how shall we do that listening? Jungian analyst and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, "The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heart of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes ajitter, sometimes trembling. …." (“Spiritual Literacy,” p. 370)

We listen to our bodies and all they have to teach us by turning our conscious awareness to our bodily processes – our breathing, our heartbeat, the wetness or dryness of our mouths and eyes and noses, the sensations in our genitals and intestines, the tension in our muscles, the pains in our joints or our heads or our teeth. Attending to even a small portion of the information we receive from our bodies in every waking moment is a powerful way to grow in consciousness. We listen to the body and access its wisdom not by thinking, but through our five senses as well as with a sixth, our kinesthetic sense – which give us an understanding of where our body is located in space as conveyed to us through special structures at the ends of nerves in our muscles, tendons, and joints. How we sit, stand, hold a position or a posture can tell us volumes about ourselves. The map of our physical aches and pains, abilities and disabilities is full of wisdom. The body is a marvel, an intricate system of infinitely expressive, interconnected systems, if we will but pay attention.

But there's more, too, than this practice of tuning in and paying attention. We have to do something with the information we receive. We have to allow it to lead us to gratitude and appreciation for our bodies.

There's a story about this from Frederic Brussat, one of the editors of the book "Spiritual Literacy." He writes, "I struggle with a negative view of my body. As a boy I was skin and bones, and was often the subject of ridicule. By middle age, I was normal weight but still carried with me a negative body image. One day while showing friends around the resort in Antigua where we vacation, I slipped on the algae and fell down, slamming my head against the rocks. There was a … one-inch … gash in my scalp.

The nurse at the hotel took care of the wound, declaring that it … did not require stitches. But the next morning, I noticed some blood on my pillow and pointed it out to the maid. 'No problem,' she said. 'I’ll clean it. I heard you cut your head.'

A few days later, I met the maid in the hallway. I was about to say something about my cut being healed when she beat me to the point. 'Preacherman,' she said with a big smile, 'you have good flesh.'

Good flesh! Those were the sweetest words I had ever heard about my body. I told (my wife) I wanted to emblazon them across a T-shirt. … Such a simple miracle really, a cut healing quickly, but it helped me to cherish and appreciate my body as I never had before." (Frederic Brussat, in Spiritual Literacy pp. 375-6)

Good flesh! So many things can awaken us to a life-changing appreciation for our bodies. For some of us it is a life-threatening illness or an injury. For others, it may be an athletic or other physical achievement. In my own experience, half my lifetime ago, I attended a six-day human potential movement boot camp of sorts that showed me body wisdom.

On the third or fourth day of the camp, we were organized into groups of five people, and sent out to do a grueling ropes course. My group, a motley crew ranging in age from my 23 years to about fifty five, and spanning a wide range of fitness levels, had never done anything like it before. We had to rappel off a cliff, and pull ourselves hand-over-hand on a rope across a ravine, suspended on our backs by a harness around our hips. And we had to jump off another cliff on a zipline, which had us zooming down a rope hanging for dear life from a pulley with handles.

Now, it was all very safe, mind you. We were trussed up in more harnesses and safety straps than I'd imagined possible. But it meant pushing ourselves physically far beyond where we had gone before – and we were scared. We had to use our bodies wisely, to help each other, and to be aware.

We all made it, I'm proud to report, with only a little whining, and lots of tears of joy and pride in one another as we cheered each other on over these obstacles.

But as I said, this was a human potential “boot camp,” and that meant that even though we were exhausted, we weren't done for the day. And while learning that I could jump off a cliff and not die was a huge revelation to me, the really big lesson in body wisdom came later that evening.

That was when we had to gather with the full group of 100 people in the assembly hall, dressed only in our bathing suits. Row by row, half-naked and embarrassed, we were ushered up on a stage, and placed in front of full-length mirrors. As the rest of the group watched, our trainers asked us to take our time, and really, really, look at our semi-naked bodies. To look at them as though we'd never seen them before. Start with your hair, they said, and then slowly move your gaze down over your head, your face, your neck, your shoulders….

Most of us could hardly bear what we saw in the mirrors: paunchy bellies, sagging flesh, lumps and bumps and weird hairs and moles and so on and so on … What I saw in the mirror, though, was a perfect body. (Perfect by cultural standards, at least.) Twenty-three years old, slim, fairly fit, well-proportioned, suntanned… all lumps and bulges in their right places. For me, the shock, the recognition that brought tears, was in seeing clearly, for the very first time, not how my body looked, but how I had used it.

Looking in the mirror I saw a Barbie doll: a plastic cutie-lump I had trotted out for display. I saw that I had used my body as a lure, as a shield. In a culture that objectifies women, I had objectified myself. On that day, when the ropes course had pushed me into truly inhabiting my own flesh, joyfully, carefully, and completely, I saw in that mirror that I had never really allowed myself to cherish my own flesh, to understand my body as friend, as sacred, as key to my personhood. I had a body, but I was, in essence, disembodied. I had been holding my perfect body out to the world like a mask, a shell, a shield -- and hiding behind it.

I saw all of this very clearly in that moment. But it has taken many long years to change. Indeed, I think it only fully shifted when I became pregnant with my child. When I was pregnant, I was suddenly not alone in my body any more. And finding myself inhabited by another in this new way, I was pushed to reclaim and appreciate my own flesh. At first it was in the name of service to my baby that I learned to honor and appreciate and listen to my body, but it is a practice that has stayed with me more or less ever since.

I don't always do it, but I try to view my body with compassion when I am before the mirror, naked or clothed. I try to hold my scars and aches and aging flesh with love.

I don't always do it, but I strive to touch my own flesh with kindness – to remember the lovely words of Persian mystic Hafiz who wrote: "When no one is looking and I want to kiss God, I just lift my own hand to my mouth."

I don't always do it, but I love to take my body out for a spin – to walk not only briskly but consciously. To exercise not only with energy, but with a sense of joy. To honor my urges to dance, to sway, to sing, to bounce, to turn and look, to sniff the air, to laugh! I don't always do it, but I work to pay attention to my breathing – to notice when I am holding my breath and to unstop that stopped flow; to remember that my lungs are generous, compassionate, ready to serve, if I will only pay attention to them. I encourage you to do all of these things as well.

My colleague, the Rev. Kathleen McTigue writes, "To touch our bodies, feel our bodies, watch them move and breathe, is to know ourselves. It is also to invite in the gratitude and awareness that can counteract the madness of our disembodied culture. We cannot trade in these precious, vital bodies of ours the way we might trade in an old car when it begins to clank a little. What we can do instead is taste real freedom, no matter what shape our bodies are in, by inhabiting them fully, letting them be what they are, and gratefully accepting the world through all the windows of our senses."

As we journey through this holiday season, the eating season, the busy season, the season of hopes and wishes, of anticipation and memories both glad and somber, let us remember that we can choose – as long as we are alive – to pay attention to the messages our bodies bring us, and to inhabit them more fully with each passing year.

We can choose – as long as we live – to honor our bodies with the foods that we eat, and remember with each bite that our bodies are connected in one great system with all the bodies on our planet.

We can choose – from now until the end of our lives – to celebrate our bodies, to open ourselves to the fiestas that we are. To remember that being embodied is a good gift, and a joyful one! We can choose – as long as we are alive – to listen to our bodies, to smile to them; to smile to our livers, to our hearts, to our feet – to breathe in and smile to our very smiles themselves!

May we all be blessed, mind and body, body and spirit, body and soul and body, this day and every day.

Amen.