This Body

It is amazing how estranged we can feel from the bodies in which we have lived our entire lives. How often and completely we can forget the miracle of how our bodies hold our aliveness in the perfect balance of breath, blood, bone, and cell, moving us through the world with grace and purpose. Surely, it is the spirit itself that gives me my next breath.  These are the bodies through which we hold one another with care, skin to skin, offering food, shelter, and companionship. All that we will ever feel in this life will flow through this body, every tender kiss and tear, each heartbreaking loss, all our strength, shame, pride, and frailty. But I forget this on a daily and moment to moment basis living too much of my life on the outskirts of my own embodiment. 

I am afraid of feeling so much, of not feeling enough. My body sometime cathedral, sometime prison, friend, enemy, and stranger.  When dissociation takes hold, I can sometimes feel as if I am not in my body but walking somewhat at a distance from it.  I can feel the estranging longing to be in another body, as if the wanting itself makes this possible, a body that feels less pain and shame than my own so that I might enjoy life more. At other times, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this body that has given me my life.  I can feel the elation of being myself and at the same time connected with everything else on earth. 

Integration into our bodies doesn’t just happen with our birth but is a lifelong process of making our home inside. Embodiment requires developing the tensile strength, compassion, and suppleness to hold emotional, physical, and spiritual pain and elation.  With an inner depth holding us, we will have less need for the self-loathing, be less susceptible to the lies of the beauty merchants, granted the chance to live into the truth of the miracle of our bodies in this world. We will be content and amazed at the movement of our feet on the earth, the holding of a teacup, the feel of the cold wind on a cheek, the pain of loss, the freedom in surrender.