Body
as path for becoming more human
Embodiment.
The Body. This house, temple, sanctuary, prison, container. This Flesh and Blood. Marrow, Bones, Skin and Organs. and Cells, vessels, muscles and fingertips. Toes and knees, elbows and funny bone. Eyes and nostrils, nipples and belly button. Hair and nails, veins and freckles. Moles and fat and eyelashes. The Body.
It is good to have a body and to be inside of a body. There are many paths of spiritual development for the body to carry us on. Some paths have told us that we must transcend the body. Some paths help us to understand and be more intimate with the traveling mind, the moving energies of emotions. Without a body, we wouldn’t have the mind or the emotions to explore any one path.
Artist: Nataliya Rozhdestvenskaya
And there is the path of the Body -the path of Embodying the Body. Of becoming more attuned to the Body, its stories, its secrets, its inheritance, its unique destiny. I like being a body with thoughts, emotions, a spirit, a soul, and the will to move through change my reality, change my world. Create change in my world.
Within the body, and becoming a more fully embodied body, there are different ways to travel. Being in nature is one of my favorite ways to travel in a body. To be with the ecosystem around me, while experiencing my inner ecosystem. Connection with my other-than-human-relations that grow visibly or invisibly beneath me, around me. In the green vines, the green spirals, the green and blooming mathematical perfection of nature.
Artist: Christy Kirk
Another path for me is Dance —specifically Five Rhythms dance, developed by Gabrielle Roth. Dancing a wave is the one path that makes me and my body more true. Keeps me honest. Brings me home. Accompanied by a map and breath, awareness and surrender. Five rhythms is more than a number, more than a beat, more than a name.
Artist: Vixie Styx
The body can bring you to ecstasy and it can also bring you to pain and it can be a locked treasure box or a ticking time bomb.
Bodies are funny and mysterious with the way they hold things: memories, emotions, stories. Bodies do not lie. Minds are the ones to keep your eyes peeled for, with their cunning. Minds can distort the reality of the sensation moving through body. But bodies, they tend towards truth. Of course, they can lean towards animal instincts in an out of balance way. And one can get too deeply entrenched in body, in material, where body is locked tightly from any breath of spirit. But for the most part, a body will be truthful.
Bodies can also get stuck in truths. And to unstick them requires as much effort as digging a trench and building a proper foundation before building a new house. Minds and bodies go together but they can also be split apart. The church once had so much power that in the 800s it split apart soul from body and that story has lasted for over 1000 years.
Body is more than body when it is embodied. What I mean by embodied is that of course, everybody has a body, but not every body fully inhabits the body, because of where the stories get stuck. And to inhabit the body more deeply, more fully, more widely, more roundly, more sensually, is to clear the cobwebs, chase away the ghosts, get friendly with the ancient ancestors of grief or trauma and listen to what the secret places in body have to say.
Sometimes you do need a guide when adventuring inside of body because Body is also a landscape of possibility and a way of freedom and it has its pitfalls and tricksters, magical helpers and potential dangers. Grief and Trauma are things that most bodies have somewhere inside of them, and many bodies do not like to make friends with these things. Many bodies know they are there, and consciously or unconsciously avoid them. There are many ways to avoid, ignore, numb out, drown out, space out and disembody a story in the body.
And there are many bodies that do not know the body, that have unconsciously walked disembodied for many lifetimes. To be a body is a lot harder than it seems. But also, an amazing, honest, deep, powerful, awesome path for becoming human. Especially with the stories and religions who for hundreds or 1000’s of years, tricked us into believing that body is bad, or that the key to life, to being a human is to transcend the body. There are many paths to freedom and many paths to imprisonment. Sometimes the path is one and the same. Sometimes that is the way inside the body.
What are your favorite body practices? What are your favorite modalities to access the wisdom of the body? How do you relate to your body? How is body a teacher, a guide for your spiritual development or incarnation in this lifetime?
Artist: Amalia Rachel
stay tuned for Body : Write
A body-centered writing exploration, in we write the stories, rite the stories, right the stories in the body. And move them toward greater freedom. Greater love. Greater truth.
I was fortunate to involve myself back in the 80s in somatic psychotherapy based on the concepts of Wilhelm Reich investigating what he called "character structure and armoring" - chronic muscular tension resulting from emotional trauma. If the tension can be stressed, it can be released and expressed in real time and life energy can again flow.
This is deep primal work and raw emotions are often expressed when released. I remember a group session attended by some "born again" Christians who interpreted the release of trauma as summoning the Devil. Paradoxically, the 'patient' experienced the release and sense of integration likely described it as finding God again. Healthy humanity is a balance, a harmony of body and Spirit.
There is a wonderful book by Dr. Alexander Lowen called "Spirituality of the Body." Lowen refined Reich's theories into a soma-based therapy which was very pragmatic, but also profoundly deep and spiritual. There is a split in the West between mind/body and also between religion/spirituality. His book attempts to explore and demystify the unfettered flow of divine energy through our human form, which he referred to as "grace."
In our culture, grace has both a secular and spiritual aspect. We admire the grace of an athlete or the smooth physicality of the movements of a wild animal, but we acknowledge a spiritual aspect of grace, a seamless energetic merging of Heaven and earth - "God's grace." The body is a conduit for this energy transfer and transformation from the etherial into form.
Eastern and Western spiritual philosophies look at one's connection to a higher order from different points of view. Eastern thinking sees spirituality as a bodily phenomenon, Western thinking views it primarily as a function of the mind. Another way of expressing the difference is to say that in the west spirituality is largely a matter of belief, where in the East is is more a matter of feeling - a "felt sense."
He noted the difference between wild animal grace and conscious human grace or graciousness. Aldous Huxley states that Man's nature is such that he must live a self-conscious life in time. "Natural animal grace is no longer sufficient for life and must be supplemented by deliberate choices between right and wrong." Lowen points out: "If animal grace is no longer sufficient for the conduct of human life, it may still be necessary. When one deliberately adopts a gracious style without grounding it in natural bodily feelings, such graciousness is a facade erected to impress and deceive the world." There can be no superiority of mind over body - grace demands a true parity, an effortless harmony of mind and Spirit.
Modern life is unbalanced and disruptive to our bodily sense of spirituality. Music, dance, "forest bathing" - anything to bring our focus back to our bodies is a spiritual practice. We must consciously turn down the volume of our heads and surrender to the deep wisdom of our guts and intuition. That is our only path to salvation and a return to Grace.
https://johnhardman.substack.com/p/return-to-eden