by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, May 2, 2004
In a poem called "Living in the Body", Joyce Sutphen writes:
Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.
Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly -- better to leave it as it is.
Body is a thing you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.
We know that body is something we need in order to stay in this world, and we know that it doesn't last forever. Knowing these two things, how do we regard our own flesh? Jack Kornfield's Tibetan Buddhist teacher said, "This human body is more precious than the rarest gem. Cherish your body; it is yours for this one time only…a thing of beauty that passes away." I wonder how many of us can honestly say that that's our perspective on our own bodies?
What the words bring to mind for me is not how I regard my own body, but how I looked at the bodies of each of my children when they were first born. We all look at newborns this way. We feel awe and pure delight at the little shell of the ear, each tiny fingernail, the length and lushness of eyelashes and eyebrows, the translucent skin at the temple, the smooth, pudgy bottoms, the delicious, fat, squeezable thighs.
Why is it that we never, ever seem to turn even a fraction of that profound admiration and joy toward our own bodies as we move through this life of ours? How did we learn to so disregard our only gateway onto the world? Because it is, after all, through this one particular body that is ours that we receive all the beauty and pain of the world around us: through our wide open eyes and ears and nostrils, our vulnerable skin and sensitive tongue. We should be taught to see them not just as precious, but as holy. Yet we hardly ever honor our bodies as something extraordinary, and precious. Instead, we take them for granted, or we ignore them. We often mistreat them, and then declare that they have failed us. We notice their abilities only when they begin to fade: when our eyes give out or our deafness grows or our joints get stiff and creaky, then we notice how competent our bodies have been.
Even worse, many of us were taught distaste for how our bodies look to us. They are too fat or short, the breasts too big or small, the face not handsome enough, the hair not thick enough, the nose hooked or crooked or bulbous or pointy. Some of us were born with disabilities, seen by others and then by ourselves as deficient, defined by what our bodies cannot do instead of by what they can do. And as we get older, even the truly gorgeous among us start to measure ourselves by what we are not: we are not still young, and our bodies show the years we've lived through.
This dissatisfaction is cultivated by our culture, in which the body is relentlessly seen as commodity. It is something to be plucked and shaved and manicured, wrestled with to make it slimmer, worked out to make its muscles bulge or its bottom tight. It is to be disguised and painted and dyed to make it look thinner and younger than it is. A couple of months ago I was sitting in a doctor's office and picked up a magazine to peruse. I think this was an issue of "People" magazine, and the cover article that caught my eye promised details on 'Extreme Make-Overs". Now, I have to confess that there are a few ways that my aversion to television makes me what my husband sometimes declares "a cultural illiterate". Otherwise you won't understand that when I saw that title, I actually thought it meant people who had radically changed their lives. I imagined someone moving, say, from a lengthy prison term for drunk driving into becoming an extraordinary, compassionate counselor for substance abusers.
As I'm sure all of you knew instantly, what they meant instead by "extreme makeover" was a whole package of plastic surgery by which lips were pooched out and reddened and puffy eyes made sleek, bellies tucked and shrunk, breasts made perky, thighs made slim. All with raving commentary from the victims -- that is, consumers -- about how fine and dandy their lives are now that they don't look so old. I get it -- I understand that surgeries like these, which are becoming more and more common, are the natural and inevitable outcome of our culture's attitude toward beauty, toward aging and toward the body. But there is no surgery that teaches us to listen to the body's hungers and needs, to treasure our cunning fingers and our humble feet as they touch the world, to take joy in how we move to pulsing rhythms when we dance. There is no surgery, no matter how extreme or expensive, that will keep us from getting old, from becoming sick or disabled, or from dying. And yet as long as we see the body as object, as commodity, we will be vulnerable to these wasteful, destructive, deeply disrespectful impulses.
James Joyce wrote of one of his characters, "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body." It isn't just Mr. Duffy: most of us live with that same delusion, to one degree or another: that sense of disconnect between me and my body. The real me is here, sitting ageless and very nearly perfect right behind my eyes; but the eyes themselves, like the rest of my body, live at a slightly different address.
Body is something we need in order to stay on this planet. We only get one, and despite all our efforts it is pretty much the same body day to day. Body is a thing that will dissolve: it will not last forever. All of those things mentioned in the poem are true. It is also true that no matter what we believe about mind and spirit and soul and self, all of the reality we can know in our lives is embodied reality. So we should stop making the mistake of believing we live at some other address. There is no spiritual growth and maturity possible in this life except through embodiment, in the particular flesh that is ours, with its blemishes and its failings, its amazing gifts and capacities, its hungers and its pain. And so we have to learn to know, to honor and to love our bodies as a part of our spiritual path.
Jack Kornfield writes, "This precious human body is a holy treasure-house for action and awakening. Holy the head, holy the ears, holy the limbs and breasts, holy the feet and hands, holy the heart and skin, holy the hair and genitals, the liver, the lungs, the blood, the tiniest cells and the breath of life. As the writer Eduardo Galeano put it,
'The church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.'"
How shall we manage this shift of perspective? Jon Kabot-Zinn, a pioneer in helping people cope with chronic pain, once said, "The deep meaning of 'rehabilitation', which is related to the word 'habitation', is 'learning to live inside again.'" I think that most of us are in need of some lessons on how to live inside again -- how to truly know our address, the bodies that carry us through this world.
There are some tried and true ways to do that, as through yoga practices. I first tried yoga five years ago as part of a meditation retreat. Until then I had avoided yoga, mostly (I am ashamed to say) out of performance anxiety. I knew perfectly well that I would never manage even the simplest stretch or position the way the yoga teacher could do it, and I was afraid of looking clumsy or inept or out of shape. Lucky for me, on this retreat an hour of yoga was a mandatory part of the program, and in the course of dutifully following the gentle urgings of our teacher, I got a mini-epiphany of sorts. I finally really saw that ever since a childhood and early adolescence wearing the identity of Fat Girl, I have had an adversarial relationship to my body -- far more aware of how it didn't measure up than of what it could do. A daily hour of yoga opened my eyes to how deeply ignorant I was of how my own body felt and responded. I was amazed at how it would open in a stretch that could enliven each muscle, how the breath could feel as though it circulated down to my toes, how vibrant and alert my body could become when I gave it some attention.
An hour of yoga a day is a daunting prospect, but fortunately that isn't necessary. It isn't the length of time or the number of stretches that matter, it's the attention we bring. It's how we regard our bodies, and whether we're willing to listen to them. There is yoga for people over seventy, yoga for people who have had strokes, yoga for people in wheelchairs. All of it is grounded in the belief that mind and body, spirit and flesh, are inseparable, and that if we are interested in truly knowing one, we need to open ourselves just as fully to the other.
And there are many other embodied spiritual practices: ecstatic dance, ritual bathing, tai chi and other eastern movement meditations. Just walking down the road can be a practice if we notice our body moving; the slow shift from bed into standing up, noticing the pull of gravity on our limbs, can be a practice. Abraham Joshua Heschel's ritual was one of the smallest and easiest: the first thing he did on waking each morning was to carefully, attentively wash his hands. So much can be held in such a simple gesture. It's a way to honor the threshold moment that most of us yawn or scowl our way through -- the passage from sleeping to waking life. To go first not for the newspaper, the coffee or the shower, or even for the toilet or the toothbrush, but to a ritual washing of the hands, is a profoundly attentive way to enter the world each day. We touch the body in gratitude and awareness, and bless the hands for all they will do as the hours unfold. We notice that we are embodied.
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.
Ram Dass, is an American spiritual teacher who suffered a catastrophic stroke in 1997. About a year later he said, "For years I practiced the path of service. I wrote books about learning to serve, about how to help others. Now it is reversed. I need people to help me get up and put me to bed. Others feed me and wash my bottom…But this is just another stage….If I think I'm the guy who can't play cello or drive or work in India, I would feel terribly sorry for myself. But I'm not him…I have a new life in a disabled body. This is where I am. We've got to be here now. We've got to take the curriculum."
A couple of weeks ago my family and I carved out six days and escaped the daily round to New Orleans and Lafayette, a part of the earth I had never seen. One night in Lafayette, with the girls happily put to bed in a little inn, Nick and I wandered down the road to a real old fashioned dance hall that was pulling in people by the score to some fantastic zydeco music. We were a little shy of going in, afraid we might stand out as foreigners, but no one gave us anything more than the nod and smile everyone else got. They were there to dance, every one of them. They were there in every size and shape and color, and among them were some who looked to be in their eighties.
They did not look like the samples of perfection our culture tries to force us toward, and as representatives of the human race in America, I'm sure they had their share of issues around body image. But what I saw was a crowd of people joyfully embodied, moving with rhythm and grace and happiness no matter what their size, their shape, their age. It felt like I was in a roomful of totally inhabited bodies; and it worked on me like a magic charm, pulling me out of the dissatisfied critiques of my mind and into a deeper and happier occupation of the flesh.
It felt like what C.K. Williams wrote about in a poem called "The Dance":
A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she's with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with effortless grace
into the union she's instantly established…
that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed…
something to which we've never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we
misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.
AMEN.