It took me a long time to be truly comfortable in my body. In fact, it is something I still work on.
I don't know about you, I treated my body like a tool. I come from the "no pain, no gain" era. The body wasn't something to be cherished, it was my own personal meat suit.
I pushed through exhaustion because rest felt like weakness. I ignored the ache in my shoulder for two years because stopping to tend it felt like an inconvenience to my schedule. I treated my body the way you'd treat a rental car — drive it hard, worry about the damage later, it's not really mine anyway. Looking back, that's an odd way to treat the one vessel I actually get to keep for this entire lifetime.
Yes, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. And we chose to be here in this dimension in this body. It is good to remember that this is the place where God lives as me.
Ernest Holmes says, "In humanity we seem to have that point where heaven and earth meet, a place where the spiritual and the physical meet. The intangible spiritual always becomes the tangible form. But in humans the spiritual retains its identity as spirit and mind, while at the same time being tangible as physical body." –Ernest Holmes, A New Design for Living
Read that again. Heaven and earth meet — not in a temple, not in a sunset, not in some far-off spiritual plane. In humanity. In this body. In your body, reading this right now. If that's true, then every time I've treated my body like an inconvenience, I've been treating the meeting place of heaven and earth like an inconvenience. That's a sobering thought, and also a freeing one — it means I don't have to go anywhere else to find the sacred. I'm standing in it. I am it.
A lot has happened over this past year for me to truly "feel" my body, not as a tool, more like a spiritual companion. I have been given the opportunity to truly understand there is no separation from my spiritual self and my human self — they are one and the same. True, eventually the physical form of me will lay off this old garment and don something new. And yet until then, it is important to love and respect this material form I have been graced to take care of.
This is the work of inhabiting — not just occupying. There's a difference between living in a house and inhabiting a home. Occupying is passive; you're just there. Inhabiting is active — you tend it, you notice it, you make it yours on purpose. For most of my life I occupied my body. I showed up in it. I didn't inhabit it. I didn't know its rooms. I didn't know what it needed to feel like home.
I recently spent an hour and a half having an Ayurvedic Bliss Massage. I used to be that person who thought the only massage worth having was a deep tissue
massage. I am sure they have their place, and what I realized is that a deep tissue massage feels like an attack on this temple known as my body. For me, there is nothing more relaxing or aligning than being on a table and having someone treat your body like it truly is the place where God lives.
I remember lying there, warm oil, no urgency anywhere in the room, and thinking: this is what it feels like to be cared for instead of pushed through. My whole nervous system exhaled. It occurred to me that I had spent decades unconsciously teaching my body that softness wasn't safe — that the only way to earn rest was to collapse first. That hour and a half undid a little bit of that teaching. One session doesn't erase forty years of "no pain, no gain," but it planted a different question in me: what if my body doesn't have to earn tenderness? What if it's owed tenderness, simply because it's the house God lives in?
Am I going to become vegan and give up espresso milkshakes? Never! And there are ways I can be more mindful in aligning my physical being with my spiritual being, because right now they are one and the same.
So, here's an invitation, not a prescription: this week, pick one small way to inhabit rather than occupy. A slower shower. Three real breaths before you answer the next text. A hand on your own chest for ten seconds, just to say I see you, I've got you. Radical Embodiment doesn't ask you to overhaul your life. It asks you to notice you're already home — and to start acting like it.
Blessings on your journey,
Rev. Gayle
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