Spirit and The Body
“Enlightenment needs embodiment. Wide open insight needs deep rooted instinct. As above, so below.”
In many spiritual circles, the body is viewed as an irrelevant and temporary storage unit. To go further, in some teachings, we are taught to denounce the body altogether.
Yet even some of the earliest religious teachings - particularly in Catholicism - the body is depicted artfully as the sacred vessel in which the Divine expresses itself most fully.
I think many of us have made the mistake that these pesky bodies of ours are at least a nuisance and at most irrelevant.
Let me tell you about my own journey with this body of mine.
As many of you know, I’ve been sick on and off with an autoimmune disease - Crohn’s Disease - since I was 7 years old. This has been coupled with a very early persuasion towards Spirit. And I don’t think there is any mistaking the connection between the two.
It has been this hyper-sensitive body of mine that has ushered me into a deep dive of the divine nature of my own being and the divine nature of all beings.
This body has been the doorway.
As a highly intuitive person, it has been my body that has felt every sneer, every ounce of love, every bout of jealousy, every slice of anger, all of the tension - good and not so good - from everyone I have ever been in contact with and even from the world at large.
I am, despite often not wanting to be, a human pendulum.
In many cases, this has been an incredible boon to my life. As I work with every client, my body immediately begins to weave together a story of their energy. It tells me where to begin and basically runs the session.
My body tells me in no uncertain terms what foods, drinks, people and places are either uplifting or draining. And it does so immediately.
“My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing that we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.”
An embrace of the body, as the vessel for Spirit, is the most important space for us to reside. We would do well to listen to it, learn to decipher its cues and act on its nudges.
Our bodies never betray us. Illness tells a very distinct story. Insomnia, indigestion, fatigue, nervous system dysregulation…they all tell us a story.
Anxiety, contrary to current mainstream tenets, is not a psychological problem. It is your nervous system desperately trying to get your attention.
Just like anxiety, depression is not embedded in an off kilter psychology. It is the body’s way of saying, “I’ve bloody had enough. Let me rest, for goodness sakes.”
Trying to heal even the most psychologically based so-called imperfections cannot be done without the body’s involvement. In fact, it will be the body itself that lights the way back to sanity.
Whether it is anxiety, depression, addiction, unrelenting fatigue or the most serious illness, it is all a call to return to what we’ve run like hell from.
None of these things is a sign that something is wrong.
All of these so-called maladaptive responses from the body are the siren song of The Divine calling us Home.
So…you might wonder, how does changing the way that I eat or move have anything to do with deepening our relationship with Spirit?
On their own, nothing. I don’t believe your Soul or God gives a damn whether you’re eating gluten or not.
And yet…
It is the call itself and the willingness to answer that call that is in-built into the trinity of experience.
It is the energetic pattern that weaves itself through all things that matters.
Gluten, as neutral as it is, contains a signature, as do all things in existence. If that particular signature, for whatever reason, is no longer vibing with your own, you will do much better without it.
Do you see?
The material world is the only way the Divine is able to fully express itself. And Light is the code in which it writes itself into reality.
The code makes itself manifest through our embodied experience.
The journey of a lifetime is cracking that code.
Don’t make this hard. It’s not.
You were born for this because the code is inborn in you.
It will not be found through thinking.
Pay attention to your vibe. Mind the ebbs and flows of your body. Let it lead you to the truth as it unfolds in you and let it reunite you with the Sacred.
The body, after all, is Sacred.
Let yours lead you Home.