And The Body: What About the Body?

Our bodies need us. Mine needs me, I know. To pay attention, to listen, to learn, to nurture: to remain as mindful of it as if it were a young child crossing a street.

What are my body’s signals? Do you know yours? The signals for food? The signals for enough?  What are your alerts for distress and your vibrations of joy?

How does joy show up in my body? The cells cheering, clapping their hands, warmth spreading through my chest, a tingling at the back of my neck, tiny hairs rising, when the choir in church nails it—hits those high notes and soars!

My body when I walk alone: am I in it or out of it? Aloft in the treetops, dazzled by sunshine, furiously fending off below –zero wind that threatens to rip off my face? Am I present?

My body: what about my body in despair, curled and damp, listless, dull-minded and limp. Am I paying attention? What does it yearn for? What does it need?

When I exercise too much and a throbbing begins in my hip, does it deserve some time out with an ice pack? How hard can I push it and still respect its limits?

When I am tired, can I be tired?  Lie on the couch, have a cup of tea, smile at the tree outside my window, watching the gray-blue nuthatches that tiptoe upwards along the bark?

It’s always all right to get moving. Is it all right to quit? All right to admire the strength in my legs and all right to smile ruefully at the pleats of flesh that fold down over my torso when I sit in the bathtub?

Can we offer our bodies some tenderness? Some gratitude?

The body is not a vehicle for us to kick around, starve or stuff, prod and push: a vehicle that too often the mind drags around like a wobbly cart through thick, wet mud. No. Never.

For we are one holy and miraculous tripartite system: body, mind and spirit. Merged and interdependent. Abuse to any part of us is an abuse to all of our parts.

I wonder why we don’t get that?

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“And the body. What about the body?” was a time-limited prompt given at the Westport Writer’s Workshop I attended on April 6. I dove into it and the above is essentially what I wrote.

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 FYI: My body loves:

1.Acupuncture and Qigong Healing with the Master, Jeff Zimmerman, at Center For Energy in Westport.

2. Pilates at Black Rock Pilates

3. Massages with Sue Kaufman, Fairfield Therapeutic Massage

4. Yoga at Yoga4Everybody, Fairfield