Hi friends,
I’m realizing that in this season of my life, I’m gonna have to stop making promises about the when or how often of this little newsletter. That being said, if you’re still here as a reader, thanks for sticking with me.
These last few weeks my body has been warning me to slow down. I have experienced several bouts of unexplained illness which are sending me very clear signals that I have been trying to keep up with too many things.
There’s so much I could say about bodies and listening to them, but let me say just a few things. The first is that, in so many settings nowadays, it’s popular to talk about inclusion. Topics such as accomodations and building renovations are bubbling up in organizational and church settings. And this is a good thing. Yet, it also shows how much we as a society are operating from this labeling system which divides humans into “normal humans” and “abnormal humans,” with the “normal humans” working hard to figure out how to “include” the “abnormal humans.”
We tend to do this same thing with our bodies, too. Our bodies are either functioning “normally” or they are behaving “abnormally,” and when they are being “abnormal,” we do everything we can to fix them so they can get back to “normal.” Yet, to get to my main point, what would happen if we saw the “abnormal” as just as central and valuable as the “normal” and made space for it as though it was supposed to be there all along?
What if we decided to listen to the “abnormal” with the same level of respect and reverence we give to the “normal”? What if our goal stopped being to try to fix things, but rather to embrace everything as “human,” pure and simple? In short, what does it mean for me to hear my body’s illnesses as important, valuable messages?
(Please don’t hear me saying treatment or medical care is not warranted, or that on the flip side, we should try to make everyone fit our mold called “normal”; that would be taking this metaphor further than I intend.)
For me of late, instead of getting frustrated with illness, I’ve been tuning into it by centering the “voice of illness” and asking what it is telling me, what it needs from me, and then tending to it. These last few weeks, illness has asked me to value myself and my body enough to do crazy things, like drop or miss classes, not do all of my homework, or take time off work.
Illness has asked me to reckon with how I am orienting my life— am I investing time in what really matters to me? The verse, “What does it profit a human if they gain the whole world but lose their very soul?” has been on repeat in my head like an earworm. What if I or a loved one died tomorrow? How would I wish I had been living?
The second thing I’d like to bring up is that we ought to be celebrating the earthy realness of our bodies. We shouldn’t wait for someone to tell us our bodies are “okay enough” to experience joy or pleasure.
Our humanness is not just somehow trapped in our souls; it is a beautiful ecosystem, a web, of mind-body-spirit interconnection. As an example, psychology is continuously discovering that we store psychological, emotional, spiritual trauma in our bodies. And you know what? I think this is something we know deep down in our ancient bones.
I think it is something we humans have lost touch with as we moved into the land of “bodies are bad/temporal and spirits are eternal” and “everything about us can be measured, categorized, sorted, and treated.”
I’m pretty sure that the more we’ve disconnected from our physical selves, the more we’ve been willing to both live into and perpetuate trauma, both on a personal as well as on a global level.
I’d be willing to connect our disconnection from our bodies to our disconnection from our planet and one another, a fact which has led to personal, global, and communal trauma. What would happen if we started to work on healing this connection? What if this was something “church” worked on?
I have so much more to say about theology and bodies, body liberation, and fat liberation, but for now I will leave it at that.
Until next time, and with much love,
Carissa.