BRINGING YOUR BODY HOME

            As simple and mundane as the body scan appears to be on the surface, for some people it is a step into healing and wholeness. It may be the first time in a long while that they have nourished their own bodies instead of rejecting them.

            Rejecting one’s own body is not as uncommon as one might think. People in chronic pain, people whose bodies have been violated, people with low self-esteem who include their appearance in their low opinion of themselves, and so on, may cope with their bodily issues by avoiding their bodies or outright rejecting them. People in pain may seek to escape their bodies through sleep, drugs, or constant busyness and distraction. People who hate their bodies may diet and exercise to extreme, submit themselves to multiple surgeries, or obsess and stress about their appearance, all the while rejecting their bodies as they are.

            The Christian writer, Henri Nouwen, in his book A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom,[1] expresses the problem this way: 

            You have never felt completely safe in your body. But God wants to love you in all that you are, spirit and body. Increasingly you have come to see your body as an enemy that has to be conquered. But God wants you to befriend your body . . . 

God desires a relationship with all of us, including our body. Our body is part of us, and He loves it just as He loves our soul. So, as we look forward to contemplation (meditating on and in the presence of God), let us remember Nouwen’s encouragement to allow our body to participate in that experience as well - or, in Nouwen’s terms, to being our body home. Where it can be held and loved both by you and by Him. The body scan can be a first step in this, for it asks us to turn inward and to hold each part of our body in awareness, not rejecting it, but holding it close for a few moments. No part of the body is overlooked. No part of our body is rejected. Each part is welcomed and accepted as it is.

            From a health point of view, the body scan is invaluable. It breaks the tendency many of us have to just use our body as the slave to our mind, without giving it much further thought. The huge numbers of stress-related disorders in our society alone are testimony that we tend to drive our body, sometimes mercilessly, without giving a thought to its needs. In this way, we live our lives horribly disconnected from ourselves because God made us spirit (that part of us that is like Him and through which we relate to Him), soul (mind, emotions and will), and body. And He wants our “whole spirit, soul and body” to participate in salvation (1 Thessalonians 5:23).[2] Christians are often told that they are spirits with a soul inside a body, leaving the body as the vehicle that chauffeurs around the real us - the spirit and the spirit’s sidekick, the soul. But the body is so much more important than that. Genesis is very clear that when God breathed spirit into the first man’s body, he became a living soul (Genesis 2:7).[3] There is deep unity among these three parts of our being. A unity that we see all the time. For example, if our body gets sick, do we not feel all out of sorts in our soul? And how well do we hear God in our spirit when we are physically ill? If we are stressed and agitated in our soul, do we not get an assortment of physical reactions along with that? And after special times with God, doesn’t our body feel healthier, and aren’t we “up” in our soul?

            So we are spirit, soul and body, but all three parts are one “me” and can’t really be separated. And we need to nourish and care for all parts of ourselves if we want to be healthy human beings. This includes our body. If we have been used to paying our body little attention, then, as we tune in to it through the body scan, we may find ourselves on a journey of discovery as our body begins to tell us things about itself that we never knew before. We may discover, for example, as we become more sensitive to our body, that certain parts of it hold chronic tension and need relief. Or that our body doesn’t like or react well to certain foods that are currently a normal part of our diet. Or that behind some of our physical pain is actually emotional pain. Or that our body has indeed been “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:4)[4] - that once we stop and look at it for a while, it really does seem to be pretty marvelous.

There is probably much more to discover about your own body. So remember “beginner’s mind” as you do the body scan so that you don’t miss important discoveries. And remember non-doing - don’t go looking for discoveries, but allow the body scan experience to emerge in its own way. 

Exercises 

Days 25 and 26 

Do the body scan meditation each day, either on your own (for 30 minutes) or using the guided meditation. 

Day 27 

Do the body scan meditation. When you have done, ask yourself:

·        What do I know about my body now that I didn’t know before?

·        Has my attitude toward my body begun to change in any way?

·        If the answer to these two questions is “nothing” and “no”, or if the body scan yielded no “special” experiences for me, how comfortable am I with that?