Nurturing and Responding to Our Bodies
Your body has wisdom. Your body connects you to God and his world. We all view our bodies differently. When was the last time you paused to thank your body for how you interacted with the world?
The truth is, God created our bodies and he created them good (Gen. 1:27). He created them with intricacies that function both in the visible and invisible world (Col. 1: 15-17). Yet, we all have beliefs about our bodies, or trauma, or disease that impacts how we feel in our body and how we listen to our bodies.
Our bodies are wise and sometimes more connected to our souls than we are. Sometimes our body has wisdom before our brain does — you know, gut intuition. Listening to your body is a way to connect with yourself and God. As French theologian John Calvin said, “There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self...”
Have you ever had recurring headaches? Think through last week — maybe every Tuesday you end the day with a headache. What might your body be saying? Maybe there were activities that day that didn’t serve well. Maybe you didn’t get enough food that day because of your schedule. Maybe God is trying to get your attention. Often our response is that the headache is getting in the way of what we are trying to accomplish, so we silence our body rather than listen to what it might be saying, to what God might be saying through our body. As we listen, our body calls for a response and nurturing.
For some background on me and my journey of listening to my body as a connection to God and myself, about 10 years ago I was a college athlete. The purpose of my body was to perform. I literally beat my body and made it my slave, made it perform for God’s glory. I would have thought listening to my body was New Age and maybe even weak. I thought that we are to control our bodies. Everything I did was to make sure my body could perform at the highest level. I ate, slept and worked out for my body to do that. There wasn’t space for my body to do any talking. If it did, it got bandaged and medicated, and I was back on the court. Have you ever been there, striving so hard that you are shutting down pieces of yourself?
I got sick after college — systems in my body shutting down, doctors visits and treatments. I began to feel like my body was SCREAMING for my attention — to slow down and listen — and, for a while, I did. I learned to live with my body and listen in a way that responded and nurtured what it was saying. I learned to befriend my body that I had made my enemy. It felt like living in unity. It felt like coming alive. It felt like I was living with God — that I was connected to myself and God.
Fast forward to getting married, having kids, moving cross country and — oh yeah! — living in a pandemic, listening to my body felt like a vague memory. In that new season I did not have the same space or capacity, yet my body was speaking. In that season my emotions were coming out like volcanos at whoever was near me. I felt disconnected and unsure how to move forward. I felt like I had lost connection with my body, myself and God. I felt like I had failed my body and did not know how to return.
When I was practicing yoga or having moments of silence I could hear a faint invitation to listen to my body, to be creative in what that looked like. I was like, “Yeah, that worked before, but how can I even do that now?” My body felt twisted up with thoughts and emotions. I was feeding toddlers and babies and didn’t have time to respond to my body - yet my body continued to get louder in a gentle way, inviting me to learn to connect in this season, to be gentle with me and gentle with my body.
This felt fitting at the end of lockdowns, that God was inviting a newness in my body to a deeper knowledge of myself and his ways to a gentleness and flow that I had not yet experienced.
God started showing me how emotions and thoughts were showing up in my body. We hear that anxiety might upset the stomach or cause a tension headache, but how do you respond to your body when it does? How do you pause to notice? What is it connected to? Sometimes I experience my voice getting quiet before a phone call or my throat tightening. Even my chest tightens when my kids talk back or don’t sleep. What is my body saying? What is it trying to reveal about me? What is God saying? How do I begin to connect with that space? It seems to me that our bodies are always speaking, and we are invited into new ways of listening to it and connecting with it in each season.
As I have explored this in this new season I have found a few practices have been helpful:
Breath Work: God breathed life into us, breathed grace into us. It’s our connection to glory and to ourselves. It changes systems of the body. It grounds us. Jonnie Goodmanson says, “It is the greatest pause, Selah, we can practice as our lives and truth are worked out in us on this side of glory. The breath bridges the body and mind, the soul and the heart, and my experience to your experience. We are all connected. When my mess interacts with your mess, it’s a mess! The breath interrupts that. I refer to that often as our spiritual AED machine. It is a shock as our chaos stops, and our heart starts beating again”.
There are many breathing exercises. For this I often use the “three-part breath” method because of how it focuses my breath and connects my body. I breathe in and feel my chest, ribs and stomach fill with air, pause and then release in the opposite way - stomach, ribs and chest.
I use the breath practice two ways. First in the moments of tension. I come to the breath to calm myself and connect with myself and God. Then, I use it for 10-20 minutes a day to be with God and myself. As I breathe, I focus on the breath and being held by God - I try to let go of other thoughts, trusting God to bring them up again if they are important.
Daily Journaling: Each day taking a few moments to ask:
What is happening in my body?
What is happening in my mind?
What is happening in my soul/feelings?
I go through each question, writing what I notice with no judgement. It helps me practice integration in myself.
Body Inventory: I take a few breaths at night and scan my body, breathing into tight places, again asking my body if it’s trying to tell me anything, and letting it be with no judgements.
This has been my invitation into listening to my body to connect with God and myself. God has invited me into this process of listening and responding, doing daily practices that connect me to him. What might be a way God is inviting you to listen to your body?