What is your body?
It's a physical organism we think of as our "self", but it's not our true body or true self. We are a spirit with a soul that inhabits a physical body, but the spirit is our true body and true self. When we can step back from our physical body in this way and understand it as something we inhabit instead of something we are, we can begin to be in our physical body in more healthy ways.
In many ways our body is like a vehicle we use to get around. It's our durable earth suit, as I heard someone put it once. Our physical body enables us to inhabit and interact with the physical world. So, how does our body work and how can we inhabit it properly?
We are not just biological machines programed with DNA responses, mindlessly reacting to input. The body has a mind. The body has memory. The body takes in data and learns, and the body exercises that learning through the Body Knowing Center. All of this learning then registers in the Soul Being Center, where the Body/Spirit Centers can then interpret and respond. The Body Center is meant to pass on the data, but sometimes it can simply react. The physical body can react without the body-mind, and the body-mind can react without the Being Centers. I think this makes it harder for the body to reconnect all the way up the chain to the Being centers through the soul.
Part of the dysfunction of disconnection from our whole being is getting trapped in our separate parts. That dysfunction can translate into identifying with less and less of our whole self. That’s why it’s called the small self. And that small self can continue to get smaller. We can think of the process of shrinking into the smallest self as a movement from our most abstract parts to our most concrete. The most abstract would be our Spirit Center and the least our physical body. Thus, the smallest self can come to live entirely in the physical body, even leaving much of the heart and mind behind. We can become just biological machines, reacting mindlessly to physical stimulus.
The goal is to begin to come alive to the connection we have with all our parts, in order to reconnect our whole self to the whole world. To do that, we need to also reconnect to the energy of that world, which is God. It is a reconnection with God which trickles down to our self-reconnection, and not the other way around. We don’t have to do the work of reconnecting to our whole self in order to jump start this reconnection to God. Only God can begin to illuminate our disconnected, dysfunctional parts and guide us to self-reunification. With God’s help, we’ll be able to start seeing and working on reconnecting with our whole self.
It takes God to show us, because our small self can only see what it is, not what it can become. The smallest self is the body-self, which only sees itself as a body with a mind. That self cannot reach upwards to anything else, because it sees nothing else. We live in a culture that is overly materialistic. To reach up to what we cannot see, we must admit that we are truly impoverished. We must become humble, and by faith begin to invite God to come and show us just how true the poverty of our self-isolation has become. Jesus, in a vison to the Apostle John, said it this way, “you think you are rich, wealthy and need nothing, but you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.” When all our seeing is the merely physical, and all our wealth is merely material, we are indeed the most blind and poor.
The wealth of joy, love, peace, and fulfillment can never be purchased with money, or held by our physical hands. To gain them we must first realize that we cannot get them, they can only be given to us. We must reverse the flow, which sees with an understanding that all things come to us from God, and nothing we can get by taking will really satisfy. The body-self, trapped in a merely physical world, does not even have the imagination to understand this possibility. We must break out of this limited self, which begins with the humble recognition that we truly cannot. We must become desperate enough to want that, which means we must first have a true encounter with the poverty of this smallest self.
How long before we stop, collapse in the dust, and simply say, “this is not working.” That point is the beginning of personal transformation. It doesn’t come through working harder, but through giving up.
The body only knows working harder, because it only sees material causality in a physical world. The idea of surrender to the body is death, because the body-self sees no other reality. To the body-self, we are in a desperate situation. The world may well be burning down around us, but we still must choose to try and survive. To jump into the fire and die is insanity. Thus, the solution of surrender and death will never make sense to the body-self. In a purely material world, we must keep struggling to survive, or we will die. When things are going terribly wrong, we still have to struggle. We cannot give up. But to the larger self, giving up is the relief we’ve been waiting for, and wanting.
We’ve already talked about the cycle of death, burial, and resurrection in the first post of this series (post 22). The purely physical self only sees the first part. It only sees an inevitable progression towards an unavoidable death. It cannot see past the grave to rebirth, even though that pattern is clearly visible in the physical world. The fingerprints of God are everywhere. The message of life in constant renewal is everywhere. The body-self cannot see that, but the Body Knowing Center can. The way we begin to step towards that rebirth, is to let the concept of our most limited self die.
Do you believe there is more to the world than the material universe? To step back out of our smallest self, we must accept that the reality of God is the most likely possibility for the created universe. This is what I call the three impossible possibilities. The three impossible possibilities are;
The created universe came from nothing
The created universe has always been
The created universe came from a mind that has always been
Of these three, the most likely is the last. The most likely impossible possibility for the material universe is an immaterial, spiritual, intelligent, eternal being who created all we see.
We do not choose what reality is.
We choose only how we relate to it.
We can attempt to control the flow of data to us, or we can surrender to the data and learn how to process it in better ways, as led by God. To filter reality produces a filtered reality, which means we never really know or experience what is fully real. The solution is to step away from the filters, let reality come to us as it is, and trust that God is big enough to help us deal with it. With the Body Knowing Center, what this means, is that we surrender as fully as we can to the experience of the body in the world. This can be harder than it seems.
We live in a world that is an increasingly dangerous place for our bodies. There is so much overt and blatant bodily abuse and oppression. In Human trafficking, misogyny, and the objectification of the body through visual media, we see bodies being abused in one form or another. In light of this, it can seem counter-intuitive and unsafe to surrender to the data. It can also seem easier to desensitize our bodies in an effort to protection. But numbing doesn’t remove us from the data, it just removes our awareness of it. The data is still streaming, still bombarding us, still there whether we acknowledge it or not. The difference is whether we're going to face it, and deal with it consciously, or cast it into the subconscious where it can still damage us unaware.
Bringing the data into the light can be hard, and painful, but it is the healthiest way, and reconnects us back to our bodies as we were meant to be.
The question is, do you want that? Are you ready to suffer through and grow? I know just how unsettling that can be, especially when dealing with recovery from trauma. But you don’t have to walk through it alone. God is with you. I hope you can also find others near you to help. Let them help. Let them know what’s going on. We need walking companions on this journey to greater wholeness. We may even need a professional help. Explore every option. Get as much help as you can on this journey. Don’t do it alone. It takes a lot of bravery to open up and let others know what’s going on. Not everyone will understand, or be sympathetic. Don’t get discouraged. The work is worth it. I hope you can see that, and can feel the energy of God surrounding you, calling you back to life.