My Body, My Love
A few years ago I used to go to a nearby gym and, being physically rather unambitious, I’d do my leisurely routine with lots of rests in-between, then have a swim and go home. Then one day I got talking to a bloke who was always there – a huge bloke, ‘built like a brick shithouse’, as we say in Australia – muscles all over the place.
At first we talked about inconsequential things – what do you do, where have we travelled, and so on – until he paused and pointed at the weights I’d been lifting.
He said, ‘You know you’ll never build muscle if you don’t push your limits. You should push yourself more …’
I shrugged, saying, ‘Nah, I’m fine the way I am.’
Then I smiled and added, ‘I don’t like raising a sweat.’
He laughed and said, ‘No offence, but you’re a drink of water. No pain, no gain, mate.’
I countered with, ‘Stay the same, no pain,’ and we laughed.
We remained gym friends after that, and a few times he got me to spot him on free-weights as he worked out, and I was very impressed with his stamina as he pushed his body through all kinds of barriers, sweating gallons as he heaved and pushed ever heavier weights and pounded the running machine for what seemed like an eternity.
Shortly after, I went overseas for a year – and when I came back, I visited the same gym and noticed he was no longer there. A few weeks went by, and one day I was wandering down the local mall, a large space with many benches where people would sit – and I heard someone call out my name.
It was my friend from the gym, but he was much changed. Where before he’d been sculpted, muscle-bound and shining with endorphins and adrenaline, now he was quite fat, and the skin on his face was flaccid and his eyes dull. I noticed as I approached him tha he seemed uncomfortable, as if he’d realized he’d made a mistake calling out to me. He’d forgotten that he’d changed for the worse, and now he was embarrassed.
‘How are you?’ I said, trying to hide my surprise.
Ruefully, he shook his head and held up his arms, looking down at himself as if to say, ‘just look at me and see for yourself.’
Which gave me permission to say, ‘What happened?’
It was a long story, but suffice it to say, shortly after I’d left to go overseas, he’d pulled a tendon in his leg and had to have surgery to have it reconnected, then wear a leg-boot for a few months till it healed. At first he’d kept up with the gym work, focusing mainly on his upper body – but with the extra stress, he’d torn a muscle in his shoulder. Having been forced to suspend his workouts, the regular endorphin hits he’d become addicted to were no longer supporting his mood, so he become depressed – which lead to eating binges which put on the weight – which caused him to become even more depressed. With the increased sick days, he lost his job and the downward spiral intensified, and that was when I came across him sitting in the mall.
Our conversation was stilted by his embarrassment, and we parted ways soon after and I never saw him again.
To me, though I’d never said it to him, he had always been an example of what I called, ‘a physical abuser’ – someone who used his body as a slave, without ever forming a relationship with it. As such, in my mind at least, he’d always been headed for a fall.
In my book, ‘Being Still’, I talk about our body as:
‘… interconnected communities of autonomous things in constant negotiation with each other – skin, bones and organs, with each part being a community of cells, every one of which is making its own decisions in co-operation with the whole. And this vast democracy of our organism also includes all the ‘immigrant workers’ in our body – that vast population of bacteria, viruses and fungi who, like migrant workers in any country, are integral members of our inner community. In fact, it is now known that there are many more of these migrant travellers in our body than even our own cells, breaking down nutrients, consuming waste, as well as affecting our moods and abilities – all of them playing essential roles in an incredibly complex ecology as finely balanced as any rain forest …’
I talk about how this body – this ‘community of things’ – tells us what it needs with its own language of sensations, both subtle and intense – hunger pangs when we need food, aches and pains when it is out of balance or damaged, fizzy light headedness when we’re falling in love, tingling and excited feeling when we’re elated, heaviness when we’re tired or need rest, and so on.
In this, our body is continually talking to us, as our friend – perhaps our only real friend in this carnival of life, because it always tells us the truth. It’s not capable of lying.
Every part of our body is devoted to helping us live the best life possible – even the immigrant workers who live within us, the bacteria and fungi – all the parts of our body work to serve us, and our lives.
But, like my friend, many of us behave like oblivious and entitled dictators, sitting in the luxurious palace of dreams and illusions that we call our mind, issuing instructions to our body to give us what we want – give me pleasure, do my work, make this happen, stop complaining, go harder, win, win, win.
We whip our body through life to get what we want, while all the while ignoring the signals our body is constantly sending to us. We use drugs, entertainment and addictions to suppress the body’s signals, and keep us deaf to what it is telling us, In this we forget that our mind, which we consider to be our self, is only half of what we actually are. And in this state of forgetting, we betray ourselves.
Result being, our body eventually stops sending us signals. It stops talking to us, and becomes numb, like a cowed slave, just doing its best to do whatever we want without complaint – until it breaks in one way or the other.
When we ignore our relationship with our body it’s inevitable that damage, illness and disease will occur – slowly at first, then compounding. So many of the illnesses we ascribe to causes beyond our control – cancer, allergies, obesity, chronic depression and so on – also originate from this profound alienation between our sense of self and our body.
For my friend, it began with the damage to the tendon in his leg – an injury that originated from his extreme ‘no pain no gain’ addiction to the endorphin hits he got from pushing his body too far by lifting ever heavier weights and running without registering how it was pushing his legs to the brink. And even then he didn’t slow down – until his shoulder gave way, and he was forced to stop, and the downward spiral into weight gain and depression occurred – all because he did not listen to his best friend – his body – which had been telling him for years that it was struggling – but he didn’t listen.
———————————-
I meditate every day – and once a week I do a particular meditation, which came to me one time when I was very ill in China.
It was a snowy, slushy winter in Huai’an, and the pollution in the air was thick and wet. My apartment was cold and damp, and I’d contracted a bout of intense bronchitis.
Now, I already knew that Chinese doctors had a predilection for handing out incredibly strong antibiotics for everything, so I decided to avoid them. Lucky for me it was a long weekend, so I had a break from the punishing schedule of work – so I decided to heal myself with meditation.
First, I slept, and slept and slept until I couldn’t sleep anymore.
Then, lying on my back beneath the covers of the bed to keep warm, I took my attention to my breath, to quieten it and allow awareness to brighten – and that’s when the sensations in my body began to clamor for attention.
At first I was surprised by all the sensations I’d not been aware of before, and I realized that since coming to China, I’d slipped into an abusive relationship with my body, pushing it to the point where sickness could take hold.
For many hours I lay still, soaking in the sensations of my body – and at regular times inside myself I spoke to it.
‘I love you,’ I would say. ‘And I’m sorry for all the work we’ve had to do. I know you’ve done your best, as you always do. But now I’m listening. Let’s work together …’
Gradually the flurry of sensations in my body calmed down – only the crushing pain in my lungs intensified. It felt as if I had an elephant’s foot crushing my chest.
My body was telling me where it needed me to direct my attention.
For the next hour …or maybe it was two, I don’t know, I contemplated this crushing pain in my chest, accepting what was there and relaxing around it as best as I could, while every so often reminding my body that I loved it.
Eventually I fell asleep. And when I woke up, after taking a hot shower and drinking some water, I went back to bed and did the same thing.
For two days I did this, and the crushing pain calmed down, and I could breath without coughing up mucus, and I felt much revived.
Since then I’ve made it a habit to commune with my body – once a week as I meditate, inside myself, I thank my body for living my life for me. I tell it I love it and thank it for being the vehicle of my life. I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, and though many might think this is foolish, every time I do it I get this exquisite fizzy feeling all through my body, as if it’s reciprocating.
And whenever I get ill, which is not very often, I do exactly what I did ten years ago in China – because I’ve developed the belief that our conscious attention is intimately interconnected, in relationship with every part of our body. As such, when we connect our attention to whatever may go wrong, in the unconditional communion of attention with body sensations, the natural healing resources of mind and body are brought to bear.
Try it out.
Can’t hurt, can it?
After all, we’re so busy giving love to everybody else – perhaps it’s time to give a little to ourselves.
…………………………………………………………………………………….
Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
…………………………………………………………………………………
