This post is PART 2 of a series on the body and mental health.
In the first post, North Carolina therapist Michelle F. Moseley wrote an amazing piece about the intersection of diet culture, mental health, and the church. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to take the time to do so. You can find it here.
From Punishing the Body to Praising the Body
This is the time of year when many of us find ourselves making, or trying to keep New Year’s resolutions.
Often these resolutions are centered around different ways we plan to change and modify our bodies.
Some people plan to punish, dominate, and conquer the body at the gym…to make it conform to their own and their cultures' stories about what a body ‘should’ look like. Some people try to literally shock and starve their body into changing appearance through diet and restriction.
Intentionality about engaging in bodily movement and the nourishment of our body is great! But oftentimes running in the background of these efforts is a subconscious belief that we’ve inherited about the fundamental unacceptability of our body as it is.
It’s understandable and makes total sense if you notice that those thoughts and beliefs have seeped into your own being in some way. We live in a culture that is obsessed with a very particular body that almost no one has (thin, white, able-bodied, young), and sees every other body as somehow lacking and deficient. It makes total sense if part of us believes the stories that we have been told, and are told, every day.
While Christianity is broad and diverse…much of the traditional admittedly has taken a negative view of the body. For many of us, the message we received growing up (or perhaps still receive now!) in the pews is that the body is bad, whereas the mind is good. A kind of theology summed up well in Arcade Fire’s lyrics from The Suburb album:
My body is a cage
That keeps me from dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
Stephanie Paulsell in her book Honoring the Body invites readers to create space for a different understanding of the body. One in which the body is viewed as sacred instead of fundamentally deficient. There is biblical evidence and a Christian tradition that honors the body as sacred and good…it is just not the dominant perspective we encounter most of the time.
In Genesis, for example, God views creation and the bodies within it as good. In the Gospels, God experiences what it is to have a body, with all the wonderful and weird things that that entails.
6 Ways of Honoring the Body
Paulsell’s book centers around six different ways or practices of honoring the body.
I invite you to imagine what it might look like to experience the sacredness of your body through these practices this year. There’s definitely not enough room to go into detail or depth, but this is enough space to get you thinking about the body in new ways, and hopefully provide space for initial reflection.
Here we go!
Bathing the Body
My six year old daughter has always loved being in water. When she was a baby it was literally the only time all day she would stop crying and begin to smile and laugh. Now, she plays in the bath by herself with toys for as long as she can each day. The simple act of showering, bathing, washing our bodies is itself a sacred act of worship.
This is the body we are given, and bathing can be an act of gratitude, thankfulness, and even reverence for that body.
For those of us who have experienced significant traumatic events in our lives, often bathing or showering with intentionality can be the first step in our healing process, as we bring our awareness back to our bodies. Letting the water stream over your hand and simply saying out loud ‘this is my hand. I am feeling my hand’, or letting it drip over your head and repeating ‘this is my head. I am feeling my head’ is a sacred and therapeutic process.
And of course for Christians, bathing the body reminds us of the sacrament of baptism, where water is used to show God’s love, and serves as our initiation into that beautiful and messy thing called the Church.
Clothing the Body
Another way we honor the body is by clothing it in ways that are a true expression of ourselves. Whether we like it or not, anything and everything we put on our body says something about who we are or how we want to be perceived. Even if you don’t believe clothes should communicate anything about yourself, that belief, value and decision itself is communicated through the clothes you will wear.
If we are to honor our bodies, it is important to pay attention to how adornment frees or constrains us. What is constraining for one person can be freeing for another. Whereas tattooing may seem a violation of one’s freedom not to be wounded and permanently marked for one person, it might be a gesture of freedom for another.
- Paulsell, 67.
Interestingly, the prophet Ezekial uses the image of God clothing Israel to show God’s love for the Hebrew community:
9 “‘I bathed you with water and washed the blood from you and put ointments on you. 10 I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put sandals of fine leather on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments. 11 I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck, 12 and I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears and a beautiful crown on your head.
- Ezekiel 16:9-12 NIV
Again, the clothing metaphor says something about how God views God’s people. That God would use costly items like embroidered dress, fine leather, fine linen, jewelry, etc., is the prophet's way of describing how God values God's people.
How we cloth ourselves, as well as how we cloth others (Luke 3:11), is an expression of the sacredness within us.
I don’t think Stephanie Paulsell or Ezekiel want us to all be rushing out to buy Gucci and Prada or whatever…and this isn’t trying to deny the ethical element and justice component of how our clothing was made and how the earth and workers were treated in that process…it’s simply to say that the act of clothing yourself authentically is a sacred act.
For many people suffering from severe depression, for example, just finding the strength to change out of their sleeping clothes and putting on something that feels good and fresh for the day is a transformative, and life-giving act.
Nourishing the Body
Paulsell writes, “when we honor our bodies through eating food that both nourishes and delights, we have an opportunity to keep our connections with the earth and with our neighbors visible every day”. Yet, for many of us, we have received negative messages about “good” and “bad” foods, and about how much we ‘should’ eat based on our body size.
Counselors increasingly look to The Heath at Every Size Principles, put out by the Association for Size Diversity and Health as guides for how to care for, advocate for, and value people in any sized body. One of those principles is Eating for Well-Being:
Eating for Well-Being: Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control.
This statement comes from the counseling world, but I hear a deep and rich theological belief inherent in Eating for Well-Being. Our bodies are good. Our bodies' natural need for food and sustenance and nourishment is good, as is our desire for food to be pleasurable.
And yet, so many of us either actively repress, or passively ignore the food longings and needs and desires of our bodies. What would it look like to take time to learn to listen to what our bodies are telling us about what they require and desire? What would it mean to learn to slow down and listen to the hunger and thirst cues coming from within, and see those as sources of sacred information to be honored and valued? What would it be like to eat slowly and mindfully enough to really be in touch with those sacred messages and cues coming from within?
Exerting and Resting the Body
The message that most of us receive about exerting our bodies is that we’re supposed to exercise for one purpose - to make our bodies thin and small if we’re women, or lean and strong if we’re men. What if learning to honor our bodies is more about learning to find pleasure and joy in life-giving movement? If running marathons and competing in triathlons brings you a deep connection to your body, and a deep sense of joy and an appreciation for the paradoxical durability and fragility of our bodies - that’s great! Go for it! And, there are also lots of other ways to be ‘in our bodies’ and to find joy in moving our bodies than the narrow range of options often presented to us:
Walking in the neighborhood or in the woods
Gardening or yard work
Mowing the lawn
Dancing alone or with others to your favorite playlist
Bike riding
Yoga in a studio or with an online video
Mopping or sweeping your house
There are countless ways to pay attention to the miraculous sensations of moving our bodies to the extent that we find enjoyable. Children are great at this! My own daughter runs, dances, jumps, climbs, spins, twirls…just because it feels good to move. And as soon as it’s not fun anymore, she stops and does something else.
The other side of this practice is learning to listen to, make time for, and honor our bodies' need for rest. Often an imbalance in our ability to sleep - either sleeping too much, or too little, or having very restless sleep, is a sign of a deeper mental health issue that needs to be addressed. But for most of us, the tendency is to try to push down and ignore our bodies natural need for sleep. We wake up groggy, pound some caffeine, go through the day tired and half-awake, and then still end up staying up late in the evening. Our bodies are telling us what it is they need and desire from us, but we’ve often trained ourselves (or perhaps numbed ourselves) to ignore its messages.
What would it look like to begin to awaken, and pay attention to our bodies messages about the kind of restorative rest they are crying out for?
Honoring the Sexual Body
Christianity and sexuality have a complicated history. As I write this, for example, my own faith community - The United Methodist Church, is in the middle of dividing and breaking apart, in part over issues related to human sexuality.
The truth is, for many of us, sexuality is a powerful force in our lives. Perhaps honoring the sexual body then, is about acknowledging that the sexual desire within us is in part a longing to feel intimacy, connection, safety, affirmation, pleasure, freedom, joy, playfulness...
Who would say that those aforementioned desires are not sacred, beautiful, and God-given?
The erotic however, tends to make Christians squirm a bit, and over the years the Church has said a lot of things about the body and sexuality. (Did you know, for example, that graham crackers were invented by a pastor to keep people from masturbating?!) It’s worth mentioning though, that there’s a whole book in the Bible - Song of Songs - that is basically an erotic poem. Paulsell mentions the following passage from Song of Songs, the moment one lover knocks on another’s door, and she hesitates to open it:
My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,
and my inmost being yearned for him.
I arose to open to my beloved,
and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
upon the handles of the bolt.
- Song of Songs 5:4-5 NRSV
If that’s not an erotic euphemism, I don’t know what is. Perhaps then, there is a way the erotic within us can be honored, and seen as an integral and even sacred part of the way our bodies are.
Honoring the Suffering Body
The previous sections on honoring the body are all about developing a greater sense of awareness of what the body is experiencing. What does it mean to listen to and hear the bodies need for food and water? To pay attention to the bodies need for movement and rest?
Suffering however, is different.
The suffering body does not subtly ask us to give us its attention, it demands our attention from us.
There is a way that oftentimes we can write poetically about the beauty of suffering…and yet there is a kind of suffering where even that attempt at meaning making can be offensive in the moment. I remember a conversation with my own therapist when she said “maybe this is happening to make you more compassionate”, which is a frequent spiritual response given in the face of suffering. “I don’t want to feel more compassion”, I said dryly, “I just don’t want to be in pain”. In that moment, I didn’t want her trying to polish or clean anything up…I just needed her presence and compassion and witness as I suffered. Perhaps there is a time for meaning making in the face of suffering…but there is also a time for simply holding space and admitting together aloud, “yes, this is truly horrible”.
There is a kind of pain that is so great it seems to isolate us…to pull us inward and threaten to trap us there forever. And yet, paradoxically, the reality of our pain and suffering is also what unites us, and what draws us together.
To honor the suffering body, therefore, is ultimately to learn to see the suffering of others around us, and to offer our own presence to those in pain.
Accessing the Wisdom of the Body
The next post in this series on the body and mental health will focus on how we can learn to access the wisdom of the body, and discern what truths it holds within it. Researchers found that this kind of awareness or bodily wisdom is actually what largely separates people's ability to create lasting insight and change in talk therapy, as opposed to just kind of talking in circles for a while before giving up.
Thanks for reading!
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About the Author
Travis Jeffords is a National Certified Counselor and Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate in North Carolina. He holds a Master of Science degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a Master of Divinity from Christian Theological Seminary. Travis writes on the intersection of faith, spirituality, the church, and mental health.