Give up the Urge to Control, and Let the Body Be the Prayer
"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground"—Oscar Wilde
Hi,
How are you this week? Do you feel at home?
An intention forges the path, and determination finds the method. When we’re unsure how to move forward, there is always a deeper knowing within us, which can lead us—if we only let go of control—and trust it.
I find myself coming full circle in the conversation I initiated with my body at the beginning of this year. In February, I wrote, “I want to encourage [my body] to speak. And, certainly, I need to learn how to listen better.” I had just arrived in my mute body in Portugal for a month back then, and many changes were on their way, both internally and externally. Fast forward six months, and I am in Portugal again, but this time—my body speaks loud, and I listen carefully.
When I first entered this conversation, I didn’t know how to go about it; I didn’t have the words with which to address my body. I felt foreign in it, and in the place of its melodic wisdom, all I could hear was a deafening silence. I couldn’t talk to my body because I had forgotten what language it speaks.
So, it remained silent, storing all the secrets in its bud, until one day in May, it opened up like a flower opens to let more sunlight in, and as the fruit of its truth ripened rapidly, it spilt out the seeds into my open hands, some of which had been dormant for years. Many of these seeds are bitter, like papaya seeds, but all, without exception, are material for growth and new beginnings.
The opening of the body through tenderness and love
I say intention forges the path, because this and determination are the only forces that brought me here. I knew no path, no method. Life had undone me, and instead of resisting, I let it. Through sickness, grief, and solitude, it brought me back home. It showed me that I cannot make any more steps further if I don’t stop right now and embrace myself fully.
The missing link to life was, frankly, my body. Intuitively, I began tending to the bud of it, watering it with love and learning how to do it just right, not too much, not too little. The sun of awareness began shining stronger and brighter, too, and it became easier to spot the weeds of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”, and pluck them gently, making room for new qualities to grow.
The path of homecoming to my body seems to have begun with opening up to the possibility of tenderness—from myself to myself.
It meant learning to address my body with reverence and entering the gently unfolding conversation with utmost respect and gratitude. It meant forgiving it for failing me through years of sickness. It meant stroking gently the wounds I caused to it through my negligence and inability to hold it softly. It meant then holding it with care and love so that it could, in turn, forgive me for all the times I allowed others to hold and touch it in any way other than loving. It meant sitting with the shame in which it was tightly enveloped and watching it evaporate part by part. Finally, it meant slowing down and listening at last to what it needs, instead of always having something to say about how it should look, feel, or function.
The watering of love and the sunshine of attention, free from judgment and expectations, allowed me to rekindle my body. Its petals began to open, and now it blooms and blooms, and I get to sip the sweet nectar of it—the vitality, the playfulness, the groundedness.
wrote in her beautiful essay (which I then noted down in my little notebook in its entirety to keep it safe and close to me), how “All the many and varied living things in nature are always doing exactly what it is that they are supposed to be doing. There are no doubts, there’s no second-guessing, there’s no weighing competing priorities and making tough choices and having regrets. There’s this activity, in this moment, and the next activity, in the next moment. Simple.”This is the forgotten language of our bodies: simplicity. Through the process of placing an ear of my mind to the mouth of my body, I noticed our relationship began growing stronger, fonder—and simpler. I noticed that now I hardly ever look at it and only stop at the superficial and complicated level of its appearance, but I see deeper and wider, and in that, I naturally begin to feel greater love and respect for it. It just happens, simply.
But then, I also get to act in closer alignment with its nature. When I care to listen, my body always tells me what it wants to eat, and when. It tells me what kind of movement it would like to receive, and for how long. It asks for touch, it asks for solitude. It tells me when to rest and sleep in, and when to rise before the sun. It guides me through the connections with people, animals, and plant friends. It opens me up to life.
This forgotten language in which the wisdom of the body is encoded became more audible to me once I offered it due respect. “It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving”, as Mary Oliver wrote.
It might sound obvious to some, and I would hope it is! However, I know that for many of us, our bodies remain mute. We’ve silenced them over the years by failing to listen. We are accustomed to always telling them how they should be, what they should do, how they should feel, and how they should look. Unheard and abused, they contact us more and more sporadically.
Eventually, if they ever reach out to us, it’s only when they scream for help: when a disease comes, when we overburden them with various substances, or when we expose them to unloving and disrespectful touch. Trauma is the silent scream of the body. These are the seeds of our consciousness that our body stores. Whether the fruits that grow from them turn into sweet delight or rot in the darkness, is the choice we get to make through the gift of tears, in the words of St. Catherine of Siena.
I didn’t know my body was screaming. I thought that through years of therapy, and then more years of insight meditation, I’d accessed and held all the major pain points of the life experience I had gathered so far. I didn’t know the flowery nature of my body; that it would only open up when I offered it nourishment and warmth, when it felt safe enough with me so it could, at first, whisper gently, and then speak in full sentences, louder and louder with confidence. I didn’t know until that one morning in May, when it opened its petals, and I offered it the sun of awareness. The traumas which were too brutal and terrifying for the mind to take hold of and which it exiled from its soils, all remained dormant in my body, awaiting their own spring. These seeds were bitter—like papaya seeds. And it took me some time to recognise their potential for bearing sweetness.
What prevented me from hearing it all sooner and more clearly, was shame.
Reuniting with life in the innermost terrains of our beings
“We are raised in cultures that really narrow down the parameter of how much we get to inhabit of our own life,” points out Francis Weller, a psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist. This narrowed-down parameter is devoid of the freedom of expression, joy, and playfulness, which we embody still in the early years of our lives, but soon enough abandon as we pass the threshold of adulthood, laced with a profound sense of inadequacy. From then on, we hold these wild parts of ourselves with judgment and shame.
When we are not allowed to fully explore our anger, joy, sensuality, exuberance, and whimsicality, “we cleave parts of our psyche, our soul out of our lives, and that’s a loss to the integrity of our psyche, to the integrity of our soul.” The appropriate response to any loss, according to Weller, should be grief, because “it is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul.”
But we cannot grieve for the parts of ourselves we hold with shame and judgment. Grief only comes when it’s preceded by love.
Francis Weller conceptualises this vague, yet intimate, sense of loss in his book “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”. There, he writes about five Gates of Grief, which, as he puts it, are different ways in which “sorrow carves riverbeds into our souls, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives.” One source of grief arises from places that have never known love, that are repressed in our culture.
It seems to me that we don’t trust our bodies. I would even dare to say that we fear them. They never want to obey our rules. Their animal nature escapes our control over and over again. We try to optimise their performance and pretty them up, but they still, against all our efforts, smell unpleasant, defecate, produce pimples, change shapes, burp, grow older and weaker, and, eventually, disintegrate—and stubbornly so.
There is some mysterious quality to our bodies, driven by ancient instincts and urges, which undoes us in all of our pretence. The very fact that the body is finite, mortal, prone to decay and wound, can make us feel uneasy in it. Tell me, how do you, as a boundless being, inhabit a body that’s so small, fragile, and for the most part, pretty awkward? It’s terrifying when you think of it. The wilderness of it is something we grew unable to explore fully, and, therefore, deemed shameful and unsightly to keep it under control.
And yet, it is these very uncontrollable bodies that live their lives without hesitation, as Sydney wrote, which allow us to be in this world in this same courageous way. They’re the soft animals, which we just need to let do what they do and love what they love. They home us within their warm walls of flesh, and they carry us through the thickening time. They sense when we get lost and call us back home, over and over again. “There’s a deeper literature of the body,” as Pádraig Ó Tuama says, “that is telling us back to ourselves, if we’ll listen. And it’s painful to do so, sometimes, and (…) that is a really wise thing to do.”
Our bodies repeatedly invite us to recognise that there’s something deeper than the narrations that we’re giving to what’s going on. If we let them, they will, themselves, go deeper into their own knowing, and reveal to us the truths that hold the key to living fully. The gateways to life, a life lived fully, embodied and celebrated, are our very soft bodies.
This wild and primal quality of our bodies is what connects us to our earliest ancestors. It’s the stardust that builds us. From this place of ancient wisdom, our bodies speak to us. It is there, I believe, that we can find what John O’Donohue, the late Irish poet and philosopher, spoke about in his conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being: “there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquillity in you.”
This wilderness, the quality that binds us to the whole living world, the animal in us that’s untamed and beautiful in its rawness—this all is sacred in us. When we recognise it, we can “give up the urge to control and just be in the body, and let the body be the prayer,“ as Marilyn Nelson, an American poet, said.
When we take the flower of our body and place it in prayer on the altar of life, we reunite with our innermost nature. The body is the gateway. When we are wild, we are fully alive.
Question to you, dear reader:
Will you let yourself be a little wild?
There’s so much here, oh my gosh. So many lines I want to call out for their beauty and just STUNNING WISDOM. I needed this read and this invitation so deeply. Thank you, thank you!
Marvelous writing, thanks for putting it out there. The gateway of the body has been my work these past few years. I finally figured out that placing all of my attention on mental practices was ignoring half of my existence. Maybe even more since the body is the substrate for the mind. Realizing that my body isn't some meat suit dumbly awaiting my instructions; it has things to say and teach me, if I have the ears to listen. I'm still slooowly regaining its trust. But its been worth it.