Reminder: You Live in a Body
On day three of my three-day weekend, I sat at my desk clad in naught but a ratty, tie-dyed nightgown and a red bathrobe I’ve owned for almost 20 years (the idea that my bathrobe is old enough for college just…anyway, as I was saying…)
So, I’m sitting there. It’s day two of drinking celery juice first thing in the AM on an empty stomach. I’m feeling pretty righteous in my habits and duly prepared to face what I have been resisting: planning the new habits of my new life. Naturally, I edit my friend’s memoir and go to lunch with my brother and fold my laundry before I finally face it. But face it I finally did.
No horrible resolutions this time. No “shoulds.” Guilt, discipline, regimes, they have never, ever worked for me.
It’s simply time for me to become another person. Or, stop trying to be something I’m not.
Many of you have noticed by now that I have cut off all my hair. (This is a multifaceted decision that I will expound upon as the year goes by.) One of the bigger reasons is this: I wasn’t being me—I was being all the parts of me that I thought other people wanted me to be…but it wasn’t me. I had to start over.
So I’m sitting at my desk, no longer in my bathrobe, belly full of overpriced chicken wings, and I’m deciding who I am and what I want. And I wish someone else would make the decision for me. I look at my star chart one more time. This time, I look up the Part of Fortune and it finally gets through to me:
I don’t know how to be in my body.
What? I have a body? Like, you’re telling me I live in the 3rd Dimension? On Earth? As in the Physical Plane? Learning is so simple for me I have to make it difficult so I don’t get bored. I dream in color. Got Spirit on speed dial. But this reality? With so many other options, why stick around here?
The profound teaching made itself known to me in the simplest of ways, and with it, peace also:
“You live in a body right now—live in it.”
So, I drafted a morning and an evening ritual based on this insight. The rituals include stimulation of all the senses to draw me into the moment, into this world. Last night and this morning I followed it exactly (it is Saturn in Capricorn season, after all).
And this morning, very satisfied with myself, I floated out the door into the frigid air. And in spite of the grey dawn, I lifted my head to smile and be grateful…and slipped on a huge patch of thick ice, breaking through a deep, thawing puddle that soaked my arm, both bags I was carrying (slush in my purse, the other a Vera Bradley bag carrying a paper manuscript) and my entire right leg.
Obliged to go straight to my car so that I could get to work on time, I humbly started the car and had a good think while I scraped the windshield, my wet skin like pin cushions in the sharp Kansas wind.
What was the lesson in this? I wondered. It wasn’t long before Spirit answered,
You live in a body—don’t take that for granted.
Life is fleeting. In finding the way to live fully, we engage in a sort of art form that dances in and out of recklessness and regimen. It’s about treating the body like a sacred temple, understanding it is also as temporary, mundane, and rudimentary as a fort of bed sheets. We are eternal souls, and any moment this experience can be over. We can slip and fall, even when we’re smiling at the sky.
So, be good to your body, but enjoy her, too. And try not to focus on the puddle, but the fact that you were able to get up and walk away.
That’s what I learned today.
