I’m thinking about bodies these days.  Partly because I’m constantly carrying and feeding and wiping and changing and redirecting and cuddling a little one.  Partly because I’ve got an enormous bruise on the back of my left leg that makes me look like I got hit by a torpedo, and I can’t for the life of me think how. 

But partly because of this integration work I’m doing, and the memories I’m re-membering.  We are such bodied creatures, and how we experience life can’t be separated from that, I don’t think.

What I’m wondering these days is whether there are folks out there who love and accept their bodies wholely, and whose body experiences throughout life have by and large been good.  Do people like this exist?  And I’m wondering, of those whose body experiences have not been mostly good (and I know there are lots of these), but who have come to love their bodies anyway, how have they/you come to have such love?  Bodies have been, or at least have been experienced, as such a thorn in so many of our sides–such a source of frustration and anxiety and shame–that the question seems worth asking:  Where can we go from here?  The tall ones and the short ones and the fat ones and skinny ones and the ones with four limbs or three or none.  The ones with bad eyesight, and muscles that won’t work, and joints that ache in the morning and sometimes all day.  And the athletes and dancers, and the children whose energy won’t end, and the diseased ones with and without diagnoses, with and without anyone believing they have something wrong. The big busted and little busted and pimply and smooth, and horny and don’t-even-think-about-it-tonightness ones.  The ones shaped like pears and bean stalks and pregant ladies and bulldogs.  The ones who stoop because they have to, or stoop because of shame, which in some cases amount to pretty much the same thing.

All of us–all colors and frecklednesses and smells!–can’t forget the smells–and textures and amounts of hairiness and wherenesses of that hair:  Where can we go from here, if loving us, not who we aren’t, but who we are, is where we’d like to go?  We are bodies–yes, more than that, too–but we are bodies.  All of us.  How to love that, how to embody these bodies well, and open up space for those around us to love like that, too:  that’s what I’m pondering.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Bodies, Healing, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.