Bringing Faith to Life
Posts tagged physical
Can God speak to us through our bodies?
010 months
God speaks to us through our bodies.
Why is that so hard to believe? We say that 70% of communication is non-verbal. Why do we insist that God speak through our listening ears? What do we perceive non-verbally?
Well, this may sound nonsensical, because in normal conversation, what we mean by non-verbal is messaging though “body-language.” What do their facial expressions say? What does their hand-positioning tell us? their posture? their movement? This is the language of their bodies? God doesn’t have a body — at least not one we can see and touch. At least not me.
What if God is speaking God’s nonverbal expression through MY body? Uniquely and specifically to me? How would I listen? How would I interpret? How would I attend to what God is speaking? If am not aware of God, is there something getting in the way and scrambling our communication?
Much depends on my relationship with my own body. So what does you body say to you when you address it? is your body telling you?Do you find yourself in any of these? here?
- the avoider: I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s change the subject. let’s talk about something else. So, how are you doing…?
- The excuse maker: I don’t speak that language. (I’m not coordinated, not good at sports, never got picked for the team, really not very competitive.)
- the ashamed: I can’t talk about that. Am uncomfortable talking about my body. am ashamed, embarassed, have been hurt of abused.
- the guilty: There’s nothing wrong with what I am doing. Nothing to see here. Move along. unaware or blind to the connection between body and God, in denial
- the arguer, reasoner/rationalizer: The Bible says the flesh is bad, but the spirit is good. I choose to focus on the spirit. After all, this body of mine is just a temporary possession. gonna perish anyway.
Avoiding, excusing, shaming, denying, and arguing are all ways we step away from this conversation. In doing so, do we miss a blessed, poignant and personal way God created for us to be aware of Him? Forfeit an intimate connection? Miss perhaps 70% of what God is speaking?
Perhaps this is the most essential message of the coming of Christ: fully divine AND fully human, incarnated. Here in the flesh. God, knowing our reluctant selves, argumentative, avoidant, shamed and guilty selves, said, I can live in that body. When I do, I can take the helm, if you give it to me. I will speak course correction, signal change of heading, chart the course, and apply the rudder. Heck, I can even still the winds blowing us off course.
The keys are two: attend to My touch and apply my direction. Use your body’s awareness of me to accept my guidance. (like horse and rider)
Try: ask your body to respond to these commands/instructions:
- slow,
- calm,
- focus
- look
- listen
- breathe
- imagine
- attend
- release
- turn
- wait
- GO!
These commands are activated in our flesh, through our physical nature. God speaks to us, so God can speak through us.
Of course, one can only be guided when one is moving. Nothing (but God) can correct the course of something that refuses to budge, arms crossed. Movement in any direction, God can work with.
Folded hands which signal I’m not budging is something God refuses to override.
We are made to move. Our bodies — heart, soul, mind, strength and spirit — remind us of this everyday. It’s the way God intended to get and keep our attention. It’s why God gave us a body — to incline us to follow Him in this earthly lifetime.
*(This is the thesis of my book, Made to Move: (learning to) Knowing and Loving God through our Bodies, find it here.)
Stretch to strengthen: pain of a healing sort
01 year
by wlebolt
in Body, Call to Action, church, Deeper Sensation, faith, In Action, Made to Move, prayer, witness, writing
No one really wants to be stretched. At least not too far, and definitely not when the stretching goes beyond what feels comfortable.
There’s just a certain out-of-control-feeling when someone is pulling you and you don’t know how far they will go, or even if they will stop. If you have ever had physical therapy after an injury or surgery, you know exactly what I’m describing. It’s painful but it’s pain of a healing sort. It helps recover your range of motion, and once you have that, the strengthening can begin. Then you’re on the road to return to action.
While there lots of ways to strengthen — exercise machines, dumbbells, pulleys, weights — it’s likely that when you earn your discharge from the PT gym you’ll be sent home with a lovely parting gift called a resistance band. It’s meant to be your home exercise companion. And it comes with a wonderful secret: When you stretch it, it strengthens you.
I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but it’s true. When you pull, it resists, gently. As you pull harder, it stretches, slowly. The harder you pull, the more it stretches and the more that strengthens you. This feels very much like life these days and, to me, very much like the life of faith. Body and soul engaged in a give-and-take which feels very much like exercise.
Apparently, my approach is a bit atypical. While most faith-folk tend to start with the soul and then invite the body along, when I begin with body, my soul always comes along for the joy ride. *
Try for yourself. Here’s a simple prayer routine using the “exercise” band and the words to the praise song, Spirit of the Living God. My daughter Stephanie’s lovely voice accompanies me.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mse98SpD1v4]
The movement is prayer. The words are prayer. The music is prayer.
But even better, even after the prayer-exercise is done, the sensation of prayer remains… in the body! The muscles that moved the band — the effort, the stretch, the exertion of prayer — reverberate and reiterate: melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Literally, the prayer is still there.
This is too good to be true, right? Try it again. Become aware of the energy, the symbiosis, the connection of stretch to strengthen. Let your body prayer become fluid, flowing one motion into the next. Body and soul, together. Who could conceive of something so powerful and yet so simple?
*My thanks to the folks at the Upper Room for honoring my unusual approach and inviting me to join them to lead worship at SOULfeast 2013.
The undeniable evidence of your senses
02 years
Nothing is certain these days, it seems. Or perhaps one might say, nothing is certain except uncertainty.
That feels especially true when I put my trust in things I can see, hear, touch, taste or smell. Yep, the evidence of my own senses seems to betray me these days. Even old familiar things are tempting to disbelieve. Especially when our collective perceptions are so divergent.
But it’s always been so. And actually I find that reassuring. Because in the midst of differing opinions and the drawing of different conclusions, each has its own validity… in a way. And that might, if you go along for the unexamined ride, convince you that there is nothing to trust and no one to believe in.
OR … it might send you searching for understanding by diving deeper. For me, the resource that never disappoints is the human body. I never cease to find something enlightening, explanatory and remarkable, yet so astoundingly simple that it sits me down and shuts me up.
I mean, just consider how you see, hear, touch, taste and smell!
For times when the darkness around you makes it hard to see, God designed a pupillary dilation mechanism to let just the right amount of light in.
For times when the sound of confusion surrounds you, God designed a cochlear hearing system which resonates uniquely to every pitch.
For times when gentle caress feels distant, God designed subdermal pressure receptors so sensitive they leave you giddy at the touch of a ladybug or the tickle of a feather but alert you to a creeping spider.
For times when life’s bitterness threatens to spoil your table fellowship, God designed other tastebuds activated by sweet, sour, salty and savory for balanced seasoning.
For times when the stench of evil and injustice suffocates, God designed olfactory epithelium to compel you to seek refreshment and renewal by the winds of the Spirit of hope.
It’s amazing to think, isn’t it, that the complexity that is each of us could possibly have begun with just two single cells and 26 sets of information. But it’s so. Quite a Designer that must have been… must be…. and is even now as we go through life adapting and responding to what comes.
Who in the world would ever have thought of all that?
Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.
John 10:37-38
I Am not A.I.
0A.I., you and I are different.
I feel.
I feel
the rays of the sun warming my face,
the chill of the cold deep in my bones,
the pressure of your hand holding mine
and mine, resting in yours.
I feel
the jitters when test scores are posted,
the wrenching when news isn’t good,
the twang when I know I really shouldn’t
and the tap when I know I really should.
God didn’t create me artificially.
God created me realistically:
real parts,
real thoughts,
real sensations,
real desires,
real hopes,
real needs.
Do I dare feel?
Am I willing?
Not just to touch the hand
that reaches out,
but to take it?
Dear God,
there are places I’d rather not go.
I still feel them;
I still remember them;
I am not safe there.
You, A.I.,
You are safe everywhere.
not bothered by sensation,
not saddled with emotion,
not addled by fear or foreboding.
Fear is a place only humans go,
only humans can go,
human beings,
humans being.
The Lord of life takes us there…
and brings us through.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)
A.I. was made for man, not man for A.I.
So the Son of Man is Lord even of the A.I.
Reconstruction Zone
0Building from the ground uP
is beautiful.
Neat.
Clean.
Polished.
Precise.
But
Remodeling from the inside OUT
is messy.
Ripping.
Rending.
Gashes.
Holes.
Cover it over with
shiny granite,
sparkling porcelain,
brushed nickel,
stainless steel.
Impregnable, in its newness.
No one will ever
see what’s under
the remodeling.
Thank God
only Me and Thee
have seen it.
We know the condition
under the addition.
Hard years won.
Make-over done.
Make-under
still in progress.
Painful
but
Grateful
Physical, mental, emotional – One Body
111 years
We have a stigma against mental illness in this country. Have you noticed?
Oh, we like to joke about “emo” people and “he’s not right in the head” people. But those aren’t real issues. We’re kidding. Right? And kidding allows us to keep this issue at arm’s length.
I’d like to do that, but I can’t. Family’s got “mental health” history. Boom. Did you hear that big boom? That’s the sound of stigma landing on my family tree. I steer away from stigma. Makes me uncomfortable. Kind of like talking about magic, paranormal, supernatural…spiritual.
I’d much rather stick with the concrete, proveable, physical evidence. The stuff we can all look at and agree upon. But we can’t, so I won’t.
What I know today is, someone I love is having physical symptoms from an emotional hurt. In fact, several someones. ZZsst. Hear that? That was the sound of connection. Mind-body connection. What do I do with that? What do I do with them? Do I excuse them? forgive them? Can one be excused from work, from responsibility, from performance of one’s duties based on emotional issues? Mental issues?
Well no, not if they’re not real. But when you make them physical, that’s a whole new story. But tell that to the person who is accusing you, accuses them, of making this up. Oh, it’s all in your mind, they’ll say. Just get over it, they’ll advise you.
Thing is, when the mind and body are connected…when our internal senses give us physical responses…people are forced to admit, we suffer from illness. Mental illness. Mental dishealth.
I wonder where we’d be if we considered mental and emotional imbalances before they became physical burdens. If we didn’t treat them with contempt or distrust. If we believed in them. And then treated them as we do the rest of our body, with what they need to help them recover. To heal. To be whole again.
Truth is, I’m not sure where the line is between ability and disability, between healthy and ill. I imagine I jump between them regularly and, on any particular day, the diagnosis would change. And that may be the place of wholeness for me. The way I was created. To skirt the edge of things, having a look into both.
Keeping my balance is a tightrope act for sure. But God calls us to the mountaintop.
If mind over matter works, would it matter if we adopted a Divine Mind?
212 years
Today, I feel great. Tuesday, I had a heart condition. How can that be?
Our mind is amazing, isn’t it? Tell us we are sick, we become sick. Tell us we can do it, we can. Convince us it is our lot in life to be such and such, we become such and such. This is no minor matter. Three days ago doctors suggested (not even told me, mind you) that part of my heart might not be working well. And all of a sudden that became reality to me.
By this, I don’t mean that I just believed them – intellectually. I mean that I developed symptoms to support the diagnosis they hadn’t yet confirmed. My mind made me sick.
Now before you go thinking I am totally off my rocker, I have shared the sensations I was feeling with other women I know and they say the same. That stress – deep feelings about people and events, concerns about hardship, fear, worry, uncertainty, even uncertainty over positive things – felt like chest pain to them. A feeling of pressure that they wanted to massage away. This is how it felt to me, too. Except, the reason for my stress was physical. I had a diagnosis.
But wait. It wasn’t. Just kidding. And now, guess what, no more chest pain. In fact, other aches and pains in joints are subsiding. Can stress and the power of suggestion really have this effect on my body?
Even though I am a die hard realist, trained in the sciences, I have to say yes. My mind took over my body there for a bit. And now I’m back. But I’m back wondering – because that’s what scientists do – how that happened. And what does it mean?
First, now I know why women are so much more reluctant to report symptoms of a heart attack. It feels like the empathy they’ve experienced a hundred times before. How can we know this time is different? Cardiologists, are you listening? Women need a different gauge. When you have one organ that both feels and circulates blood, how do you separate which is overloaded?
Second, I’m wondering how much my imagination runs away with me, physically. How often do I suppose something is so and then is becomes so even if it isn’t? Like, I imagine that someone doesn’t like me or is out to hurt me or will take advantage of me, and then that “thought” becomes real to me. Even if they haven’t thought it at all.
Third, can I use my mind for good? That is, can I think healthy and become healthier? Can I think forward-moving and overcome my procrastination? Can my mind really overcome my matter? Honestly, that seemed pretty far-fetched until this week. I mean, how could you connect your mind with your body that way?
But now I am wondering. Even though I can’t see the connection, I have felt it. In real time. In concrete and undeniable ways. And if mind and body are inextricably linked, should I not examine what I am thinking? Test those thoughts. See if they are true, if they are real? And should I not look at my body, my physical self – this sensation, this addiction, this behavior – and ask, might my mind be causing this?
Just introducing the thought has me wondering…Is this why we’re instructed to adopt the mind of Christ, place not only our bodies but also our thoughts in His hands? Would that not heal us?
Injury Prevention is God’s Primary Business
0My left rotator cuff is giving me a bit of trouble again. I notice it when simple motions give me a twinge. Like pulling the sheets back or grabbing the seat belt. I, ever the self-diagnostician, always stop at the twinge. I lift the arm. Rotate it. Lift it again. Until I get it exactly right. And by right, I mean, when I can repeat the pain.
That may sound a bit counterproductive, but that’s how I pinpoint what to address. It hurts – right – here. Poke. Prod. Let me try a push up… Nope. That hurts. Maybe a stretch… Nope. That hurts. There is always rest but that sounds so very much like giving up. I mean, something caused this problem, I must FIX it.
So, I can’t do push ups but I can do my “regular” upper back/trapezius/cervical spine strengthening lifts. I do these lying face down on a half foam roller. Straight armed raises using 3 (yes, 3) lb weights – call me a wimp if you’d like – arms at my sides, then arms out to the sides, then…wait. When I lift my arms toward the back – the motion opposite my rotator cuff pain on the front – I feel weak on the left side. Go figure. A weak muscle is likely the culprit in the straining of it’s opposing muscle.
Why is it when we have pain that we poke and prod around the painful spot rather than behind it? That we scurry to shore up the injury instead of looking to its support system for weak links? Why do we fix rather than strengthen and stabilize in a way that would repair and steady us to move forward?
Perhaps because it’s dark and cobwebby down there. It may get ugly. We may get dirty. It may be hard work. Or it may be that we just don’t want to think about it.
It just sounds very much like God to me to say, “Wendy, I used that sore spot to get your attention, but what really needs doing is this.”
It’s such a better conversation than the one I usually have with myself that starts with, “ouch” and ends with: “this would have been so easy to prevent had I addressed it sooner.”
I believe God is in the injury prevention business, not just service and repair.