Embodied

We all have one – a body.  Life experiences we have are manifested through physical selves.  My mind, the psychological self which resides in my body, is chewing on this idea with its mushy, lumpy, fleshy little teeth and the digestion seems slow and attentive.  It is the embodied self that is the real deal, the package in which we rest. 

Embodied is listed as a form of the verb embody in the entry found at dictionary.com.
1.  to give concrete form to; express, personify, or exemplify in concrete form:  to embody an idea in an allegorical painting.
2.  to provide with a body; incarnate; make corporal:  to embody a spirit.
3.  to collect into or include in a body; organize; incorporate.
4.  to embrace or comprise

Also at dictionary.com The Online Etymology Dictionary, 2010 Douglas Harper offers that embody traces to c.1652 in reference to a soul or spirit invested with a physical form.  This word history captures what I am pondering this morning.  I happen to hold fast to the idea that we are spirit.  But at this moment we are bodied spirit.  I cannot be otherwise.  I am corporal.  My fingers are typing.  My belly is digesting.  My lungs are filling and emptying.  My brain is chug-a-lug-lugging along crafting sentences for this blog, listening for the laundry cycle timer, wondering what’s for lunch, anticipating the grocery store, thinking I should have some hot tea.      

Being embodied is so straightforward and obvious yet for me has taken a long time to figure out.  How can that be?  Perhaps because in my social history exists years of learning that the body is to be denied, is bad, is an enslavement, that all help for me is outside myself.  But new ideas offer me the body as a path to the soul.  Knowing it.  Moving it.  Being present in it.

I’m not advocating a wild physical free for all, for that is not honoring the body or the soul.  Abusing one’s body is not a path to true self but a numbing agent.  Understanding how our human body works, how best to care for it and live in it, knowing how to make choices that are good for our physical selves lends itself to the spiritual growth that blossoms into contentment.  Or at least that’s where I’m placing my bets.

              Physical Education

              Roaring flame-red rubber ball stings soft stomach skin
              skidding from fingertips fired fast behind the lines, telling

              in and out of traditional bounds, the court rules everybody
              fools somebody sometimes selling distractions.  Nobody

              knows the great guts it takes to build a balanced body, baby
          first swimming, screaming into prerequisite skin life begins

              cells and senses, bones, limbs and lips, lungs, eyes, elbows
          hunger and feces finding happy homebody hasten to rest

              sitting with a neighbor getting the scoop of being anatomy
              busybody breathing the business of life, learning incarnate.