If you’re like me, most of your life is lived neck up. The main thing I intentionally use my body for at work is to sit and type. I use my brain, my voice, my ears. When I preach, I use my legs to hold me up and I wave my arms around a bit when I get excited. Sometimes I lay my hand on a shoulder and I shake hands and for some who are more touchy feely, I will offer a hug.
Outside of work I use my hands, arms, and right foot to drive. My phone and radio are hands free. I supposed I could write this blog hands free if I wanted to. I guess I am still a bit old school. I use my thumbs an inordinate amount flipping through pages with my phone. I use my jaws to eat food, but once it gets down my throat, my unconscious, neck down body takes over…until it has been fully processed and then there is some business to take care of. And yes, there are bedroom activities, but let’s say I am modest.
But for the most part my neck down body is something of a barely animate object or at least that’s how I think about it. I don’t exercise much, nor do I even really stretch much. I worry that I, along with the human race, will become like it did in the movie Wall-E. The people spend their lives in floating Papasan chairs. They have these little lifeless legs and are all just big blobs. Life is all mindless and bodiless entertainment and then you die. AAGGH! I’m not there, yet, but I feel like I could get there if I work at it. Or rather never work at it.
Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me was having an anxiety attack. It was as if my neck down body was screaming at me, “We are still alive down here!!! Pay attention to us!!!” One of the things I have learned through my journey of anxiety is that emotions are experienced throughout our bodies, not just in our brain. In fact, our brains are part of our bodies as well, not just some disembodied collection of thoughts. Our thoughts, our movement, our emotions, our internal processes, and our spiritual lives are all caught up in our whole bodies.
We were not created for living exclusively neck up. And if you neglect the rest of your body, it will start to rebel, I promise. But there is also a problem with just thinking about the rest of your body as some burden we must give attention to or die.
Living a full-body life will connect you with joy and a whole hosts of other wonderful emotions, feelings, and sensations.
I began gaining a sense of this when I started taking my son to the neighborhood pool. Something about playing in the pool with a four-year old opened up great feelings of joy and peace.
My skin celebrated the wonderful sensation of emersion. My muscles shouted for joy as I threw my giggling son up into the air. My joints seemed to sing a song as I glided through the water. And low and behold, my anxiety departed. My soul began to emerge down from the depths of my body, traveling up my spine, through my neck into my brain’s stem and then through the emotional center, and probably an unconscious smile before it finally made it to my prefrontal cortex–the place of awareness
In reality our entire bodies are places of awareness, not just our prefrontal cortexes. Our bodies are how we experience the world around us, the world within us, and even the world beyond us.
God put us in bodies for a reason. He speaks to us through our bodily sensations, our stomachs and chests, through our emotions, not just the space between our ears and above our necks.
And maybe that’s why God came to us in a body, one we call Jesus Christ. Maybe he wanted us to know that our bodies matter. I am not asking you to get out of your head, but to get below your neck as well and experience a full-bodied life.
Live in your body! Give thanks for it! Celebrate it by engaging it fully!
Christmindful 