Loving Your Unbroken Body

Collection: Body and Embodiment

There are so many ways to look at the body, with assumptions and critiques, advice for keeping it healthy and strong. In this article I discuss several lenses through which we tend to look at the body (many of them unkind!). I imagine you might not (yet) relate to the phrase 'unbroken body', as few of us have an uncomplicated relationship with our bodies. Bodies hurt, tire, feel scarred and worn out, or don't feel like a safe place at all. However, despite real and perceived shortcomings, your body works diligently for you every moment of every day and is so eager for your love.

Our bodies often bring up intense feelings, so please hold yourself gently with whatever comes up. I would love to hear from you in the comments below. What is your relationship with your body? Would it be possible to reconnect with your body as a beloved friend who is always there for you? At the end you'll find some ideas for self touch, to re-anoint your body as a sacred place.

The Cultural Body

Whatever culture you live in, I am sure you hear many confusing messages about the body. In most religious cultures, the body received a very bad press, often equating nature and especially the body with wild, ungoverned, sinful, and other 'ungodly' values. 

In popular culture, the female body became objectified, sexualised, given value mostly through the male gaze, and not by its own strength and miraculous life-giving power. Also, cultural gender stereotyping strongly affects people whose sense of identity doesn't match with their given body.

In medical science culture, the body is seen as a machine, with defects that can be repaired, and imperfections to be improved. The advances of technology reinforced the pressure of popular culture to 'beautify' an otherwise perfectly healthy body to meet some idealised beauty standards. 

Finally, in academic culture, the body is mostly perceived as a container for the brain and to transport the intellect from one meeting to the next.

The Challenged Body

Every body has its own rhythms and timings. We often only take notice, when something is out of balance, which happens to most of us at some point. 

Sometimes our physicality gets challenged on a more regular basis, when we are transgender, live with asymmetric bodies, experience chronic pain, or are healing from intense surgery. 

There is also the challenge of the ever-aging body, veins that get more fragile, wrinkles that crackle our skin, joints bruising or swelling more easily, the increased vulnerability of illness and ultimately death. What happens to our body-perception, when we consciously re-anoint this place as a sacred vessel? 

The Unsafe Body

For many people, women especially, the body categorically feels like an unsafe place. Our integrity can have been violated through harassment or rape, which of course makes the body the last place we feel safe. 

Also, apparently more innocent, verbal messages that taught us not to enjoy our own bodies or experience sensual pleasure with another person can erode our sense of body as 'allowed' or 'hallowed' territory. 

With all the cultural hang ups described above, that might lead us to believe it's better if we don't think of it at all. This often leads to a degree of dissociation that reinforces the separation between body and the sacred. How can we renegotiate our perception of our own body as safe place and sanctuary for our own sacred soul? The answer to that might be different for everybody and every body, depending on what you experienced in the past. 

The Beloved Body

Parking these challenging views on the body for a moment, have you have considered your body as the only being who is with you your entire life? Rather than neglecting, reprimanding, fighting or punishing this 'innocent' creature, how would it be to make friends with it and care for it like we care for someone we love? Could we extend this loving capacity to our own body?

In a beautiful audiobook The Joyous Body (2011), Clarissa Pinkola Estés invokes:

Let it be known that the body was made in ecstasy so that we can experience consciousness. Let it be known that spirituality, religiosity, sexuality, beauty, and nature are physical and emotional gateways to consciousness. Let it be known that every type of body is desiring and desirable till the very end. (Pinkola Estés 2011, audio book chapter 2).

Pinkola Estés speaks of our good and benevolent body as the ‘beloved consort’ who relies on us for nurturing and safe keeping. Whatever challenging past or present circumstances we have lived through with our body, how can we considerately care for it so that we and 'it' "can thrive and feel supported" (Kieft, 2022: 53)? 

Sacred Self Touch

Did you know that there is a deep connection between touch, relaxation and emotional wellbeing? Unfortunately receiving enough safe and undemanding touch isn't often a given, even if we find ourselves in a loving, healthy relationship. 

Therefore, I'd like to make a bold case for regular self-touch to regain a nourishing intimacy with our own body. I'm not (yet) talking about sexual touch here, although it can, of course, grow into that. I am talking about taking a moment to caress your body with loving attention, when you are in bed or under the shower, or getting dressed for work. 

Give yourself even just five minutes of soothing, comforting touch each day, for example:

• a face, hand or foot massage

• a gentle caressing hug with both your arms wrapped around you

• breathing in and out as you draw long strokes over your torso (breathe in as you draw your hands up the midline, breathe out as they descend down the sides of your body)

• while you're seated, rub your shoulders, legs or your knees

You can choose to do this naked or with clothes on, however you feel comfortable and most at ease. It is really okay to touch yourself this way. It is a form of loving kindness and self care, and you have a right to give this comforting, soothing, calming or any kind of touch to yourself, your beloved body, and celebrate the mystery from within.

The small print...

• Kieft, Eline (2022). Dancing in the Muddy Temple. A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

• Pinkola Estés, Clarissa (2011). The Joyous Body. Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype. 5 vols, The Dangerous Old Woman Series, vol. 3, audio recording, chapter 2. Louisville, CO: Sounds True.

• Image credits:
  Blue Kintsugi Image: The Unbroken Body. Mover: Eline Kieft, artistic rendering by Florian Divi (2020).
  Hand on heart: Darius Bashar, Unsplash.

• Other versions of this essay appeared on 2.12.2022 in the Feminism and Religion Blog under the title "Re-Anointing the Body", and later on Medium as well as Toward Your Beloved Body (4.10.23)