The Body has a Story to Tell
Over the past eleven months, we have explored a variety of ways to grow in our walk with Jesus. We’ve talked about why spiritual formation matters and looked at ten different tools to help us slow down and experience the triune God more intimately.
During this year, as I have been deep in a season of rest, I have been exploring a form of spiritual formation that I’m not sure I have ever considered before.
In the fall of 2020, I started seeing a counselor. I was in the middle of a big season of change and needed some help processing the decisions that were to come, which meant weeding through the past. I reached out to a friend and asked for some trustworthy recommendations, did some research on the names she gave me, and then got an appointment scheduled. I met with that counselor for a little over a year and healed and learned a lot.
During this time I was reminded of a book. Have you heard of the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.? I heard about it a few years ago and tried to listen to the audio version. I quickly realized this was not a book I could process via audio, so I picked up a hard copy. But I didn’t get very far at the time.
Recently, I knew it was time to pick up this book again. My counselor and I chatted and agreed that the healing that remained required me to switch counselors to someone who specializes in the nervous system and the memories that the body stores - even after we’ve walked through forgiveness and grief.
A few weeks ago I had a picture come to mind, an image from Peter Pan actually. Do you remember the scene when Peter is trying to find his shadow? It has separated from him and once he catches it he needs help reattaching it. Thanks to Wendy his shadow gets sewn back on and he is good to go. As I was thinking about that scene I was thinking about how the work of exploring the memories stored in my body was a bit like Peter searching for his shadow.
He was missing a part of him. He needed that part to be complete, to be his full self. And while Peter Pan is obviously a cartoon, that image has stuck with me as I have thought about what it has looked like for this same kind of disconnection to take place within my body.
What I discovered is that this work of listening to the Holy Spirit and paying attention to the clues coming from my body is a form of spiritual formation. God made our bodies. When they are in pain they are communicating a message to us that something isn’t working quite right.
Sometimes that pain is really easy to assess. If you’ve fallen and twisted your ankle, then you know why your ankle hurts and you know about how long it will take to heal. But other times the pain is much harder to figure out.
Sometimes there are wounds that come from work, or friends, or church, or wherever that settle deep into our body. We might know what happened initially, and we might even have walked through the grief and forgiveness, but something else can happen when our brain gets stuck in the fight, flight, freeze, fawn mode and stays there for a really long time.
We can end up with chronic pain. Pain that isn’t explained by any test, but is very real.
So this month, I thought we would explore some ways that paying attention to our bodies can be a deeply healing form of spiritual formation. I’m still very much on this journey, which is probably why I’ve waited until now to talk much about it, and while I won’t share all the details of my story, I do think that there is much to be said about paying attention to the bodies God gave us and the messages they are sending us.
This week I invite you to pause and just consider the question - How are you doing?
I hope you won’t just say fine or great and move on, but I hope that you’ll give yourself some time to really consider the question and invite the Holy Spirit into your pondering to reveal anything in your body that might need your attention. Maybe it is something very subtle, or maybe it is glaringly obvious - either way, it is worth exploring and getting curious about, and my prayer is that your curiosity will lead to you encountering Jesus in every part of your body.
~ Melissa