I don’t wake up easily. Coming back to my body after sleep has always been a chore for me, as if I’m putting on a garment that doesn’t quite fit. Or perhaps I’m not entirely sure I can trust the body to do my bidding throughout the day.
Being a sickly child who was allergic to dust, pollen, animal dander, most foods, and my father’s cigarette smoke set that early pattern of distrust. Waking up was to re-enter a toxic world that I was powerless to escape. No wonder I did my best to hide in the safer environs of thought and imagination.
But these days I have a deeper appreciation for my body—especially for its remarkable ability to enhance my understanding of the thoughts and images that comprise my world. Because, after years of spiritual practice in listening for the heartbeat of God (as author and theologian John Philip Newell suggests), I have come to recognize the body as a brilliant listening tool that always reflects this moment’s truth.
In recent years, I have discovered tears as the surest barometer of that truth. Have you ever been in a lecture or religious service or heard a particular musical passage that moved you to weep? What caused that involuntary response?
I recently heard Carl Jung quoted as saying that tears come from the primal material of our being—the salt sea of our most essential element: water. We know that our bodies are mostly water and that water is a natural conductor of energy. The most important energy the water body conducts, then, could be that of the soul.
We have been taught that the soul is a small, amorphous thing that lives tucked into a spot about two inches below the navel—a place the Chinese call the tan t’ien. It’s the chi spot, a centering place from which great power can be evinced.
Suppose, however, that the tan t’ien is not the soul’s residence, but merely its place of most direct connection with the body? Suppose that the late Celtic wise man John O’Donohue was right in his assertion from ancient tradition that the body lives in the soul. Imagine the body enveloped in a swaddling garment of soul stuff, and you begin to envision a powerful dynamic between spirit and matter that lends startling possibilities of body awareness—especially in its ability to communicate.
