The year was...2016.
I was working three part-time jobs: cramming my feet into high heels on the way to hospice chaplain visits and spiritual direction sessions by day and changing into no-slip shoes for the closing shift at Caribou Coffee by night. While chain coffee bar backing is certainly one of the easier food service professions, anyone who has worked in such a position knows that the job is 0.05% espresso, 20% colorful customer personalities, and 79.95% cleaning up fluids you desperately hope are coffee.
After one such closing shift, I returned to my apartment where my best friend greeted me with a smile and smooth jazz. I walked through the threshold and promptly pressed myself face-first into the floor.
Fortunately we had just vacuumed.
As I lay there in carpeted euphoria, I started unclenching every muscle that I had been contracting more or less consistently for the last 14 hours. Starting with my toes, I sent deep exhalations to every part of my body up through the top of my head in a practice called body scan meditation. I tend to hold stress in my chest (no alarming ER-inspiring pains there!), so when I reached that part of the scan I felt especially grateful. I spent a few extra succulent moments luxuriating in the healing capabilities of my mortal coil.
Once the scan was complete, I found myself in a state of complete surrender—physically, mentally, and spiritually. To my surprise and to my delight, I then found that I felt especially capable of communing with the sacred. I thought of the sacred, and it just felt closer. It was as if it was physically closer than my breath. Closer than my next thought.
I felt an overwhelming amount of gratitude not only because I had found some respite from a busy week, but because in that moment I experientially felt the relationship between the body and mind. The body and mind are meant to work in sync—not in spite of one another. Earlier in the day, my mind had a difficult time connecting with the sacred, because my body was having a difficult time connecting with the sacred. The answer wasn't to shut the body up so that the mind could speak, but rather to allow both the body and mind to speak together. I didn't peel away my layer of bodily mass in order to reside with my mind; I invited my body to speak and then invited my mind to do the same. Humans are able to do both.
Body-conscious meditation prepares us to settle effortlessly into the sacred, physical universe, from which we received a body that is capable to do so.
For this very reason, I strongly prioritize body scan meditation at the beginning of every spiritual direction session. Before we begin the gratifying work of spiritual exploration, we have to make sure that the body is on board. We have to make sure that the body is aware of and comfortable with physically being in the sacred space. Once the body is settled, rooted, and responsive to the physical setting, the mind may then reach out from a sturdy foundation.
I offer body scan meditations as part of spiritual direction in person, virtually, and outdoors. The spiritually curious can check it out for free. Schedule here.
January 28, 2019 | Denver, Colorado
#bodytheology #spiritualdirection #spirituality #spiritual direction #spiritual advice
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