MARCH 12X12: "Introduction to Your Body and Its Wisdom"

This is part 1 of a Saturday-long Conference I attended with Adam Young and a guest speaker for the month of MARCH. This one was entitled: "Trauma and Your Body: Exploring the Story that Your Body is Telling You." I will be breaking this down in parts. I am attending one of these on the first Saturday of each month for a year and taking notes for my own references.

I love when Adam starts these conferences with "Kindness to yourself will take you further on the healing journey than you can imagine." If this feels overwhelming, don't be hard on yourself. Have kindness to yourself! Your posture toward your body matters ... immensely.

Your body holds so much wisdom. Your body will communicate to you through pain. In my case, I struggled with chronic migraines for years. I am now convinced that those migraines were a result of all the things I had stored up in my body. When John is in the ER, he will often see patients come in with chronic pain. When he sees people with fibromyalgia, he almost always sees accompanying sexual abuse in their past. The body does keep the score! 

Many Christians have been taught that we can't trust our body. Yes, we need to trust Jesus! But we can also trust in the body he gave us to help us know what we need. People will tell us that the body is exceedingly wicked. But remember, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. When you are have tightening in your chest, or in your jaw, why is that happening? Your body is trying to speak to you! You can argue that it is the Holy Spirit communicating to you or that it is the way God created your body to tell you things. Honestly, I'm not trying to figure out the nuances of it anymore. 

What I have learned in this mental health journey is that my body is actually able to communicate with me. It has a headache. Why?! You feel exhausted while trying to be in a being social gathering after a hard week. Do you just push that away or do you listen to what your body is saying? Are you living in your body? Or are you living on the front lawn while your body does whatever it wants to do. 

I believed that if I listened to my body, I might actually cause myself harm. I needed to rebuke Satan and anything "speaking" to me. If I wasn't happy and healthy, than I was letting Satan tell me what was what. Our bodies are the place where death occurs. Where pleasure happens. Where we experience intimacy and closeness. 

Have you ever had a moment of sadness and then someone puts their hand on your shoulder and you come alive? That is for a reason! This body is not just a shell that will one day decay. God could have not given us bodies. But he did! And He has a purpose for those bodies. 

My trauma in 2024 forced me to listen to what my body was telling me instead of just pushing it away. I used to just say, "Here is what I need to do," instead of saying, "I need to take a break." My breakdown changed the way I viewed everything. God gave me this body!

Our culture gives us shaming messages. Our trauma gives us shaming messages. Embodiment is the experience of being connected to your body and making sense of what your body is telling you.  Our culture will even tell us that some bodies are good and some are bad. Generally we see that handicapped bodies are bad. Overweight bodies are bad. 

Plato, as a philosopher, toted this idea that the MIND and BODY and SPIRIT are separate from each other. But John, in the hospital, has repeatedly seen how we cannot be just one of these things. They are all connected. René Descartes came along and went further, telling us the body was deplorable. We were being taught to separate from the body. 

Our society has put an emphasis on "GO, GO, GO!" But what about those of us who are listening to our body and we cannot GO anymore. Those who have more energy or more ability end up being more successful. 

It was that scary.

It was that bad.

You had to disconnect.

That is truth for some of us. Our bodies turned off and wouldn't let us look at the trauma of our past because we wouldn't be able to handle that trauma until it was time to see it. There are many messages that we have received. 

• Women are taught that their body is only good if it is young and fertile. Getting older is not looked upon as kindly.
• We often use the word "pleasure" as something bad. We even say "Guilty pleasure." But God designed pleasure!
• We are told we are not our body. That we are our spirit. That is true, but God gave us our bodies!!
• We are told appearance is everything. We know this is not true. But it is hard to remember.
  
• We are taught that certain bodies are better than others. Oh yes!
• We are told that changing our body might make us feel better. Surgery might help us. But what about who God made us to be?
• We are taught that others can decide what is best for our bodies. 
• We are taught that little girls should like girl things. But some are tomboys! And that's okay. Allowing kids to be who they are. I was always allowed to do this when I grew up as a tomboy but some little girls or boys were not.
  
• We are taught that bodies get in the way of what really matters. That spirituality and intellect are way more important. And of course, this is true. Our body will die. But it still is part of us while we are here. 
• It would be so hard to jump into intimacy with something (our body) that we were taught wasn't safe.
  

This was just an introduction and some "things to think about" for this conference! Much more to come!