As I approach forty, I realize how much of my life I've spent in an adversarial relationship with my body. As if the years of alcohol abuse and chain smoking weren't enough, I've always had a resentment toward my body.
I'm a born thinker. I love the wild, dizzying heights my mind can climb to effortlessly. It always seemed to me a pain in the ass to have to drag some lumbering meat shell along.
Plus, as a result of childhood teasing and a general aversion to all things athletic, I somewhere along the line got it into my head that my body was ugly, wrong, and an utter liability.
Now, as I conclude my third year in recovery, with 70 extra pounds accumulated since my last drink and cigarette, I'm grateful to have discovered some real acceptance of myself inside and out. I don't hate my body. That's a big change for me. In fact, there are some parts of my body I like. Some I'm curious about. Some I've begun to relate to positively as unique features that make me me.
Still, though, there is a sense of separation, disconnectedness. For so long, I've considered my body an awkward and ill-designed vehicle for my thoughts and creativity. I've regarded my body as a literal shield against the world. My body has been the blunt barricade keeping the world at bay, while I hid out safe and warm inside.
It's very foreign for me to consider my body an extension of my personality, my self. I'm as much a victim of Adonis body image marketing as any gay man. I usually approach my body with fierce judgment and criticism and with almost always an exclusively aesthetic eye. Most often when I look at my body I feel disappointment, failure, shame.
Lately, though, I've been learning my body is consciousness itself--a magical machine with the power to navigate space, collect data with senses, and keep my big ol' brain from falling off a cliff or setting itself on fire.
My body is the sacred space of intersection between my consciousness and the consciousness of the world. My body is the axis mundi of my reality. Human being requires a human body. In fact, how do we distinguish human consciousness from bird consciousness, dog consciousness, or whale consciousness? The body of each of those things.
The brain is just a body part--an organ like the heart, liver, or lungs, and most of the thing is not even essential for the survival of the body. My valuation of anatomy is decidedly skewed.
My human consciousness is dependent on my body. When I go to sleep and slip past REM state, my body continues to work, restoring itself, monitoring the environment for danger. Even without 'thoughts', without language, I am still alive. My body retains a deep primal consciousness of itself...
Then there are those metaphysical systems of the Indians and the Chinese, which posit that the body is an energy system, plugged into and exchanging energy with all other things in the Universe. I like this idea. It takes me to a pagan place, a poetic place.
The body, too, is an ultimate expression of karma. And I don't mean karma as so often ill-defined by the West as a moral payback on prior sins. I mean that the acts and choices and lives and influences of generations upon generations of people before us manifest in our bodies--for better or worse. We are all intimately connected to those who have gone before by little scripts running in our cells. We then have our own choices to make, our own destinies to follow, our own consequences for our own actions.
This weekend, I visited a friend who has been re-snared by the cunning, baffling, and powerful disease of alcoholism. To see that man curled fetal with suffering, in a tall, powerful strong body, demonstrated to me the complete oneness of mind, body, and emotion.
We are sacred and fragile beings. A miraculous and tentative confluence of molecules, memories, desires, and breath. How urgent it is, that we take care of ourselves--body and soul.
Passion, beauty, and love, folks--24 hours at a time...
image: James Franco shaving his armpits for Gucci.
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