June 2021: Embodiment
Embodying Love as we Reunite
Every year, before my roses bloom, I have an idea of them in my mind as I anticipate their arrival. I can close my eyes and try to remember what it is like to have them blooming in my yard or look at a picture I took last year, but it is not ultimately satisfying. Now, when they are fully expressing their pink, orange, white and red beauty I get to interact with them at the visceral level. I walk up to the bush, bend over, pull a branch closer, inhale the perfume deeply, investigate the texture of the petals, and look at the yellow fuzziness of the stamen. I walk away from the rosebush refreshed, inspired, uplifted, smiling, and changed by the encounter. I have also re-connected to the great mystery that is at the heart of life as I experience the creative power endlessly unfolding through the rose I hold in my hand.
Our bodies are how we live and move as human beings on planet earth and they fully carry our lives within them, including our spiritual development and expression. The divine dwells in and expresses through our miraculous bodies and although it is said that the body is our temple, I believe that all of existence is our temple, and that the body is the portal to anchor and savor it at the deepest level. If a vision, idea, quality, feeling, or prayer does not become tangible within our body then it will have no form and cannot be realized. As we embody that quality that we so deeply want to experience in our life – such as love – transformation alchemically happens, for we are already love, and we have already tapped into the truth Oneness is always present within us.
So how do we do this, as we celebrate this month of June when we get to come back in person at our Center? And what a blessing that is! This wonderful gift of togetherness in person gives us a chance to start fresh by doing two things: First, we can show up really open and present to each other as we are, in all of our uniqueness, vulnerability, fragility, pain, and joy; accepting and valuing all of that in each other, and really taking each other in through the senses. Even if some of us aren’t ready to hug yet. Second, we can pay attention to what is going on in our bodies as we do come together. We are always cycling through emotions and responses to what is going on around us and these impulses are always accompanied by bodily sensations because we are one being. In fact, if we aren’t aware of these emotions, if we don’t allow ourselves to feel them in our body, and if we don’t disarm the toxic ones by naming and releasing them (and getting help for deeper trauma that may be present in our bodies) then we may believe our fears and doubts are who we are, and thus feel stuck.
When we do this work of embodying our emotions and releasing the ones that don’t serve us (through community ritual, spiritual practice, body work, spirit groups, therapy or whatever works for us), we expand into greater awareness of the love within us, and greater awareness of the spiritual truth that we are love in action. This work of expanding awareness is sacred, and right now we are being called to do so, not just in this community but in the United States and throughout the world. This necessity is at its greatest today because if this work is not done right now, historical and current trauma experienced by so many that isn’t felt in bodies and reconciled through reparations and political changes of various kinds will continue to recycle and haunt us. The reckoning that really has to happen in order to co-create A World That Works For Everyone is a spiritual one involving love, and that happens through our bodies, and it starts right now.
-Jane Midgley, Ministerial Intern