The Unlikely Spiritual Practice of Loving Your Body

If you haven’t yet had a chance, I’d suggest starting here with these essays before jumping into this week’s Field Notes so that what follows will make a bit more sense to you:

1. Announcing our new series: Unlikely Spiritual Practices: This one is for the Quiet Time Drop-Outs

2. We are not trying to become worthy of grace; we are learning to live as though grace is already true: Unlikely Spiritual Practices Part 2

3. The Unlikely Spiritual Practice of Wonder & Delight: Unlikely Spiritual Practices Part 3

4. Today!

The Secret Field Notes Podcast Episode 53 is up and waiting for you to listen to either through your web browser or through your preferred podcast listening app.

Listen Here

Hi friends,

Welcome back to Unlikely Spiritual Practices, our summer series here at Field Notes! I’m loving our conversations and your responses to these essays. Today we’re talking about the unlikely spiritual practice of loving your body. I know, it’s the worst! But stay with me…

We will be covering:

• An introduction

• I couldn’t think my way into loving my body

• The spirituality of embodiment

• The first gentle invitation

• One Important Thing I Learn From Jesus

• A minor miracle

• More Than Ourselves

• A Few Starting Practices

• Further Reading

• Reflection Questions

When I was very sad and very sick, I would go to the lake to remember how to love my body.

I remember one day in particular, it was late summer 2020. We were in the dead centre of the pandemic’s punishing waves of isolation and grief and loss. I was still in the early days of figuring out how to live within the constraints and realities of chronic pain and then-new diagnoses, while still recovering from surgery at the beginning of that year, all thanks to a car accident several years prior.1 One of my best friends, an uncommon soul, had suddenly died a year before, leaving many of us bereft. And we had also lost our church community because some folks had drummed up campaigns because of our support for LGBTQ+ folks, meaning that a place of belonging had become a place of exile. These are just the headlines though, there were stories happening off the front page as well, stories about family, extended family, work, income, all of it.

In those months, it seemed as if took every ounce of me to get from one end of the day to the other end of the day. I was trying my best to look after everyone else while feeling torn off the hinges of my own life.

The rare times that I dared to look in the mirror, I did not recognize the heartsick and exhausted woman staring back. Who was she? Damned if I knew. My eyes were as weary and pained as my bones. I felt like my body had aged ten years in two; twenty in my soul. I did not recognize my own self anymore, not only in appearance, but in my lived experience within a body that had changed profoundly to integrate all this reality.

In the middle of those rough years there, I stumbled into the unlikely spiritual practice of learning to loving my body, all while I was still very sick and deeply sad.

And I believe that practice helped to save my life.

I believe it set me free of some damaging theology, helped with healing in both body and soul, and even changed how I showed up in the world for our neighbours. It was also one way God unlocked the connection between embodiment and justice, peacemaking and presence for me.

I’m Gen X so of course I had always struggled to live within this body, let alone love her. At first it felt impossible. Some days it still does.2 But it was in those days that I began trying.

I knew that I was in the aftermath of one life, the beginning of another. I did believe that those liminal spaces are sites of holy discomfort, it was time to act like it.

Most of the spiritual practices I had been given in the early days of faith were deeply cerebral or interior or contemplative, rooted more in my head than in my body. There isn’t anything wrong with those practices but let me tell you what: I couldn’t think my way into loving my body. I couldn’t just contemplate my way to knowing God’s goodness in an embodied way. I couldn’t ruminate and believe my way towards loving my body.

No, I had to learn how to BE in my body and to LOVE this particular body, right now, right then, and always in order to heal some profoundly broken notions about God and my own belovedness.