I recently finished Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection. She writes here of the body:
“We have forgotten how to listen to our bodies; we pop pills or everything that goes wrong with us; we can have an intestinal bypass or we can have our stomach stapled. We can turn ourselves over to medicine without ever questioning what the body is trying to tell us. To our peril, we assume it has no wisdom of its own and we attempt to right our physical ills without making the necessary psychic corrections. We may temporarily succeed but the body has its way and soon another symptom appears, attempting to draw our attention to some basic problem. If we ignore the small symptoms, the body eventually takes its revenge”. (page 26)
Woodman brings attention to our penchant for responding to pain and discomfort by immediately attempting to “fix” the body through medical intervention without actually coming into dialogue with our body’s needs. It is a pervading problem in today’s society that we continually emphasize the mind over the body, and in doing so further sever the connection between the two. In their separation, both the mind and body suffer.
I spent years trying fruitlessly to eliminate discomfort from my body through Western medicine without actually trying to understand where the pain was coming from or what it needed from me. I went through periods of utter hopelessness as I experienced declines in health due to my failing immune system. I couldn’t hear my body’s calls, I was too focused on finding the right medicine, the perfect treatment, convinced that If I did I could make it all go away. But the pains became more frequent, and amid the aches, in the spaces between tight muscles, a voice and image emerged to me and I could no longer ignore its howling desperation.
When I started to listen to the voice and dialogue with the part of my psyche that belonged to the body, the instinctual fleshy animal that my mind had cut off, I saw before me a coiled black snake. I saw a creature that was starving and fearful, angry that its needs had been deprioritized. He had been starving in this secluded cave that I had kept him in, not listening to his hissing until finally, the pain of his bite forced me to. Pain is often the soul’s cry for help. It forces us into dialogue with our neglected creatures, the parts of ourselves that we have banished into darkness.
In seeing the suffering of the serpent I felt compassion, compassion for myself and my body which had been through so much. Pain forced me into reality, I had to reckon with the state of my body. In my compassion for the snake, I couldn’t bear to see him suffer when I overexerted myself. I needed to change how I spent my energy and really shift my lifestyle so that I could care for the serpent that was hurting inside of me. This is a difficult shift for anyone experiencing chronic health issues because one must begin the exhausting work of detangling oneself from the learned values of efficiency and productivity that so pervade our capitalist culture.
Surprisingly, accepting the current reality of my condition has brought relief and further openness. Once I stopped kicking and screaming in my unwillingness to accept what I perceived as the inherent unfairness of my situation, I started to become more at peace with my limitations. These limitations were a gift in a way, they forced me to prioritize and figure out what really mattered to me. I could no longer spread my energy thin by doing as many things as possible. I had to ask: What made my life fulfilling? What kind of relationships were necessary and/or possible for me right now? What am I spending energy on that I don’t need to be? The suffering of flesh forces us to grapple with our values, it creates tension that our ego must mediate, the pressure it creates is what enables the transformation of the spirit.
The instinctual animal side of the psyche is the voice of survival, the inherited knowledge of thousands of generations of humans who survived before us. We must be able to trust that the voice of the body is telling us something because it is invested in our survival as a species. While pain is usually an overwhelming sensation, the work of listening to the body requires one to pay attention to the subtle cues. The creature speaks to us sometimes in protest of little discomforts and overexertions. If these become frequent enough you will quickly have a screaming animal and a sudden pain in your wrist, or an attack of nausea. It doesn’t just require proper rest and nutrition, the body’s signals are spiritual in nature, the instincts of the unconscious are desires of the soul. The soul speaks through metaphors, so signals for hunger may not be satiated by physical food. Your body wants you to feed it with experiences that feed your soul
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I started to understand through my hunger my snake required emotional the nourishment that I had been neglecting him. His mouth was always parched, in dreams, I fed him milk for his flickering tongue. No amount of real milk would satiate him, it was a spiritual thirst. My snake wanted me to spend on cultivating more intimate emotional bonds where I could experience mutual love and care. When my throat hurts, when my jaw is tense, I am reminded that this creature in me wants its voice to be heard. So, I try to speak up. I began to write more, and it spoke to me through poetry, drawing, painting, and ceramics. I wrote this poem as a part of an ongoing dialogue:
I am the red and coiled one
Having shed my burned and blackened husk
Slithered through it like a gauzy tunnel
Emerging from my gate at the shore
I taste the sweetness of blood and milk
Offerings placed upon my lotus
I am the fire about the shrine
I burn upwards in a furious spiral
My circle is that between mouths and hearts
My bend is the curve of the egg
The protected center, the golden eye
Never blinking
A shift towards a more embodied way of being is the product of the pain and tension caused by illness. Societally we must embrace the discomfort and find the ways in which pain is speaking to us through bodily wisdom, how it seeks to guide us towards a greater wholeness. I speak to my snake and I open my ears to his hissing. While the illness is not my fault alone, nor his, it is our responsibility to work together, to understand each other through the language of sensation. Even though my healing journey is far from over, I can feel the creature relax a bit more every day as we hold each other in our shared purpose, our shared vessel that used to be a cold and hostile battleground which is now been filling slowly with warmth and light.