The Body as a Shadow Element

The body, as the realm of the instinctual and the intuitive, as the level of feeling and sensing has always been unknown to the intellect.

We tend to fear what we cannot understand, and we tend to try to control what we fear. 

Thinking has no way of truly penetrating the mysteries of the body since the two are different and separate capacities of ours altogether. 

To the degree that we are identified with our thinking, the body is seen as “other.” 

In much of our society today, the body is used merely as a means of transport for our heads and as a means to extract pleasure from what we can eat and drink as well as from sex. 

A thorough exploration of what we call “the body” is a far away adventure for a great many of us, mostly because we have no role-models to pave the way. 

We are, for the most part, complete strangers to our bodies. 

Yet, in today’s world we see bodies everywhere, continuously, whether we are looking for them or not. Social media is full of bodies so are commercials and movies, and TV shows. 

Considering most of these bodies are either half or nearly fully-naked, one would think sex is out of the closet in today’s society and so is the body, but are they really? 

Are we really much closer to our bodies now compared to the past when sexual pleasure was taken to be sinful or when religious people were trying self-torture as a way to “tame” the “hunger” of their bodies? 

Getting to know the body from the inside is a much larger undertaking than taking up yoga practice (even though yoga or any type of physical exercise can greatly help us in this exploration). 

The body wants more than nutritious food to be fed to it, more than massages applied to it at the spa, more than the “full-body” orgasms we might be busy chasing. 

The body longs to be known, to be penetrated fully by our compassionate attention, to be held by our loving touch, to be explored from deep within. 

The mysteries of the body include emotions and also go far beyond. 

To inhabit the body is to be grounded in our emotions. The deeper our intimacy with our emotions, the deeper our connection with our feeling core, the more energetically open and relationally attuned we become. 

Emotions communicate a lot more than we can imagine through our intellect, however sophisticated our minds may be. To be out of touch with our emotions is to be disconnected from the body, and therefore from our true needs and mature relational capacities. 

Numbness is the biggest global epidemic we aren’t talking about. 

Bringing the body out of the shadow is to reclaim it not only as ours, but as us. For as long as the body remains an “it,” feeling whole within is not possible. 

When we get to know our feeling and sensing capacities and our emotions, when we have enough intimacy with our pain, we begin to intuit that what we are in Spirit we are in body. 

Formlessness and form are not two. We recognize the true nature of what we refer to as “the body.”

Then the body is no longer merely an object of our awareness, but where we are being aware from.

The coming together of consciousness and physicality shows us that we are the feeling instruments of the Divine, ever tuning into the symphony of the infinite, ever in orchestra with everything there is.  

May we get to know and fully honour our bodies before their demise, then we shall know the miraculous beauty of what is to be alive. 

Click here to read more about how to get in touch with the body’s innate intelligence.