I

Being in your body sounds a little gross, if I’m honest.

This has been my first year of regularly practicing Yoga. My girlfriend is an instructor, so it’s part of the deal unless I’m a dumdum, which I am not.

I grew up a little suspicious of all things Eastern, things like yoga, martial arts, and meditation. It’s not that there was an overtly racist connotation to these suspicions, it was just that our colourless spirits, and thus souls, belonged to all-powerful-all-knowing-god, and he didn’t like it when they were diverted by non-church spiritual practice, or totems of the land, or hippy-dippy peace, love, and incense. Don’t try to add it all up, it won’t.

As a result of this somewhat xenophobic vision of the divine, I subconsciously engaged with my life as the driver of a meat puppet. Counterintuitively, this had the effect of seeing me sacrifice a certain amount of agency over my life and well-being.

There is a danger incumbent to the belief that you can just leave, or that you can be rescued from the consequences of your actions simply by way of apologizing to an entity unrelated to the transaction of your transgression. In such a dogmatic trap, one can become quite presumptuous and entitled, even reckless. That is a hazard of this silly way of thinking, this confusion, and resistance to the idea that nothing is separate from anything else, and that you’re not very different than anyone else.

The most poignant example is closer than home. There are no strings to this meat sack that can be sliced in order to divest yourself of your responsibility to maintain this body of thine, not until your consciousness unravels in death, or whatever it does when it all shuts down as we know it. When you’re cut, your spirit also bleeds, and the reverse is also true.

It all makes such sense to me, and always did, in theory, but it’s tough to overcome one’s conditioning to believe that, at the end of life, you simply shuck this now worthless husk to go sing with the angels forevermore. What an odd presumption, that a god would even want that, that a god would be such a sordid collection of human faults. Mysterious ways indeed.

Maybe I just misconstrued the entire collection of input, but that’s what happens when you retell stories that don’t make sense to a kid with a wild imagination-like all kids-and an even accidental acquaintance with critical thinking.

But it’s difficult to overcome conditioning, and things become separated. Mind leaves body, and moves to the future, or heaven, while the body remains behind, struggling on its own, neglected. After a while neglect leads to resentment, and resentment leads to pain, and the connection is renewed, with the mind now under under austere contract to endure every moment with great attention until some balance is restored.

That is one way of being in your body; you can be at war. You can allow some belief that counters all rational perception to keep you at odds, and fighting, and in pain, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to live like that.

You can be kind to yourself. You can apply your capabilities to the task of creating a unity that heals wounds, allows peace, and soothes pain.

If you intentionally hold a belief that causes avoidable pain to yourself or others, there’s something wrong with your process. You are leaving your body and entering a realm where you have no physical control of your world because you have surrendered to moral disease. I know this because I do it all the time. I’m actually doing it right now because I’m getting mad. I’m skirting the edges of a conversation about war, and it makes me break out in rage sweats to think of the horror, the pain, and the hate that is caused when people think that it is their god-given right to mind other people’s business.

I’m so angry, and I’m nearly overcome with grief at the wrongness of it all, of all this time that I spend outside of what I can control, out of all I have the right to control.

Me.

So I take a breath into my lungs, deep enough to expand my chest and swell my belly, and I take a drink of water, and as it plunges down into my guts, I follow it all the way to my skin, and out, away, carrying all that anger, because I can’t have it in me if I am to have peace. I move my bones to clear it out of my joints, and I tension my muscles to make it necessary for my juice to travel, and I look at something beautiful, and my eyes soften, and I say ‘Thank you’ to unclench my jaw. And then I do it again. I allow my body to remind me that he is a partner in this endeavour, this adventure of life. He is not a tool, he is not an enemy, he is not a sacrifice. He is the only thing I can control, and the first I am to love.

If I let him.