I spent the better part of my Sunday sick with the flu...the yucky kind of stomach flu with the body aches, the the fever, the headache, and the wish that someone would just come in and put me out of my misery. The kids tried so hard to make me all better. Nathan, in the most sincere and innocent way, offered to make me spaghetti. Just the word "spaghetti" was hard to handle. Thank you, Nathan, but I'll pass. And Olivia climbed in my bed and sat cross-legged next to me, and put her tiny hand on my head and sang me a song, a song that was a mix about God dying and going overboard for Jesus. I have to say she hit it right on the head. Being thrown overboard from this ship sounded pretty darn good. Charles came to check on me after church and he gave me a big hug. And as he held me, I remarked that I could understand why sick babies and kids just want to be held when they aren't feeling good. His arms around me, I realized how the pain in my body sort of melted away. Love relieved my pain. As a matter of fact, love will relieve the world of pain. Being held did me more good than the Tylenol I couldn't keep down. The energy and warmth of physical touch heals. He tucked me back into bed and took the kids to the park and out to dinner, and I took my aching body and sat in a hot tub of water to try and cope with the hurting.
Our bodies are so miraculous. God never made them to get sick. Sickness was never a part of the loving mind of God. Disease had no place in paradise. God's breath that filled us was the breath of LOVE and LIFE, not death and suffering. As soon as we began to believe that fear was real, our bodies immediately did not know what to do with that emotion. Sickness is really a word to describe the absence of Love, or separation from God. Our bodies are often referred to as our "temple" and we are to treat them as God's temple. When I think of a temple, I think of God's house, a building, a place of worship that has walls, floors, places to sit, and maybe some holy icons of some sort. So why don't I treat this temple better if it is such a holy place, a place where God lives and moves and has His being?
Why do I know what to do for my body, and still choose not to act on that knowledge? What accounts for the wide gap between knowing and doing? I, for one, have not separated my body from the building. I treat my body as a thing, rather than listening to it as I would another person. I had to start thinking about the word "temple", and figure out if there was something about that word that, in my mind, I needed to correct. And after thinking about what word I might replace "temple" with, I think it is "relationship". The temple we are told to honor is a relationship. We are a spirit that has a body, and we are in relationship with that body. What is our relationship with our body and how do our relationships that we have with other people, and the conversations of forgiveness, compassion, love, and mercy affect the relationship I have with my body? I have been treating my body as a thing, and I tend to take a lot of things for granted.
One of the benefits of Silent Meditation is that you are always invited to think about what you think and why you think it. Before practicing Silent Prayer on a regular basis, I was like the duck that found herself caught in an oil spill, near death,unable to move, paralyzed by the tar and pollution that the oil spill( my invalid beliefs) left behind. Silence (God) rescued me, pulled me out of the muddy, filthy, scummy waters of certain death, and set me upon a shore of a billion grains of sand. Each granule a thought, a belief, or a "truth" that I have made and formed into my own castle, with no firm foundation, and easily washed away with one large wave, where I choose to abide. The hands of Silence picked me up, rescued me from dangerous waters, and soaked me in gentle, clean, soapy waters working tirelessly to rinse away every last tar ball, every last string of sticky oil until I am free and able to live again and returned to my natural Home. This is exactly what God does for us when we wait on Him to wash us and renew our strength. God cleans our hearts, washes our minds, and then sets us free to fly to our natural home of love. The duck has to sit in stillness and surrender to being washed clean. The duck is frightened, panicked, and fearful that he will only be hurt further, but eventually, even the bird is calmed as she realizes that these gentle hands are for her life, not against his life, and he will eventually be free of the muck that once choked off his very breath.
Eventually, as we stay faithful to Silent Prayer, the muck, the muddy waters, the paralyzing pollutants of my thoughts and feelings about my body have to be washed clean, lest they paralyze me from loving my "self" and loving others. Every mother understands how drastically a body can change after having children. And then add years to this and looking in the mirror gets a little harder as time goes on. Wrinkles, sagging, drooping, cellulite, aches and pains make it more difficult to have a respectful, loving relationship with our bodies. Our physical bodies are constantly responding and reacting to the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that we hold in our minds. Our bodies become what we think about and what we believe about ourselves. We are what we eat, but we are also the beliefs and feelings that we digest. Ever experienced indigestion? What beliefs and feelings do we swallow that burns our inner selves?
I realized I needed to start thinking of my body as an actual person that has a mind of its own and feelings of its own. My body is not a thing, or a mere structure that houses my spirit. My body is its own person that is only designed to thrive and function on love. The DNA that permeates our bodies, and makes us who we are is really this: The Divine nature of our existence, the Need to experience love, and the Allness of God. Because God is love and God made us in his image and likeness, then everything about our bodies is based on divinity, love, and everything that God is. In other words, anything that isn't love is foreign, damaging, and is threatening to our bodies. Think of it this way, if my body were a car and I tried fueling my car by pouring lemonade into it, that car isn't going to respond. But if fueled with the proper gas, wash it, take it in for regular maintenance, change the oil, and fix it when it is broken down, it is going to run smoothly, efficiently, and take me wherever I need to go.
The only fuel my physical self will respond to is love, mercy, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, joy, peace, patience, pure goodness and self-control. We must learn to feed our bodies the fruits of the Spirit, by allowing minds and hearts to become a new creation. Anything else is lemonade and is damaging. It will never function like it is meant to function. I have never been able to stand in front of a full-length mirror without any clothes on. I've thought about it, but have never been able to do it, until this past weekend when I got sick. When our bodies get sick, it is an indication that love, in some area of our life, is needed. Every cell, every vein, and every organ is lined with the fragile, yet firm, and ever-changing tissues of love, and every time we have a loving thought, do something kind, forgive someone, listen to music we love, or pray to our God, our cells light up, open up, grow, expand, and make new ones. Every time I blame someone, judge someone, hold onto anger, resentment, complain, or live in shame, our cells contract, harden, and shrink away from fulfilling the purpose they are intended to fulfill. Cells turn into tumors and tumors feed on fear and drain the energy of love. Every time a thought is rooted in fear, worry, fret, anxiety, panic, and doubt, every cell absorbs the message, direction, and instruction of illness. And our bodies produce all kinds of ill conditions. If, over long periods of time, we hold onto anger and blame, our bodies will reflect the dis-ease in our thoughts and feelings, and serious illness can begin to take form.
When Charles and I were discerning our relationship, and we were first dealing with our feelings for each other, and the relationship was growing more serious, I couldn't tell anyone. A Roman Catholic priest and a nun aren't allowed this form of love. I was keeping that part of my life a secret because of the circumstances we found ourselves in. Months of this took its toll on me, and this secret began to take the form of chronic sinus infections that eventually led to sinus surgery. My sinuses had begun to physically close off and everything in my nose could not be released as a healthy sinus cavity is always able to release. (Can you tell I'm trying not to disgust you?) All my sinuses were really reflecting, was the "closed off" part of me, the cavity in my heart, that I had sealed up, preventing anyone else from entering in. The minute, and I mean minute, that I felt safe enough to share this part of my life with someone, my sinuses began to drain. After that conversation, my kleenex was full of everything my sinuses were holding onto.(Still trying hard not to disgust you...so sorry). From that point on, my sinus infections eventually calmed down. Every feeling of shame, guilt, fear, anger, and loneliness ended up stuck in my sinus cavities. My body was trying to send me a message, but at that point and time, I still believed my body was separate from heart and mind. Any repressed emotion finds a home in our bodies, firmly plants itself in a vulnerable place in our cells,our organs, our veins, our muscles, our joints, and will grow if not released and forgiven. Negativity seeks the place inside our bodies that is empty of love so that it can fill it with the expression of fear. Absence of love makes us vulnerable, weakens are immunity, and attracts sickness.
Love boosts and creates immunity to every dis-ease. If you go to a job that you don't love every day, and you are constantly saying how much you hate that job, eventually, your body will no longer be able to absorb the dis-ease in your mind and heart, and you will find yourself with any number of physical symptoms. Babies will physically die if they do not feel the love of another human being. People who have suffered sexual abuse, and never felt safe enough to tell anyone, form cancers and other major illnesses. Anger that goes unresolved can take on the form of depression. People stuck in loveless marriages wind up with chronic physical conditions. Love has the power to make our bodies ageless. How many of us know someone that doesn't "look" their age? They either look older than their age or younger than their age? Choosing stressful thinking, stressful beliefs, and stressful actions ages us. People who handle stress well, eat well, exercise and meditate often look much younger than they are. People that suffer bladder infections often are in a "toxic" situation of some sort or are holding onto some "toxic" belief pattern that they might be unaware of, or choose not to address.
This temple that we're in, this "relationship" with our body, is really not all that complicated once you awaken to what you are thinking and believing. Simply put, our bodies need to feel that they are loved. Not being able to stand in front of a full-length mirror without any clothes sends the body a message of shame. What we laugh about and make fun of over and over is really serious business if we cling to the belief that my body is shameful. Hiding under the sheets in a pitch black room in order to allow your spouse to touch you tells your body that you are ashamed of how it is and fearful that you will not be desired and accepted. We hate our bodies so much that some of us are willing to stick needles in our faces, use substances to smooth out wrinkles, go under the knife to get rid of a tiny bump on a nose, allow a doctor to stick a tube in us to remove fat, and make the parts that we don't like smaller or bigger. This says to the body, I hate you enough to do some very extreme, abusive things to you. Cancer, is at its very root, a disease of self- hatred and self-rejection. At the root of every cancer is lack of self-love and a rejection of "self in one form or another. Unexamined thoughts and beliefs about our bodies eventually become physical symptoms, or lack of physical symptoms, if those thoughts are not aligned with love. Awareness of what we think and what we feel can help to prevent cancer.
What is one thing we can do to start a more loving relationship toward our body? While I was lying in bed sick, instead of repeating the thought in my mind of how bad my head hurt, I began to realize that this was just one tiny space on my body that was hurting. My fingers didn't hurt. My hands didn't hurt. My toes didn't hurt. In order to take my mind off of what did hurt, I started to thank God for what didn't hurt on my body. Giving all my emotional energy to gratitude, actually lessened the aches. And then I decided to try praying for people that I knew who are physically suffering from illness. Unfortunately, that list was long... too long. Removing all energy from the sickness and keeping our eyes off of the present circumstance and fixed upon God relieved my mind and my body of my burdensome thinking. I stopped repeating in my mind how awful I felt and started to repeat prayers instead. Watching a funny movie, kept my thoughts occupied on something light and mindless.
And yes, the next day, I decided to take the plunge and stand in front of the mirror and really take a look at a body that has done some pretty miraculous things.(No, it really wasn't the fever talking). I didn't jump overboard the ship like I thought I might). Showering, I thanked God for every body part that I was washing. The place in me that grew my babies, the hands that typed every last word of my book, the arms that I wrap around Charles when he comes home to us in the evening, the eyes that allow me to drive my van and see everything my kids are doing at school, the feet that play kickball with my children, and take me shopping, the ears that allow me to hear I love you. The mouth that allows me to taste the chocolate that I love so much. A shift in our heart and minds will shift the trajectory of every cell, every blood vessel, every artery, every organ,and propel our bodies toward greater health. Gratitude heals. Laughter heals. Prayer heals.
I say I love my body, but yet I still eat and drink what I shouldn't eat and drink. I love my body, but then my actions say I love food more than me. I say I love my body, but I don't often get enough sleep, or laugh enough, or just relax enough. I say I love my body, but I put off working out or taking a walk. I say I love my body, but I can't just look in a mirror and see only perfection. I say I love my body, but I don't wash my hands often enough, or long enough. I say I love my body, but I don't wash my mind often enough, or long enough. I say I love my body, but I don't clean my heart often enough or long enough. I say I love my body, but put it down in conversations, laugh about it, and take my frustrations out on it, and even feed it things I know I shouldn't. Yes, we need to eliminate certain foods in our diets, but of even greater importance is elimination of certain words, especially fear, the greatest poison to our physical selves.The question that we need to answer every day is: Will fear shape my body or will love? What our bodies look like to us in this moment began to take shape in our mind (thoughts) and our heart (feelings) just a moment before, and a moment before that, and a thousand moments before that.
Begin each day with loving your body in whatever way you can. Make looking in the mirror and forgiving yourself seventy times seven a holy habit. Release your real body from being a slave of the perfect body that lives in your imagination, always wishing it were a different body, a body that society says we should have. Would you tell your child that you wished they were in a different body? So why would we tell it to ourselves? It is the vehicle that carries us through the day, communicates something to everyone, and helps us get done what needs to get done. Treat your body as you would treat another person. Say to your body, what you would say to your daughter about her body... That she is beautiful and perfect, fearfully and wonderfully made in every way. Be kind, forgiving, and tenderhearted toward your body too.
I don't believe that we have to experience illnesses and diseases in the way that we do. God was never the author of sickness and illness. God only penned chapter upon chapter of resurrection, healing, and wholeness. Our self-hatred, our self-rejection, and the secrets we keep in our hearts about ourselves are the chapters we wrote about our bodies. The life-blood that flows through our veins can only be love. Anything that isn't rooted in love throws our blood counts off, clots up the lifeforce within us, and attacks the heart. If Jesus were here today, he would hold the arthritic hand in his, and ask the person what in your life is crippling you? Where are you inflexible and rigid in your thinking? He would say to the person with an ulcer, what in your life has caused so much anger to flare up inside you and eat at your core? And he would say to the obese person, what are you trying to protect yourself from? What heavy burdens do you carry? What has caused you to need comfort? Who has betrayed you that you need to make food the perfect friend? To the woman with breast cancer, he would ask When did you give up on nurturing yourself?When did you start believing that you weren't important enough, good enough, beautiful enough, to tend to? When did you stop believing that you are loveable? To the friend with high blood pressure he might ask What are the pressures and expectations of perfection that you hold yourself up to? To the person with laryngitis, what truth about your life hasn't been given a voice? What do you need the world to know about you? What are you afraid to express? When we become aware of what we are telling ourselves about our bodies then the gap between what we know we should do and what we do do will cease to exist. When Jesus healed people of their illness, he simply closed a gap between knowing we are loved to actually feeling that we are loved, and believing it. Whatever you do, don't feel guilty when you get sick. Our bodies absorb our guilt all too readily. Many illness reside in our subconscious, and eventually, and very gently, the origins of that illness will surface over time if we are open, available, and willing to be taught by our bodies.
Sometimes when we get news that someone is ill, our bodies absorb that news as its own news. If there is a particular person in your life that always has news of cancer, illness, and death, that is an energy you simply don't want to absorb. Everyone of us probably knows someone who dwells on that type of news on a consistent basis. They are the people you don't enjoy being around or getting a phone call from. Anything that is dwelt upon is magnified, multiplied, and made into a mountain. That level of negativity is hard on a physical body. It is simply a type of avoidance as to their own body, mind, heart issues. Those kinds of conversations that are always around sickness, that are repeated over and over again, can wind up making you sick. Respectfully change the subject and wash your mind and heart of that type of dysfunction. It is a defense mechanism and a place of distraction. It is a projection of the sickness in heart and mind that they are unaware of. Remember that Jesus came to heal the sick, not the healthy. Be an imitator of God, a healing presence for them. Respond in a positive way, but don't join them in making that mountain.
The next time you are sick, just stop and think about the conditions of your mind and heart that might have led to the illness. Then think about the steps you may have forgotten to prevent the illness - like washing hands, getting enough sleep, not enough laughter, eating too many sugars. You know the list. If you are facing a serious illness, not only do you need to treat the symptoms your body is demonstrating, you need to treat your heart with loving, peaceful, positive thoughts. Forgive your self when you get ill. It is a part of the journey. It is never a weakness. In our illnesses, we experience God's perfect strength. No one deserves to be ill. God doesn't punish anyone through illness. Everyone deserves God's healing. A God believed to make sickness contradicts a loving God that heals. Even our false images and beliefs about God can make us ill and keep us sick. Everyone has a divine right to live long, happy, healthy lives. I don't believe that the human race has to be as sick as we are. When we put on the mind of Christ, our bodies will follow that divine lead. A divinely ordered life leads to a divinely ordered body, strong, light, and free. At the end of the day, remember to thank your body for all it helped you accomplish. Our bodies thrive under gratitude, compassion, and tenderheartedness. Every scar, every wrinkle, every gray hair, every curve has a message and a story to share. Listen to your body. Ask your body what food it needs, what drink will quench your thirst, what exercise it desires. Listen. And it will tell you. Your "gut" will tell you. Pounds over our center suffocates the VOICE of your inner heaven,that just wants you to know that you are loved. you are perfect. And you are limitless.
