The spiritual integration of owning the body
My recent health checks and realizations
A friend who was close to my age died from cancer a few months ago. And over the past year, I have noticed hormone fluctuations that seem to indicate the start of peri-menopause for me. Together these two things lit a fire under me to go do a health check, finally.
My head is spinning after getting a whole battery of tests, body scans, and blood work done this week. It’s the most comprehensive health exam that I’ve had in a decade. Honestly, I haven’t actually done any health exams for a decade. I have neglected this, because I have some aversion to doctors and hospitals. I have not had a pressing reason to go. I consider myself “pretty healthy” and I am blessed to have a low-stress lifestyle.
I don’t have anything particular “wrong” with me. I am not dying. At least not in an accelerated way compared to the average human being. My health is okay. What I do have is a host of chronic issues that are mildly annoying. Nothing debilitating, just inconvenient – at least for now. For as long as I can remember being in this body, I have struggled with skin and gut health issues, sporadic sinus infections, sleep disruptions, and some baseline anxiety.
None of this is a health emergency. These are all things that I have learned to live with. I have learned to live in a body that functions sub-optimally. It causes me discomfort sometimes but it’s familiar to me. And turning a blind eye to the underlying causes of my issues is easier. It means not having to do anything to change the way I am living.
Big realizations are landing for me. I feel like I have been handed a golden key to long-term health and vitality. Or at least, some critical insights for my body’s healing. Maybe there are bits and pieces of this information, which I have suspected or received hints about before. But I didn’t fully see what was happening with my body on a deeper systemic level.
“Oh, my gawd. How did I not do this sooner? Why did it take me so long to arrive here??” This is the self-flagellating thought that keeps replaying in my head, now that I see the big picture. The simple answer is – I didn’t know because I wasn’t ready.
Medicine for illness and wellness
I went to a big international hospital a couple of times this week. I spent hours wandering around a complex of huge buildings, as I was passed around from one department to the next. I saw an orthopedist for a bone density scan. I went to an OB/GYN for a pap smear. I felt like an object on a conveyor belt each time as I waited for my queue number to be called.
This experience largely mirrors the Western medicine approach to healthcare. Compartmentalized, disconnected, fragmented, with a focus on treating symptoms.
I also visited the private clinic of a functional, integrative, holistic medicine doctor this week. Functional = focused on optimizing overall wellness, rather than treating a specific illness. Integrative = looking at the body as a whole system. Holistic = offering solutions beyond surgery and prescriptions, which include diet, exercise, nutrition and lifestyle changes.
The doctor and I sat on a sofa together while she asked me about my health concerns, my lifestyle, my family and childhood. Then I went into a room with a nurse, and an ordinary-looking computer terminal. I was instructed to hold a metal bar in my left hand, while squeezing my hand into a fist. Five minutes later, what came out was a pages and pages of data, with detailed readings on each of my organ systems, potential allergies, trace minerals and a whole bunch of other things. Everything measured as vibration.
The doctor spoke with me for 30 minutes. She did a brief hands-on physical exam. She looked at the data from the bio-resonance scan. And finally, using the body scan, she was able to pinpoint the further blood tests needed. Based on those four inputs, she put together a compelling picture of my body as a whole health system. The bio-resonance scan is an impressive technology, but the miracle blessing for me was not the technology but the doctor who was using it. She was seeing me as a person, not just a bunch of numbers.
This doctor described to me the cascade of effects that are happening in my body – with each issue acting as a domino knocking over the next. All of it traced back to having a weak pituitary gland, hyperactive mind, poor sleep habits, too much sugar, and undernutrition throughout my childhood. You know what else she told me after meeting me for the first time? That I probably developed a lifelong sugar addiction from not receiving enough physical touch as a child. Don’t cry for me. It’s okay, I am crying for me.
The early roots of dis-ease
It makes a lot of sense. I grew up in America in the 1980’s, with both parents working full-time. I was a latchkey kid. By the time I was 8-years-old, I was expected to take care of myself. I fed myself and my younger brother with microwave meals and processed after-school snacks. My diet was full of simple carbs, sugar, and preservatives. I was trained to be a high achiever. I never learned how to relax, or how to breathe deeply or chew my food slowly for that matter. I was always thinking, always working, always striving for the next achievement.
A lot of these patterns and habits established early in my life continued on into adulthood. I spent 15 years working in corporate, drinking five Starbucks lattes a day, and eating most of my meals in hotel lobbies and airports. I sat under fluorescent lights, hunched over a laptop for hours every day. My life force was weakened. I had no connection to Source, no sense of anything beyond my ego and what my ego was achieving.
Of course, my system became a play party for all sorts of parasitic entities. Because when we are not tapped into our own soul frequency, we become extremely susceptible to infiltration by foreign guests. These entities might be calcified thought forms inserted by media programming. They might be emotional debris from trauma and conditioning. Or they might be physical parasites, proliferating in the hotbed of acidity in our gut microbiome.
Rebuilding the house of health
I live in a community hyper-focused on health and wellness. I have been exposed to and have easy access to many so forms of healing for the body. There is so much available, in fact, that it is overwhelming. I have tried elimination diets, fasting programs, detox protocols, deep tissue bodywork, colon hydrotherapy, somatic healing, energy healing, supplements, essential oils, you name it.
What I have realized now is that without a root cause analysis, I was just “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick.” Some of the things I did, offered me temporary relief. And some of the things I did, I know now, masked symptoms, but also added stress to a system that was already unbalanced. Ultimately, I found my body would eventually twist itself back into its long-held distortions. Some things worked, a bit. Nothing would stick.
There was no permanent fix, because I was addressing symptoms, not causes. I was trying one thing after another, without any thought to sequencing the healing process. What I am learning now is that some things need to be healed first before you can address the next issue. With the new information that I got this week, I am hoping this is what will shift now.
You know the expression: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, if you are building a house, you are going to need more than one tool. And you have to start working from the ground up. I have been living in a village full of tradespeople – many of whom are experts at their craft. And I have been going around the village, using the tools of those tradespeople. But when your house is damaged throughout many rooms, you need to plan and design the renovation process, and you have to take care of strengthening the foundations, before re-building step by step.
Descending into the body, as a spiritual being
For me, the final frontier of my spiritual awakening is landing fully in my body – consciously consenting to be here, in the physical realm. Not halfway. Not hesitating. I realize now that for most of my life, I have been resisting this. I have rejected my own body. And it shows up as me simply not taking care of it, not treating it as the temple that it is. My health has never caused a crisis, so my body simply languishes in okay-ness.
I am not sure if spiritual “awakening” is the correct term, actually. When we talk about spiritual awakening, we often talk about the knowing that you are infinite. But there is also the knowing that you are limited, as an incarnated being. When we are awakened, both truths can be held true at the same time. Awakened human beings are then able to navigate the physical world in a body, while simultaneously remembering that we are a localized, specific expression of something ineffably vast.
Maybe it would be more accurate to call it spiritual integration. It’s not just awakening. It’s not just embodiment. It’s being both awake and embodied at the same time. Ego and essence. Spirit and form. To integrate spiritually, it requires a clear mind, a clean heart, and an inhabited body.
For some people, it’s a bottom-up process because they are already quite connected with their physicality as dancers or gymnasts or athletes. And then the healing moves to the heart space – where we all have work to do, because of the inherent relational trauma that comes from just existing as a human being. And for those people, where embodiment comes naturally, the final stage is awakening. It is about befriending the mind as ally and not enemy. It is about gaining access to the true higher mind, by taming the monkey mind. It is about learning to connect with intuition as divine direction, and to access clarity and direction and discernment.
My journey has been more of a top-down process. The entryway for me was learning how to see the trees of higher intelligence, while wandering around in the forest of my egoic intellect. I studied spiritual philosophy and teachings of non-duality. I learned about typology systems like the Enneagram, which managed to codify the sacred geometry of the psyche. It was a way for me to connect with the infinite capacity of Source, by noticing the variants in its expression. For me, the pursuit of understanding is what led me down the garden path where I fell into a rabbit hole of seeing and knowing what can never be explained.
In recent years, I have been removing imprints of trauma from my heart space. I have spent a lot of time using and guiding others with psychedelic therapy. Engaging in this as both personal practice and offering has powerfully expanded my capacity to hold all aspects of human experience and expression, with unconditional acceptance.
Now it seems like I am entering a new phase of the game. The phase where I care about and care for, my physical body. I see how I have been subtly rejecting my body – simply by letting the part of me that doesn’t want to be here be the loudest one in the room. It’s time now that I fully commit to this ride of human experience. I want to honor the gift of Life that I have been given by tending to vehicle maintenance. I want my body to be something that I treasure, not just tolerate.
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