Please Log in to Vote.

2 out of 2 members found this useful.

Thinking about Being Embodied

Posted August 16th, 2008 by Gayle Karen Young in ruminations

I was thinking of what it means to be embodied after a phone conversation with Beena Sharma last night when she scrambled my brain. She said something to the effect of, "we don't live, we're not alive...we just think about living." It got me thinking of what it means to live, to be embodied. (The deep irony of this is, of course, that I'm thinking about living and being embodied...) It reminded me of reading "Women Who Run With Wolves" by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, so I thought I'd share a couple of the passages there related to the flesh from my notes in reading:

I’m enjoying the chapter on wild flesh, joyous flesh – about body and self-image. She writes:

“The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it. Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed…. The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising hope… To confine the beauty and value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation.”

As someone who was rewarded for living in her head for so long, I think one of my vastly underdeveloped lines is that of living in my own body, being my own body, the beingness of body.

I am also reminded of David Abrams’ text, “The Spell of the Sensuous”, and of the notion of reciprocity of the body – the notion, for instance, that to touch others means the experience of myself as a touching being. So if I lay a hand on the hand of another, I not only feel the heat and texture of their skin but I open myself up to their feeling palm of mine.

Another memorable paragraph from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' work that struck me, particularly in the visceral memory of my own ugly duckling year, is:

“There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment…So that is the final work of the exile who finds her own: to not only accept one’s own individuality, one’s specific identity as a certain kind of person, but also to accept one’s beauty…the shape of one’s soul and the fact that living close to that wild creature transforms us and all it touches.

When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective, and we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is just right.”

I daily come into contact with people I find beautiful. I sometimes wonder if they know it, if they see it in the line of their jaw, the brightness of their eyes, vivacity of smile, grace of walk, strength of hand. I am sad to realize that I really doubt they know it - some few do, and it’s visible in the sense of lightness close to them, frequently hard won.

User login

Quick Links

The Archives

Please Log in to Vote.

Thinking about Being Embodied

Please Log in to Vote.

Beautiful...