Body and Spirit

Unitarian Universalist blogger Elizabeth wrote a post today that captured some of the spiritual issues raised by illness, especially when the diagnosis is unclear.

In “On not being that sick anymore and hope,” she writes:

We are taught that our bodies - our sickness - somehow happens to us. Or that we cause it. When it is really neither. We are in relationship with our bodies - we are our bodies - yet, they have a mind of their own. Both. And. And neither.

May we love our bodies. May we be fully in them - listening to them - open to the healing that can take place, yet gentle on ourselves knowing that incongruence between body and soul and spirit is both real and something we might be able to draw closer together. When I was sick I hated my body not cooperating with me. Yet, I had to also to come to terms with it being me. Me being it. Yet, also not.

These paragraphs really resonated with me. It’s very tempting to put bodily experiences into strict categories — to attribute a physical problem completely to psychological factors, thus ignoring the agency of our bodies. Or to attribute a physical problem purely to the body, as if the body is not impacted by our mental state.

On one extreme, we have people who reject using any kind of medicine, even for the treatment of severe illnesses, with the assumption that one’s mental and spiritual state is the true source of illness. On the other extreme, there are people who over-medicate for problems that may be in part psychological. We see concerns about both sides sometimes discussed in the media (for example, in articles about the prescribing of medication for children’s mental health problems, or in the Tom Cruise/Brooke Shields/post-partum-depression controversy).

This wanting to parcel bodily experiences into strict categories also spills over into sexuality. There are those who believe sex can be purely physical — that sex can be detached from relationships and emotional connection. And there are those who will argue that all sex must be emotional — that sex is only enjoyable when two people are in a longterm, committed, monogamous relationship with positive feelings about one another. And yet, I believe many people would report that their experience of sex and sexuality falls on neither end of this spectrum, but rather somewhere in between the two extremes.

The desire to categorize what is going on in our bodies as either/or can cut us off from understanding the ambiguity of the body/spirit relationship. Rather than trying to fix our experiences of our bodies into strict categories, we can also choose to accept the complexities of the connection between our physical experience and our spiritual state.