#body intelligence

When I was a kid, I learned that you develop immunity when an illness rages through your body. Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn't just heal—it learns. It remembers.

Some wounds can only be healed and transformed in the context of community: within the understanding that each group member has a responsibility to the other and is part of a shared story. Only then can the past be re-visited and held in such a way that it transforms the present.

Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging. The more times we traverse this path—feeling the loneliness or craving, and inhabiting its immensity—the more the longing for love becomes a gateway into love itself. Our longings don't disappear, nor does the need for others. But by opening into the well of desire—again and again—we come to trust the boundless love that is its source.

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body.

I discovered early on that mobility for a woman in this culture is crucial. The ability to live and work on your own if you have to is vital. The ability to pursue the life of the mind is vital. The ability to journey the body's full story is vital. Volition. If you can find that in yourself you are going to be okay.