Needing to Hit Pause

Bodies have their own rhythm. I often ask my directees to notice what is happening in their bodies. Sue Monk Kidd wrote in The Secret Life of Bees, “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.” The body knows things before our brains can process what it is that we are feeling. The body doesn’t need to think about it. It feels it.

The body knows. I can see it on my their faces when something unexpected appears. My directee has said something important. Something that they didn’t know they felt. Something so true that silence is all that can follow.

It’s startling and slows us down to wonder if that’s really what we do think. It was said and it felt true, but is that what I really believe? Is that what I want? What does my body know that I haven’t heeded? What is my body trying to tell me? How might I listen to what my body is trying to say?

The spiritual director version of this question, and the one I find myself asking myself right now, is, Where do you feel that in your body?

We are all stuck in our heads. Or think we should lead with big ideas so that this question can be disorienting. We don’t stop to think about our body’s wisdom.

We push aside those feelings wedged in our guts. That stab in our back. That heaviness that weighs us down so deeply. Sometimes it is expansiveness that our whole chest feels open and wide, ready for anything. We might not be able to explain it. There might not be words for it, but our bodies are trying to communicate with us.

Last month, in April, my body fell hiking on the ice. I badly sprained my ankle so that it required surgery. My mind wanted to push through and believe that it was OK. The doctors told me that my body was saying something else. It would need surgery. It would require a long recovery after surgery in which I wouldn’t be moving around as freely.

My body is asking me to slow down and take time to heal, and I’m doing my very best to listen. I sent an email to my current directees earlier this week to let them know that I will be taking a summer pause. I will be taking an unplanned break to focus on my body’s restoration.

I offered them this small gift of a Summer Relief Kit. (It was a free offering to my directees but tending for the spirit also has the annoying need to pay the heating bill next winter, but it’s a mere $5 if you are looking for something to feed your spirit.) In these few pages, there are a series of practices and reflection questions in these downloadable pages centered around this Ross Gay poem. It doesn’t include a body practice. Maybe that will emerge over the summer but it wasn’t something I could write at the moment.

I didn’t want this message to my current directees to appear without something that felt like relief. When everything else is out of your control, which isn’t intended to refer to anyone’s injury but a wild gesture to the state of the world right now, here are some things to care for your spirit because it’s hard. It might be easier to push through with all of the big thoughts and ideas, until we come to a crashing halt and our bodies insist that we pay attention to the wisdom living inside each of us. To wonder, maybe even out loud, what is my body trying to tell me?

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

I don’t really know what my body is trying to tell me. I’m not as young as I think. Ice is slippery. Anything and everything could happen. Healing could mean so many things. I haven’t the foggiest idea other than the fact that my body is telling my head that it needs some space. It needs to press pause. It needs space to recover.

Part of me is still dreaming. Part of me is still wondering what else the world. That part of me couldn’t quite slow down. It made a playlist and a reading list over on Bookshop.

That part of me thinks I should be writing with the hours I’m spending just sitting on the couch resting, but the wise and wonderful Howard Thurman instructs that what “the world [really] needs is people who have come alive.” That part of me doesn’t have all the answers. It wants to over-function. It wants to push through inserting some ableist notions of grace and healing, and there has to be more. There needs to be more so I’m hitting pause to create that space to come alive again.

If you were to click over to my calendar, you’d see that there only a few spots left in the month of May for spiritual direction before my children get out of school. A long summer pause follows through the months of June, July and into August. In the end of August, my calendar opens again to welcome regular opportunities to notice what is in our bodies and in our spirits. To share in the wonder of deep listening through spiritual direction after I’ve had some time to heal my body. I’ll look forward to being with new and old directees -- maybe that even includes you -- in the fall.

Until then, I’m sharing a piece of this summer relief kit that I wrote and then deleted from the packet. I offer it to you here to wonder about what season your body is in. What does your body know it needs right now? I hope you find the space that you need for this season.

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