I know where the divine lives.
I have the holy GPS coordinates. I’m in the DMs of that sacred inbox.
I’ll share it with you. Follow my hands as they peel off the dress that has hidden this sublime site. Watch my skin prickle as you see the goddess revealing Herself in the tiny little hairs that cover me. Trace the wishbone curves of my ribcage, the gates at the entrance to this sacred ground.
Yes, the divine lives and breathes in my very body. As it does in yours, and everyone you’ve ever known.
Disturbing the Peace
This is heresy to many ears, I know. So, please, allow me to disrupt the peace further.
When we worship the wisdom of the body we remember that we are already whole. We need no church to enlighten us when we have the diaphragms that open and close our throats, lungs, and sex organs. We need no scripture to awaken us when we have the truth of our hands, our voices, and the kiss of our upper eyelids against the lower.
All we need to realize the holy word is to know that it already exists in every breath we take in and expel.
The End Result of a Spiritual Journey
I have learned this truth the only way I know how: by denying it for many years.
I have been a spiritual seeker for more than 20 years now. One could argue that my seeking has gone on for multiple lifetimes, but I place the start of my devotion to mystery at the moment when I shut my big mouth and listened to wisdom speak. Since that day, I’ve followed a long and circuitous path of training. To summarize years of experience into a few pithy bits of prose is an impossible task, but I’m all about making the impossible possible.
All I’ve learned in my spiritual journey is this: We are more than these bodies.
Our Graven Images
In a culture that worships what we can count, that is a radical statement. We bow to dollars in the bank, repetitions at the gym, notches on the bedpost – these are our graven images.
This hyperfixation on seen reality at the expense of the unseen leads to a sort of nearsightedness, a focus on base desires – the one-hit wonders of sensory experience – without the divining rod of those deeper desires that will lead us home.
Praying to what we can count on one hand is not wrong, per se. It’s just not all there is. Our eyes easily miss what is swimming below murky waters.
The Pendulum Swings
As I gained this nugget of spiritual wisdom about going beyond the body, the pendulum swung away from conditioning that told me my body was the focus and toward the side that says that spirit is all that matters. In yoga studios and meditation centers, I joined the cult of Western spiritual practitioners sighing a breath of relief as we replaced one leg of a wobbly stool with another. Finally, we said, this will fill in our missing blanks.
But as I shifted my identification from the body to the untouchable, intractable, universally connected force, I mistakenly believed that I had transcended the thing that caused all my problems.
It turns out, the body is the holy ground I was looking for.
Holy Ground
When a mortal is lucky enough to bear witness to some holy creature – a goddess, an angel, a piece of toast with a message – we declare the site of that apparition sacred. We build monuments, sound trumpets, and sell tickets to pilgrims who crawl on their bloody knees for the chance to kiss that hallowed ground.
Yet in the face of the everyday miracle of spirit animating our fleshy bones, we are too quick to discard this precious monument.
Imagine if we were to unify these parts – the body and the spirit. Imagine if we were to gaze into a mirror and realize that it is no accident that I, as in the spark of consciousness that lives behind all of our eyes, arrived here, as in the physical site that holds heaven on earth.
There Are No Accidents
It is no accident, but instead, divine orchestration of a magnificent opera of spiritual experience that only happens in a body. Yes, I am, but also I do. Both are needed. Both are true.
With only the body, we are empty and shallow. With only the spirit, we are formless and useless.
But when they are valued equally, we are powerful beyond measure.
So go ahead, trace your fingertips along the site of the divine. Look upon the hair that falls like angel feathers from your crown. Taste something, smell something, hear something and then call yourself a holy ghost in human form.
