One's physical well-being has a lot to do with one's mental, emotional and spiritual well being. It's all tied together. Physical illness does not happen in a vacuum. No thing is separate.

In around March 2019, I was cleaning the living room windows one morning, and noticed I could never get them perfect. They always had some kind of streaks or fog when the sunlight hit them, no matter how much I wiped them. It occurred to me the windows were metaphors of the limits of expression of clarity and the light of knowing (like when writing), a God metaphor. So when living or expressing God or love or truth, it’s always imperfect.

The nature of this (embodied) reality is imperfection in some sense. This is perhaps the so-called “fall from grace” in Christian wisdom teachings.

“Perfection is not a perfect body. Perfection is absolute perfection.” - Lester Levenson

Yet how could the totality be anything less than perfect: that is, exactly as it should be down to the smallest detail the mind can dream up, up to the whole and complete totality of existence? That’s what I was asking myself. Here’s what came to mind:

The experience from mending the ceiling this week:

The shoulder that never fully “healed” from physical therapy (last year), could have been thought of as a potential limitation. But I really wanted to do this work and mend the ceiling and not have to call in help or owe something to a friend. And I saw it as a kind of interesting challenge too.

The problem was holding this large panel up over the big hole in the ceiling (a large rectangle of ceiling board was cut out after water damage in the series of heavy rain storms) and screwing or nailing it in place. It was a flexible plastic panel so even while holding it in place with my head, it would tend to flop behind and pull back if I tried to fasten it at one end. It was a real puzzle.

But what if I were living in the remote wilderness alone and wanted or needed to do this? There had to be a way. A fun situation, like a game. I knew I could use the body and mind to do it on my own. So I “commanded” the mind and the body to come up with a solution, and they worked to do it. Overnight the mind came up with some options, and I still wasn’t 100% sure how to hold it in place and nail at the same time, but had faith the mindbody would do when I started. So I went ahead and launched into it, knowing that problems would be solved, in context, as they came up.

As it turned out, right beforehand I thought to drill holes along one end and part way up the sides, to make it easy to put roofing nails through and hammer them into the ceiling, then had nails and a hammer in my pockets. I got up on a ladder and used the pre-drilled holes at one end, to hold it in place from slipping, and put nails through while holding the panel with one hand and the head. It was complicated gymnastics with all parts of the hands, fingers, arms, head, body in play, maneuvering with geometry through the puzzle moment to moment. A very intricate harmonious dance. But I didn’t have to think much except a small amount of imagining, visualizing the initial maneuvers at the beginning.

There was maximum physical effort - right to the limit of what some muscles would do before they gave out, yet I knew that whatever happened would be OK. There was no stress to it. There was a joy knowing I had these faithful servants I loved. There was pain from the shoulder but it didn’t bother me. It’s just a sensation and I knew it would be OK.

I got the panel up completely and then just refined the job until it looked nice.

Ironically, the shoulder has been feeling better since then – still stiff, but I never think of it or worry about it. Most people would think doing such a thing would damage it. That is just a fear, a thought. But there was no fear or force doing it, so why would there be damage?

The body is my masterful robot. No need to fear pain. It’s meaningless. The body will repair if needed.

There’s a difference between forcing the body to do something and simply lovingly having it do your bidding, knowing everything will be OK. Forcing implies violence and disrespect.

I’m now living more like the body is my faithful amazing harmonious intricate marvelous robot animal servant, flowing through the day, like an art, or fun dance, rather than an enemy that’s going to betray me.

Physical Pain as Suppressed Emotion (Sometimes)

The author had another enlightening episode about the body last year (2023), where there was chronic pain in the neck and shooting down the arm that went on for weeks and months. The neck had been having episodes of pain and stiffness for decades. This time it was so severe that it shot down into the right arm, made it difficult to get out of bed, and prevented me using the computer for very long.

I started going to an acupuncturist, sports medicine practitioner that I'd seen before for other issues. I also went to regular doctors at some point – and of course they gave me bad news, as they are apt to do. Our healthcare system is a fear-based system, an illness-based system, not really a healthcare system. They claimed they saw things on the x-rays that led them to use scary words – also based on their assumption from numbers, my age, statistics, and images and concepts they had, such that they uttered things like "degeneration" and "arthritis" and "your age" and so forth. They also assumed this meant either it would eventually require injections of cortisone drugs, or surgery on the spine, the neck.

I thought that was both suspect, in how they were interpreting x-rays — vague black and white images on a screen — and ridiculous attack on the body. The poor, innocent body.

Anyway, after many sessions, the acupuncture sports medicine guy (who also by the way, was quite knowledgeable about Western medicine and the structure of the body and how it moves) could only help in a minor or temporary way. This time the pain really was "chromic".  Finally, he he told me about the work of a Dr. Sarno. The insight from Dr. Sarno had helped the acupuncturist with his own chronic back pain. If and when the pain ever came back, he would simply review the work, re-read a book or somethings written by Dr. Sarno.

Dr. Sarno is no longer alive physically, but his work lives on in books and videos. His great insight was that in a great many cases, there is no physical damage, but a mental dynamic at play. An emotion that one is not allowed to feel, is considered unacceptable, such as anger or fear, is expressed as a pain. The brain converts this emotion into a contraction of muscles that restrict blood vessels and results in pain. One becomes aware of these repressed emotions, and the pain goes away. Hard to beleive, but results speak for themselves.

For me, just reading about, listening to videos about this topic, was enough to relieve the pain, the situation, after not too long. Yes indeed, I saw there was some underlying worry, frustration and anger about a certain client, for example, and my work with them. That awareness, plus, somehow, just the general awareness that there was nothing really wrong, nothing to worry about, and I could resume normal activity, was helpful as well. Seeing that part of that contraction is the worry about the pain and what it "means", or assumed rto mean — that something is wrong — and the tension of sort of holding or contracting that body part out of fearing something is damaged or going to get worse from activity, is a cycle that can be let go of. With that knowledge, that reassurance, you relax, and go about your day, and do your bike rides or work on projects, whatever.

So it went away. The body cured itself. Like a miracle. The chronic neck and arm problem have not returned for over a year. And by the way, this neck issue had been coming and going every few weeks or months for decades, and I had never linked it to stress from frustration with work clients or whatever. I had just endured and tolerated it, slept with a special pillow, taken pain killers, and so forth.

And in an absolute sense, bodily hurts and tiredness are just that — experiences of sensations — and have no fixed meaning beyond temporary appearances; and they will change, like all appearances, and take care of themselves. No more thinking is needed about them other than what they may be telling us in a practical sense: remove a thorn, stop contracting, set right and put a cast on a broken bone, let go of worry, take a rest, allow something to heal, whatever.

The body (and mind) are "just" instruments of Love and Awareness, universal intelligence. They are not an enemy or something to fight or fear.

We both are, and are not the body, in some sense that’s hard to explain.

Better to love, laugh and enjoy each other, nature, the body, and whatever you can in the moment.

(originally written 04-12-19)