Not Food, Not Sex...Then What?

I’m beginning to think that my body may need or desire more than food or sex. Or food and sex. J The fact that this statement arrived as an insight does not bode well for my state/level of evolution in spirit-mind-body harmonies.

As per “Hunger’s Many Tongues” of last week, I’ve been listening more closely to the times I perceive hunger and how it manifests, what I associate with it. Time and again, I become aware of an emptiness or a sensation akin to hunger and I immediately assume it must be met with some kind of food. I find my mind cataloguing through various kinds of foods to see which one seems a “fit” for whatever hunger I perceive.

But what if the energy clue or sense of emptiness has nothing to do with food at all? If I make it this far, sans catalogue-fit, then the next candidate is physical desire on my roster. Am I yearning for some intimate time and space with my partner or is it a more solitary yearning? Communal calendars, work energies, ongoing narratives all come into this discernment, of course.

But then…what if the energy clue or sense of emptiness has nothing to do with physical intimacy at all?

I don’t think I’ve ever made it this far, myself, because I have little to no idea. Sometimes my body requires rest when I’m unaware of it, but that sensation presents itself differently than hunger or emptiness. It therefore seems an illogical or incoherent item for consideration in this musing. Another posting may emerge about times when I feel extreme weariness or tiredness. I’ve learned this can be a signal I’m avoiding something just under the surface that part of me feels inadequate to address or conceptualize, understand or respond to. Another time, perhaps, with no energy drain at avoidance.

Several learnings come to mind in these things, these veins. There’s a very interesting assumption in play, for one. My mind must sort out what my body needs and then arrange to provide it. Rather colonial point of view, mind over body. A portion of this assumption also requires that communication between colonizer and colonized must be language, conscious, speech of some kind. [And no, just to clear expectation and listening: I don’t have an intention of punning on “colon.” If something clever had come by now, I’d aim for it, but you’re safe, for the time being.] If anything, body-language or felt-sensations I’m coming to understand as ‘communication’ are not in such forms that my mind can easily perceive. Instead of words, linear-associated images, or direct meanings, I’ve begun to learn my own body-speech comes in sensations, symbols, unexpected energy points. An image from Thomas Keating to describe God’s way with us: it’s like my body is playing peek-a-boo with my mind, allowing it just enough to conceptualize but so little as to be unable to control it, direct it.

Another learning has to do with commitment and ‘making space.’ This pathway continues to unfold only as I practice fidelity without clarity, commitment without conceptual direction. A big energy point arrived upon realization that re-entry into my professional work after the freedoms of sabbatical required stability of personal training time, not decrease of it, for example. Following the slight desire to return to a women’s circle I sometimes attend opened a doorway to a regular (weekly or bi-monthly) body-wisdom in a shared circle of practice. I have begun to walk through that doorway with less clarity of energy but awareness of significance. Julia Cameron’s observation about such doors opening, or Quaker-wisdom about ways-opening, seems undeniable in this case. Each time, it has been the willingness to create the space, enact the commitment, that clears my ears/eyes/mind for hearing body-speech.

I wonder how people live when they cannot articulate what it is their body needs but they are committed to receiving it…? Is the task to resist conceptualizing an object to be provided, releasing assumptions about object-ivity, moment-to-moment?

I’ve also wondered whether the task should be understood as the mind surrendering to the body, but that now seems to be error in the other direction, overcompensation for years of one kind of imbalance mistakenly selected to become years of another kind of imbalance. Such surrender may be part of it, but it cannot be the whole of it. Balance comes not within the colonial logic there at play, but release from the logic altogether. Spaciousness of an evenly matched tennis game between body and mind, lived in the breath and exertions of spirit. Or another image…the energy and movement of a jazz quartet, playing in concert so each can innovate and all can relax into the innovation, trusting its integrity and flow.

Not food then. And/or sex. Or rest. Then what…? Once again, there is no ‘what.’ Perhaps the best I can offer myself—mind-body-and-spirit—is the metaphor of music and flow, rhythm and balance. Dynamic, relational terms in which strengths of each energy source weave together into a dance, a personal and communal harmony out of which delight is borne. I’ve named that before, of course: an expressive delight able to companion suffering of self and others. We recognize the music, the flow, the rhythm and balance when abundance overflows and all we are yearns to mend and tend what needs to be, expressive of this incorrigible delight.