It has carried the grief and the fear you could not carry yourself, and it has never once stopped loving you. Here is how to come home to it.

Your body is one of the few things that makes you fully human. It is your instrument of experience, the way you see and hear and taste and touch, the way you take in every pleasure and every delight, and the way you take in the pain too, all of it. And still, so many of us live at a distance from the body, or at open war with it, when it has been on our side this whole time. The guides keep pressing this on me lately, that it is time to put the great power of the mind and the soul, that vast eternal part of us, back in service to this magical, divine, animal body.

Here is the thing that changed everything for me, and it is so obvious once it is said that you will wonder how you ever missed it. The body is an unconditionally loving being. It accepts you completely. It holds you. And it goes further than that. It holds the things you cannot hold, the emotions and the traumas and the experiences that are too painful to process in the mind, or even in the deeper places of the soul. What you cannot metabolize, the body stores for you, and carries, and tolerates, and works quietly to heal, and if you are still here, she is still holding it. That is a kind of love most of us have never once thanked her for.

One

Everything you have ever known, you have known through the body. Every sight, every sound, every taste, every touch, all the energy that moves through you, it all comes through this magical animal, and it does this for every one of us, all day long, without ever being asked. Language almost fails here, because who are you without your body? There is no you standing off to the side, watching. You are not a mind that happens to have a body. You are a being who lives as one. The body is not a thing you own. It is the vehicle of your whole experience of being human, and it deserves to be honored as exactly that.

Two

When I say the body loves you unconditionally, I mean it accepts everything. It tolerates. It holds on. It keeps carrying what you handed it and could not carry yourself. That is a strange and holy loyalty, and it asks something of you in return. Not perfection, not a better body, not a thinner or stronger or younger one, but honor. To live in harmonic resonance with her instead of against her. To stop treating the one being who has never once abandoned you as though she were the enemy.

Three

Most of the ways we try to care for the body are still run by the mind. Yoga, tai chi, even many of the somatic therapies, good as they are, tend to be led from the head down. There is a practice I found, called Ishtara, that does the opposite. It lets the body lead. It uses music as a doorway, any music that speaks to you, to bring you down out of your mind and into the emotional experience of the body, so she can teach you, in her own language, what she has been holding, and give it back to you slowly, in a form you can actually feel, tolerate, and release. It is a gentle, body-led method for healing your relationship with your body and your emotions, and it is not therapy. I am not a teacher of it, and I do not practice it professionally. It simply became one of my great teachers. I found it through a remarkable woman named Sylvia, and you can learn more at ishtarabody.com.

Four

You do not need a formal practice to begin. A couple of minutes will do. Little islands of refuge through the day, where you drop your energy, your soul, your busy mind back down into the body and simply feel it. This matters more now than it used to, because so much of what we touch all day cannot touch us back. Your phone is mesmerizing, and it is brilliant, and it will never once be able to hug you. There is no living human resonance inside a screen, not in the apps, not in the feeds, not in any of it, and living human resonance is exactly what the deepest part of you is starving for. It starts in the body. It starts in your body, and in the bodies of the people you love.

Five

So give yourself the islands. Give yourself a whole day, if you can, or a whole week, with the screens off, and find your way back into the plain sensory miracle of being this animal, this body, the grounded, rooted, gravitational joy of belonging to a living planet you have been physically connected to every second of your life. Both of these are mysteries, your body and this moving earth, and both of them are gifts that keep on giving and giving. Delight in that. And then turn to someone you love, and share it.

If your body has been holding something for you, maybe today is the day to thank her for it. Tell me what she teaches you when you finally sit down and listen. And if someone you love has been living too far up in their head and their screens, send this to them.

— Juli Martin, The Love Lady