The Body is the Temple...
Of the Witch
The phrase above is part of a Wiccan ceremony in Ravenmyst Circle, my Tradition. The notion of the body as a temple is in the Bible, too, but it’s also far older. There are rites in the Craft where the Priestess’s body serves as the altar, it’s so sacred.
The Sacred & the Profane
All things involving the divine or the practice of religion, or that are considered holy or spiritual are called “sacred.”
Mundane, ordinary things, everyday things are referred to as “profane.”
So for example, in the Craft we have clothing and cords of station that are only used during rituals and ceremonies. They are sacred. One would never use one’s athame to cut a sandwich in half. It’s a sacred tool that is never used to cut anything physical. The athame’s blade touches only non-physical (or spiritual) things.
I do not accept this way of understanding the physical as profane. Nor do I think that some activities are sacred and some are so ordinary they don’t much matter, and here is why.
The Physical World and the Non-Physical World are One Thing
There is no separation between physical and spiritual. It’s a spectrum. (Like gender. But that’s another post.) Everything in existence has physical and non-physical within it. Everything begins as an idea, a notion, a thought, and then if thought on more, becomes more and more dense, for lack of a better word, until it is born as a physical thing. All it was before is still within it. But now there’s a physical component, too.
If the non-physical is the apple seed, the physical manifestation is the apple. And inside the apple, we find the seed.
Our physical bodies are, I’m convinced, created by us, for us to inhabit before we are born. We exist before physical birth just as we exist after physical death. We are Consciousness, a very specific part of consciousness that is unique unto ourselves.
When we decide to come into the physical world, we think about the things we’d like to experience in this lifetime we’re about to begin. We gather up from the Whole of Consciousness all the little pieces we will need for this round, and we weave them into who we are, creating a fresh new soul that is the next evolution of the soul we were last time around. We choose our parents, according to which are the most in keeping with the role we’ve decided to play in this lifetime, and these arrangements are made long in advance.
We cannot judge our choice of family from here. Choosing who we wish to be is very much like an actor choosing a role. We perceive without judgement, so every experience we intend to have is not seen as good or bad. It’s all just experience. Every bit of experience adds to the Whole, expanding it further, which is the purpose of life.
Eventually an embryo is formed in a human womb, probably in the womb belonging to a soul we know well and have interacted with in many previous lifetimes.
The Film Avatar
In the movie Avatar, (the one with the blue people, not the TV series with Ang, which I also love,) a wheelchair-bound human man is going to transfer his consciousness into the body of a tall, blue being from the planet Pandora. This being is one of the alien race, called the Na’vi.
The DNA of the human is used in the creating of the Na’vi body, so that it will match the soul. Kind of like organ transplants. If there’s not a match, the body will reject the new organ.
You with me so far?
Okay, so the body of the Na’vi is in an artificial womb, and it’s developing. It has an umbilical cord for nutrition. It is floating in liquid.
While this body looks very much like a living Na’vi, it is not. The soul that will animate it has not yet arrived. It’s in the guy you see here, watching his future body develop. Kind of like our souls watched our bodies develop.
The soul enters the body with the first inhale.
The soul leaves the body with the final exhale.
Until the soul moved in, the Na’vi body was an empty vessel. I believe this is exactly how it is with humans.
So what happens to the soul that prepared this body for itself, if the body expires before the soul can enter? It tries again with another body.
We can’t prevent a soul from incarnating from this end of things. We can’t. It’s not possible. A soul that has decided to have a human lifetime will try and try again until a body makes it to all the way to birth, opens its mouth to breathe, and takes its first breath. The soul rides that breath, (“lil” in Sumerian) into the body. The baby opens its eyes. It is now conscious, and its soul or inner being is looking out through those newborn eyes.
Bodies are one to a customer
And so we create this body, and then we move in with the first breath, and here we are. The body is our soul’s home, temple, vehicle, and interface with the physical world. We can’t interact with the physical world without a body. I mean, we can a little, but it’s extremely difficult and inefficient, and physical humans almost never notice.
But in our bodies, we can live and walk and speak and be in this physical world, interacting with other parts of Consciousness that have formed souls and entered bodies of their own.
We get one body per lifetime. It has to last the entire time we’re here in the physical realm. If we don’t take good care of it, it can become sick. It can become weak. It can lose function. It can become so damaged that living inside it feels like being imprisoned.
And yet, one must assume that if they’re still occupying their body, there’s a reason. It is not yet time for them to leave.
We are here until we finish what we came to experience, inside these bodies that we designed to be the physical expression of our souls, and to be our homes through this lifetime.
And so it’s vital that we care for them.
Body care self-assessment.
Here are some questions to ask, to help us explore how well we are doing taking care of our bodies.
First question in the Temple Care Assessment Quiz: Am I sedentary?
A lot of the time, I can answer yes to this, because that’s my default setting. But to practice effective self-care means we have to move our bodies, so I make the effort and it is an effort for me.
If you leave your car parked in the driveway for a year without starting it or moving it, and then jump in one day and turn the key, that car is not going to work. The battery will be dead, the brakes will be rusted, and if hubs were here he could give me ten more things that would be wrong. (I married a motor-head.)
Moving our bodies is, I think, the 2nd most important part of caring for them. It doesn’t have to be torture. We can begin with a really easy step: Start keeping track of how much we’re moving and challenge ourselves to increase it.
The way we move is important too, because there are really three kinds of movement we should include in our daily routine.
We want to move in ways that raise our heart rate and keep it elevated (check with your doctor first) for at least 20 minutes a day. This is referred to as aerobic exercise. Walking, running, dancing, etc. Mowing the lawn, pushing the vacuum cleaner around, lawn and garden work count! It’s a good idea to keep track of your heart rate while you do this. There are places online where you can calculate your maximum heart rate and at what percentage of that rate you can safely exercise, but again your doc is the best source.
I’ll link a heart rate calculating site at the end of this post.
Doing this “aerobic” exercise reduces blood pressure so effectively that if you’re on BP meds, you need to watch it and have your doctor watching it, too. It will reduce so fast you might have to go off your meds. (Not without the doctor!) This kind of movement will increase energy, remove brain fog, improve your mood, improve sleep, ease depression, and improve your sex drive by light years.
Guys, it’ll help with ED, too.
The second way we need to move is by stretching and balancing. Stretching will keep us from developing the short shuffling steps we see in many of our seniors in the US. It helps keep our muscles long and limber. Exercises like Yoga or Tai Chi will improve our balance, which will in turn, prevent falls and accidents. You can find free examples online.
The third form of exercise we need to engage in is resistance exercise, and this is anything where we use our muscles. Our bodies will not feed or maintain muscles we don’t use, because our bodies are such efficient machines. We can achieve resistance exercise using light hand weights, or elastic bands, or by using our own bodies for resistance by doing things like pushups, sit-ups, squats.
I leave light weights where I have to pass them on my way to the bathroom, so I see them and remember to do a few reps every time I get up. I do modified pushups on the stairs (easier than flat, horizontal pushups.) I do a few squats every time I leave my desk.
We can mix and match, we don’t have to do all three things every day.
Second question in Temple-Care Assessment Quiz: What do I feed my body?
I have a whole other blog devoted to food and health, so I’ll just link it at the bottom, and very briefly quote Michael Pollen: “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.”
And I will add that what we eat is the MOST important part of caring for the temple.
Third question in the Temple-Care Assessment Quiz: How stressed am I?
Most of us think stress is caused by the conditions outside us, which is not in our control. But stress is actually caused by our reactions to the conditions outside us, and that is completely within our control. And this is probably the third most important thing we can do to keep our temples in good repair.
Meditation is easy, and free, and it only requires 15 minutes a day. If you search this blog for meditation you’ll find a dozen how-to pieces. There’s a ton of research proving that a meditation practice improves health in numerous ways, but its top benefit is that is a cure for stress.
And really, mindset itself can mitigate and even eliminate stress. We must remember that things don’t happen to us, they happen for us. The events of our lives are the dials on the dashboards of our cars. They are telling us how we’re doing. They are showing us a reflection of where our vibration is. It’s all a mirror. And every reflection is an opportunity to fine-tune our way of being. As we focus more on what’s going right than what’s going wrong, and take each obstacle in our path as a message we must interpret in order to surpass, we adjust our vibration and in turn, we become stress-proof. Mostly.
The three questions
Am I moving my body enough, and in the right ways?
Am I feeding my body the best way I can?
Am I spending my days in bliss or in stress?
I have to do this assessment at least twice a year to keep myself on track. The older I get, the harder it is, I’ll tell you that. I have this old conditioning in my head that says, “After 60 I can sit around if I want to.” But the truth is, after 60, I should sit around less than ever before.
So I’m assessing myself again right now, and I thought it a great idea to share.
The Links
