Faith in the Faithful Body

It’s tempting to fear the body. Fear is encouraged by the culture, which hawks products to prevent aging, improve appearance, increase vigor, etc. Fear also arises from personal factors, from our dislike of vulnerability and mortality. At root, our fear is rooted in distrust. All too often, the human mind looks at the human body not as a faithful friend, but as an unreliable machine that needs constant tinkering and threatens us with humiliation and ruin.

When not examined closely, the machine analogy seems accurate. Our bodies do need regular attention in the form of nutrition, rest, trips to the bathroom, etc. And as years advance our bodies do begin to fail. What’s missing in the analogy, however, is the intelligence of Life.

Unlike manmade devices, bodies repair themselves. And although we believe our conscious mind is responsible for feeding, sheltering, resting, and other bodily needs, the body can meet most of those needs without much conscious effort. Think how many times you’ve fixed a snack and nearly finished it without thinking much about it. When your body feels cold, it shivers, curls in on itself, and motivates you to find a wrap; your conscious mind might choose between a sweater and a coat, but the rest happens automatically. Our nightly sleep happens in a daily rhythm that needs little planning. And we don’t need to think much about going to the bathroom; when the time comes, we go.

In fact, if we look deeper, we don’t fear the body because it needs so much from us, but because it needs so little. That bodily needs often push aside ego-based desires reminds the mind of its dependency, which can feel terrifying. Consider how animals, without verbal thought, are able to take care of themselves just fine; so how much does thinking really contribute in the struggle for life? The picture of the body as a needy, unreliable device is the ego’s defense against its own unimportance in the fundamental issues of life: maintenance, survival, and reproduction.

Of course human ingenuity has helped our species thrive. But the most important advances occurred long ago and may have happened rather automatically. It’s likely that the move toward agriculture took many generations, as a little bit of local horticulture that supplemented hunting gradually became larger, collective crops, while domestic animals gradually supplanted hunted ones. This may have happened so slowly, in so many small steps, that it wasn’t actually mentally planned in any meaningful sense. It simply evolved, like Life itself. It was Life (in this case of the human sort) solving the problem of living, like it always does.

Life continues to solve the problem of living, even today and even in our human bodies. The body keeps us alive in two ways. It prompts the mind to pay attention to biological needs, while simultaneously and deep within, it maintains massively complex processes necessary for survival and reproduction. Breathing, circulation, digestion, immune defense, repair, toxin elimination, perception, coordination, balance, learning, and much, much more happen with little or no conscious involvement. Even sexual arousal and mate selection are arguably done mostly by hormonal and neural systems beneath the level of conscious understanding. Myriad processes keep us alive and permit us to seek mates, support others, and work creatively in the world.

If you wonder how much is involved in keeping a body alive, peek into a critical care unit someday. Healthcare providers hover around the patient, adjust tubes that insert and drain substances, watch monitors that measure blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, etc., and work around the clock to help the ailing body remain alive. It’s called intensive care for a reason. But even with all that effort, much of the hard work of Life is done by the body itself. And when healthy, the body manages all these functions continuously and optimally, without all the fussing and managing.

If the body does so much, could we cultivate more faith in it? Consider what happens after a major injury. Some years ago I underwent a major abdominal operation. Through a 12-inch incision, the surgeon exposed and clamped my aorta, then sutured a shunt between it and a major artery to the upper abdominal organs, in order to bypass a kinked region that blocked blood flow. In the days after surgery I felt violated and disrupted. There was tremendous pain with every minor movement; my bowels didn’t function; I felt exhausted and helpless. But in subsequent weeks and months, my body healed. The incision closed by itself. The gut started gurgling again. My vitality recovered. I didn’t need to think about any of this; the living processes within my body knew what to do.

This is a kind of intelligence. The body possesses wisdom that has capacities beyond the mind’s. If the healing of skin, muscle, gut, and arteries had been dependent on conscious thought, I’d be dead. Instead, I only needed to rest and let the body do what it does naturally.

In other words, I trusted my body, and it healed. Despite the tendency toward distrust that I mentioned at the outset, we trust more often than we realize. We trust our bodies won’t tip over while we’re walking; we trust they’ll keep breathing during the night; we trust them to digest our meals, no matter how poorly chosen. And most of the time, our bodies prove themselves deserving of our trust.

Even when the body begins to fail due to age or illness, it does its best. Many immune, endocrine, and reparative processes kick into gear, trying to restore health and vigor. If you’ve ever watched a person transition from life to death, you’ve seen how the body never gives up until it simply can’t hang on any longer. Anyone who has contemplated suicide (as I did many times when younger) knows that killing the body isn’t easy. One can’t just hold one’s breath and die.

The body is trustworthy in a more subtle way, too. Think of intuition. When we are heading in an unhealthy direction, we feel uneasy in our gut. When we meet someone who is good for us, we feel a warmth of heart. The mind may think: “this job pays really well” and ignore the gut’s reaction; or it may say to itself “that person isn’t attractive enough for me” and deny the heart healthy companionship. Yet choices made by the mind and ego rarely turn out as well as those guided by the body, by intuition.

The body is our faithful companion in Life. With us from conception until death, it deserves our trust.