Tending The Body

   The amount time I spend taking care my body leaves me with very little time to do much else. If I am not tending the body, I am recovering from the exertion of having tended it. There are days were I wonder if this is to be, in the end, the total of my life. I know there are days where I am asked "What did you do today?" and my answer is "I took care of my body".

    "She spent the whole of her life tending to her body", a statement I imagine someone could say after I die. That doesn't appear to be a productive way to live. I have no choice in the matter. The loudest voice in my life is the cry of my body and its systemic complications.

    To find meaning in in this condition, I turned to spirituality. There arose yet another struggle: modern spirituality is NOT body based! You are supposed to be striving for heaven, or Nirvana, and you are NOT allowed to bring your body with you!  You end up, on this non-body-based journey, looking everywhere outside yourself to find the kingdom of heaven, or god, or enlightenment, or samadhi.  The "new age" philosophies often regard illness and death as a complete failure. "You don't really want to be well or you would be", says one well known "new age" healer. Or a well meaning "spiritual" friend who says "Why did you give yourself this illness?" Then there's the "spiritual counselor" who asks "What is the pay off for remaining sick?" The sad thing here is the "spiritual persons" just mentioned have completely immersed themselves in delusional thinking. True spirituality includes the very conditions you are in right now. You cannot escape your body, and achieve spiritual wholeness. Your body is your vehicle. That being the case , we need to work with spiritual principles that include our body, as it is. Each of us who bears an illness such as this has a right to demand a body-based philosophy from their spirituality. To believe any other way does not contribute to wholeness.
 To tend the body IS to tend the soul, the spirit, the mind-stream.