"The Language of the Body"

Callings, by Gregg Levoy, includes a chapter with this title, opening with this line by Herman Melville: "I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."

The body speaks in signs.  When something hurts, the symptom may be telling us something we can't "get through our thick skulls" in the ordinary language we speak.  The body doesn't speak English.

I read this book years ago, but this time I'm reading it with the backdrop of all these films I've been watching (like Hungry for Change), which say that the body is designed to heal itself of many ailments and diseases, if we know how to read what it's telling us.

I watched a documentary called My 600 Pound Life that followed a morbidly obese woman for seven years. As she begins to lose the weight, she acknowledges that she had been sexually molested as a child, and that she nearly "ate her way to death" to protect herself from further abuse.

When surgeons  cut off pounds of excess and sagging skin, she looked way better--in clothes.  But her body unclothed looked battered from the ravages of gaining and losing more than 400 pounds. The point of her journey was to lose enough weight to walk around, "to get her life back," as she said. But the strange thing was that she was not advised to eat drastically different--only less of the stuff she was already eating: hot dogs and canned chile and cookies.

Everyone wants to avoid what is painful or unpleasant, but the thrust of this chapter is that we shouldn't medicate symptoms away before we hear what they are trying to tell us.  Stephen Levine said that we are not so much responsible for our illnesses as we are responsible to our illnesses. "The question is not so much what to do about our suffering, but what to do with it."

The body speaks in pain,  blockages,  bleeding, stiff joints, etc.--just as the psyche speaks in dreams. We have to learn the language to understand what our bodies may be trying to tell us.

Alice Walker says: "Illness has always been of enormous benefit to me.  I have learned little from anything that did not in some way make me sick."