On Befriending the Body

The first time my back went out, I was in my early thirties. Let’s take a second to pause over that curious idiom: “my back went out.” Where did it go? For a walk? On a date? To get some groceries? It didn’t leave a note. Just pain in its absence. Every tiny movement of even the furthest extremity a reminder of what I’d taken for granted while it was “in.”

At that time, I served as a solo pastor in a rural community in northern Iowa. I hope my congregation experienced kindness from me. I think they did. I didn’t always know how to show it to myself.

There was a Sunday morning when my back was flaring and my mind was making an enemy of my body: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” I took a new prescription for the pain, got dizzy and puked it back up, and very slowly and deliberately got myself dressed and walked across the park from the parsonage to the church. Every step a grit of the teeth and a stab jolting through the place my back should have been.

When the elders and deacons started showing up, people a decade one side or the other of my parents, they took one look at me and told me to go home. I handed over the 3-ring binder with my sermon and wobbled across the park back to the parsonage. As the bell called people into prayer, I lay in my bed crying hot tears. For the pain, for the strangeness of being so close yet so far from being able to do my job, and from anger at my body. It wasn’t doing what it was supposed to.

My spiritual director listened to these events with great compassion before saying a word. But when she did, it was paradigm shifting. She had had her own struggle with her body because of disease and so I knew she spoke from experience. I listened deeply to the wisdom she offered. “Imagine your body as another person,” she said. “A person who is a dear friend. How would you treat a friend who is in pain?”

Ohhhhh… The realization dawned like a full-body revelation. My body is not my enemy. How do I show her compassion? Speak gently and acknowledge her labor and pain? Give thanks for what she has accomplished and promise to listen to the messages she shares?

This is far easier to do when the body is functioning in a way that is pleasing to the mind: strong, independent, capable. It is much harder to do when she has passed her limits and is in collapse.

The first time I was able to speak compassion to my body during a bout with pain, I felt my body melt into tears of relief. The need to defend myself against my own anger evaporated with a kind word and a gentle touch.                      

I’m not sure where all I learned to be unkind to my body. A lot of it is just in the cultural air we breathe. Be softer and smaller and tighter and stronger and prettier and and and… Some of it certainly came from my religion—"sins of the flesh” and all that. Though my master’s degree and a lot of theologians tell me most of the Christian nonsense about the body (pitting it against the spirit, blaming it for all the bad decisions the mind makes, scape-goating it for sin) most of that is thanks to Plato, not Jesus.

Across religions, Incarnational theology—the idea that God put on a body and cares for bodies—is still pretty scandalous. When I started learning about this in divinity school, it struck me as strange that so much Christian practice isn’t more embodied. Why did the Christian piety I grew up with require sitting still in a hard pew? Where was the Christian parallel to yoga? Where was the focus on the breath (the ruach, the Spirit)? Where was the movement and the dancing? Where was the kindness to the body?

Last week I got very angry with my body again. I wasn’t in physical pain, but it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to. After an adulthood of predictable periods, mine was AWOL. For a short time, we let ourselves live into the hope that this meant we were pregnant. After over three years of trying and seven IUI (intra-uterine insemination) attempts, all I had to do was order thousands of dollars of IVF drugs and quit my job. Voilá! Pregnant!

Except the pregnancy tests told a different story. Lucas was researching the possibility of false negatives and the clinic was talking about inducing my period. What does that even mean, inducing a period? And why not just wait and see? Turns out this happens with some regularity in patients seeking fertility treatment. They assumed I just hadn’t ovulated that month.

WTF, Body?! Seriously!

My mind started spinning out. Had we waited too long? Tried too many IUIs when we should have switched to IVF sooner? Was I going through perimenopause? I had made my peace with IVF as our path forward. But this waiting? Ten days on a hormone to induce bleeding and then another three days to two weeks for the bleeding to actually commence? I cried and cried. I told Lucas, “I was ready. I was ready for you to start jabbing needles into my belly. But this?” I was so angry and scared and disheartened and confused. And I blamed my body for it all.

I took a day to wallow and to weep. I wept on the phone with a friend who asked how I was going to be kind to myself that day. I wept while in prayer, laying hands on my body, trying to touch her in love. I wept through yoga, trying to gently but literally move my body into this new reality of indefinite waiting. I wept while taking the pill that over time would make me bleed. (And let me say, after years of hoping my period wouldn’t come, taking that pill was truly a mindfuck.) But slowly, as the grief ebbed and the new normal set in, I remembered that my body is facilitating this journey, not impeding it. She is always on my side. Always a friend.

The next morning, I awoke to the new reality, prepared now for a lot of waiting and unpredictability. I wrote my first newsletter that morning (thank you for your responses and for walking this journey with me – it’s been an overwhelming blessing to see you flood in from all different stages of my life). I shared what was happening with friends (more on the glory of good friends in another edition). I made healthy food and tended my body like a dear friend, not the enemy I sometimes make of her.

The next afternoon, day three of ten on the meds, I started to cramp. It felt like my ovaries were the size of grapefruits. I thought: Surely my body can’t sustain this for another week. Turns out she didn’t have to. I’ve never been more relieved at the flow of blood.

Sunday morning, we went in for an ultrasound and were given the okay to start the meds that had been waiting for what seemed like an eternity but turned out to be just over a week. These injections (stimulating the ovaries to develop many mature follicles (eggs) to be harvested instead of just one or two) are given subcutaneously in the belly.

The nurses who taught us how to give the injections invited us to imagine my belly button as a nose in a face and described putting the shots in the “smile” under the “nose.” So, on that evening of our first injections, I asked Lucas to draw a smiling face on my belly. He’s a gifted cartoonist and I wanted to mark the start of this part of the journey, as we were finally able to begin it, with some joy. He made the face more true-to-life than I expected—tears brimming from the eyes and the mouth a little wobbly. That seemed just right.

I didn’t even feel the needle as it went in—Lucas was so focused and skilled and kind. His kindness to my body helps me remember to be more kind to her, too. To treat her as a friend. It turns out that she just needed a little extra time, even if it meant running late. (No one who knows me well will be surprised by this.) I’m doing my best to give her the time, space, love, and compassion she needs through this process, whatever the outcome. The “smile” on my belly is now marked with pale bruises and red pinpricks from the nightly injections. I’m proud of my body for bearing these marks and carrying within her the possibility that we might yet bring new life into the world. The marks are a physical reminder that she is our partner in this and always a friend.