Day 3 - Embodiment & the Bible

“I am bent over and racked with pain. All day long I walk around filled with grief.” (Psalm 38:6, NLT)

“But as I stood there in silence—not even speaking of good things—the turmoil within me grew worse.” (Psalm 39:2, NLT)

“Fear and trembling overwhelm me, and I can’t stop shaking. Oh, that I had wings like a dove; then I would fly away and rest! I would fly far away to the quiet of the wilderness. How quickly I would escape—far from this wild storm of hatred.” (Psalm 55:5-8, NLT)

In our fast-paced lives, it’s easy to live disconnected from our bodies, shuffling through our days on autopilot, trying to tune out the noise inside. And I don’t know about you, but for me, for years, this often meant feeling frustrated with my body when it was difficult to turn the volume down.

Days or seasons when I was stressed, it was hard to ignore an unsettledness in my gut, flutters in my chest, and tightness in my shoulders and neck. And because feeling stressed isn’t the most pleasant experience, I started to associate feeling things in my body as feeling bad or negative things.

I’m curious if you can resonate with this at all: associating feedback from your body as annoyances or problems. Maybe you also know what it’s like to be frustrated when you have a day or week you need to push through, but it feels like your body is working against you. Or maybe your body seems to give you feedback at all the worst moments–right before a presentation at work or just when you have time to slow down and relax.

Whatever the feedback, we live in a culture that rarely teaches us how to tune in with what’s happening in our bodies, let alone that the feedback our bodies gives us can be helpful and worth listening to. Couple that with how normal it is to live in chronic stress, and we’re likely to be left stuck in a place of disconnect from our bodies.

Now, while I’m the first to admit that feeling stress doesn’t feel good, because of how familiar we tend to be with feeling stress, we’re going to spend time with more Psalms that give voice to how we can experience stress in our bodies. As we do this, we can help our bodies and brains map out how we experience stress, which can also help us navigate what happens when we are either pushed further into stress, all the way into a place of shutdown, or, what happens when we find relief from stress, sinking instead into a sense of safety in our bodies.

As you read through today’s Psalms, I invite you to be curious about how these ancient cries might give voice to ways you’ve experienced stress in your bodies. How might these Scriptures be a roadmap to connect with what happens inside your own body? Is there anything else your body might want to say, joining in with these ancient cries?