The Body Is Your Temple (how To Put It Into Practice)
Trees and caves must have been the first external temples of the human being. But before them there was already our body, that space that welcomes the most sublime experiences and that as such deserves to be treated.
The body enables all the big and small experiences in life, from eating to working to playing to loving. But it is also subject to disease, pain, aging, and ultimately death.
The rejection of the body is well known in the Western Christian religious tradition, but it has also occurred in the East. Hindu Brahmanism shares the vision of Christian asceticism when it dismisses the body as unreal or as a dense burden to be freed from. Some Buddhist texts define it as a source of suffering, and similar qualifiers can be found in Judaism and Islam.
The body can be an ally of inner growth
However, in the same traditions we find words that extol the body as a very materialization of the divine. Along with the tendency to separate the body from the most sublime of the human being, there is the intuition that in practice they are united or are the same thing.
For Jorge N. Ferrer, author of Creative Spirituality (Ed. Kairós), it would be desirable to leave behind the ambivalence of spiritual traditions to definitively embrace the body and the material universe as spiritual manifestations.
Take care of it, beyond health
Considering the body as a temple leads to caring for it with an intention that goes beyond maintaining health. Or, in case of illness, to try to cure oneself by natural means, not so much fighting the symptoms as respecting the intelligence of the body, which can use the illness to favor an existential turn or a change in values. The body can be a teacher even when it is sick.
More than avoiding disorders, it is about promoting the development of your extraordinary vitality potentials. For this it is necessary to know its structure. Traditional wisdoms describe it as a combination of three distinct levels: physical, mental, and spiritual.
Beyond theoretical descriptions, everything in the body is connected. That is why techniques such as yoga, tantra or martial arts act on the physical body to achieve spiritual or immaterial goals.
By feeding, breathing and practicing certain exercises, its functioning can be refined until it becomes an instrument of knowledge.
Body awareness practices
Treating the body like a temple means taking care of all its dimensions, from the most physical to the highest, remembering that no practice focuses exclusively on one of them. Washing, dressing, drinking, eating, greeting, giving, taking, collecting … any of these acts is an invitation to be more aware.
Physical exercise, like different sports or walking, can be as ritualistic as the techniques that work the subtle energies (tai chi, yoga, chikung, certain massages), and even like the different types of meditation and visualization, which operate at the level of consciousness.
Throughout the day and the week there is time to dedicate in a balanced way, and in accordance with personal characteristics, to each type of practice.
Another way to exercise the body
The combination makes it possible to enrich the quality of each one. For example, when running or cycling we no longer focus on burning calories or increasing performance, but we pay attention to the harmony of movements, breathing, the sensations we experience and the relationship with other living beings.
Strength and endurance training, which often leads to a feeling of exhaustion, familiarizes us with the ability to be reborn and go beyond the limits.
These experiences are surely so important for the human being that they largely explain the practice of highly competitive sport or mountaineering.
Achieving the flexibility and control of the body exhibited by expert yogis requires an equivalent effort, accompanied by inner conquests for which no degrees are awarded.
Practitioners of psychophysical disciplines develop skills that allow them to properly manage mental, emotional and energetic states. Thus they cultivate serenity and promote psychological or spiritual growth.
In yoga or chi kung this domain refers to the vital energy that descends and ascends through the trunk of the body as in a closed circuit.
The ultimate goal of these practices is to achieve such a fusion between the physical and energetic structures of the body that the unfolding of the extraordinary potentials of understanding and longevity referred to in ancient traditions is possible.
Reconnect with the body and with the Earth
Spiritual traditions see a resonance between the body and the cosmos. In its operation, all the wisdom and creative capacity of nature is expressed.
The mind may crave knowledge of physical and chemical laws, but the human body is already the most complete result of their application. In some way, the goal should be to connect with what the body already knows.
The experience of the body as a sacred entity – worthy of respect – is a first step towards considering the whole of nature as its origin and its home. Thus we reach a double hold, in our body and on the Earth, which heals the strange sensation of not being part of this world.
