The Body You Never Owned

A restorative practice, a teacher's closing class, and the grace of stewardship.

Key Takeaways

• Our bodies, minds, and souls are borrowed, not owned.

• The walls we build to protect old wounds also block the grace meant to reach us.

• Becoming love is the practice of receiving and offering grace without condition.

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Observation

I was lying on my mat at Love Yoga in Whitefish on an overcast Sunday. The heated room was a welcomed reprieve from the uncharacteristically cold June weather. Anna was teaching one of her final classes before adventure called her and her family elsewhere. I laid down, one hand on my heart, one hand on my gut, and let the restorative practice slow everything down until what was buried began to surface.

What surfaced was a realization. Whatever separates us, the stories, the distance, the careful management of who gets close and who doesn’t, simply dissolved. I could feel something sacred inside and around me at the same time, with no clear edge between the two. The micro- and the macrocosmic stopped feeling like different scales of the same thing and started feeling like one. The material and the spiritual stopped competing for my attention. The invisible became entirely noticeable. An aura of grace enveloped everything in and around me, and whatever normally keeps us from God’s grace disappeared. Yoga means “to yolk” or “to unite” and this was simply that—a union of all things as one. Moments like these go by many names: samadhi, non-duality, consciousness, but grace feels most accessible to me.

Revelation

I started to appreciate that we walk through life as if we own what we’ve been given: our bodies, our minds, our life. But none of it is actually ours. A body is a tiny collection of cells, microorganisms, electrical impulses, and chemicals, borrowed from the stars and the Earth, working in a unison none of us designed and few of us notice until the noise quiets down enough to feel it. We are stewards of our bodies; we don’t own them.

The same is true of our minds, our emotions, our souls. The quality of a life depends less on what we are given or what we own, and more on how we steward it, through both the nurturing environments and the challenging ones too.

Meaning

For most of my life, particularly before sobriety, I did not know how to receive grace. Even when it was always available, I pushed it away—undeserving, foreign, unworthy. I pushed people away, severing relationships when they got tough, inconvenient, or uncool. I hid, from others and from myself. People saw a version of me they appreciated, but I never let them see enough to truly know me. I was certain that if I let anyone close enough to really see me, they would eventually reject me, so I left before they could or I pretended to be someone I wasn’t. (See also: Armor Up!)

I convinced myself that strategy made sense once. Protecting what was soft and delicate inside me to from being hurt. But it also meant spending years standing just outside of every relationship I was in, guarding a door that grace had been trying to walk through the whole time.

The work I have spent decades doing, helping people heal, started long before I understood what healing meant. I now believe an essential component of healing is recognizing the preciousness of what we have been given—this body, this life—and learning to be a good steward of it rather than a guarded owner. What I felt on that mat was what it might feel like to stop guarding the door entirely, even for a few minutes, and let the veil lift.

I call this Becoming Love. Not the love that has been bent and distorted by pain, the kind we earned or withheld or used as leverage, but the love that holds what is true and good and quietly guides us toward our next right action. It is a concept I have been developing, shaping, and stewarding over the past decades, and one I plan to share with the world shortly.

This month’s series is about grace, and the myriads of ways it shows up. Open your hearts, still your minds, and prepare yourself to receive the grace that abounds.

What to Carry Forward

• To be a blessing, we must share our blessings. We are borrowed from the stars and the Earth, remember that.

• The walls that protect us can easily imprison us.

• Becoming Love starts with learning to receive what we didn’t earn.

Reflection Question
What part of yourself have you been guarding so carefully it’s forgotten what it felt like to be nurtured, not just protected?