Body Prayer
It's OK to pray to the Divine. But be sure that, once in a while, you pray to your body...
"O my Body, forgive me! I listened to almost everyone but you. I need to spend more quiet time with you, just hearing your voice. Perhaps it is only the sound of your heart, or your breathing, or the secret thunder of your underground rivers of blood. But those are the voices of true prophecy, those are the heavenly messengers, nearer to me than my own name.
"O dear Body, I remember when we were very very young, there didn't seem to be two of us. I was you and you were I. Your rolls and buns and loaves of pudginess were scrumptious. Your nakedness was like a peach, you were tasty as wild oxalia, mushrooms on the forest floor. Your compost was sweet and strong, a mixture of lilies and poo. You could do yoga just rolling in your crib and burping. You taught many wise old people to laugh and to surrender, and never charged them an initiation fee.
"I just wanted you to know that I deeply appreciate all the things you do for me, even while I am sleeping. You sustain me, breathe me, beat my heart, digest my food, expel toxins and disease, and do I ever say thank you? I'm sorry. Forgive me. I love you.
"I'm done with the anorexic Bennaton model, I'm done with men's robot abdomens and steel-armored hearts, I'm done with glossy hatha-tantra studio models in yoga fashion mags, pretending that spirituality has anything to do with exotic asanas that nobody ever really performs, I'm done with smoothie herbal concoctions that few humans have the luxury to cultivate, let alone whip up in high-tech juicers and magic bullet blenders. Now I return to you, my Body, just as you are.
"I've wasted years pumping you into iron in front of 24-Hour Fitness mirrors. It would take a medieval torture chamber to achieve a Barbie body of actual human flesh. But I bought into the American culture of body-image perfection, which is an addiction no less than any drug. I purged, pumped, ripped, sculpted, starved, wasted and detoxed you. I turned you into a grass-fed free-range gluten-free organic Olympian god. I punished you in the kitchen and the gym, I abused you with shoes and belts and designer clothes; and in a thousand unconscious acts of not dwelling, not reposing, not luxuriating in the sprawling garden of your wild and glorious flesh, I proclaimed, 'I am not my body!' - when in fact, I am nothing else...
"Dear Body, forgive me for being this crazy voice in your head. No wonder you felt like wearing a tin-foil helmet to protect you from the alien rays of your own mind! Yes, it was I who bombarded you with messages from space like "you're too fat," "you have zits," "you smell human," "your penis is too short," "you tits are sagging," "your butt is too big," "you're over 30 and your done," "why can't you run the marathon like everybody else?" "why can't you do the crane pose, the lotus headstand, the forearm standing scorpion, the eight-angle ashravakrasana, you little yoga wimp"? Dear Body, I made you crush at least two vertebrae in your neck playing football. I forced you to have sex when you didn't really want to, with people you didn't even know. And I whispered confusing hints that the color of your skin mattered, and you would somehow have to always be sixteen.
"I even prevented you from breathing, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, because I thought you needed to suck in your belly and puff up your chest and tighten your ass and walk like John Wayne or Grace Kelly.
"But all the time, you were gazing up from the cradle of your bones, from your warm golden comforter of belly fat, from the satin pillow of your cheeks, waiting for me to remember you, to speak your name, to put my arms around you and gently hold you, O my Body, pressed out and overflowing with the juice of my ancestors, surging with the salty ocean blood of every animal who ever walked on four legs, slithered, swam, or flew on wings: yet I would not, because I thought that I was someone else!
"So I'm praying to you now, dear Body, forgive me. I'm praying for the grace of your warmth, your softness, your pulsation, your swelling up and sinking down. I'm praying for your sacramental weight, whatever it is, reminding me that you are full and present like food, bound to the earthen breast, the mother ground, you are ripe with the miracle of her gravity, you are the luminosity of dark matter, you are the sacred rite of walking, standing, sitting, lying still; you are the ritual of aging, the slow beauty of dying, giving your petals, your pollen and fragrance away. You are the never-ending offering of breath...
"Bless me, O my Body, with the whole sky in every inhalation. Bless me with the green nectar of returning seasons in each out-breathing of my heart.
"For now I know that all possible worlds, all heavenly mansions exist in the architecture of your molecules. I know that every electron of your darkest marrow contains the boundless light that created the universe. I know that you are a cosmos of infinitesimal divine Words and sub-atomic Logoi, created so that Gods and Goddesess might find a dwelling place on earth. I know that the space beyond the galaxies is the space between your atoms. I know that you, my Body, are the body of Christ. I know that your breath is the breath of the Buddha. I know that your heartbeat is the sound of Krishna dancing in the moonlit garden of Vrindavan.
"Dear Body, I love you. I surrender to you. I Am you. Therefor, bowing down to the lotus feet of my Body, I curl up and sleep like a God, so that I may rise and walk tomorrow like a river, sit like a mountain, move like a cloud, and sparkle like the endless sky."
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