How the **** did I get so disembodied?

(estimated reading time: 2 minutes)

“Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

- Howard Thurman

What does this quote from Howard Thurman cause you to think/feel/want?

I love to read Thurman’s wise words and reflect on them often. And I love doing things that make me come alive. But for a significant portion of my life, I felt pretty dead and wasn’t sure what exactly made me come alive. My inability to know what brought me to life was due to disembodiment. That disembodiment was due to decades of conditioning within systems of oppression. (It’s always going to come back to the patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.)

Oppressive systems survive and thrive by disconnecting us from ourselves. We go into auto-pilot mode, usually because we’re just trying to survive. However, the longer we operate as a cog in the machine, the more we detach from ourselves, one another, the earth, and the things that make us come alive. For me personally, sexual, physical, verbal, psychological, and spiritual abuse I experienced further contributed to my disembodiment.

That abuse also led to internalizing the (mis)belief that I could not exercise autonomy. My misbelief met dangerous theology when I was taught, “You are not your own,” pulled out of context from 1 Corinthians. Abuse survivors do not need the message that we are not our own. We need to be empowered to establish boundaries in safe relationships. Then, we can begin to build a healthy relationship to our bodies and secure attachment to ourselves.

Before we can trust our bodies and decipher the messages being sent to us, we must reconnect (or connect for the first time) to our bodies and be present here and now so we know what that “aliveness” feels like. (Disclaimer: We don’t get to “come alive” via exploitation of others, like what occurs under the aforementioned trifecta of oppression.)