Embodiment – tiffany nicole fletcher

In July, my aunt Hilde left her body. After suffering from a brief illness, she left us to be with the Lord forever. During her life, she carried a beautiful joy for many things: music and singing, delicious food, travel, writing and reading, fashion, and for her service as a nurse, service she fulfilled for nearly 50 years. She lived with a true “zest for life,” as my mother calls it; she loved celebrations and gatherings, and had so many amazing experiences during her lifetime.

I was sitting in the park thinking about her, as I looked upon the horizon, where the sun was setting in a gorgeous array of colors. I thought about how our souls are given this bodily vessel and how to have that experience is a blessing. We tend to lose our awareness that it is a gift to dwell in a body, even if that body has aches and pains or things we might wish to change.

The body is our home for life. We live in it every moment yet most of us live in a disembodied state, rarely thinking about our body unless something is going wrong, unless we’re experiencing some kind of pain or physical dysfunction. And, maybe also when we’re dressing it, or thinking about how we’d like to change it.

But when you live with chronic illness or pain, it’s as if the body turns up the volume and regardless of whether you want to or not, you’re forced to live in a heightened awareness of the body you live in. You’re forced to live in direct relationship with it, and this relationship can be just as complicated as any other—you might experience anger, frustration, power struggles, days or moments when things are less difficult, and days when you feel more accepting towards its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. You might struggle with feeling like the communication is “off” between you and your body, like you can’t understand it and like it can’t hear you when you tell it you need a break from the pain or want to understand what’s going on with it.

The Practice of Savoring

Embodiment and the Pain of Chronic Illness and Trauma