The Christian, embodiment and mindfulness 

Why our bodies are central to our spiritual life and wellbeing. By Shaun Lambert

 
This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) was about how movement increases our wellbeing. It is important that the word movement was used rather than exercise, to show that all or any movement is beneficial even with reduced mobility.

The choice of the word may have been influenced by the rise of mindful movement where you learn to be mindfully aware of your inner world as you move. Mindful movement is also an opportunity to find the soft edge and hard edge of movements that might be more difficult. In this way you can learn to move with mindful awareness, aware of your limitations and their edge.

There are movements I don’t make, like bending down. If I want to reach something I bend with my knees and keep my back straight. This is mindful movement. It can help us stay with difficulty when in mindfulness we begin to face afflictive thoughts and emotions as working with the soft and hard edge of the afflictive thought is a similar process, we are learning to increase our window of tolerance to difficulty.

I have used a form of mindful movement for about 25 years to manage back pain. My chiropractor has helped me develop a series of safe exercises that strengthen my back and increase my flexibility. I have also drawn on pilates, yoga and mindful movement exercises. One of my chiropractor’s pieces of wisdom that has helped me is the idea is that pain does not always mean harm.

Mindfulness points out that we can avoid our bodies because we don’t like them very much. As Mark Williams, pioneer of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) says, culture may have shaped us to ignore our bodies because ‘they might not be as tall, or as thin or as attractive as we’d like.’[1] To be grateful for our embodiment is an important spiritual practice. However, living a more embodied life has spiritual implications not just wellbeing ones.

The Gnostic heresy that the spirit is good, and the body is bad, is alive and well in the church. James K. A. Smith critiques the church from a philosophical perspective and says that Christians have over-emphasised information and the cognitive, ‘In other words, we imagine human beings as giant bubble-headed dolls; with humungous heads and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies.’[2]

This leads to disembodied spirituality which is deeply unsatisfying, and this disembodied living is exacerbated by the virtual world in which we live. Smith argues for a more holistic, integrated anthropology that incorporates body and desires, not just our minds. If we can address this theologically then we can create a healthier relationship with our bodies and desires.

We can also create a healthier relationship between our bodies and feelings; because difficult feelings are felt in the body, we can avoid the feeling by also avoiding our bodies. Our bodies are central to our spiritual life and wellbeing. The New Testament scholar Joel B. Green describes the gospel as the embodied gospel.[3]

Where mindfulness, which is our God-given capacity for attention and awareness, comes in is to enable us to cultivate mindful awareness of every aspect of our being. We cannot change what we are not aware of. Part of the repertoire of our mindful capacities is self-awareness. We can become aware of every aspect of our selfhood: body, mind, soul, imagination, emotions. The challenge of secular or mainstream mindfulness for health is that it enables us to reclaim these capacities to some degree. What it cannot do is redeem them. Only God can do that through his Holy Spirit, and so we call attentiveness inhabited by the Holy Spirit graced attention.

I had a friend who was challenged by one of my talks to try silence. He told that whenever he sat down to be silent (and in solitude) he fell asleep. I knew he liked running so suggested he saw running as a way to practise silence and solitude and finding a still, calm, mindful state of mind. It worked.

That simple move out of our heads and our story-telling narrative self (which often tells negative distorted stories that focus on judgmental, self-critical scripts) into our bodies and senses (experiential self) enables us to take a holiday from our weighty thought life. When Jesus tells us to ‘consider the lilies how they grow,’ (Luke 12:27 KJV) I don’t think this is an intellectual exercise, I think Jesus wants us to go out into creation and be drawn into embodied wonder, and as we are drawn we are released from our worries, if only for a moment.

Within Christianity we don’t have a systematic practice of working with the body; what we have is fragments out of which we can make a whole. The early contemplatives who pioneered The Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner) used to weave baskets as an embodied practice to keep the thinking mind active. In the Orthodox tradition the prayer rope developed, where you move one knot of the rope every time you say the prayer. The prayer can be said with the breath and with attention to your posture.

Mindfulness is the simplest way to learn to inhabit our bodies. We can then utilise this in our spiritual practices. It is not just that we are to inhabit our bodies fully for our own sake. Our relationships need to retain their embodied, face-to-face dimensions, rather than becoming completely virtual. So much of our implicit relational knowledge comes from our body language. The Holy Spirit works in incarnational ways.
We need an incarnational and embodied turn in our spirituality, otherwise we will simply be left behind by mainstream or secular mindfulness which in its embodied focus is an antidote to our disembodied lives.

I find Mark 9:15 a very helpful example of holistic incarnational spirituality, ‘As soon as all the crowd saw Jesus, they were overwhelmed with wonder and ran to greet him.’

My reading of this verse, which I have memorised and meditated on, is that God transformed their physical sense of sight into a spiritual sense. The crowd sees something (the recently transfigured Jesus), and the Holy Spirit touches their emotions which become wonder, and their bodies are taken up in this wonder and run to Jesus. My reading here is that God can touch our minds, our emotions, our awareness, our senses, and our bodies, so that we experience the divine presence in a truly incarnated way.


Image | Nicolas Thomas | Unsplash

 

Shaun Lambert is a Baptist minister, psychotherapist, writer and mindfulness researcher whose new book has just been published: Mindful Formation: A Pathway to Spiritual Liberation

[1] Mark Williams & Danny Penman, Mindfulness a practical guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Piatkus, 2011), 94.
[2] James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press: 2016), 3.
[3] Joel B. Green, “Embodying the Gospel: Two Examplary Practices.” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 7, no.1 (2014):12.
 
 

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