Humans are an amazingly diverse species. We come in a wide array of sizes, shapes, textures, and hues. Humans are tall, short, skinny, fat, and at the midpoint of all of these size ranges. Humans have skin as white as the falling snow, as black as the night sky, and every shade and hue in between. We can no more point to an average human appearance than to an average human voice. The same principle holds true for the cultures we’ve developed to create meaning from our lives and experiences, and the ways we manifest those cultures in language, art, spirituality, and behavior.
Really, when you come down to it, the only thing that all humans share in common is our bodies: our bruised and beautiful bodies, our flawed and fallible flesh. All of our bodies develop from sperm and egg joined in a zygotic dance of union and division. All of our bodies emerge from within another human body into the world to change and grow, play and work, live and love. And of course, all of our bodies falter, fail, and die. Whatever else may happen beyond that point, death is the end of the line for our bodies. From there, barring artificial processes to detach them from the natural course of events, our bodies will wither and decay, ultimately returning to the elements of which they’re composed.
None of these observations is revolutionary, or even notable. After all, mortality is the defining characteristic of the human condition. Countless religions and philosophies have been created for the sole purpose of explaining, denying, or circumventing the reality of death; and an incalculable amount of art, science, industry, and sheer bloody-minded brute force has been committed to the ceaseless struggle to cope with the unalterable final word on life: that it ends.
A somber note on which to begin, perhaps, but it underscores the centrality of the body to human existence and experience. Simply put, embodiment—having the dual nature of both flesh and spirit—is a key component of what it means to be human.
What does it mean to be embodied? In Western culture, we often speak of having a body or a soul, in much the same way that we have a car or brown hair, but there are two kinds of having at work there, and they aren’t really the same thing. In one case, we have an object, and having refers to an inventory of our possessions. In the other we have an attribute, and having refers to a quality intrinsic to our being. That quality might change or disappear altogether, or we may divest ourselves of it intentionally. I can see this at work in my own brown hair steadily going gray. I could choose to dye my hair, or to shave it off altogether, but my hair will still and always be my hair. On the other hand, if I sell my car, not only do I no longer have it, the car is no longer mine; I have, if you will, de-possessed that object. Not only am I divested of physical and legal custody of that vehicle, but—unless I sell it to a personal acquaintance—I will no longer inhabit it.
What does it mean to have a body or a soul? Is a soul an attribute intrinsic to being human, or is it a possession (pardon the pun) to be kept or sold, presumably to some infernal spirit? Is the body a vessel and vehicle, or is it something else, something less reducible to consumerist terminology? And when we speak of having a body or having a soul, who or what is doing all this having?
Body and Soul, or Body as Soul?
In the Anderson Feri tradition, we are taught that each human being is made up of not a single soul but three, an understanding that can be usefully considered both as interconnected parts of a single entity and as separate entities in their own right. Of course, the concept of a tripartite soul is hardly unique to Feri. The Greek philosopher Plato posits a tripartite soul in his Republic, for instance, where he names the three parts as 
(logistykon, logical), 
(thymoeides, spirited) and 
(epithymetikon, appetitive).13 Likewise, the Jewish mystical tradition of Qabalah names three souls (or three parts of a single soul) as the nephesh, the ruach, and the neshamah, which are roughly cognate with the three souls described below.14 (I should note this is a necessary oversimplification of a vastly complicated subject which a host of highly intelligent, deeply spiritual Jewish scholars have spent their lives studying and writing about.)
In Feri, these souls are sometimes called the fetch, the talker, and the god-self, though Cora Anderson refers to them in her classic essay Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition as the alpha (
), beta (
), and gamma (
) spirits, respectively. The gamma spirit, or god-self, is that within us which is also a part of God Herself, a spark of brilliance within the curved black mirror of infinite space that is Her all-encompassing body. The beta spirit, or talker, is the soul of the mind, the intellect, and the identity, the part of us which interfaces with the waking world. Last, we have the alpha spirit, or fetch, which is the soul of the body and the senses, the animal soul.15 The alpha spirit is the part of ourselves that craves physical comforts, the part of us that revels in sensual delights and erotic pleasure. It’s also the part of us which transforms those physical, sensual joys into energy or, if you will, into power: raw, untamed, untrammeled sorcerous power. In this book, I call this sensual power eros, after the Greek god of sexual love. We’ll talk more about eros in Chapter 6. For now, think of it as the energetic output of the alpha spirit: the shivery thrill of excitement you get from hearing a beautiful piece of music, tasting something delicious, or the feel of a lover’s fingertips on your skin. That sensation is powerful—it is power—and it’s been harnessed for magical purposes by tantrikas, sex magicians, witches, and other practitioners for literally thousands of years.
Sadly, the alpha spirit gets short shrift in Western culture, due in great part to our ongoing struggle with mind-body dualism, in which the body is seen as separable from—and, ultimately lesser in value than—the mind. Some of us indulge our bodies and senses to the point of toxicity, addiction, and ill health. Others deny our physical needs and desires to the point of mortification, self-abuse, and neurosis. Still others struggle with the perceived need to physically and psychologically master and dominate our own bodies through exercise, diet, cosmetics, even surgery. It’s rare for anything between these extremes to be viewed as a happy medium or a desirable compromise. We praise people for their weight loss or critique them for weight gain. We laud or critique changes in personal grooming and styling. We bemoan the loss of ability as we age and fret over wrinkles and gray hair. In all of this, we are upholding a particular set of physical attributes—youthfulness, ability, particular shapes of muscle and fat, particular hues of skin color—as the standards by which physical embodiment should be judged. In doing so, we are literally making judgments about the physical manifestation of someone’s soul, specifically the soul through which they interface with the material world. As the body is separated from the whole being and denigrated, so too is the alpha spirit isolated. Our relationships with our own bodies and our own souls become toxic.
The good news is, this is all remediable. We can learn to embrace our embodiment, love our bodies and the souls of our bodies, and thereby reclaim our own power. Even better, a lot of that work is actually quite pleasant.
On Trauma and Embodiment
The slightly less good news is that it is work, and some of that work can be tedious and unpleasant, even painful, depending on your background and history. One of the areas in which that work can be both unpleasant and potentially dangerous is the interrelation of trauma, mental health, and embodiment. While embodiment can pose a host of challenges for any of us, particular challenges can arise for survivors of sexual assault, sexual abuse, relationship violence, and/or physical abuse.
I’m sharing the ideas, practices, and exercises in this book with the understanding that many of you reading this have experienced one or more forms of trauma at least once, if not multiple times. There’s a spectrum of responses to such experiences; while some survivors might not identify their experiences as traumatic, many others do. This trauma can physically manifest in the survivor’s body in a variety of ways, whether or not the violence they experienced was physical in nature: a lack of sexual arousal or an inability to become aroused, reexperiencing the physical sensations of an assault, a physical disconnect or dissociation between the body and the mind, and so on. These sensations and experiences of trauma can be harbored in the body as well as the psyche for years after the initial trauma and may come and go over time.
While the practice of embodiment techniques can be both challenging and potentially hazardous, it can also be empowering, even liberating. Each person’s healing process is unique to them and doesn’t necessarily run on a cut-and-dried linear pattern. I’ve done my best to operate in a trauma-informed way to provide every reader, at whatever stage in their healing, with tools for the reclaiming of their own bodies and their own power. With that said, everyone reacts to this work in their own way, and some of the material in this book can be difficult, even for people without trauma. It’s entirely possible that some of this material may provoke negative responses for you: you might not be ready to tackle certain parts of this work right now, and I may not have presented the material in the way that’s accessible for you.
What I want you to understand is that’s okay. It’s perfectly normal to have your own responses to this work. For some of you, those responses might be wholly positive and empowering, which is marvelous. For others, doing this work may unearth additional traumas or experiences you’ll need to process. Whatever your responses, I strongly encourage you to honor those responses, and to engage in self-care.
I call the practices and exercises in this book “work” for a reason. Many of us are working through traumas of one sort or another, and all of us are working in the context of a modern life which has a vested interest in keeping us separated from our bodies, locked into our assigned gender roles, and ashamed of our sexualities. The process of fighting back against those forces and reclaiming our bodies and spirits is hard work and can leave us feeling depleted and beaten up.
The following is a list of ways you can nurture yourself, tend your bruises and wounds, and replenish your power, and care for yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually while doing this work. Fundamentally, these suggestions are what’s called self-care, and can be employed at any time, but they can be particularly useful when dealing with traumatic triggers.
Take a Break
I’ll start with what is easily the most important suggestion in this list. It’s really, truly okay to say to yourself, “This is too much for me to take on right now.” The whole point of this work is healing and empowerment rather than retraumatizing ourselves by demonstrating that we can soldier on through anything, even things that are harming us. You can press pause on the work, close this book and set it aside, and come back to it later … and “later” can mean later today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or whenever you’re feeling up to it, with no time frame attached. There is no shame whatsoever in choosing your own self-care and well-being over any perceptions of toughness. You have nothing to prove—to me or anyone else. Honestly, that you’re here at all is more than enough proof that you’re a badass. Honor your own strength and be proud that you have the courage both to take this work on and to give yourself permission to take a rest from it when you need to.
Breathe
Focus on your breathing. If your breathing is fast and shallow, slow it down and take deeper breaths. Get through the next moment, and the one after that. If your heart and mind are racing, calming your breathing can help to bring them down out of the rafters and back into your body. Breathe, and center your awareness on yourself, in yourself. Remember that while you’re breathing, you’re still alive. That’s a victory all in itself. Breathe, and give yourself time to figure out the next step.
For those who are unfamiliar, “grounding and centering” refers to a category of meditative, energetic practices intended to calm our minds and spirits, reaffirming their connections to our bodies and the Earth, as well as to bleed off any excess energy, which often takes the form of anxiety, jitteriness, and fear. Grounding and centering ourselves is often a useful, even necessary adjunct to getting our breathing under control. If you don’t already have a grounding and centering practice, the following is a quick and dirty version you can do while lying in bed at home, riding a crosstown bus, or waiting in line at the bank:
Close your eyes if it’s safe to do so, take a deep breath in, and hold it for a moment. As you do so, draw your awareness inward, into the core of your being, and feel the tension and excess energy in your body gather there. Now, release that breath slowly, and let your awareness drop down. If you’re standing, let it flow down your spine, through your legs, and into the earth, like a taproot. If you’re sitting or lying down, extend your awareness down from your spine directly into the earth. As it does, let the energy you’ve gathered flow down into the earth and dissipate, like water soaking into the ground. Do this twice more, each time remembering to gather your awareness into your core, then sinking down into the earth. After the third time, take one more deep breath, pull your awareness back into yourself, and exhale, opening your eyes.
Of course, if you already have a grounding and centering practice, the trick is remembering to actually do it in the moments you need it. I wish I could tell you there was an easy way to develop the habit of practice, but I’d be lying. I’m just as prone to forgetting to do this in high-stress situations—and then wondering why I feel so agitated, disconnected, and anxious—as the next person. The best suggestion I can make here is to create a mental association between those unpleasant emotional and energetic states and the necessity and desire for grounding and centering, such that over time it becomes second nature to ground and center when you’re in those unpleasant states.
Monitor Your Body
Take a few moments to check in with your body. How are you feeling, physically? Are you too warm, too cold, hungry, or thirsty? Do you need a restroom? How’s your posture? Are you feeling sleepy, tired, or worn out? Is anything hurting, itchy, achy, or just physically uncomfortable? Are your clothes too tight, or binding you in some other way? When was the last time you stretched or moved around? Whatever you notice, do what you can to alleviate the discomfort or, if it’s not something you can remedy in the moment, at least acknowledge the sensation. This practice is an excellent prelude or pendant to grounding and centering, because any of these physical issues can detract from any spiritual work you’re doing and can exacerbate any emotional distress you’re feeling.
Bathe
Warm baths are a sensual luxury all unto themselves and can be a marvelous technique for regrounding ourselves in our own bodies, physically and emotionally. If you’re feeling in need of an additional layer of spiritual protection and grounding, you can include any bath additives you like. This can be as complex as a cleansing bath with oils, tinctures, and candles, or as simple as a sprinkling of salt and an invocation to one of your spiritual allies. If you don’t have access to a bathtub, cleansing and grounding showers can be utterly glorious as well, and the additives can be used as a body rinse during or after the shower itself.
Eat and Drink Mindfully
When we’re stressed and under strain, it’s easy to fall into unhealthy eating habits: eating too little, eating more than we really want, and eating things that are intrinsically unhealthy for us. I’m subject to all three of these, depending on the nature of my stress. When I do, I find it helpful to pay attention to the dietary urges I’m having, and try to sort out what’s underneath them, what my body is trying to tell me. If I’m craving sweets, I’m either physically or emotionally worn down and looking for something to pick me up. In those cases, I try to rest and take care of my emotional needs. If I’m overeating, I’m likely insecure and scared, and would benefit from shoring up my security needs, either emotionally or spiritually. If I’m not eating at all, odds are good that I’m either sad or depressed, and if I can push myself to eat something healthy, just a little, I’ll have the energy to think about my situation with a little more clarity.
The same goes for drinking, both alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages. We often use sweet and/or caffeinated beverages to mask our fatigue, or alcoholic beverages to dull our fears and insecurities. Easing back on those artificial aids is never a bad idea. In any case, I’m rarely drinking enough water, and if you’re anything like me, neither are you. According to the Mayo Clinic, that adage about drinking eight 8 oz. glasses of water (which is just under two liters) is still sound advice, and I offer it here as a reminder for all of our benefit.
Spend Time Outdoors
At the risk of sounding far more nature-oriented than I actually am, getting ourselves out of our interior spaces and into the Room with the Big Blue Ceiling can do wonders for our mental and emotional states. Fresh air (or fresher air, anyway), natural light, and exposure to plants and wildlife are excellent medicine for stress, and can help us refocus our attention and ground ourselves back in our bodies. It’d be nice if we all had access to beautiful outdoor spaces, but the reality is that many of us live in urban or suburban spaces where hiking and such aren’t really an option. There are parks and green spaces to which most of us will have access, and if you do, I highly recommend utilizing them. Going for walks, or even just sitting on a bench or under a tree, can be remarkably restorative. If your access to such spaces is limited or nonexistent, neighborhood walks can offer many of the same benefits. If that’s out of your reach, even visiting your own backyard, patio, or front porch can be beneficial. Part of the benefit derives from the change of location and scenery, which disrupts our perceptions enough to get us out of thought processes that reinforce emotional patterns of stress and anxiety. Should all else fail, you can open your windows, air out your living space, and remind yourself that your indoor space is still a part of the larger world around you.
Find What Inspires You
Discover, remember, or revisit what feeds your soul. For some of us, that’ll be singing along to our favorite singer-songwriter, reading poetry, listening to choral works, or meditating on classical paintings or sculpture. For others, that’ll be rocking out to a metal band, going to movies full of explosions and car chases, or binge-watching an entire season of a television show. (My personal go-to for this is sweet, romantic, slice-of-life Japanese anime. Your mileage may vary.) The point is, find or remember what works for you, and take refuge in it. It doesn’t matter one bit what other people think of it. If that’s your safe place, revel in it.
Make Something
One of the most empowering acts we can undertake is to create something from nothing, exercising our will on the material and spiritual planes to make a change for the better. Splash paint on a canvas, string words together, pound on drums, or pick out a melody on a keyboard. Cook a meal, sing a song, bake a loaf of bread, knit a scarf. Even cleaning a room is an act of creation, a production of order from chaos, an expression and extension of your Self into the world around you. In the act of making, we are saying throughout all the worlds, “I am here. I exist. I matter.” That’s art, that’s craft, that’s resistance and rebellion. That’s magic.
Spend Time with Loved Ones
Our relationships with friends, intimates, lovers, and families—of choice or of blood—can be a balm to our emotional and spiritual wounds. Try to stay in contact with your support networks, and reach out to them when you’re in need. That support can look like a sympathetic ear and a soft shoulder, or a night in watching silly movies and eating popcorn. Whatever your support needs are, communicate them to the people in your life, and let them be there for you. Not only does this get you the kind of help you need when you’re in a vulnerable place, it allows your loved ones to be helpful, and sends them the message that you’re someone to whom they can come when they need a hand, as well.
Seek Professional Counseling
I make this suggestion with some reservations, though not because I have any issue with therapy. On the contrary, I’ve had marvelous experiences with counselors and therapists, and would cheerfully recommend them to anyone who has access to professional mental health treatment. Unfortunately, as of this writing, many of us—even in the so-called developed world—simply don’t have that access, especially those of us in marginalized and disenfranchised groups. Even for those who do have access, the stigma against pursuing treatment can raise social and economic barriers. However, if you can get past those barriers, therapy can be an immensely useful tool for helping you to cope with both past trauma and present fears and patterns.
Give Yourself a Break
Yes, I started with this suggestion, but it’s important enough that I’m restating it at the end as well. You are beautiful and brave, dear ones. Take care of yourselves.
When Bodies Fail: Ability, Health, and Embodiment
Another issue around embodiment that we tend to dodge in modern Western culture is the issue of ability. The everyday world in which most of us live is conceived and built around the myth of the average person, a Platonic ideal of the human being. This “average person” is then used as the basis for a host of assumptions about the ability level of its occupants. Some of those assumptions are that we’re all sighted, hearing, ambulatory adults within a certain range of bodily dimensions and mass, and that we’re all neurotypical. (Neurotypical refers to people with typical or normative neurological configuration and functioning, who experience, cognitively process, and interpret their sense-impressions of the world in a similar way. The contrasting term, neurodivergent, refers to non-typical neurological configuration or functioning. Common forms of neurodivergence include autism, mood disorders, anxiety, attention deficit disorders, and dyspraxia.)
These assumptions exclude a breathtaking number of people: young people, old people, blind and vision-impaired people, deaf and hearing-impaired people, people with ambulatory impairment, fat people, skinny people, short people, tall people, neurodivergent people, people with mental health issues, and many more.
I’ve worked to make this book as inclusive as possible toward people with bodies at all levels of ability. However, the reality is that not all experiences are accessible to all people, and that some of those inaccessibilities will be rooted in the body. Rather than dodge this fact, I want to openly acknowledge it and, where it’s feasible to do so, offer suggestions for ways that people with disabilities can adapt the ideas, exercises, and practices here to their own experiences of embodiment.
The modern esoteric movement has a curiously paradoxical relationship with the body, depending on which part of it you’re occupying at the moment. Some communities are deeply cerebral, while others are openly body-positive and sensual. In my experience, though, an issue where most of our communities falter is in addressing disability. Some of us are born with disabilities, while others become disabled through illness or trauma. Even those of us fortunate enough to avoid misfortune will nonetheless get older, and as we age, our strength will wane, our energy will diminish, our bones will grow brittle. In what ways does our practice help us to deal with our changing relationship with our bodies as our ability diminishes? In other words, what do we do to cope with the reality that our bodies often don’t function the way society expects them to?
The most common answer to this conundrum, both in mainstream society and in the subculture of the Western esoteric traditions, is “as little as we can get away with.” Even in our ostensibly body-positive traditions, we avoid the subject of disability as much as possible, despite the presence of disabled gods in our pantheons: the club-footed Hephaestus in Greece, Nuada of the Silver Arm in Ireland, the blind Höðr of Norse myth, and so on. Similarly, even in traditions where death is valorized and romanticized as “a necessary part of life” and the so-called gateway to the next realm, there’s often little attention paid to what that actually looks like, in practice. We shy away from the awareness that our own terminal approach brings with it infirmity and decrease in ability, both physical and sometimes mental.
Moving past the Western world’s avoidance of the reality of disability and death for a moment, we still have a host of body-related issues to contend with. Perhaps we feel that someone’s body is too fat, or too thin, or in some other way the wrong shape. Maybe we dislike the things they choose to do (or to not do) with their body: we find the kinds of sex they choose to have distasteful, or we might disapprove of the changes they choose to make (or to not make) in their body. Some of us, deep down, may feel that the way someone else is embodied is intrinsically a danger to our own embodied identities, perhaps even to our safety.
While they may seem disparate, these issues are all related to one another at a fundamental level. For starters, they’re all culturally derived, rooted in particular places, times, and demographics. As an example, the benchmarks for what was considered an appropriate body size in Western culture—and, therefore, where the boundaries for too fat and thin are—were radically different even as little as fifty years ago. At that same time in history, tattooing was a marker of belonging to a lower socioeconomic bracket (possibly with a criminal background) or of having served in the military, whereas today it’s hardly noteworthy to find elementary school teachers, accountants, computer scientists, and other members of the professional middle class with tattoos. The extent to which we understand and accept sexualities and genders beyond obligatory cisgender heterosexuality have waxed and waned so widely with time and place that it’s pretty much impossible to say that any given culture was or wasn’t queer phobic without immediately following up with a bunch of disclaimers and explanations, including phrases like “at this point in their history.”
In short, like our feelings about sex, our feelings and beliefs about bodies are rooted in our cultures, which are notoriously both intransigent in the short term and mutable in the long term. Because these feelings and beliefs are culturally based, they tend to manifest in ways that shore up our shared cultural identities, to create a clear sense of belonging and to dissuade others from violating these cultural norms. This enforcing of cultural norms around bodies, sometimes called body policing, isn’t necessarily a conscious choice. In fact, it’s often done unconsciously, triggered by a sense of uneasiness with a body which is clearly not matching the expected norm. Many of our issues around bodies grow out of the conviction that, on some level, we have both the authority and the obligation to tell other people what to do with their bodies. Most of us carry in our minds a set of standards for what embodiment should look like—how bodies should look, function, and be used—and we find other people’s failure to meet our standards of embodiment troubling, distressing, even threatening.
Body-policing is a toxic mechanism, one which does harm to everyone. It’s obviously harmful to people whose bodies don’t match our cultural standards of beauty, ability, or function, but even those who do fit within those standards are shaped, figuratively and literally, by the toxicity of the belief that we should have power over others’ bodies.
A Précis of Body-Positive Esoteric Practice
Our issues around embodiment can be especially pernicious in esoteric, magical, and devotional contexts, where so much of our narrative as a movement is built around notions of body positivity, sex positivity, and valorizing the physical as equally sacred. If we want to live up to our own self-image, we owe it to ourselves to be honest about how we actually think and feel about bodies, our own and others’. Only then can we work through the ramifications of those beliefs and prejudices and embrace a truly body-positive esoteric practice, based in the realities of embodiment.
So, what would such a practice look like?
• From womb to tomb: It would openly accept and address both the beginning of life, the alchemical union of the spiritual substance of the soul with the tangible matter of the body, and the end, in which that body returns to its constituent elements and the soul moves on to the next adventure. Dying and death would be as enfolded into our cosmologies and our rites as pregnancy and childbirth, and neither the newborn nor the dying would face their transitions alone.
78• Rooted in reality: It would enthusiastically incorporate our ever-changing scientific understandings of our own bodies into our theologies, cosmologies, and practices, including the realities of the wide genetic variances within what we think of as biological sex. The biological essentialism of past traditions, based on earlier misunderstandings of biology and psychology, would be replaced with symbolism and rites more closely reflecting our lived experiences.
• Sex-positive: It would valorize all forms of healthy sexuality as valid ways of achieving pleasure, expressing intimacy, and approaching the numinous, both within and beyond ourselves. It would likewise support the right of any person to engage—or not engage—in any sexual practices they choose, for any reason they choose. As such, it would support sex workers in their vocations and encourage the protection of sex workers’ rights to practice their trade free from oppression, shaming, or cultural opprobrium. Likewise, it would support the rights of those who choose not to have any sort of sex, for whatever reasons they choose, for whatever length of time they choose.
• Consent-positive: As a necessary corollary of sex positivity, body-positive practice would be intrinsically consent-positive, holding the autonomy and sovereignty of each individual over their own body as one of its highest core values. After all, just as sex without consent is rape, sex positivity without consent positivity is rape culture. This practice would reject every aspect of rape culture, replacing it with a culture of consent. It would overtly and explicitly honor all bodies, in all shapes and states, as the physical, tangible expressions of our souls. When you touch the body, you touch the soul, and our practice would require that we exercise the greatest respect in dealing with other people’s souls and bodies.
• Embodied without shame: It would embrace and encourage the health of all bodies, of any size or shape, and dispel any notion of shame or judgment targeting bodies which fall outside some arbitrary hegemonic standard of beauty or fitness. Consider the abundant bodies of Silenus, the tutor of Dionysus, or Abundantia, the Roman goddess of plenty later syncretized with the witch-goddess Habondia, or the paleolithic stone figure dubbed the Venus of Willendorf.
• All abilities welcomed: Likewise, it would be accessible and relatable to those pushed outside the conventional norms of society by disability or infirmity. Recall again the disabled figures of myth and legend, gods and heroes whose infirmities are as much a part of their persona as their divine might, skill, and power: the lamed Hephaestus, the one-armed Nuada, the blind Tiresias. A truly body-positive practice would embrace and strive to be inclusive of bodies of all levels of ability, and it would work to make that practice as accessible as possible to those with disabilities.
• Trauma informed: Our bodies are durable, but they’re also vulnerable to injury from both misadventure and violence. Rooted as they are in our bodies, our minds and spirits are also vulnerable to harm stemming from injuries and violations inflicted on the body. The aftereffects of these injuries can linger on in the body, the mind, and the spirit long after the initial physical damage has healed. A body-positive esoteric practice would necessarily be informed by an awareness of and sensitivity to trauma, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual, and would work to foster healing and empowerment for those affected by trauma, both directly and indirectly.
80• Your body is yours: And, underlying all of these principles, body-positive practice would explicitly acknowledge and support the autonomy and sovereignty of each human being, each human body, as belonging only and solely to themselves. It would reject the imposition of cultural norms onto autonomous bodies: body policing, body shaming, kink shaming, and so on. It would support the right of any person to do with their own body as they will, from body modification to gender transition, without procedural, legal, or social obstacles.
I’ve occasionally been asked which traditions of practice and devotion I would single out for praise as being especially body-positive. I understand the motivation behind this question, but I think it starts in the wrong place. Any tradition can be body-positive or body-negative, and any tradition can embrace body-positivity as a core value of its praxis. I’ve met Tantric sex practitioners who used pseudoscientific theories about sexuality and the body to bolster misogynistic ideas about the role of women. I’ve known ostensibly feminist witches whose body-negativity bordered on the pathological, who felt entitled to judge their acolytes’ bodies, sexualities, and abilities. I’ve seen putative elders of the Craft who treated skyclad ritual as a useful tool for selecting which students they wanted to sleep with. These views aren’t an inherent part of any of the traditions in which these individuals expressed them. On the contrary, they’re part of those individuals’ baggage, smuggled into spiritual traditions and propped up with the authority of doctrine.
Conversely, I’ve met Pagans, polytheists, magicians, and other esoteric practitioners whose discernment and praxis has led them to embrace the body in all its flawed, fallible beauty, and given them a wealth of tools with which to engage the material world. Nor is this kind of discernment unique to outsider faiths like Paganism and polytheism. I’ve known devout Christians whose sacramental view of the body led them to a deeply sex-positive, body-positive theology of incarnation and embodiment which puts many modern esoteric practitioners to shame.
Again, it’s not about the tradition. It’s about where people want to go with it.
Writing Sex and Gender on the Body
Chapter 2 covered the connections and distinctions between biological sex and gender, as well as the habitual conflation of those two categories in most of Western culture. After all, one of the first questions to be asked about a newborn child, or even a developing fetus, is whether the nascent human is a boy or a girl …a question predicated on the assumption that the biological sex of the child is an indicator of their gender, and that those things somehow determine something useful about the child as a person.
What if that’s a false assumption, though? If we accept Judith Butler’s assertion that gender is something we do, rather than something we are, we are forced to question what it even means to be a woman or a man. Of course, there’s a host of cultural assumptions, projections, and inheritances in Western culture that go along with the genders we ascribe to people based on their bodies, and our culture is more than happy to supply us with answers to our questions about the value of gender, reinforcing the good and powerful qualities about whatever assignation we’ve been given. Women are the mothers, the nurturers, the mama bears, the witches, and so on, while men are the fathers, the protectors, the mighty hunters, the sages, and the like. This sort of empowerment through gender-complementarity is incredibly common throughout Western culture and turns up in Paganism and polytheism quite often.
If we look under that mask of empowerment, though, we find our old friends Male Supremacy and Patriarchy. In this paradigm, we are who our culture tells us we are. We write gender and sex on the body and soul, creating a culture based in hierarchy, a societal structure with a place for each person, and each person in their place.
What if we don’t accept the gender written on our bodies and souls, though? Who would we be without gender at all … or, phrased another way, who would we be if gender itself were something other than what we’ve been led to believe? We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 4.
Embodied Sexuality
While we’ve spent some time challenging the connection between bodies and gender, the connection between bodies and sexuality is somewhat more obvious. When we think of sex, we tend to think of bodies, frequently naked, doing things with each other, or to each other. Consider popular euphemisms for sex: most of them involve actions and body parts, don’t they? It’s curious, then, to realize the truth behind the truism that the brain is our most powerful sex organ, the most intense erogenous zone humans have. While our bodies can certainly influence our sex drives, our sexual pleasure, and our sexual desires, none of those things live in our genitals, or in any other external parts of our bodies; they live in our brains. Bodily sensations are just electrical signals firing along our nerves without the brain to interpret them and assign them meaning and value. At the same time, the body is how our brains experience the realm of sensation, the material world of sights and sounds, tastes and scents and, most definitely touches. Experiments with sensory deprivation demonstrate that without the body to give us sensory input, the brain can become unmoored from reality, resulting in hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, even short-term psychosis.
Our sexuality originates within our brains and expresses itself in and through our bodies. Quite literally, it is embodied.
The Body as an Instrument of Magic
All well and good, you might say, but what does that have to do with magic?
That’s a reasonable question. The somewhat unreasonable, but entirely accurate answer is, everything. For all of us incarnate beings, our bodies are the inflection point where that spirit meets matter, where spirit becomes matter. The sacred mystery of incarnation, of spirit made flesh, doesn’t just elevate our bodies above the status of crude matter; it’s what empowers us, what enables us to do magic. Our bodies are the first and most powerful instruments of magic we possess, the one with which we have the most immediate and intimate relationship. Bodies are the means by which we experience and interact with manifest reality, and the ground in which our consciousness is rooted to interact with the unmanifest.
We can change the physical realm through our bodies, obviously enough. Perhaps less obviously, we can also use our bodies to raise power which can be employed to make changes in nonphysical, magical realms. This power—the vital, animating force generated by the bodies of living beings—has been interpreted and called by various names in cultures around the world: prana in Hindu philosophy and practice, qi in traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts, and mana, an Austronesian cultural and religious concept appropriated and reinterpreted by Pagans and gamers alike.16 Modern Europeans have tried to express and engage with this vital force in scientific terms, such as Carl von Reichenbach’s Odic force, the Vril of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race, and Wilhelm Reich’s orgone with varying degrees of success and credibility. Some have even compared it with the Force of George Lucas’s Star Wars.
Many traditions of modern Western esoteric practice have embraced the raising and use of this power in operant devotional and magical ritual, often in the context of sexual magic. We can also look at the practices of Gerald Gardner’s witch-cult of the Wicca, who embraced nude (called “sky clad”) working as a means of freeing this power from the confines of both social convention and mid-twentieth-century English clothing. Even without the nakedness, many forms of modern Paganism seek to raise power through dancing, chanting, drumming, music, incense, and other practices that engage both the senses and the physical activity of body itself. One of the best-known examples of this embodied practice is the Spiral Dance used in some traditions to generate a cone of power from or through the bodies of the dancers, which is then used to effect change in both our world and the otherworld.
The body’s role as an instrument of magic isn’t limited to merely generating power to be manipulated by sheer will. Virtually all magical and religious traditions throughout history have used somatic gestures and poses as a way to channel and direct magical force. Practitioners in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, for instance, use symbolic ritual hand and body gestures called mudras to convey meaning and transmit power. Similarly, Western magicians, especially those influenced by Golden Dawn and Thelemic ceremonial magical practice, often employ a variety of signs drawn in the air with a hand or a tool (such as pentagrams, hexagrams, and so on)and bodily poses (such as the Sign of the Enterer, or the Sign of Silence) both for their symbolic value and to project and direct magical power. Many esoteric practitioners also use sympathetic magical practices involving the charging and manipulation of material objects—including one’s own body or someone else’s—to effect magical change.
What we do with our bodies is every bit as magical as what we do with our minds, or our souls. In many ways, the magic we work with and through our bodies is the easiest to experience, because it’s rooted in the immediate, visceral, and tangible world of our senses. And because our senses are intimately connected to our emotional selves and our deepest memories, the magic we do with our bodies reinforces itself and empowers, not only us, but those around us with whom we’re connected.
Part of the trouble we encounter is that most of us live in cultures where bodies are either devalued in favor of the mind or valued only for their material function, resulting in the reality that we think too much and work too hard. We spend so much time speculating about the future, daydreaming about the past, and wondering about what’s going on somewhere else that we fail to experience our own present moment, rooted in our own bodies.
The following exercise is intended to help get you out of your head and into your body, into the world of sensory experience and feelings. It shifts our focus away from the places most of us spend our time and brings us right back to the here and now. And the best part is, it’s delicious.
— Exercise —
The Orange
This exercise has been adapted from a mindful eating meditation taught by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nh
t H
nh.17 For this, you’ll need your journal and a writing implement, as usual. You’ll also need a ripe orange, mandarin, or other citrus fruit. You could use another fruit if you’re so inclined, but you’ll need to adapt the exercise to suit the fruit you’ve chosen. In any event, it should be one you can open and eat, unadulterated, with your fingers. (Bananas and apples are fine, but I wouldn’t recommend lemons, grapefruits, or pineapples. Prickly pears are right out.) It’s also nice to have a quiet place, preferably one with a comfortable chair with a table, where you can sit and spend some uninterrupted time in contemplation. A kitchen counter or dining room table would be ideal, but honestly, you could do this exercise on a park bench, or at a bus stop.
Take your orange in hand and feel its weight. Is it light, or is it surprisingly heavy for its size? Run your fingers over the surface of its peel, feeling the shape and texture of the orange. Is it smooth or bumpy, gently curved or knobby? Raise it to your nose: does it have a scent, unpeeled? Hold it up to the light and look at the color of the peel. How bright is the orange hue? Is it a deep orange, or closer to yellow? Are there hints of green near the stem?
Now, start to peel the orange. As you first break into the peel, notice the spray of volatile oils from the skin and the strong orange scent they give off. Observe how the segments emerge from the rind as you continue to peel. Feel the white pith of the orange rind under your fingernails as you peel the orange, both the stringy bits that stick to the segments and the soft, squishy stuff in the empty rind.
When you’ve finished peeling the orange, hold it in your hands again and notice the difference in weight. Turn it over in your hands, noticing the dark, juice-filled segments peeking out between the lines of pith still adhering to them. Pull the segments apart carefully, noting how they cling to one another, and pluck out any remaining pith in the center of the orange.
Once you’ve separated all of the segments, focus on one of them. Run your fingers over its smooth, almost velvety inner skin. Is the skin tight against the juice-filled inner cells, or is it looser? Smell the segment, the earthy rawness of the pith set against the hint of citrus suggesting the juiciness of the fruit inside.
Now, put the orange segment in your mouth. Feel the texture of the segment against your tongue and palate, between your teeth. Bite down on it, and taste the zippy tanginess of the juice, sweet and lively, almost electric against your tongue. Continue to chew the orange segment until you’ve masticated it thoroughly into pulp, then swallow it, juice and skin alike. Sit with it for a moment, letting the taste fade slowly from your mouth.
Continue with the rest of the orange segments, taking the time to eat each one with intention, awareness, and contemplation. Once you’ve finished the last segment, gather up the orange peel pieces, noting their shape and character now that they’re separated from the fruit they once held. Take in their scent one last time, noting how your perception of the scent may have changed now that you’ve eaten the orange.
Set the peel aside, or dispose of it in your compost or rubbish, then rub your fingers together and notice the sticky residue of juice, oil and pith. Wash your hands to remove this residue, dry them, and rub them together again, feeling how the texture of your own skin has changed.
Once you’ve finished your orange, take a few minutes to write in your journal. In particular, make note of the emotional and physical responses you may have had to any particular parts of the exercise, and any thoughts, images, or memories which may have surfaced as a result.
So, what was the point of that whole exercise? As delicious as it is, this wasn’t just about eating an orange, right?
In fact, there are actually a few points. On one level, it’s an exercise in attention, specifically in the Buddhist idea of mindfulness. We spend a truly dismaying amount of time sleepwalking through our lives, our minds focused on everything except where we are and what we’re doing in the material world. It would be easy to blame modern technology for this phenomenon—cellphones and tablets and readers, oh my!—but doing so is both facile and fallacious. After all, zoning out and daydreaming are as old as humanity, and anyone who’s ever tried to read while walking can attest to the dangerous intransigence of telephone poles and fire hydrants. Our minds like to wander off into their own world, especially when we’re tired, bored, ill, sad, or in some other way feeling less than optimal. We idle away our moments, and we wind up detached from our physical surroundings, even—or especially—our bodies.
It’s endemic to the experience of being a physical being that we’re unable to experience and process all of our sensory input all at once. For instance, were you aware of the sensations of your left big toe or your right earlobe before you read these words? If we spent the whole of our mental energy experiencing our physical bodies, we’d be utterly overwhelmed by them, so we spend most of our lives blocking those physical sensations out. By bringing our focus to a specific physical set of interactions between us and an object that engages all of our physical senses, we are reclaiming the connection between our mental and physical selves. We are owning our physical selves and devoting our awareness to them in a way that we rarely do in everyday life.
13. Plato, Republic, trans. by Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1888), 126–139.
14. Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, Sha’ar ha Gilgulim (Gate of Reincarnations), trans. by Yitzchok bar Chaim, http://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/378771/jewish/Gate-of-Reincarnations.htm.
15. Cora Anderson, Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (Portland, OR: Acorn Guild Press, 2005), 16–19.
16. Matt Tomlinson and Ty P. K
wika Tengan (ed.), New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures (Canberra, AU: ANU Press, 2016), 26–28.
17. Thich Nh
t H
nh, “The Moment is Perfect,”Lion’s Roar, May 1, 2008, www.lionsroar.com/the-moment-is-perfect/.