Befriending the body

For a long time, I couldn’t understand what it meant to get comfortable in this physical body.

I think many of us can’t. Especially those of us drawn to spiritual work, to healing, to the unseen. Getting comfortable here — in the body, in the physical, in ordinary daily life — can feel like the least spiritual thing we could do.

The body can feel like the dense, slow, sometimes painful container — and for a long time, I believed the real spiritual work happened in the other realms, not at the physical level. We speak of transcendence. Of rising above. Of something in us that exists beyond what we can see or touch. And all of that is real. But somewhere in the reaching upward, we readily abandon the very thing that made this life possible.

We chose to come here in physical form. Not to escape it as quickly as possible, not to spend our time here wishing we were less dense, less heavy, less bound by its rhythms and needs and limitations. But to actually experience what it is to be this — a soul living inside a body, moving through a physical world, feeling everything that comes in the package.

The denseness is what makes it real, and yet we fight it. We ignore what it tells us. We push past its signals, override its needs, and treat it as something to be managed rather than listened to. We control it when it is inconvenient. We abandon it unless it screams in pain. We rarely sit with it and ask what it needs. What is it holding, and what has it been trying to say?

This beautiful machinery works silently for us. And we judge it, ignore it, criticise it.

The body holds everything we have not yet processed. Every emotion we never allowed ourselves to fully feel, every experience we survived by going numb. Every grief, every fear, every moment of joy we did not let ourselves have. The body keeps storing all of it. And eventually the body breaks — because it wasn’t supposed to hold so much.

And I want to be honest about the other side of this too.

I have also been too demanding of the body. I have tried many diets, many approaches, many ways of trying to make it look a certain way. Not from a place of gentleness. Not from wanting to keep it in its best health. But from frustration. From not feeling good in it. From wanting it to be different from what it was.

That is also not befriending. That is also a kind of rejection — just dressed up as self-improvement.

We move from ignoring the body to demanding everything from it, and we call the second one taking care of ourselves. But the body knows the difference. It can feel whether the care is coming from love or from frustration. And when the demands come from a place of not being enough — not thin enough, not strong enough, not comfortable enough in its own skin — the body carries that too. It gets tired of being the problem.

Befriending is neither of these. It is something closer to companionship. Caring for it not because it needs to be fixed, but because it is carrying you through this life and it deserves your kindness.

Learning to befriend the body means learning to have a conversation, sitting down with it the way you would sit with someone you have neglected for a long time and want to know again. With gentleness and patience.

For me it has meant noticing when the body contracts and asking why, rather than pushing through. Feeling where I hold tension and getting curious about what I am holding. Learning to eat, rest, move, and create a healthier relationship with it — one day at a time.

The physical body is not easy. The weight of being human, the sheer effort of it some days, is real. But the answer is not to fight it, ignore it, control it or wait until we are free of its limitations. The answer is to fully embrace it. To stop hovering over your own life and immerse yourself in it.

The body is where the spiritual work becomes real. Not as an idea, but as a practice — in the way we breathe, walk, rest, speak and love. Every insight eventually asks to be lived. Every moment of clarity asks to be felt in the body, not just understood in the mind. Every healing asks to come home to this.

Maybe that is why we came here. Not only to awaken. But to inhabit this life so completely that spirit and body are no longer two separate things.

That is where the transformation actually happens.

Not above the body. Inside it.