Bodies have their own rhythm. I often ask my directees to notice what is happening in their bodies. Sue Monk Kidd wrote in The Secret Life of Bees, “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.” The body knows things before our brains can process what it is that we are feeling. The body doesn’t need to think about it. It feels it.
The body knows. I can see it on my their faces when something unexpected appears. My directee has said something important. Something that they didn’t know they felt. Something so true that silence is all that can follow.
It’s startling and slows us down to wonder if that’s really what we do think. It was said and it felt true, but is that what I really believe? Is that what I want? What does my body know that I haven’t heeded? What is my body trying to tell me? How might I listen to what my body is trying to say?
The spiritual director version of this question, and the one I find myself asking myself right now, is, Where do you feel that in your body?
We are all stuck in our heads. Or think we should lead with ideas so that this question can be disorienting. We don’t stop to think about our body’s wisdom. We push aside those feelings wedged in our guts. That stab in our back. That heaviness that weighs us down so deeply. It isn’t always negative. Sometimes it is expansiveness that our whole chest feels open and wide, ready for anything. We might not be able to explain it. There might not be words for it, but our bodies are trying to communicate with us.
Last month, in April, my body fell hiking on the ice. I badly sprained my ankle so that it required surgery. My mind wanted to push through and believe that it was OK. The doctors told me that my body was saying something else. It would need surgery. It would require a long recovery after surgery in which I wouldn’t be moving around as freely.
My body is asking me to slow down and take time to heal, and I’m doing my very best to listen. I sent an email to my current directees earlier this morning to let them know that I will be taking a summer pause. I will be taking an unplanned break to focus on my body’s restoration.
I offered them this small gift of a Summer Relief Kit. (It was a free offering to my directees but tending for the spirit also has the annoying need to pay the heating bill next winter.) In these few pages, there are a series of practices and reflection questions in these downloadable pages centered around this Ross Gay poem.
If you click over to my calendar, you’ll see that there only a few spots left in the month of May before my children get out of school. A long summer pause follows through the months of June, July and into August. In the end of August, my calendar opens again to welcome regular opportunities to notice what is in our bodies and in our spirits. To share in the wonder of deep listening through spiritual direction after I’ve had some time to heal my body. I’ll look forward to being with new and old directees — maybe that even includes you — in the fall.
I pray for your relief and healing in these summer days too.
HOLY THREADS 
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