Body Parts

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong.  Body is not marble.  That is not its purpose.   Its purpose is to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling--that is the supreme psychic nourishment.  It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight.  It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit.  The body is the launcher of those experiences.  Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness.  All that comes from the body.  The body is the rocket launcher.   In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.  The above excerpt if from "Women Who Run With the Wolves" by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.  - a fabulous and highly recommended book!