Ask Amy: The Body As Repository for Unconscious Thought or Communication Link?

Q:  I’ve been told by a couple of people that I need to get out of my head and into my FEELINGS and work on healing using the body as a “portal.”  I know you did a workshop recently that had to do with ACIM and the body.  I would like to gain insights and healing through/by using the body.  I’m also wondering how you’ve worked with your own body to grow spiritually, and how you meld that with ACIM’s view of “the body”?

A: I love how A Course in Miracles reverses (un-reverses, really) everything!  For instance, in order to be free of the body, we need to embrace the body.  Many of us are too much in our heads and benefit from bringing our body experience into our awareness and then integrating its energies into our daily lives.  In that way, anger, for example, is embraced as fire energy, and becomes a motivating force rather than a divisive one.

I think of the body as the repository for unconscious thoughts.  Body-oriented psychotherapy led to my spiritual awakening.  For me, and many of the clients with whom I’ve worked, breathing through feelings brings the ego into our conscious awareness and then we release guilt, fear, grief, shame, anger, pain, etc.

Giving our thoughts and feelings to the Holy Spirit is the ACIM forgiveness practice.  Definitions are dismantled. Judgment is dropped.  Assigning meaning is relinquished.  Sinking into bodily sensation takes us through the viscera, into the cellular structure, DNA and beyond … eventually we melt into pure Joining.  This usually takes practice because the ego will sense its demise and throw up resistance.

A portal is a gateway to knowledge.  The Holy Spirit can use the body as a vehicle for God’s Love to be extended in the world; a communication link through which miracles flow.  “The body is the means by which God’s Son returns to sanity,” is what we’re told in W-Pt II.5: What Is the Body? (which is worth reading and re-reading).

The body becomes a symbol of unity and forgiveness rather than personal identity and personal satisfaction.  We can maintain the body like a car, using it well until the time it is no longer necessary, and, little by little, dis-identifying with it.  Rather than “my” body, try saying “the” body.  This needs to be done with the Holy Spirit’s help or it becomes a particularly unworthy form of denial and dissociation, rather than true perception and loving detachment.

We are also told in more than 20 lessons in the Workbook, “I am not a body.  I am free.  For I am still as God created me.”  Yet Lesson 353 clearly directs us:

My eyes, my tongue, my hands, my feet today
Have but one purpose; to be given Christ
To use to bless the world with miracles.

ACIM explains that we each have an individualized curriculum, and once we are willing to choose the Holy Spirit’s purpose for our body, His wisdom will prevail in the form that best suits you.  For me, I often experience the present memory of God through yoga and chakra work.

There is a feeling that God’s Loving Light pours in through my crown chakra, circulates within the body and then radiates through my limbs and skin, brightening my presence which then shines on my brothers.

NOTE:  Since I wrote this article, it has become clear that That which brightens “my” presence, is the Presence the little “me” ego-mind/time-body lives within.  “I am” is the name that precedes all names and forms.   In other words, that which lives in the body is that which the body lives within.

This Q&A appears in the Ask Amy column from the Nov-Dec 2013 issue of Miracles magazine.  Miracles is a well-loved  staple in the ACIM community.  To get a subscription, email [email protected] or call 845-496-9089.  To ask Amy a question, email miracles (at) amytorresacim (dot) com