Soulful Spirituality: Becoming Fully Alive and Deeply Human by David G. Benner PhD

Author:David G. Benner PhD [Benner PhD, David G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441214362
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

Being an Embodied Self

We are, as I have been arguing, our bodies. But we are more than our bodies. Because our bodies represent our most visible identity, it is easy for us to equate our self with our bodies. But equating our self with a body that is destined to dysfunction, decline, and decay always leads to suffering. If you are your body, when beauty fades and vigor diminishes, you fade and diminish. But in reality, it is in those periods of the ebbing of our physical self that we are often most able to experience the strength of spirit and soul that makes us most distinctively human. I have learned this not from books but from my own journey through the late decades of the middle passage of life.

And so, paradoxically, we must ground our self in our body but must not limit our self to it. The equation of our self with our body is one of the fundamental illusions that deep spirituality warns us against. Ultimately, to discover my truest and deepest self I must move beyond my body, even beyond what I experience as my individual self. I must discover a new sense of “I”—a knowing of me that comes from finding myself in a larger whole. This is the spiritual route to our true self. In it, my self and the other are finally understood to be interrelated aspects of something larger—of God.

Teilhard de Chardin suggests that the prevailing contemporary view is that the body is “a fragment of the Universe, a piece completely detached from the rest and handed over to a spirit that informs it. In the future we shall have to say that . . . my matter is not a part of the Universe that I possess totaliter: it is the totality of the Universe possessed by me partiliter.”[57] Both our materiality and our deepest self participate in the stuff of all that is. However, limited by our egocentric ways of knowing and being, we fail to be aware of this truth.

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