Why would you say that?

How we have become disembodied

Few things make me question my relationship to reality more than my body. Or comments on my body. Or seeing my body in a photograph that presents a reality far different than what I pictured in my head. Recently at a wedding, a fellow wedding guest decided to introduce themselves to me by asking “when are you due?” Before I learned their name, they had assessed my body, drawn a conclusion about the state of my womb, and presented it back to me as fact. I now dread seeing candids from the wedding photographer because will they show a reality that is starkly different than the one I constructed in my head as I got ready for the wedding that day?

It’s this sense that I can’t trust my own perception of my body. I am somehow disconnected from the reality of it. Disembodied.

There are big circumstances through which one can become disembodied. In Christian circles, there is much talk about the damages of purity culture. Sheila Gregoire is one such voice shining a light on the conversations evangelicals have around sex, expectations of sex, and what we can do better. Having grown up when I Kissed Dating Goodbye and True Love Waits rings were the measuring sticks by which the young women in my nondenom youth group were told to live, I can remember one summer a guy at a Christian leadership training retreat told me the criss-crossing ties on my shirt were a distraction. Purity culture had such a black and white, binary position of saving yourself or being a crumpled rose (iykyk), that in that moment, I felt like I failed the test without even realizing it.

Trauma is another way a person can become disembodied. Whether accidental or inflicted by self, by other humans, even nature, trauma can make us distrust our body’s signals of safety, or make us hyper aware of how others have used bodies against us. That trauma can also be communal and felt generations later, as many Black people have shared regarding the practice of weddings and celebratory events at plantations where chattel slaves were held and worked and killed. While I hold a belief that experiences in nature can be restorative, my life and experiences are but one perspective. I’m always grateful for voices like Breonda Montgomery in When Trees Testify where she shares how trees impacted enslaved Africans and their descendants.

A place to find where trauma has tried to divorce bodily reality from living embodied is in the life of KJ Ramsey, a trauma-informed therapist, writer at Embodied, and any non-cliche you can think of a person dealing with a body that is trying it damnedest to make KJ recant her joy. I appreciate KJ because she’s not going to tell you life isn’t shit. But she’ll also, in seasons, tell you about wildflowers.

There are myriad big reasons that can cause us to become disembodied from ourselves. I also think there are more mundane, every day ways that it is also possible that we become disembodied, and even from each other. As human beings, we tend to organize ourselves into groups of different sizes, different purposes. A friend group, a church body, a neighborhood hiking group.

I don’t believe there’s a coincidence that coming out of the pandemic, we saw the simultaneous rise of both Artificial intelligence and the popularity of the phrase, “touch grass.” As Covid-19 pushed us into our homes and onto our screens to see our coworkers, attend work happy hours, to play board games with cross-country friends, to know what is happening with the world - only to digitally witness fatal bodily harm perpetuated in real time. Empty office spaces made many employees and employers alike question the status quo of work, productivity, and who needs to be doing what. We fractured as a society, and also sought community more and more through online means. There was good and bad in that. I’m grateful I had ways to connect with family from far away, to be able to attend Bible studies, to laugh at the same Tiktok videos as other friends. But something was lost, or had been lost but became more obvious the more we saw and shared online. It became a quick way to dismiss someone’s point by telling them to go touch something real, like, grass.

While the motive might not have been altruistic, I think there’s some truth to being restored in nature as a way to handle the reality of the world. What will it take to become embodied again as a society? To see each other as real flesh and bones, real neighbors, temple members, or coworkers. How can we use touching grass as a way to come back to ourselves, and I don’t just mean individually?

If you live in an environment where grass is hard to come by, how can that prime your curiosity about how that came to be for yourself and your neighbors?

Kat Armas says “No single body, culture, or nation can bear the fullness of God’s image alone,” and I find grace in that, both for myself and my neighbor.

I’m grappling with what does it mean to become re-embodied where I’m at, and finding a way back to embodied (of self, in community).