Rev. Matt Alspaugh
Introduction
I forgot to get ready for today’s sermon. Please indulge me for a few moments while I prepare.
Hold hands up in V, run around for a few moments. Return to pulpit.
Thanks.
There is some evidence that what I just did, taking a expansive posture, or as some call it, a ‘power pose’ helps a person feel more powerful, capable, and creative.[1]
Conversely, taking a contractive posture hunched over, arms crossed, looking down, can lead one to feel powerless and ineffective.
The science around this understanding of ‘power poses’ is controversial[2][3], and we’ll return to that a little later.
My Story
As I look back over the course of my life, I find that one of my life tasks, part of becoming more mature, has been getting out of my head, realizing, as Catholic writer and contemplative Richard Rohr has said, that “the key to a healthy spiritual life is getting out of the top 3 inches of our body.”
I remember as a kid, being so convinced of the primacy of the mind, that I argued with a friend in junior high school that anything worth learning could be learned from a book, as long as the book was well enough written. I’d even convinced myself that one could learn to ride a bike through the mind alone — boy I was a nerdy, geeky little intellectual, back in the day when being a geek didn’t carry the Silicon Valley cache, with the promise of a big financial payoff, that it does today.
To the teenage Matt, my body was just a vehicle to carry my brain around. Eating and sleeping were annoying, time consuming activities. I couldn’t wait for the promise of food pills, George Jetson style. I even played around with sleep learning, using tape recordings at night, and of course it didn’t work.
Getting Out of My Head
Getting out of my head meant, in part, learning to deal with my mind, that increasingly restless, anxious and stressed out part of me. By my late 20’s my mind was increasingly confused about who I was and what I was doing. Religion helped. After many false starts, prompted mostly by kindly but misguided evangelical Christian friends, I found my way to Unitarian Universalism.
For me, the Unitarian Universalism of that era was perfect — it was strongly focused on the mind: an academic religion, with intellectual stimulation at its center. Our UU world was open to exploring other religions, but from the heights of intellect, seeking common underpinnings of all religion.
The UU movement focused on the here and now, on world affairs, urgent concerns, with lofty goals most expansively defined by our seven principles, which had been adopted only a few years before. Unitarian Universalism seemed to point to a larger sense of purpose for my life, and that was reassuring.
As a UU, I dabbled in other religious practices, especially meditation. That practice was full of promise, as a way to ease the chatter of my mind, and hopefully, to ‘follow my bliss’ as Joseph Campbell put it. But meditation — just sitting there, thinking about nothing — was hard, very hard, and I couldn’t seem to stay with it.
Ultimately, at a UU church, I was introduced to one form of meditation that I could stick with, and I practiced it for many years. Called passage meditation, it involved meditating, not on nothing, but on words! We meditated by silently reciting whole passages of text from various religious traditions. Those words kept my mind busy, and the meditation did help with stress and anxiety.
Only in the last few years have I been able to branch out to other meditation practices, mindfulness, lovingkindness, and body based meditations, like the body scan.
Since we are focusing on embodiment as the theme this month, let me invite you into a meditation on your body. Let’s participate in a brief body scan meditation.
A Body Scan Exercise
get comfortably centered, close or soften eyes
notice heaviness of body, it has weight
notice the parts of the body in contact with pew or floor
soften into those areas
let’s just be here now, letting go of plans, or past thoughts
let’s, just for now, meet our bodies with friendliness
now we’ll take a tour of the body, just experiencing the parts
letting them relax, if that’s possible
noticing whats’ going on, hot, cold, pressure, itch, pain,
without judging
let’s start with our feet – bring attention to the feet
allow them to relax
lower legs – knees – upper legs – relax
buttocks – groin – abdomen
chest
move over to hands – relax fingers and hands
lower arms – upper arms
relax shoulders
neck – head – jaw – eye muscles
feel the whole body – sweep up and down
feel the body in its wholeness
open eyes and return to this space[4]
Getting Into My Body
As I began getting out of my head, I began to encounter my body. Getting into my body meant coming to terms with my body, accepting and loving it, knowing its limitations, and being grateful for its strengths. I’m sure this has been a path for many of you.
Two years ago, Liz and I traveled to Ireland, where among other things we had a chance to study with Christine Valters Paintner, an artist, poet and spiritual teacher. Writing about her own body. she says:
When I was twenty-one, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative auto-immune illness. The only other person in my life I knew with this disease was my mother and it had ravaged her body. I was devastated. I felt deeply betrayed by my body. In an auto-immune illness the immune system begins to attack its own tissue. Six years later I had to take a year off from work and go on disability because of the pain and inflammation. That was the year I first walked into a yoga class and was one of the paths I took back to loving my body.[5]
…
(She asks)
How many of us treat our bodies with the lavish attention they deserve? What does it mean to treat our bodies like the temples they really are? What is the damage caused by the endless messages we receive each day about our bodies’ inadequacies? What if for one day we could put to rest the damaging stories we tell ourselves about how our bodies don’t measure up? What if we could bring our full presence to our bodies’ needs instead of endlessly ignoring them?
My own awareness — even love — of my body began when I increasingly depended on it to do things, to hike, to camp, to make a multi-week bicycle trip. I began to care for my body, paying greater attention when I was stressing it beyond its limits. Yoga became an off and on practice, and then came regular group exercise. And there was dance. I grew into my body through the improvisational movement and dance that a practice called Interplay offered me. I awakened to my body and its movement gradually became a source of joy.
Not Taking It on Faith
Now I’m pretty much a humanist at my core, and yet my spiritual journey was calling me to take a lot of things on faith — not an easy thing! I just had to trust that I’d get benefits from practices like meditation, yoga, energy work, and so on. Some of that faith was based on texts of the ancients, the teachings of the eastern religions in particular.
Consider the sayings of the Buddha, in the Dhammapada, which include these lines:
Hard it is to train the mind,
which goes where it likes and does what it wants.
But a trained mind brings health and happiness.
The wise can direct their thoughts,
subtle and elusive, wherever they choose:
a trained mind brings health and happiness.[6]
That was a pretty solid argument for training the mind through a meditation practice. But still, I was reluctant to put too much stock in religious texts.
Science Basis
Fortunately, the science is beginning to catch up, with studies showing the health benefits of these various embodied spiritual practices on the body, mind and health.
So, for example, my willingness to stick with my early passage mediation practice was bolstered because of early studies connecting that particular practice to health benefits, including stress reduction[7], hypertension reduction[8], and resistance to infection[9].
And now we are now beginning to understand underlying causes for these benefits. For example, a 2013 study using brain imaging of people who took part in an eight-week meditation training program showed that meditation shrank the amygdala — the fear center in the brain — and conversely, thickened the prefrontal cortex — the executive decision-making center.[10] Less fear, more thoughtfulness — everyone in America could use that.
Similarly, yoga has been shown in clinical trials to reduce depression, anxiety and stress, as well as improve glucose regulation, important for diabetes control.[11]
But more fundamentally, science is beginning to offer up a deeper understanding of the nature of the brain and the body as a holistic system.
When I was growing up, conventional wisdom divided the mind and body into two. We were like machines: the sense organs of the body shipped data to the mind, in the brain, which made decisions, and then commanded the body to act — to fire up the leg muscles, for example, to pump out adrenaline, and so on.
We’re figuring out that things are more complicated, more interesting, than that. Last year, Peter Strick and other researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, mapped the neuronal wiring between the brain and the adrenal glands. They expected to find a simple direct connection, where some singular fight or flight area of the brain commanded the release of adrenaline. Instead, they found a complex, multi-layered neural network that included, among other things, connections from the axial muscles of our core. Strick says,
“Something about axial control has an impact on stress responses. There’s all this evidence that core strengthening has an impact on stress. And when you see somebody that’s depressed or stressed out, you notice changes in their posture. When you stand up straight, it has an effect on how you project yourself and how you feel. Well, lo and behold, core muscles have an impact on stress. And I suspect that if you activate core muscles inappropriately with poor posture, that’s going to have an impact on stress.”[12]
So the power-posing thing – standing up straight, being open, might just have a neuronal basis.
Changes in UU
And what of that heady, intellectual Unitarian Universalism? Over the years, our faith has changed, too. We broadened out from the mind, the intellect, to become a little more heart-centered, to the point where we sometimes have been labeled ‘the love people.’ We’ve allowed a broader range of emotions to show up in our worship on Sunday mornings. We’ve also been willing to experiment with spiritual practices, with ritual, and sometimes even movement.
I think this is healthy. We can each show up Sunday morning with our full selves, with the promise that some part of our selves, our minds, hearts, bodies, spirits will find engagement, fulfillment, or solace.
Conclusion – An Embodied Life
Barbara Brown Taylor, author, theologian writes from her tradition in the Anglican faith. But she says that for her, spirituality is bound up in “the bodily experiences of human life on earth.” She, says,
In a world of too much information about almost everything, bodily practices can provide great relief. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger — these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. … In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.[13]
And so our faith, our Unitarian Universalist faith, is like that too. It connects mind, and body, with all things in that wonderful interconnected web of all existence of which we — as embodied beings — are a part. We are connected with the world. In this world, we think, we feel, we act, and we become more fully alive, and in so doing make the world more alive.
The Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore captures this well, in this small section from his epic poem Gitanjali:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.[14]
May we be made glorious in our awareness of this world of life. May we, as fully embodied beings, go out to make the world more alive.
Notes:
1 http://www.people.hbs.edu/acuddy/in%20press,%20carney,%20cuddy,%20&%20yap,%20psych%20science.pdf
2 http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana_carney/pdf_My%20position%20on%20power%20poses.pdf
3 http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/09/read-amy-cuddys-response-to-power-posing-critiques.html
4 adapted from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7650123
6 https://www.bmcm.org/inspiration/passages/blessing-well-trained-mind/
7 Passage meditation reduces perceived stress in health professionals: A randomized, controlled trial. By Oman, Doug; Hedberg, John; Thoresen, Carl E.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol 74(4), Aug 2006, 714-719.
9 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12883106
10 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-does-mindfulness-meditation-do-to-your-brain/
11 https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2012/165410/
12 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/cortical-adrenal-orchestra/496679/
13 Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, xvi
14 https://deeshaa.org/2013/01/20/rabindranath-tagore-the-stream-of-life/