Of Birds And Bodies

Different and the same.

It happened at the airport and changed my view of bodies forever.

When I wrote my book Living In Grace, the hardest chapter to write was the one on bodies. I didn’t want to write it. I worried that if I said, “We are not our bodies,” few would believe me, and all of us would have trouble making that statement work practically in our lives.

After all, think of all the ways we believe ourselves to be our bodies.

Our bodies are how people know us. We appear to live in them. They provide basic transportation.

The mirror reminds us that what we feel like inside is rarely what the mirror reflects back.

We have a picture of how bodies are “supposed” to look, and sometimes we come close to that picture, but most often, we don’t. That disparity results in a variety of feelings—not usually happy ones.

We feed our bodies. We put them to bed. We take them out for walks, and sometimes we exercise them.

They help us express ourselves. Sometimes, our bodies are our expression.

I couldn’t leave out a chapter on bodies because I was writing a section on relationships, and I knew that most of us, and yes, I include myself, would fight a battle with one of our strongest-held beliefs, and it was, and is, a hard one to shift.

However, until that day at the airport, I didn’t realize that I had retained a perception of what a human body looks like, and it was the standard view of shape and proportion.

Then, I saw something that changed my point of view.

I was daydreaming while waiting for my ride, not in any mode of judgment, just observing. I watched people greet each other with love and enthusiasm. Often, it was members of their family.

I knew they were family because they looked like each other.

One particular family that was especially effusive in their greeting caught my eye as they hugged, and in my daydreaming, I imagined them as a family of beautiful, round, multicolored beetles greeting each other.

That’s when the world snapped around to a new picture of what it is to possess a human body. That beautiful family didn’t look at all like shapes and proportions accepted as “standard.” The closest I could come to explaining it to myself was that they looked like a different human species.

They looked different from me, and we were both perfect.

At my birdfeeder, the beautiful cardinals are different in color and shape from the pert and funny chickadees or house wrens with their tails sticking up into the air. There are fat brown and orange robins and fast and slim multicolored hummingbirds. Huge hawks and black crows fly in the woods.

Never do I think they should look the same.

They are all birds, but unique and perfect in their distinct look and body.

Each species of bird eats, flies, and sings differently. No belief systems are attached to their ways of living, yet they are all birds.

In the garden, I see beetles of many shapes. I don’t think about one beetle working out or dieting to look the same as another. They don’t waste time looking in the mirror or at each other, and they don’t attempt to look the same. They are uniquely different, and yet they are all beetles.

As a species called human—we are different, and we are the same.

When we expand beyond calling ourselves human and know that, in big R Reality, we are the spiritual expression of a Creator who sees everything as a unique expression of Itself, we are even freer to let go of defining ourselves within the same view and experience.

Yes, we are not our bodies, but with all the attachment we seem to have to them, it takes some time to release the threads of habit and belief that we are.

Therefore, in the meantime, we can stop expecting anyone, especially ourselves, to fit a mold because there isn’t just one model of perfection.

Some of us are round, some of us are straight, some of us are short, some of us are tall, some of us have two arms and legs, and some of us don’t.

All of us are perfect.

All of us are like birds with our own feathers and our own look, and yet we are always flying together as One in the atmosphere of Love, where in that mirror, the only image we see is called perfect—which is how it is.

PS
Here’s that book, Living In Grace: The Shift To Spiritual Perception, and its chapter on bodies.