book stack tuesday : the recovering body
“It is often said that exercise is medicine, but a more correct statement is that insufficient regular exercise is abnormal and pathological.” -Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University
I received this book in the mail, a gift from the author. At first, I set it aside, not considering that it applied to me since I am not in recovery.
But because the author sent it to me, I put it in the pile of books I’ve been sent–I do read them all, even if it takes me a long time, because I am honored by the gift of them and want to honor the writers.
I coincidentally picked this book out of the pile at the beginning of yet another focus on wellness–food and fitness. And realized immediately that Matesa’s focus on recovering from alcohol and drug addiction mirrors a recovery from addiction to food or sugar–that movement, sleep, nourishment, and mindfulness are also tools for that kind of recovery as well.
As she put it, this book is “about our capacity to change once we quit numbing out with any substance–heroin, booze, methamphetamine, Xanax, sugar, nicotine, anything–and start healing.”
Numbing. Food. Yes, I can identify.
“The body,” she writes, “lives only in the present. The mind can wallow in the past or future-trip out the wazoo, but the body is right here, right now.”
Maybe that is scary. Maybe it is easier, and less scary, to live in the intellectual world inside my brain.
Early in the book, Matesa writes about being fully present in our bodies by recounting an experience of riding on a ferry to Fire Island:
“I could smell the sea, feel the salt air on my skin…My body was hungry and pleasantly tired…I felt enormous joy bloom inside my chest, at first slowly like rising bread dough, then like bursting white light, as though my ribs would rip apart…At the same time as my body felt that joy, my mind closed in, saying, You do not get to feel this.”
Oh, wow, yes. In that instant, I remember my first yoga class. We lived in Washington, DC, and it was on Connecticut Avenue in a small studio. I felt the joy Matesa writes of, a body-joy I had never felt. I remember standing in the sunlight outside the studio after the class feeling amazing, fully embodied, the wind in my hair, the sun soaking into me.
And I never went back.
You do not get to feel this.
“My illness,” she writes, “wants to separate me from my body.”
Boom. There it is.
“I’ve learned to recognize this divide as a moment at which I have a choice about whether to enact self-compassion or self-hatred.”
Double boom.
To heal, we have to live inside our skin and bones, Matesa tells us. “When I’m confused about what’s true, I have the option of coming back to my body–it will tell me the truth.”
How many of us believe our bodies? Ignore them? See them simply as a necessary thing to carry around our brains?
This book invites us to come home to the truth of the body. It is about “the wisdom, self-compassion, and healing we find when we move back into the body as our first and last home–and about the active addiction that takes over when we abandon our bodies like condemned houses. Because that’s what addiction is: self-abandonment.”
Matesa writes honestly and clearly about her own recovery and about going deeper into what fitness can be–a practice about awareness on a very deep level, from movement to sleep to meditation and awareness. She outlines a plan for strengthening the body to work with the mind and the mind to work with the body. Five key areas are examined:
- Exercise and activity
- Food and Fuel
- Sleep and Rest
- Sexuality and pleasure
- Meditation and awareness.
My thanks, Jennifer Matesa, for taking me on this important journey and deepening my own understanding.
Don’t abandon your body. It is your truthful home.
