BODY LANGUAGE
I talk with my hands.
____________________
My favorite memory as a child is one that I don’t remember.
It was a moment gifted to me. Not something I could close my eyes and call forward. It was about me. But now that I really think about it, more my Mama’s memory than mine.
Through the years she would speak of it as mamas do, like little girls in marvelous pink tutus twirling about the stage. Bragging rights. Although mine wasn’t so “pretty.”
At least not in the traditional way.
We were in the market, this tiny four-year-old girl and her mama strolling the aisles, when something caught my attention and I bolted, running straight to a stranger with an obviously and severely twisted and bent hand.
That I grabbed his hand and began speaking life into it, into him, is something that feels so familiar. Not as memory. But as part of me.
The little girl. The woman I am today.
Why is it so easy for me to [still] speak healing into strangers but not into myself?
Life and death are in the tongue.
Words. Audible. Resonating.
My studio reverberates with the sound of fingers tapping on a keyboard. Thoughts of life…and death…poured out through the hand.
I have been indicted by this revelation of silence. The presumption that my own body “knows” the thoughts that begin like seeds as tiny impressions and grow to entire sentences, paragraphs of angst and love and wondering planted in the quiet.
Can my body read?
Life…and death…are in the tongue.
What that little girl knew, what she brought to the world was sound—
Lively little steps reverberating through produce and dairy aisles.
An eagerness to touch and hold.
Words tumbling out, void of embarrassment or pretense.
Raw in their need to reach, connect, and heal.
Before thought comes the Spirit. His words pre-empt, pre-exist. It is mine to capture that.
Again.
To hold my own body—
the one that can’t read but can hear.
To speak over it as if it is paying attention. Because it is.
To invite the abandon of the child to overtake the woman who might hesitate in appropriateness and reserve.
Our bodies are not only speaking…but listening.
They are eager, like children, to hear the good report—
You are beautiful in your Design.
You are strong, and able to do remarkable things.
You know just what to do at just the right moment.
You are miraculous. Believed in. Supported. Adored.
Is it that rather than waiting on our bodies, our bodies are waiting on us?
The life-giving thought we keep within us is the seed planted.
The audible word brings it to life.
But I may have mistaken what it means to speak healing.
This body does not need me to explain its work.
It knew how to close a wound before I knew there was such a thing as a cell.
It knew how to knit bone, clot blood, summon defenses, replace what was spent.
It has been repairing and regulating and defending me beneath my notice for a lifetime.
There is an intelligence in its Design that does not require my understanding to exist.
The miracle was already here.
What has been missing is the sound of my agreement with it.
I trust you.
Not because nothing has gone wrong.
Because so much is still going right.
I am with you.
Not standing apart, watching for the next failure.
Not suspicious of every sensation.
Not asking you to fight for me while I speak as though you have betrayed me.
I am on your side.
I believe in the miracle of you.
The one that existed before diagnosis.
The one that remains in the presence of it.
The one that wakes every morning and gets about the extraordinary business of keeping me alive.
I defend you.
Against the words spoken over you that were never yours to keep.
Against statistics that know populations but do not know you.
Against my own temptation to confuse what is happening within you with who you are.
I undergird you.
With what I eat.
How I rest.
The hands I place upon you.
The treatments I choose.
The prayers I pray.
And now—the words I speak.
There is authority in that.
Not the authority of domination.
The authority of alignment.
Of refusing to stand in fear on one side of myself while asking my body to move toward life on the other.
What would happen if we spoke to our bodies the way a mother speaks into the becoming of her child?
Not because the child has no idea who she is.
But because there is power in hearing someone who loves her say—
I see who you are.
I know what is in you.
I believe you.
Go.
Maybe this is the body language I have been missing.
Not instruction. Recognition.
Not pleading. Agreement.
Not standing over my body and commanding it to become miraculous. Standing with it and acknowledging that it already is.
My body does not need me to teach it how to heal. It needs something much more intimate from me. My allegiance. My confidence. My voice.
Four-year-old me knew something about that. She saw a hand that looked wrong and did not recoil from it. She ran toward it. Held it. Spoke.
All these years later, the hand I need to reach for is my own.
To hold this body without fear. To believe in its Design without requiring evidence of outcome.
To speak aloud what I have too often left buried in thought, even writing.
I trust you.
I am with you.
I believe in the miracle of you.
Maybe the most healing thing I can offer my body is not another instruction.
It is the sound of me believing in it.
NOTES
SOUL MAP
REFLECTION
the hand → speaking life → silence → can my body read? → sound → listening → Design → miracle → trust → allegiance → agreement → HERE
A Soul Map is not the chronology of what happened to us.
It is the trail of what happened inside us.
Sometimes we discover that the place we have arrived is somewhere a much earlier version of ourselves already knew how to find.
A little girl sees a hand that looks different.
She runs toward it.
Takes it in hers.
And speaks.
All these years later, I find myself tracing my way back to her.
Not because she knew more about the body than I do now.
Because she had not yet learned to withhold her belief from it.
The body I inhabit today is not waiting for me to explain healing to it.
It is already engaged in the astonishing work of repair, defense, regulation and renewal.
The miracle was already here.
THE BODY OF SOUND
A spoken word is physical.
Air leaves the lungs. Vocal folds vibrate. Sound moves outward as pressure waves. The ear receives those waves and the nervous system processes what has been heard.
Science is beginning to acknowledge what those of us who live in the land of WooWoo already know— that speaking particular healing words causes diseased human cells to heal.
It is fascinating to know that cells respond to mechanical forces—a process called mechanotransduction—laboratory research has found that audible acoustic stimulation can affect certain mechanosensitive cellular processes under specific experimental conditions.
Thought plants the seed.
Speech adds breath.
Vibration.
Sound.
Hearing.
Meaning.
The body responds to what has been spoken.
And participates in what it hears.
What happens beyond that leaves room for mystery.
And miracle.
REFLECTION
Maybe this week we don't think our answers.
Maybe we hear ourselves say them.
Where have you become more practiced at describing what is wrong with your body than acknowledging what is right?
What does your body do every day, without instruction or applause, that you have stopped recognizing as miraculous?
What words have you repeatedly spoken about your body?
Are they the words you would choose to speak to it?
Where did you begin to fear or mistrust your body?
Where have you overlooked the thousands of things it continues to do right while attending to the thing that has gone wrong?
What would change if you stopped standing apart from your body and stood with it?
What do you know about its Design that deserves to be said aloud?
What does allegiance sound like in your own voice?
And perhaps the most important—
What does your body need to hear you believe about it?
Drop your pins.
_____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → HERE
Then put your hand there.
And say it.
Out loud.
YOU ARE HERE.
Image: Recently I grew my nails out for the first time in my life. I was so proud of them I took this picture. Then I promptly cut them all off because I couldn't type. Apparently, when forced to choose between beautiful hands and talking ones, the talking ones win every time.
Resource: There’s a small but powerful book about speaking scripture over your body. It is written by Charles Capps. It is called God’s Creative Power [For healing]. If you ever wonder what book aligns the closest to what I believe [spiritually] about healing…this is it.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed—Isaiah 53:5, KJV