(Nimue)
Some of my Druidry this year has been about nature as it manifests in my body and exploring myself as an embodied being. I haven't had a good relationship with my body - ongoing issues with pain, fatigue and unmet need have had me disassociating a lot in the past. It's something I'm working to change.
We are all collaborations of tiny things. All those cells. All those bacteria. We're electrical impulses in a meat sack. We're chemical events triggered by environment and experience. We are random ancestral jam. There's a lot going on in here at a scale it is hard to think about - in terms of how small those parts are and what massively huge numbers of them are involved.
About this time last year I'd started to realise how shot my body chemistry was. I didn't feel much - mostly empty, hollow or numb. I wasn't experiencing feelings of reward or satisfaction, I had lost the capacity to want things. It was grim and I was ill in a number of ways and not well resourced to change things.
Last week I went for a walk and, coming to the top of a long flight of steps, I had a brief experience of my body producing endorphins. I've never been good at endorphins, I don't easily get the pain relief or the pleasure associated with exercise. There have been times when I've danced for hours, or walked twenty miles and managed to get a hit, but it's never been reliable. To get endorphins for climbing a modest amount of steps was startling and exciting.
We're so prone to treating our bodies and minds as separate. We don't talk much about how soul needs might impact on body functionality. Conversations around chemical interventions have tended to focus on serotonin but this is by no means the only neurotransmitter impacting on how anyone feels. Inside this skin there is one coherent system and everything is connected. Health and illness are not brain issues alone, or body issues alone. Our emotional states are chemical states. Our mental states depend on neurotransmitters and the electrical events in our central nervous systems. Being alive is being a big, messy, complicated interaction of many things.
We talk a lot in Druidry about how everything is connected. Pagans of all kinds talk about the web of life, and we honour how that works in food systems and the interconnectedness of the natural world. All of this is also inside us. We are complicated networks of systems interacting with each other. We are delicate, fragile ecosystems that need treating with care and respect. When one part of our inner ecosystem is damaged, everything is damaged.
There's much to celebrate here. There is so much wonder in a human body. Our inner collaborations are incredible things. We constantly take the world into us and release it again, separate and yet part of the whole. This is wild and beautiful, it is our every breath and bowel movement.
I'm starting to explore what it means to honour that rather than taking it for granted or trying to ignore it when things aren't working.
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