There are faith traditions that have you say a prayer for nearly everything you do or encounter in your day. You pray thanksgiving when you wake up, when you go to sleep, for the ordinary and the extraordinary of everything in between. I’m not sure how many people actually do this, but I suppose it is a way of moving mindfully that could be adopted in simple ways. Perhaps just a noticing with gratitude all of the things that work and the opportunities to learn from the things that don’t.

I thought of this is the dark middle of the night when I was using the bathroom (I know, tmi) but it felt wonderful and profound in the moment as I recognized many things I was deeply grateful for and that too often I take for granted: the luxury of not only indoor plumbing but a space only twenty feet from my bed, that I was in a bed, and a home, safe, comfortable, the fact that my body knows how to take what it needs and to filter out what it does not without me doing anything. It is that last point that really struck me, this miracle of how we are formed, as the psalmist said thousands of years ago, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” -Psalm 139: 14

I found myself full of wonder at the thought that my body, this vehicle that I have been moving in for nearly fifty-two years was formed in such a way that it knows better than I what I need. If I listen, if I feel, if I trust, all the information I need, and all the information I don’t need, will be filtered and processed and used or released. Certainly I am a participant in this process, I have choices to make, but there is a lot of simple gratitude I need to have in the noticing of how little I actually have to figure out and do.

I have had two times in my life where I have been very sick, and both came after long periods of ignoring the signals to rest and the accumulation of a lot of stress. My body knew what I needed long before I was ready to acknowledge it. The ‘push through the pain’ mentality of the world of social achievement justified ignoring the signs. I didn’t want to appear weak, though that is precisely what we all are at times. I have learned that allowing the reality of weakness brings us into caring for and being cared for, which we need for healthy relationships. In both cases my brain and my ego got in the way of my physical knowing. I needed to rest, to acknowledge that I was under a lot of stress, to slow down. I thought I could talk myself out of reality but eventually my body said ‘no,’ and rest is what I was forced into.

The body is not just a complex vehicle to carry around our brains and personalities, it is a part of that knowing and feeling and doing and being. Too often I have talked myself out of what I feel to be true and have been very wrong. I think that too often we are afraid to say what we feel because we can’t prove it, or measure it, or repeat it – this is the challenge of mystical knowing and faith: allowing ourselves to know what is true even if we can’t explain it to anyone else. But the body knows, and sometimes I just have to get my brain out of the way. Just think what happens when we decide we know better than the body and take over trying to control the systems, if you are otherwise healthy it rarely goes well.

What I’m left wondering in this meditation is this: if my brain is a part of my body, and my body often knows better what to do than my intellectual knowing, are there ways I can let go of the intellectual knowing to allow my brain to do it’s work without my interfering and trying to control. I am thinking that this is what prayer and meditation can do for us because if you engage with the process over a long enough period of time it just makes you see the world differently, taking out what you don’t need, processing what you do, you start to live with a gratitude filter that changes how you see everything in the world. And really I suppose this way of living is the prayer for everything we do, because we start to understand it is more than we can do ourselves and we become overwhelmed with gratitude.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” -Psalm 139: 24