Body and Spirit

There’s a paradox in the ways Eastern and Western societies view the relationship between the body and the spirit. In the Eastern world, the body is used as a vehicle for spiritual growth, whether through yoga, many forms of meditation, dance, martial arts, or any of a wide range of other physical practices. In the West, spiritual growth is focused far more on mental activities such as prayer, meditation (understood as a rational activity), study, etc. There is little or no tradition of using the body as a vehicle for spiritual development.

This situation is curious from a worldview perspective. Eastern thought tends toward monism, the idea that everything is one (frequently identified as god), and that distinctions between things are illusions. In fact, in many versions of Eastern thought the physical world itself, including the body, is an illusion.

In contrast, Christianity believes that the physical universe is real, including the body. The world is a creation of God that is sustained by Him but has its own integrity: it operates according to its own rules in accordance with the laws God established at creation, subject to miraculous intervention on the part of God.

So how is it that the worldview that sees the physical as an illusion uses the body for spiritual development, but the worldview that sees the physical as real doesn’t?

We need to add one qualification here. Physical disciplines involving self-denial, such as fasting, abstaining from certain kinds of food or drink, sleep denial, and celibacy, find their ways into spiritual traditions around the world. There are many reasons for this which we may explore later. In this post I’m more concerned about physical disciplines that involve developing the body as a vehicle for spiritual transformation

Looking at the Eastern world first, physical disciplines in these spiritual traditions are intended to produce one of two specific results. They may be designed to put you in an altered state of consciousness that will enable you to see through the illusion of distinctions to the fundamental unity of everything—in other words, to generate a mystical experience that transcends the merely physical. Alternately, they may be intended to focus the mind on the immediate present, a state known as “mindfulness.” Mindfulness can be a means of shedding your ego and living with compassion because you recognize your unity with everyone around you. Living in a state of mindfulness is generally what people mean when they use the ill-defined term “spiritual” to describe someone.

The point is that in the East, the body is used as a vehicle to transcend the physical.

In the West, particularly since the rise of Christianity, spirituality is connected ultimately to the Bible and related texts. Since the Bible emphasize practices like prayer, singing the Psalms, meditation (understood as a rational activity), and study, along with corporate worship, these form the core of Christian spirituality. The body is conspicuously absent from this list, except for fasting and different forms of self-denial. The only focus on the body in these devotional practices comes from the use of particular postures for meditation in some traditions, such as the Celtic crossfigell (cross vigil).

In an odd way, the very fact that the West sees the physical world as real contributes to the sense that the body is irrelevant to spirituality. Particularly in the wake of the Enlightenment, we’ve bought into the idea that the physical and the spiritual world do not mix, that the world of matter and energy is completely separate from the world of the spirit. Since the spirit is non-physical, we thus must use non-physical means to develop it.

This idea is akin to an ancient heresy called Gnosticism, which argued that body and spirit are separate and ultimately opposed to each other. In Gnosticism, the body had nothing at all to do with the spirit, leading Gnostics either to unbridled excess on the one hand or to extreme asceticism on the other. Even though the Church rejected Gnosticism as heretical, in part because the Bible teaches that the physical world is intrinsically good, it has had continuing influence on Christianity.

A good part of the reason for this is the Apostle Paul’s rhetorical contrast between “flesh” and spirit, where the flesh is described as evil. When used this way, however, Paul does not mean the physical body; he is referring to something that is non-physical, that is, the part of us that resists the Holy Spirit’s authority and direction in our lives.

To be sure physical appetites can be occasions for sin and the body can be used for sinful behavior. Christians need to recognize that and deal with it. But Scripture tells us that the body is good and that it needs to be used in the love of God (“The greatest [commandment] is ‘Love the LORD your God with all your … strength’…”).

So it is clear that we need to reject Gnosticism, and along with it the idea implicit in the typical post-Enlightenment worldview that the spiritual and physical worlds do not connect with each other.

Does this mean that physical development can be part of our spiritual development? I think it can be, for reasons that I’ll discuss in the next post.

And now for something completely different, a post on exercise

Learning to love God with all our strength involves taking care of and developing our body. Key elements of this include adequate rest, proper diet, and regular exercise. Chances are you already know a lot of what you are supposed to do, but the question is, do you do it?

Here, I want to focus a bit on exercise, and in particular, one form of exercise most people do not know about.

Probably the most common approach to exercise breaks it down into three basic types: cardio to strengthen your heart (e.g. jogging, biking, or swimming); resistance training for strength and to maintain muscle mass and bone density (e.g. “the bells”—barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, and clubbells—or bodyweight exercises such as pushups); and flexibility exercises (e.g. stretching or common approaches to yoga).

There’s a lot of information out there about these three kinds of exercise, some of it better than others. But there’s another class of exercises that is just as important that few people discuss: joint mobility training (JM).

JM systematically moves all of your joints through their full current range of motion (ROM) in every direction the joint is designed to move. A full routine includes the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, thoracic spine, lower back, hips, knees, ankles, and toes, working either from top to bottom or from the periphery to the core.

JM is different from flexibility training. To understand why, do the following:

1. Lie on your back.
2. Keep your left leg straight and on the ground, and bend your right leg at the knee.
3. Bring your right thigh toward your chest and notice how close you can get it.
4. Lower and straighten your right leg.
5. Keeping the right leg straight, bring it toward your chest again.

With your leg bent, you can move your leg far closer to your chest than you can with the leg straight. In a nutshell, that’s the difference between JM and ROM exercises and stretching: in stretching, the flexibility of the muscles is the limiting factor, while in properly designed JM routines, muscular flexibility is largely taken out of the equation.

Why is joint mobility important? In the former Soviet Union, scientists studying the human body determined that biological age was directly related to the condition of the connective tissue in the joints: the better the connective tissue, the more youthful the body. They also discovered that JM can improve the quality of the connective tissue and even repair some kinds of joint damage, and as a result it can act as an anti-aging program for your body.

Done consistently, JM can also improve ROM, eliminate early morning stiffness, and lead to better, more pain free movement. It is also very useful as a warm up for exercise, as a kind of “pre-hab” to prevent injuries, as well as for releasing residual tension from exercise in your cool down.

The best joint mobility programs that I have found come from one of two places. The first is China: tai chi and some qigong programs include very good JM work, which is why many Chinese tai chi masters move so well into their 80s and 90s.

The other source is Russia. Pavel Tsatsouline, the “evil Russian” who re-introduced kettlebell training to America, has a JM program called Superjoints. Superjoints includes several different routines, some of which combine JM work with conditioning. One of his instructors, Andrea Du Cane, also produced programs called The Ageless Body and Kettlebell Boomer that include both JM and kettlebell work. These have different levels graded to condition and ability. If you use kettlebells, these are excellent programs. All of these resources are available from Dragondoor’s website.

Scott Sonnon, who studied in Russia, has produced JM programs including Intuflow and Ageless Mobility. These are graded for different levels. Scott’s routines take less time than Pavel’s and advance by increasing movement sophistication rather than by increasing repetitions. On the other hand, the higher reps Pavel prescribes can be very helpful for repairing some kinds of joint damage. Scott’s programs are available from RMAX.

Steve Maxwell, one of Pavel’s former instructors, also has a series of JM routines for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels that are instantly downloadable via the internet. These can be accessed through the link at the bottom of this page.

Two notes: first, all of these sites deal with high end strength training, fitness, and martial arts; don’t let that throw you—the JM programs are for anyone. Second, in the interests of full disclosure these are affiliate links, so if you order through them, I will receive a commission.

And the standard warning: do not start any exercise program without consulting your physician.

Body and Mind

When many Christians discuss on “spiritual growth,” they generally mean Bible study, prayer, and other “religious” activities. But while that’s an important part of spiritual growth, it’s only one part of the picture.

Since God created all things good, it is safe to say He values them, and so we should as well. This means we need to be concerned about growth in all areas of our lives, not just “religious” or “spiritual” activities. Limiting Christian growth to things like prayer and Bible study is actually more Gnostic than Christian—it suggests that there’s a radical split between the physical and the spiritual, an idea that has no foundation in the Bible.

Our souls are the critical point for personal development, since we need to use our will to choose to take actions that will lead to growth. But developing the soul directly is difficult. Rather, the soul is generally developed indirectly, through building habits of body and mind that will feed and shape it. So let’s look at these two areas.

Ideas about spiritual growth usually ignore the body, but that is a serious mistake. Our physical strength (frequently described in Scripture in terms of endurance rather than raw power) is a critical component to anything we want to accomplish in life. Put simply, if we are tired or lack energy, it is extremely difficult to focus on anything, and we are more susceptible to temptation and more likely to fall into easier (and generally bad) habits.

Without physical energy, it is impossible to cultivate the mind and the soul, a fact recognized by the classical idea of “a sound mind in a sound body.” (It is also the legendary origin of kung fu, which is said to have grown out of exercises that were taught to monks at the Shaolin temple to keep them from falling asleep during meditation.) So it is important to commit ourselves to a process of physical development. This includes taking care of our health (since our bodies are temples of God) and cultivating our energy through diet, exercise, and rest.

With increased energy, we are in a better position to cultivate the mind. Christians tend to assume that this means knowledge of Scripture, and that is certainly part of it. But this is only part of building the mind. If God is the source of all things and Jesus is Lord of all, then God is interested in all of life and we can study any and every subject as a legitimate part of our personal development and as a spiritual activity.

This includes advancing in our professional life. Whatever you do for a living, unless it is criminal or intrinsically immoral, it is a sacred and holy calling by God for your life at this time. Professional development is therefore also a spiritual activity.

If you’ve been a student you already know how to learn, and all those skills can be applied here. But learning for transformation rather than information is a slightly different process. You need to learn new information, but you also need to let that new information sink deep into you to change how you think. We are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2). So how do we do this? That will be the subject of the next post.

Heart, Soul, Mind and Strength

Continuing our discussion of God’s priorities, we see that proper love comes from the inside out, heart to soul to mind to strength (physical actions). To understand this, it will be helpful to define the terms Jesus uses:

• Our strength refers to our physical body.
• Our mind is our thought life and our ability to reason and think.
• Our soul is our settled convictions, core values, conscience, memory, and will, which together comprise the essence of who we are. The Greek word is psyche, the root word for psychology, and is often translated as an individual’s “life” (e.g. Mark 8:35). As C. S. Lewis put it, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” To be more precise, we are embodied souls.
• The heart is the even deeper levels of our being, the innermost core of who we are that is generally invisible to us. Scripture tells us that only God knows our heart, which means we don't even know it completely.

We live from the inside out: our hearts move our souls, which then choose what we think about and what we do.

This raises a problem, however: I don’t have direct control over my heart. I (that is, my soul) can control my body and mind, but I can’t will my heart to change because the heart is a deeper part of me than my will.

So how do I move my heart to love God completely?

We may live from the inside out, but we grow primarily from the outside in. In other words, what we choose to do and to think about consistently will mold our souls, which then shapes our hearts. If we are going to change and grow, we need to develop new patterns of action and thought, because this will change our internal lives.

I would take this further to argue that since God expects our best, it is important for us to work to grow ourselves on all levels, heart, soul, mind, and strength. Growing in love for God will inevitably put us on a journey of personal growth as well.

In practical terms, the same applies to loving our neighbors: we need to grow ourselves so that we have more to give to them. For example, the best thing we can do for the poor is not to be one of them ourselves. As John Wesley said, we should make as much as we can, save as much as we can, and give as much as we can. Growing ourselves enhances our ability to help others.

So how do we grow ourselves in such a way that we can love God completely, love ourselves correctly, and love our neighbor compassionately? This is the subject of the next post.