Morning in My Body: A Meditation

The room is still, quiet and cool. The air conditioner has finally caught up from yesterday’s heat.

I am awake.

There has been, for how many hours I’ve slept, no external stimulus to distract my mind from my physical self. As I lay in bed, unclothed, eyes still closed, not yet disturbed by news, plans, images, videos, or words, I take stock of all that there is in the moment.

Me, in my body, in this room.

I’ll remain this way until I hear birds calling out to each other. Ten minutes? Thirty? Having not yet looked at my phone, I have no conception of time. The birds’ high-pitched chirps will tell me when to break my stupor, at which point I’ll open my eyes. The time will have come for me to rise, to place my feet on the floor, to more formally begin this day.

But not yet.

This preceding moment is also a beginning, lighter, slower, a liminal transition from slumber into consciousness. There’s an awareness both limiting (of the outside world) and heightened (of my self).

A deep breath in. Hold. Exhale. Again. And again. I remain trained on my physicality.

I take stock of my body and all there is to notice and contemplate about my physical being.

There is nowhere else to begin than my obvious state of arousal. It strains against the blanket on top of me. Commanding attention and focus, it fuels desire: for release, for touch, for deeper exploration into my body’s capacity for pleasure and movement, for pleasure through movement. That desire brings forth a reminiscence, a recollection of times I’ve felt that pleasure, the kind that can only be generated and shared with another person, another body.

The urges push forth a longing to experience that pleasure again.

The longing is a familiar one. In phases such as the one I’m in now, it is almost daily, and the days add up. Another deep breath. I choose to set aside the frustration of being sexually unfulfilled.

Instead of frustration, I focus on wonder: at inhabiting a body that craves physical connection, a body that manifests an altered physical state when desire is peaking. The physical urges instinctively craving touch and pleasure — not through any conscious or intellectual choice — are primal and innate. The desire that is inherent within me, encoded into the function of my physical self, asserts a primordial longing that likewise can only be expressed physically.

Another deep breath to slow down my accelerating heartbeat. Yet another, with an audible exhalation. I become humbled at my body’s sway on me, how, despite being able to control my actions, I am unable to influence my physical urges.

Many mornings such as this I provide myself a release, but today I choose not to, patiently letting arousal linger until it dissipates, slowly subsiding. I take another deep breath and in an instant become distracted by another part of my body making its presence felt and heard.

My stomach is growling.

Hunger doesn’t usually arrive for me until several hours into the day. I register any pains or discomfort from what I have eaten the day before. Do I feel full or bloated, was there anything I put into my body — or did I put too much into my body — that this morning I regret? Thankfully, today I feel satiated and at ease. It is not a coincidence, I think, that the night before I had a light, early dinner.

I register the differences and similarities between the hunger for sex and food. While the urges for both are intrinsic, fulfilling them is wholly different.

I can satiate my need and desire for food any way I want, pretty much whenever I want. While I can provide myself a measure of sexual pleasure and release, unlike food, I can’t order up or find the kind of sex I want on a whim.

Only a certain kind of sex fulfills me and it is worth forgoing, I’ve learned from experience, the kinds I don’t want. In that way, sex and food are similar. Just as there are kinds of sex I don’t like, so too there are foods I avoid. Just as identifying the kinds of sex that enrich me has been a process of experience, luck and experimentation, so too have my dietary tastes and preferences evolved.

Like sex, there can be different kinds of pleasure to be had from eating, and there can be foods I enjoy in the moment but later regret, and eventually come to avoid altogether.

Developing a focus on health while simultaneously learning how diet impacts the way my body feels has led me to consider my diet in a more thoughtful, conscious way.

It’s challenging finding the balance between pleasurable eating that is also beneficial (and not harmful) to your body.

My stomach has calmed down, but my thoughts stay on food.

Do I have enough to get through today, tomorrow, the week? Since the pandemic, and a handful of other events such as extended power outages, I’ve become more sensitized to having food available.

I’ve become more focused on knowing exactly what I’ll eat and when. Admittedly, it’s a little dramatic. A grocery store is two miles away, with many restaurants in between. Yet I can’t shake what feels like constant nagging of needing to know what my next meal will be.

I breathe deeply again. Inhale, exhale. And I remind myself just how fortunate I am. I’ve never experienced food insecurity. Despite my neurotic fixations, I, unlike so many, don’t need to authentically worry about where my next meal is coming from. Just the opposite: I have the luxury to purchase and make the exact kind of meal I want, or go out and have someone make it for me.

I clear my head enough to express a simple gratitude for the food I eat, and for the relative ease with which I acquire it.

With a momentary shift of perspective, I nonetheless take stock of the food I have on hand. There is chard, squash and snap peas that need to be eaten soon. Another habit that intensified during the pandemic: a heightened aversion to wasting any food.

The year of lock down during the pandemic was a forcing action for the way I approach my diet.

Living alone, not being touched, seen or heard except through a computer screen or telephone, eating and drinking became the most sensual experience I had for a long, slow year. I mean that in the most literal sense. Food was about the only thing that interacted with my bodily senses in any meaningful way (other than music): I could feel, taste, smell and touch it.

As Covid raged through the country and we came, too briefly and temporarily, to see those working in the food system as essential workers, I came to appreciate more than ever what other people did, what risks they exposed themselves to, what labor they performed in harsh conditions for lousy pay and benefits, for me to have such ease and choice in feeding myself.

It was when the beef industry received a massive infusion of federal funding during the world’s greatest health threat of my lifetime that I decided to experiment with changing course. No one has to die for me to eat chicken or a hamburger.

Not that grains or vegetables don’t also expose workers to risk, but at least plant-based foods are better for the environment, less resource-dependent overall, and not as dangerous to prepare and package like animal products.

Thinking of food and eating stirs a sense of hunger. I place my hand on my stomach, and insecurities arise, even a sense of disappointment of what I feel. Around my waist line are the five, six, seven pounds the doctor has been asking me to lose for the last five, six, seven years.

The same pounds I see when I look in a mirror and that won’t disappear despite the crunches, despite the mostly plant-based diet, despite drinking more water and laying off sugar and processed foods.

Not wanting to interrupt my morning meditation with negativity, I consciously turn to gratitude again. To the thoughts of appreciation I’d had just before. To being grateful that despite those extra pounds, I am in good health — and how I feel about my body is entirely within my control.

This momentary fixation on weight and appearance turns my attention to exercise. I take stock of how I’m feeling, from my calves, quads, knees and hips, to my arms, chest, shoulders and back. What is sore from a previous workout? What exercise did I do yesterday, and what kind ohave I not done recently?

Exercise is another way of experiencing my body that changed significantly because of the pandemic. Not willing to enter a gym, I began working out at home. This equated to using a handful of dumbbells, a mat and an exercise app on my phone. No more treadmills or elliptical machines. No more unlimited choices of free weights or machines.

Instead, it’s jumping jacks, burpees, squats, lunges, bicep curls and shoulders presses, in as many different variations as there kinds of stir fries. To me surprise I took to it — and haven’t yet returned to a gym.

It’s the bodyweight exercises I enjoy most. No machines, no tools, just me and my body, moving in ways that are new and surprisingly challenging and difficult. Sure, I miss some of the equipment you can find at a gym. Every now and then I want to lift heavier weights than I have at home. But forgoing those is easy compared to the benefits of not driving to a gym, changing my clothes in a locker room, waiting on equipment and staring at myself in a mirror the entire time.

My body feels good, no soreness, no aches. Another thing to be thankful for. But also, maybe a sign that today I should push myself through lifting weights. Lift enough, or at pace, or in compound movements without stopping, and there are plenty of ways to push the body to its limits.

There are two moments I love when exercising. The first is the feeling when my body is warmed up and sweat begins to form. Initially it’s uncomfortable, but once it begins I want to produce and feel more.

The physical manifestation of strenuous movement, one that is visible and tangible, that I can feel against my skin, heightens a sense of embodiment, makes me attuned to the functioning capacity of my body: the strain of muscles, feeling sweat roll down my back and pool on chest and forehead, being winded to the point of having to consciously, rather than naturally, modulate my breathing.

That’s the other moment I enjoy. When I’m getting into my lungs, when my body is giving me signs I’m at or getting close to my limit. It makes me feel that I’m reaching my physical boundaries, and that next time, hopefully, and the times after that, I’ll be able to do more.

But it goes deeper than that. There is a stronger connection to my self-awareness of breathing, one that is a story of my body’s history.

Self-awareness of breathe has been a life-long condition. Since childhood, asthma has been a constant companion. Using a twice-daily inhaler has helped tremendously in controlling the condition, to the point I rarely struggle anymore to breathe. Certainly not like I did at times as a youngster, when, on a handful of occasions, I was forced to the hospital, gasping for air. Working remotely and as permanently connected as I feel to the internet, I sometimes joke that the thing I need most to survive on a daily basis is a wireless connection. In fact, what I really need is that inhaler, and it’s not a joke.

Eating, sex, and exercise are a combination of physical urges, desires, and needs. They also come in countless forms, allowing me to be thoughtful, conscious, intentional and even experimental in how I experience them. I get to identify what I enjoy and dislike, what I think is good for my body or distasteful or unpleasant — and all of these evolve.

But what I can’t modify — except through medication — is breathing. It is so core to our daily and even momentarily existence that we barely notice it. We perform it instinctively, without effort, even when we sleep. It is controlling of our bodies in that it can take seconds without breath for us to notice.

Breathing is so intrinsic to our physical functioning that modulating our breathing during exercise, yoga, meditation and even sex can impact our mental and psychological state as well as our physical exertion. Few things bond the mind-body connection as does breathing.

I focus on that now as I open my eyes. I breathe in deeply, and audibly exhale. I do it again. Then one more time, the deepest breath I can, and slowly let it out. I am grateful for the act and ease and movement of breath. So many times in my life the simple act of breathing became painfully difficult. As this day, I am grateful for the luxury of easy breathing.

I twitch my toes and stretch my arms over my head. I bend my knees and move my legs out from under the sheet and blanket, and put my feet on the floor. I sense the soft rug as I rise.

The muscles in my back tighten.

I take my first steps of the day. The first thing I do is tend to my body.

Then I drink water and make coffee and my meditation is broken, and the day has formally begun.

Have any thoughts? I can be reached at scottmgilman @ gmail.com.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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