I’ve been hearing for a long time that emotions are something you feel in your body. Something angers you, or makes you afraid, or skyrockets your anxiety, and your body is responding almost before you know there’s something to respond to. Your autonomic nervous system elevates your heart rate and prepares you to fight or flee or freeze, long before you can make a decision about how to respond. There are all kinds of emotions that live in your body, but as I try to locate them, the negative ones are easy, but the positive ones are a lot harder to locate. Harder to notice your heart rate slowing than it is to feel your palms getting sweaty. 

And the really big positive emotions are kind of even harder to pinpoint. Where does love live in the body? What cells are responsible for love? Is it in the flood of neurotransmitters? Is it in the loosening of the mind when we relax into someone’s loving arms?  Is it my neurons, or something in my chest? Is it my skin cells that love the warmth of my partner’s touch? Is it the cells in my eyes that loved gazing into Fatberry’s sweet kitten face? What causes that sensation in the heart or the brain that we are connected, loved and loving?

I love thinking about this, because I love thinking about my millions of cells working together to create these wild experiences that we simply call life. These cells are walking me around, and giving me consciousness. They’re giving me thoughts about cells, and moving my muscles so I can type words about them. Carl Sagan says we are starstuff, the universe contemplating itself. And I am a universe of cells, cells contemplating themselves. 

In the middle of this is my long and tortured personal history with my own body. I have hated it. I have abused it. I have been at war with it. And all this time, it was happily humming along giving me life itself, like I wasn’t doing everything in my power to cut it off. I gave it no attention, no love, took anything it had to give me without thanks and without gratitude. In 2012, it even saved my life. My mind decided it was time to check out, and my body gently said, “Not now, Stef. We aren’t letting go yet.” I am so happy and grateful that my body saved me.

So I’ve been trying to have more gratitude. And the closer I look, the easier gratitude is to find. These cells, they do so many interesting things! They do all the things. I’m middle aged now, so I have all kinds of weird aches and pains, and it’s interesting to feel grateful for nerve cells letting my brain know that this area or that needs some attention. They give me the experience of consciousness, one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been dialed into. They give me feelings that I love, and am loved.

I’m kind of a nature nerd, and my therapist pointed out that maybe I need to cultivate an attitude of stewardship toward my body. I love that. If the human body is a planet, the human mind is its population of people, competing and jostling and wildly complicated. I’ve spent 47 years ravaging my body’s natural resources – taking and taking without any appreciation. Depleting the good stuff without a thought about what resources I would have in the future. Strip-mining my body’s access to pleasure for the easy thrills of nicotine and alcohol. Waging war on my body. It’s all pretty shameful, really. And as a wise friend said, “Nobody’s having fun in a war.”

Stewardship implies a relationship of compassion, gratitude, and advocacy. It will be an ongoing project, because 47 years of ingrained habits and attitudes take time to turn around. But my body is an overwhelming gift that has been entrusted to me, and, like with so many things in my life, I am so glad I noticed I hadn’t paid it attention or appreciated it before it was too late to pay it attention or appreciate it. The more attention I pay it, the more rewarding it is, whether it’s an embodied meditation, or yoga, or long walks with the dog. We are having a good time together. I don’t know what cells in my body are me telling my body that I absolutely love it, but I’m so glad we have this time together.