Acknowledging your relationship with yourself – letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves
September 21, 2011
by michaelwilliamroach
Sometimes poetry because it speaks from an aesthetic point of view can be more real than ‘factual’ reality. You could think of ‘factual’ reality as living in the black and white world and living from an aesthetic point of view in the rich world of colour. If you haven’t watched the film Pleasantville this illustrates this beautifully.
The title is a line from one of Mary Oliver’s poems ‘Wild Geese’. You can find a lot of Mary’s poems by Googling her name, this one is from the book Dream Work. Here’s the poem:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver published by Atlantic Monthly Press © Mary Oliver
The line I like is ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’ because when you do this it changes how you experience the world.
One of the problems people often talk to me about is that when things go wrong they wind up beating themselves up. Like when something goes wrong in their relationship, or when they are trying to get into a relationship with someone else and they get turned down or to use the worst metaphor or way of thinking it imaginable they ‘crash and burn’. This beating yourself up doesn’t make things better it makes you feel worse. Yet this has become such an ingrained habit for most people that they no longer have conscious control over this or realise that they can have control over this. In addition the normal schooling process and just growing up in western culture, the process of enculturation or the learning process of fitting in to your surroundings you learn to place your attention on what isn’t working and fix it. Remember all those mistakes they circled in red at school, that is what they were telling you to pay attention to, what wasn’t working, how you don’t get what you want.
So instead of beating yourself up just let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Here’s how you do this:
Pay attention to your body and how you feel. Whatever you feel acknowledge that and notice for what would make you feel better. That’s likely to be a treat like chocolate or your favourite biscuits or whatever it is you use to make yourself feel good… If it’s really bad you may be thinking about drowning your sorrows with alcohol or having a cigarette to relieve the stress. Whatever it is pay attention to that feeling. I’ve had people tell me that it feels like they have been wounded. You can even think of being given a hug. But what is really interesting is that when you do this you’ll start to feel better. NOT eating the chocolate or the biscuits or any of the other things. Simply letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves will change how you experience things.
From the neuroscience point of view what you are doing is letting the neurological cascade that you had started of bad feelings and emotions subside and replacing those toxic brain chemicals with good feelings, good brain chemicals that you generate yourself with your body, you create a new cascade of positive good feelings that washes away the bad toxic stuff.
Go on try it.
Next time you are feeling bad. Just stop. And let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
