Sunday, December 12, 2010

Fully Integrated

I'm participating in Reverb10, and this post is in response to a prompt from author Patrick Reynolds: Body integration. This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

I could tell you about my increased pilates training, and how a dedicated effort to strengthen my core has done just that, strengthen my core. About how after a 50-minute work-out with my rock-star trainer, I put my legs up against the wall for the cool-down meditation and because my mind and body are probably so integrated my thoughts are crystal clear, my emotions quickly channeled. I could tell you about long runs in the country, lost in thoughts that empty themselves out, crossing the threshold and letting the endorphins drive.  I could.

The author of this prompt submits a smokin’ hot shirtless photograph of himself for this reflective end-of-year exercise and I think, well yeah, that’ll put me in my body. I’m not sure that this is what the prompt is meant to evoke, although if you snoop around long enough on this guy’s website you'll see that indeed he does use sex to sell his health regime. It must work.

It does.

I’ve been considering this prompt all day and I can’t think of any better way to get to a more cohesive me, alive and present than a first class orgasm.  Of course there's the physical release, but this catalyzes the letting go of something else that seemed so necessary to harbor, except once released, it heightens the pleasure.  Briefly, I touch it: a clarity creeping dangerously close to some kind of universal memory, experienced only in such private passages, a vulnerable stretch of glistening moments that lasts forever in the moment, but is still, in retrospect, fleeting.

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