#124: The wisdom of your body (with Hillary L. McBride, PhD)

I had the great joy of welcoming author, psychologist, researcher and podcaster Hillary L. McBride, PhD to the show this week. We discussed the idea that our bodies are a source of wisdom and truth, the topic of her critically important new book, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living. Hillary shared profound insights on the burdens our bodies bear when we ignore them, the ways Western colonialism has disembodied all of us, and how salvation itself can be a bodily reality. She offers helpful guidance for those of us getting used to being in-person again after COVID lockdowns, and more. I highly recommend this discussion and her book!

Order The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living (Canadian edition)
Order The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living (US edition)
Learn more about Hillary at hillarylmcbride.com
Follow Hillary on Twitter and Instagram.

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Check out the B-Side!

Once you’ve listened to this, make sure to check out the raw and uncut B-Side interview where my friends and I unpack the conversation in even more detail. Available exclusively on Patreon.

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Transcription

Hillary McBride  00:00

I used to think that salvation or being saved was a way that we've left our present reality and guaranteed something later. But I've been learning like this is not so much about ejection from present, but about wholeness, here. And I don't know if there's a way to experience wholeness without being in our bodies. I don't know if there's a way to experience wholeness without also being here and learning here with all of it: the suffering, the pain, the illness, that's part of being here, not something that needs to be fixed or solved, but is actually part of God expressing God's self in all of these different iterations of what it means to be human so that wholeness looks more complete than just one narrow definition of a body or one narrow definition of a story.

Jonathan Puddle  00:58

Hey, friends, welcome back to The Puddcast with me, Jonathan Puddle. This is episode 124. My guest today is Hillary McBride, PhD. I've been longing to speak with Hillary for a very long time so it was thrilling to have her on the show this week. You may know Hillary as an author, psychologist, speaker, researcher. She's the host of Other People's Problems podcast, she was a contributor for quite some time to The Liturgists podcast, which is how I first heard about her. She is a fellow Canadian. And it was a real delight to get to talk with her all about her brand new book, The Wisdom of Your Body. We sort of begin the conversation right away because I was about to count us down. And then I said, actually, you know, I'm having a hard time formulating my questions because I feel so present in my body and not stuck in my head. And she said, "Great, let's go with that." And so that's, that's where we begin. Details at the end of the how to find her book, and of course, the show notes for the text transcription and links to purchase at jonathanpuddle.com. Alright, here we go. Hillary McBride on The Puddcast. I'm just, I feel really in my body.

Hillary McBride  02:12

OK!

Jonathan Puddle  02:12

Just because I've been enjoying just sitting here reading. And I was just like, I hope this is a good interview because I just feel really happy and present right now.

Hillary McBride  02:22

That's right.

Jonathan Puddle  02:23

I'm not up here... I'm I'm very much in here right now.

Hillary McBride  02:25

Right? Okay, well, why don't we just jump in with that point, though, which is that when we, like there's something about embodiment that disrupts our way of being in the world. Because it when it's reoriented, re orienting us back to something that is in a way more human more connected, more present, but it is meant to be a shift from the way that we leave our bodies, move up into the cognitive domain and live there in a way of kind of, yet disembodying ourselves to participate in the structures that make our capitalist system go around, that make our kind of hyper productivity enhanced, right. There is something that actually in a way is kind of a rebellion to be in our bodies. And it, it is meant to be, I think, a little uncomfortable, because it is an upset of what we're used to. So even you saying like, "Well, I hope this is a good interview" reminds me of like, when I am more connected to my body, there are times when I am more productive. But there are also times when I'm less productive, or my way of interacting shifts, because I am tuning in, and it requires us to slow down, requires us to rest, requires us to pay attention to our feelings. And sometimes that means that we're not just machines powering through anymore.

Jonathan Puddle  03:46

Yes. Okay, so exactly how many areas of modern Western life are actually contrary to human thriving?

Hillary McBride  03:56

It's a great question. I mean, if I was in a different field of study, I could give you a more accurate number or you know, analysis, but I think that a lot of them right? Like there are these, we see these reemergences is of embodiment coming back into our culture through through like borrowing—or appropriating,depending on who you're talking to, and what is really going on—things from other cultures, like we look at yoga or we look at the way that you know, sometimes there's there's dance that happens in, in celebration or dance classes. It's funny that we even have to kind of like structure it in that way. We have to, you know, get a babysitter and we have to leave our house we have to pay $45 and we go take a class to learn how to be in our bodies. But it is, yeah, I would say to your point, a foundation of Western colonial societies to be disembodied. It is actually quite outside of the norm for us to stay connected to ourselves in our Western context in white context, you know, in our adult selves.

Jonathan Puddle  05:04

Yeah, yeah yeah. So this book for me just personally, is just coming at a wonderful time. I have been on a journey the last couple of years, like I did a big kind of a faith thing like 15 years ago, like, you know, before it was cool. And then and then in like, the last handful of years went on a major kind of emotional and trauma awareness and self compassionate kind of, kind of journey. And, and then, like, I realized, I read this book, similar title to yours, but The Wisdom of Your Heart, all about the God-given purpose of emotions. And I was like, this is like a, this was like a field guide, or like a manual for all these feelings, and no one ever told me what they were. And it was so life-giving as a man with very big emotions, who grew up in a hyper masculine, sports-obsessed culture in New Zealand in like the 80s and 90s, I did not fit into the picture of what a man was meant to be. And through my own journey with my therapist, who, you know, like, God set me up with this amazing South African man who was like, "Oh, I understand, I get your cultural touch points", you know. But there's something about moving now into my body, which I feel like I've been exploring for the last couple of years, through breath work. But what you've got here in The Wisdom of Your Body is like, it feels like at the crudest level, to just slap a label on it is to be like, this is like a manual, an operator's manual for your entire human body.

Hillary McBride  06:45

Oh, wow.

Jonathan Puddle  06:46

Including all these broader areas of self. And I'm, I'm, I have to read it again, for me rather than for an interview.

Hillary McBride  06:58

Right.

Jonathan Puddle  06:59

But I'm, I'm this man, like, there's so many ways that my brain is firing off, wanting to ask you about... but I wonder maybe you just tell us a bit about your story. How this came to be? What are some of the problems that that Hillary McBride cannot leave the world unchanged?

Hillary McBride  07:22

I haven't heard it quite put like that. That's interesting. I'll have to reflect on that. What I what I can't keep my hands out of because I'm so compelled by or frustrated by Yeah, I'll do some reflecting.

Jonathan Puddle  07:33

In coaching, I say, "What can you not tolerate being the way it is?"

Hillary McBride  07:38

Yes! Right, which is a really good insight into where you're right. Of course, you know, this your where your passions are, where your skill is, right? Where you have a refined sense of yeah, how things could be made better. And interestingly, I would argue that that is connected to some sort of bodily knowing, like maybe one way to embody that question, or make that body that make that question a bodily, what is to say, and what is it inside that lets you know that you can't handle it? What, what's the feeling like? What, what are the parameters on that sensation that tell you this is not okay, I want more than this. Okay, so I'll come back to your question, because I've taken a taking a little detour there. My body has been a complicated place to be, for, I would say probably the last 20 years for different reasons. Early in my adolescence, I developed an eating disorder, which seems at first blush to be about the body but is actually more about leaving the body or controlling the body or in a way trying to subdue the body which reminds us of our humaneness, reminds us of our connection to everything and allows us to feel pain in a world that sometimes doesn't know how to skillfully support us to feel pain. So we can be overwhelmed by it. And in recovery from eating disorder from the eating disorder encountered a therapist—after many therapists, who had not done this, and I felt the head actually encouraged me to further disconnect from my body by employing mostly cognitive based interventions for the for treatment—I found a therapist who invited me to experience my body as a place that was good. And encounter my body as a source of wisdom, you know, my body being a kind of truth teller, and my desire to subdue or shut down my body was not because my body was telling me lies or was too much but was actually telling the truth in a world that didn't know how to handle or didn't know how to support us through what those truths were. Truths about trauma, truths about emotion, true surround sensitivity to cultural and interpersonal dynamics, which have gone endorsed by hegemonic masculinity patriarchy, misogyny for too long. So I had this experience of encountering my body is good and having someone—and this is important—someone with power, someone in a medical system, someone who was trained hand the insight back to me. Hand permission to trust myself back to me. And then of course I did the thing that people who are disembodied do, I decided to research it, try to understand it intellectually, like what's happening with what just happened here my healing what's going on. And, and got really interested in the research around body image and eating disorder prevention. And lo and behold, it turns out that just having a better body image isn't enough to give us a good experience of being a body. That body image is a place where some of us encounter or struggle with our bodies. But when we think about what body image is, it is primarily an image orientation towards the body, which is not the totality of what it means to be a human. Right? We are not just images, we are not just appearances that we can evaluate positively or negatively. So of course, what that led me to was this piece of research around how being a body, how experiencing yourself as a body and having good experiences of yourself as a body: liberated, free. you know, of unhindered, connected, present attuned experiences of the body, could inoculate us against a world that has us thinking of ourselves as just an image. So as a result, I started looking more into embodiment and then wow, it really feels like everything kind of, was birthed out of that place of seeing that the being of a body is so central to being human. And yet, why is it something that I have to learn about in a book? Why is it something that I have to experience intellectually, to get first? And when when you unpack it from there, you can really see that not everybody has to learn it from a book, there's certain people in certain places and certain cultures with certain identities that don't have to learn it through a book because it was retained for them. But learning about it in a book tells me something about the context that I've grown up in and the way that I've learned to be good, which is: be up in your head, experience things intellectually first, and again as an academic, and having a PhD, this is like been a way that I've both accrued social value and protected myself when my body has been, you know, felt unsafe, but go into the mind, become a master of the mind. Right, and then no matter what happens in your human experience, you can eject out, you can think about it, and you can survive. So, in deconstructing the ways that I have been disembodied, I saw how they were all around us and wanted to... I mean, thank you for describing it as a manual. That's that feels like, actually quite an endorsement. But it it reminded me or taught me all of the ways, to see all of the ways that we have learned to leave our bodies, but also how those specific places tell us something about culture and tell us something about how to come back to ourselves. The site of the injury is not necessarily proof that we as humans are broken in that way. But perhaps that they're, our bodies are responding to systems that don't work for us anymore. And that the place of injury tells us something about where the healing needs to be.

Jonathan Puddle  13:40

Wow, come on!

Hillary McBride  13:42

MhhmM!

Jonathan Puddle  13:42

Yes.

Hillary McBride  13:43

Yeah.

Jonathan Puddle  13:44

Okay, that's so good. Again, again, my brain is like firing all these different directions. My father was a dancer, is a dancer, and

Hillary McBride  13:54

OK.

Jonathan Puddle  13:54

a playwright and theatre director and actor, and travel agent, because

Hillary McBride  14:00

OK, all the things!

Jonathan Puddle  14:01

you have to pay the bills. I just bumped into him kind of randomly last, literally last week in London, England. It was a whole lot situation and I forgot he was there.

Hillary McBride  14:10

You bumped into your dad?

Jonathan Puddle  14:13

I screwed up my flight. I didn't. I got denied boarding my return ticket to Canada and he bought me a new... it was a whole thing.

Hillary McBride  14:20

Oh, Dad came through.

Jonathan Puddle  14:22

He did, he totally did.

Hillary McBride  14:24

Okay.

Jonathan Puddle  14:24

So my dad, was this expressive? Is this expressive, embodied guy.

Hillary McBride  14:27

Yeah.

Jonathan Puddle  14:29

And my mother was a was also in the performing arts. And we grew up missionary YWAM kids, traveling the world doing evangelistic work in this really embodied way. And then I joined the Charismatic church and was full of expression and dance and you know, people waving flags. I mean, I was in the crazy church where people would be turning up in bridal gowns, because we're really excited about being the Bride of Christ. So like, you want weird, expressive church. That's where I grew up. But also, watch out for the flesh, because the flesh is this problem. And it never occurred to us, I guess, that the flesh was not... Paul is not talking about the atoms that make up our body.

Hillary McBride  15:22

Right.

Jonathan Puddle  15:23

What you just said at the end of that section about these systems that oppress us. I'm, I'm like, oh, oh, that is that what Paul was talking about all along? Systems within that are problematic and egotistical framework of self. That does bear bad fruit, that maybe it was never our bodies.

Hillary McBride  15:50

Right.

Jonathan Puddle  15:52

And I know you understand this, but I honestly I, I read your words. And I love it. And I'm like, yes, yes. And there's parts of my body that know it to be true. And there are parts that don't. When when you said, like, "You are your body."

Hillary McBride  16:08

Yes.

Jonathan Puddle  16:09

Chapter One.

Hillary McBride  16:11

Right, right from the get go.

Jonathan Puddle  16:12

And I'm like, yep. And nope.

Hillary McBride  16:15

Yeah.

Jonathan Puddle  16:16

I could feel parts of my body relax with permission. And I could feel parts of my body go, that's an awfully reductionistic kind of statement. Surely, there's more to be said than that. And this tension.

Hillary McBride  16:32

Mm hmm, that's right.

Jonathan Puddle  16:32

Build up inside me. And and so I'm, again, I'm thinking about it. I'm like making my little notes that I'm going to talk to Hillary about. And, and I'm like, surely I'm not only my body, surely, my thoughts are an importent part of who I am. I, I don't feel like my body reflects the fullness of who I know myself to be. And all of a sudden, I'm like, Oh, maybe I am back in the realm of shame. As soon as I vocalize that thought.

Hillary McBride  17:07

Yeah, that's what's connected. Like, shame is a part of that.

Jonathan Puddle  17:11

I remember watching a guy who's like, 10 years older than me, sit on a couch, like cross legged as a 30 year old man, and thinking, "Holy crap, men are allowed to sit on couches like that?"

Hillary McBride  17:23

Oh yeah.

Jonathan Puddle  17:26

I was inspired as a 20 year old to be given that permission. And so I feel like, I'm just so drawn to this. There's so many layers of body related stuff and church and expression. And it's complex. It's like super complex.

Hillary McBride  17:45

It is! Oh my gosh it is complicated.

Jonathan Puddle  17:47

And I know I haven't vocalized a question in there.

Hillary McBride  17:49

No, but can I just respond?

Jonathan Puddle  17:51

Please!

Hillary McBride  17:52

I'm hearing a number of things in what you're saying that feel so important to be really explicit about. Like one, although people who are male identified and very masculine presenting in Western contexts are often attributed with more or given more social power, there is a very oppressive narrative around how masculinity needs to show up, which, which is oppressive to the souls of men, too. Right? And there's something about the way that the body, the gender body, stories that go along with masculinity have been, have flown under the radar for so long. It seems that that will be a really important final frontier of doing justice work, if when we can allow men and white men to encounter the ways that they have also lost something, because of the way power has been distributed. And I don't mean this to diminish any other kind of marginalization in any stretch of the imagination. I think that all of that, like, I think that it's really important to acknowledge that power in how it's distributed has created really harmful, horrific, in some cases, murderous experiences for some people. And until we see that one of the things that's holding it all together, is the rigid narratives of masculinity that prevent people at the very top of the power chain from examining themselves and prevent them from connecting to the places inside of them that do empathy, which have been eschewed away as these traditional kind of feminine characteristics or like soft skills. Until we're able to do that I don't think we're gonna have huge cultural change towards, you know, actual justice and equanimity.

Jonathan Puddle  19:56

Yeah.

Hillary McBride  19:56

Not equanimity, equality. Of experiences of, of shared human connection.

Jonathan Puddle  20:04

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Hillary McBride  20:07

That comes to mind. Another thing that comes to mind is the way that we live in these paradoxes of how there are experiences that we know of being in our bodies that are good? Like, for some people, it's sex, or for some people, it's dance, or for some people, it was movement in church, that are also married with these places of disembodiment. Right. So performing sex in a way that feels robotic, where the sexual script is something that we've seen on TV or in some form of media, or we've been told is a way to perform desirable sexual activity. And it feels good, but we're also not really in it. Or in church, right? Like the be in movement, this is a superior way to demonstrate worship, this is a way to show you are fully abandoned in the Spirit, in the presence of God, but also your body's bad, right? Like, these paradoxes exist in our cultures. And it's so important to acknowledge that that is, that's complicated. And it makes it tricky. And sometimes, like, we don't really know what to do with that. But we do get tastes of our body being permitted to exist, to be experienced. And, and sometimes those are not powerful enough to make up for the fact that we have these other narratives that are going around that say, but don't be in your body, don't be connected to yourself. But those exists at the same time, and it's, it's hard to know what to do with all of those sometimes.

Jonathan Puddle  21:43

Tastes... you just said something about tastes of allowing, like our body or parts of our body to exist. And that is like... I have this visceral picture. It's rather sexually explicit. But it's like I was thinking about when my wife and I got married. We were both virgins, Christian, good, Christian people. And so we read the books, right? That's what we're supposed to do. I remember talking to my buddy from high school, and he's like, What is wrong with you? You're reading a book about sex. Like, this is like, this is not a brain thing, bro. This is like a body thing. And I remember being like, well this is next best thing, because it's what us Christians do. We divorce ourselves from our bodies, but even in the pages of this book there like, so your clitoris is allowed to exist under these circumstances.

Hillary McBride  22:30

Oh, wow.

Jonathan Puddle  22:31

And your penis is allowed... this part of your penis is allowed to exist with the following guidelines and rules in place. And it's sort of like cherry picking—no pun intended—these parts of the body that are permitted to exist under the right criteria for the right reasons in the right frame. But we're again, we're only allowed to really give mental assent to that, we can't live there in our body. Even though I find myself teaching people all the time, you know, "Jesus had a body." Jesus had a body, that's really good. And then and then you're provoking me with your language saying, "Do we talk about our bodies, like something that we possess? Like you *have* a body." And I'm like, Oh, bloody Hillary.

Hillary McBride  23:21

Hahaha, right, right. But this is like, this is a really important piece of introduction to re experiencing ourselves as a body to go, oh, oh, the body exists, it is it is mine, it belongs to me, I am going to possess it as an object. And somehow that is still even better than forgetting it exists altogether. Because when we have an object, then we can borrow language like care, we can care for things. We can we can care for, for objects that are in our domain, that we are responsible for. We can direct our attention towards a something because a something exists. And still... that neglects the subjectivity of our body. But like I really I want to acknowledge that for many people who are wildly disembodied, who have forgotten that their body exists, who experience them themselves primarily as a floating head that walks around the world. Simply having an, having a thing that carries that floating head around, is a really good reenter, reintroduction to being a self. So if that's where you were at, what a great place to be, if that is something that you are new to. And how does it impact us to encounter ourselves as a body? To experience the world from the place of the subjectivity of the body where our mind is not this thing that exists in some sort of like astral projection elsewhere, but but our mind is embodied, our cognition is embodied, our... the seat of the self moves into all of the territory from head to toe. What would that offer us?

Jonathan Puddle  25:11

Hmmm, yes.

Hillary McBride  25:13

Let's, I just pose it like that as a question because perhaps it's a little less inflammatory that way.

Jonathan Puddle  25:22

Hahaha. We touched on this in the beginning, there's so many parts of our kind of normative Western life that are opposed to embodiment, right? I mean, we sit in these office chairs, we sit in you talked about sitting in long meetings, you know, like the, the normal work office life. I quit my normal work office life job two years ago, partly because I could feel my... it was, what I was having to do, to do my 9 to 5 was becoming increasingly incongruent with the rest of my journey as a, as a soul...  As a body. My body was sort of like this last piece of the puzzle being like, Yeah, but you're, you're still contorting me. I had the privilege and freedom to quit my job and find a new way of being. That's, that's a freedom that obviously most people are not going to have. So if someone's listening to this, and like, Okay, super practically, how do I stop hating my body, but I also work three jobs to care for my kids or my aging parents. Can you give us a just kind of a mile high and even a practical, a few ways to just Okay, let's start caring for this thing, that is us. While also still having to still live a hard life?

Hillary McBride  25:55

Right! Oof. Yes, exactly. Well, maybe I'll ask the question like, "What is it that is allowing us to work the 3 jobs and care for the aging parents?" Like Is that some sort of like, meaning system, maybe? But when the meaning system fails, what is actually getting us up to those jobs, every single day caring for those people, it's the body. So we don't necessarily have to be completely I would say, you know, air quotes here, liberated in our embodiment where we are unencumbered and there is no social structure that we you know, have to find ourselves within because we have the finances and the intellectual freedom and the ability physically to do whatever you want with our bodies like that. That's not necessarily the end goal here. Maybe attunement is and maybe gratitude is so saying, "Wow, no wonder I'm tired all the time. Look at all of the things that I'm doing. No wonder." So wow, I need to, I am really seeing up front the way that our systems don't support moms, or I'm seeing the way that people in this kind of sandwich generation, who are working and taking care of parents and kids are experiencing this. Wow, I get a new slice of understanding of what it means to be human because I'm here and I'm so tired, and how will that allow me to connect with other people, to empathize better? Or is it possible for me as I'm driving between those 3 jobs, to experience a kind of deep exhale, as I'm in my car, that allows me to feel for just a moment what it's like to tune in to space and quiet and silence, even as I'm on my commute? Like, I don't think, I don't think that until our social structures change enough for all of us to live in sustainable ways that... maybe I'll say that differently. There is a problem with our social structures, not our bodies. And when our bodies are moving between all of these demands, and are nourishing so many people and sustaining us, maybe the very best that we can do in this moment is to tune in and be grateful. And pay attention. And notice, not just the things that feel difficult or hard or draining, but also the things that feel pleasurable, that allow us to feel sustained. So maybe we are more mindful of what our food tastes like, because it feels really good to nourish ourselves in the midst of all of those stretching experiences and demanding requirements of our existence. Or maybe, you know, as we're making dinner for our family, we put music on where we're dancing because it creates just a little bit more joy and we feel that joy in a bodily way.

Jonathan Puddle  29:39

We'll take a quick pause so I can tell you two important announcements: 1) Big love and thanks to all of my Patreon supporters, you are all seriously the best. I love being able to dialogue and go deeper on all of these wonderful topics that we have on the show. Thank you for your support. I hope you're enjoying the B-Sides, and drop me a line. Also 2nd announcement, as a way of saying thank you, Merry Christmas, I've dropped the price of my devotional, You Are Enough: Learning to Love Yourself the Way God Loves You to 99 cents on Kindle. So go and grab it right now. It'll be 99 cents just for about two weeks, because I'm going to take a Christmas break on the podcast and it will be back to normal price by the time I take that break. So head to jonathanpuddle.com as soon as you're finished listening to Hillary, and go grab a copy of her book, and then go grab a copy of my book on Kindle for 99 cents, You Are Enough: Learning to Love Yourself the Way God Loves You. Back to the wonderful Hillary McBride.

Hillary McBride  30:40

Like I had someone ask me this recently, like what do I do in social systems or in relational contexts, which, in which my being embodied is something I am punished or excluded for. And that makes it really tricky for us. Because as people and I write about this in the book, we are wired for connection, our bodies are wired to be in relationship in a way that actually fosters our development. So sometimes that puts us in a squeeze where we have to choose between autonomy and agency and relational connectedness. And that's an awful feeling. But what we don't have to give up is attunement to ourselves. So even if it were in a relational setting, a work setting, a systemic setting, where we cannot have full bodily agency like we want to, we don't have to shut off connection to ourselves. And maybe what that means is we say to our bodily selves, I know this is really hard. I know. But I'm listening. And I can feel all of the information that you're sending about how hard this is, and I am not ignoring it. I'm not ignoring it. So even though we can't do something different right now, I am listening. For anybody who is a parent, you know what that language sounds like. I say this to my daughter all the time, and I've been like, really thinking about how attachment and understanding attachment relationships gives us skills around embodiment. So there's probably going to be some work that I come out with in the near future about that, but I say to my daughter, when she's in the car seat, and she hates it, and she's crying, and we're in the middle of traffic or we're on the highway and I can't, you know, can't get out of the car seat, "I am so glad you're telling me. You can always tell me what doesn't work for you. And I'm absolutely going to do my very best to support you in these experiences. You don't have to stop giving me information about what you don't like, just because I can't change it."

Jonathan Puddle  30:51

Mhmm. Wow!

Hillary McBride  31:31

And that is how I want us to be able to talk to our bodies like, okay, here we are, there's all this sensation that saying that this doesn't feel good. But instead of cutting myself off from myself, I'm going to be with that information and I'm going to grieve the things that need to be grieved until the systems change, until I can get a break, until there's somebody else who can grieve for me and whatever the "until" is, but what we don't have to do is disconnect from ourselves.

Jonathan Puddle  33:14

Yes, ah I can feel that, here in my chest.

Hillary McBride  33:20

Mmm. Mhmm.

Jonathan Puddle  33:22

My theory, my theory is that Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane does the most present embodied thing a human has ever done and that's that's the birth of a new humanity for all of us that's that I will be online through the most horrific painful rejection trauma and I will be in my body and I will be feeling it and I will not disassociate. And in doing so I will alchemize all of this pain and evil and suffering into some new.

Hillary McBride  33:56

Wow. Wow.

Jonathan Puddle  33:58

And invite you all to this kind of life.

Hillary McBride  34:03

That's... I'm so glad that you gave me that that image because I when I think about Jesus and his humanity and the his being embodied I think about his dying as one of the greatest, right greatest gifts to us.

Jonathan Puddle  34:18

Right.

Hillary McBride  34:19

Right. The the somehow the narrative like it's okay. It's okay to die. It's okay for things to end. The suffering doesn't have to continue forever that and not I'm not talking about the resurrection. I'm actually talking about his his human body dying. But you just gave me yeah, that is such an important piece of insight there. It's about everything that happened up to that and staying present to it. That that fits in line, I would say more with my work like being attuned, being present feeling... the aches, the loss, the suffering, that reminds us that we can to. That no matter... no matter what place of pain we experience in our life we get to say, we don't have to be alone in it. It has been felt before. Thank you for that.

Jonathan Puddle  35:09

Some of that comes from Aundi Kolber. We talked about this on the show and she said, you know, he probably had access to resources, attachment resources that we don't always have access to. We could theorize...

Hillary McBride  35:21

So good. Right. Yeah.

Jonathan Puddle  35:24

But it's not even like we that we don't categorically have access to those resources.  I think that's obviously the reality of life is that we're not always connected to the, to the resources that are actually there. Okay, hard left, turn.

Hillary McBride  35:29

Yeah.  Okay.

Jonathan Puddle  35:42

Church on Sunday. I don't know I'm a leader at church. And I, I can't remember. And my hugging people, am I not? Am I pretending that I'm not hugging people, because I'm meant to, to enforce some idea of social distancing.

Hillary McBride  35:57

Oh right!

Jonathan Puddle  35:58

And but the person standing front of me is my best friend. And I've just come back from a trip and haven't seen her and I don't remember what I'm supposed to do. And so I'm going to do nothing. And then I get in the car and I feel stupid, all over my body, like whatever I just did was not the right thing. And I walk down the sidewalk, and I see another human being and my body's now trained reaction is to give them sidewalk space. And to be like, am I gonna move out of the way first? Are they going to be moving out of the way?

Hillary McBride  36:23

Yes.

Jonathan Puddle  36:24

And I feel like COVID has done this crazy, double edged sword, where on the one hand, it's given us all this awareness and language that like, hard things affect us, and we are not okay. And we need room for that. Like, I feel like that, hopefully is the great gift of COVID; that it's shifted our awareness and our understanding of what we can tolerate. However, I feel like it's messed with our our certainly our communal embodiment, massively. I mean, and I have family and wife and kids, so it's messed with it for me less than for countless others who are physically isolated and lockdowns and all of that. Do you have some some thoughts on how we sort of, I guess, reintegrate... those of us who live in spaces where that's even happening in a COVID context?

Hillary McBride  37:20

Oh, my gosh, yes. So okay, what for those of you who are listening, it can't see I'm putting my hands on my body. Right now. I'm touching myself as a way to offer some self support. And what's so important about this is that touch really matters for regulating our nervous system, which is part of why it has been so hard in COVID for especially for people who are living in isolation, because we're not getting that touch. But the research shows us that when we touch our own body, we also get an oxytocin release, similar to when someone else touches us. So touch and touching ourselves, actually can be one of the ways that we soothe ourselves. Now applying that in action, to answer your question might look like, as we're navigating these new kind of re integrations into what life looks like and experiencing proximity, I actually mean physical proximity to people in a way that we haven't. It would be normal for us to have a an activation response in our body, because our body's saying, "You've learned that that is dangerous." So you're meant to have alarm bells that come up in a physiological way to signal you're about to do something that's really dangerous. Are you sure you want to do that? But it is our job, and this is when we when we experience ourselves as bodies and we know what's going on, and we also have our attention circuitry online and we have skills like this, what we can say to ourselves in response to that, by putting our hands on our body, and regulating ourselves that way is: "Of course this feels scary and uncertain. It's new!" Even though it's not new in the whole history of your life. It's new in the recent past. And wow, we are so good at adapting that we have learned that something that used to feel okay, it's not okay anymore. So wow, okay. I am feeling nervous. And I know because of the context I'm in, this person is safe, and I'm going to be okay. And it's okay that I feel all weird inside about it. So when we're using our insight about how the body works, when we're using touch to regulate ourselves, when we're using our mindful awareness to understand like, what choice is the right choice to make, all of those things together allow us to move forward in a way that readjusts to what this kind of new normal looks like. It allows us to adapt again, right? We adapted to this reality and we can adapt to another reality. But we often have to do that consciously when we are coming out of a fear response state, because our body is much better at adapting and learning quickly about things that are dangerous than our bodies are about learning what is now safe, it takes longer to learn that something that was previously dangerous is now safe than it does to learn that something that was safe is now dangerous. So doing things that we only do when we are at rest and safe and cared for, like touch, and kind dialogue and reassurance, and mindful awareness, and putting together the pieces and being thoughtful about the way that we move forward. Those things help our body readapt. But we have to be, like gracious to ourselves and gentle and patient because it will take a long time. And that doesn't mean that we're doing something wrong, or that we did something bad before. It's just how our bodies are wired to keep us safe.

Jonathan Puddle  40:55

Yes, yes. So good. So good. Thank you for that.

Hillary McBride  40:59

Oh, you're welcome.

Jonathan Puddle  41:01

I'm going to have to talk to the publicist, because I would love to do a part two, because I have so many more things I'd love to talk to you about.

Hillary McBride  41:06

Yes.

Jonathan Puddle  41:06

But we're pressed for time. Any other thoughts that you'd leave with us? And seriously, I want everybody to go and read this book, which is already a best seller status on at least like two lists in Canada alone.

Hillary McBride  41:21

Yeah.

Jonathan Puddle  41:21

And America in time, if not already.

Hillary McBride  41:23

Thank you.

Jonathan Puddle  41:25

Seriously. The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness and Connection Through Embodied Living. Any thoughts you'd leave with us? And would you pray for us?

Hillary McBride  41:35

Oh, yes to both. I used to think that salvation or being saved was a way that we've left our present reality and guaranteed something later.  But, but I've been learning like, this is so interesting to think about how words and understanding the words of the actual biblical texts can help us reorient ourselves away from a problematic cultural understanding of something to what was actually intended. So learning through study of the word salvation, that this is not so much about ejection from present, but about wholeness here. And I don't know if there's a way to experience wholeness without being in our bodies.

Jonathan Puddle  41:49

Gahh.... Come on!

Hillary McBride  42:23

Right? I don't know if there's a way to experience wholeness without also being here and learning here, with all of it, the suffering, the pain, the illness, that that is part of it. That's part of being here. Not something that needs to be fixed or solved, but is actually part of God expressing God's self in all of these different iterations of what it means to be human, so that wholeness looks more complete than just one narrow definition of a body or one narrow definition of a story. So I want to leave us with that thought, that that salvation doesn't have to be about leaving your body, but could actually be something that we experience more fully through our bodies or because of our bodies.

Jonathan Puddle  43:11

Yes.

Hillary McBride  43:13

And I will pray. And the way that I want to pray is I want to invite us to breathe together. And so as we breathe, I invite you to imagine and experience the breath of God filling your lungs. And as you exhale, your body's natural way of releasing what doesn't work for you anymore, what doesn't serve you, what becomes toxic, toxic, if you hold on to it too long. I invite you to exhale, and as the breath of God moves out of you, taking with it things that don't work for you anymore, kind of releasing. So we'll just do a few more rounds of breath. Experiencing ourselves filled. And consenting to a letting go and releasing as we exhale. And then when you're ready, we'll come back to our shared space. Amen.

Jonathan Puddle  44:35

Amen. Ooh, so rich. I can't wait to have Hillary back on the show. She's a busy person so it might be a while, but I think that's gonna happen for sure. So make sure you go and grab a copy of her book, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness and Connection Through Embodied Living. And I am serious, it's like an instruction manual, a user's manual for your body and your self. And it is really quite remarkable. I anticipate it will rapidly become a go-to book for anybody wanting to live this kind of whole life. It's going to be right up there in my top recommendations. So go grab that. Go listen, go read the transcript if you prefer text or if you have a friend who does, let them know that this is available in text. Friends, thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Much love and grace. Have a wonderful day.