Letter Writing Instructions

Excerpted from Andrew’s book

The Direct Path

A Native American healer I met a few months later helped me enormously by suggesting to me that I
write down for myself the “history” of my relationship with my body. She said with a sad smile, “You will
discover a lot of grief, humiliation, and abuse. We all do.” And she was right. As I meditated on how I
had lived for forty years with. My body, I uncovered three different levels of physical self-contempt. The
exercise the Native American healer had suggested was a very humbling one, especially for someone
who considered he had already had a mystical “awakening” and thought he understood a great deal
about the holiness of the creation and of the body. But to visualize your own body blazing in dividing
light is, I’m afraid, only the beginning of the recovery of its sacredness; you also have to ​unleash, ​and
unlearn as thoroughly and completely as you can, all the inherited ways and assumed patterns of bodily
self-hatred you have been adhering to, often without knowing it.

The first level of physical self-hatred I uncovered in myself was cultural. I am English, after all, brought
up in the Spartan and semi-sadistic atmosphere of English private education. The message about the
body I received as a child was, your body is a machine to be treated harshly, with furious discipline. To
be sick was to be weak; to listen to the suffering of the body was to be a “sissy” or “patsy” or “spastic”;
to be demonstrative of any “physical” feelings at all, in fact, was to be vulnerable to mockery. I was not
an athletic child either, but studious, slightly effeminate, round-shouldered, and plump; from early on in
my life I considered myself unattractive. In my “history” I found myself writing, “The pain in your back is
all that pain about your body that you repressed and deliberately didn’t listen to for so many years
coming up now to be attended to, heard, and healed.”

I discussed this “cultural” level of self-hatred with my friends in American and Europe. Even those who
had been athletes and beautiful from an early age agreed with me that they had been taught to treat
their bodies as machines and had been forced to grow “deaf” to their own physical selves. Several of my
American male friends said in real rage, “How can I begin to deal with my body and its needs? I have to
work seventy hours a week just to stay afloat. If I started to care about my health and stopped endlessly
whipping myself and beating myself up, I’d fall behind.” I was shocked to find myself identifying
intimately with what they said; as a writing, teacher, traveler, spiritual seeker, and nomad, I had been
“whipping and beating” by body for years in a desperate attempt to “make my way” and “keep up,” and
as a result of an unconscious addiction to transcendence. I had even learned- as they had – to take a
certain stoic pride in how much I could “forget” my body; to remember it would be to slow down and so
to fail in a world that valued only continual achievement and success.

The second kind of physical self-oppression I discovered in myself was sexual. Nearly all of us grew up
with the message that sex is in some sense dirty and sinful and that our physical appetites are shameful.
Uncovering the different depths of harm that suck taboos have done you is one of the most grueling
tasks an adult can undertake, but it is vital if you are ever going to have the chance to live a consecrated
and sacred physical life. What I discovered as I investigated my past was that I had been driven to
despise my body as the source of difficult sexual hungers very early on, and that painful emotional
experiences in my twenties had only confirmed this self-contempt. Not only did I “despise” my body
because it was sexual (and so the source of grief and loneliness), I also projected back onto my body all
the sorrow and confusion my heart and mind had felt as an adult as I tried – mostly unsuccessfully – to
negotiate the shoals of “sophisticated” sexual life. I had my body the source of sexual pain and the
scapegoat for sexual and emotional failure and so unconsciously could not help wanting to “drop” or
punish it.

The obsessive sexualization of almost every aspect of our culture has made us all, I believe, profoundly
insecure. As a famous young actress once said to me with a desperation so extreme it was almost comic,
“Who can ever be this or sexy or alluring enough for long enough? Who can always stay twenty-four?
Who can keep up with all the different styles or ‘beauty’ changed twice a year?” It isn’t only actresses
who live haunted by the fear of growing old and unattractive; the natural fear all human beings have of
being discarded as they are is infinitely expanded by our contemporary obsession with your and physical
beauty. How can we not fear and despise the body that is the source of so much anxiety and distress?

The third level of physical self-hatred I uncovered in myself was religious. Until I methodically and as
fearlessly as possible started to analyze the different “religious” messages that I had been given about
my body, I had never even begun to understand just how oppressive they were. I came to see how it
wasn’t simply. My Judeo-Christian heritage of original sin that had given me the unconscious notion that
my body was something ugly, sad, and disposable but also everything I had ever read in the great Sufi,
Buddhist, and Hindu mystical texts that described the body as an irredeemable source of fantasy and
illusion. I came to see just how damaging the cult of transcendence in ​all​ the patriarchal religions has
been to any healthy awareness of the physical; in their rage to abandon ​this​ world and its messy,
awkward reality, the patriarchal traditions have devalued the sacredness of creation and cut off our
inner access to it.

For years I had been studying and trying to uncover and love the sacred feminine aspect of God; I now
understood the necessity of the recovery of the feminine as sacred with a passion and hunger I had
never experienced before. Unless I saw and knew my body as sacred in itself, how could I gain any
balanced understanding of its role in my life? If I didn’t love and honor and revere my own body, how
could I really love honor and revere the bodies of others and so be a guardian and steward of the
creation?