IIC 12: Bodyset: Accepting our Bodies – with Dr. Andrew Sodergren

Our guest psychologist Andrew Sodergren guides our Catholic audience through the four major psychological obstacles that keep us from accepting our bodies as gifts from God. We discuss the importance of getting to the stories that underlie our negative attitudes or feelings toward our bodies.  Dr. Andrew leads a guided reflection on the body and accepting the body.

[00:00:10] Dr. Peter: Welcome to our podcast, Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. We are seizing the day. This twice-weekly podcast helps us rise up. It helps us embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this pandemic. And our podcast does this by being thoroughly grounded in a Catholic worldview. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski. I’m the host with Souls and Hearts here at soulsandhearts.com. It is great to be together with you. Thank you for tuning in. This is episode 12 and it is released on April 27th. I am super excited today because I have a guest, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, a Catholic psychologist. He’s the clinical director at Ruah Woods. That is a theology of the body Ministry in Cincinnati, Ohio. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC. It is a blessing and an honor to have Dr. Andrew with us. Thank you for being here, Dr. Andrew.

[00:01:13] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: It is my great pleasure to be with you, my esteemed colleague and friend, Dr. Malinoski.

[00:01:18] Dr. Peter: We have known each other for many years, Andrew. Many years. It’s been like 12 years that we’ve known each other. So, as we were going through this stuff on bodyset, and I mentioned this in a previous episode, I was like, I would so like Dr. Andrew to be with me on this because there’s just so many things that he has to offer. And we were able to work it out. I have a lot of gratitude for you being able to work me into a busy week. Thank you for that. And on behalf of all of our listeners, it’s a blessing to be here. So we are going to talk about the body. We’re talking about bodyset, and we are focusing initially on what does it mean to accept our bodies? What does it mean to just, let’s just start there, with acceptance.

[00:02:05] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah, it’s a great place to start. I’ve really enjoyed your previous two episodes on bodyset, and the question of what does it mean to love your body? These are just such, you know, provocative topics and questions. And I thought the next logical place to go with exploring what does it mean to love our bodies, especially in an authentically Catholic way, is to look at this issue of acceptance. What does it mean to accept our bodies? Acceptance can mean a lot of different things. In English, we use that word for a lot of different things. And I think from a Catholic perspective, when I reflect on the word acceptance, it always brings me back to the idea of receiving. Receiving from another. It reminds me of the Mass, for instance, when the priest says, you know, “Take this, all of you, and eat from it.” Right? The Latin word there is very similar to our English “accept.” Right. And it’s a similar kind of word is used in the wedding vows in a Catholic wedding liturgy. So this idea of acceptance means, on the one hand, to receive something from another, to receive from another. And so when we talk about accepting our bodies, we have to first recognize that our bodies are a gift.

[00:03:39] Dr. Peter: Our bodies are a gift.

[00:03:41] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: A gift, a gift. Yes, they’re a gift. And they may not always feel like that. I know, especially as I get older, there are many days in which I don’t always experience my body as a gift. I’m more and more aware of my body’s limitations. I’m sure, I know you probably can’t relate. 

[00:04:01] Dr. Peter: Come on. Yeah, yeah. No, I totally get it. But go on, go on. Body is a gift. We accept the body as a gift.

[00:04:12] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: A gift, yes, right. It is a gift, right? Because, you know, as Scripture says, every good and perfect gift comes from our Father in heaven. In reality, everything in our lives is a gift. Our very lives themselves are gifts. You could say from a certain perspective that that’s what we are, we are gift. And that’s just what it means to be a creature, right? To be a creature means that I depend on God just to exist. And I think every Catholic, every Christian, understands that, you know, that God created us. But we, I don’t think we really reflect enough on the fact that that wasn’t a one-moment-in-time sort of act of creation. It’s that God wills us to exist at every moment. It’s like he’s always creating us, always willing us to exist. And so the life that is in us, the life that is in our bodies, is always a gift that we’re receiving moment by moment. And we rarely pause to actually become cognizant of that, become aware of that, right? We sort of take our bodily existence for granted most of the time. And that makes sense too, right? I mean, I can’t be contemplating. I mean, there’s things to do, right? There’s things to do, bills to pay and children and, you know, professional things and so forth. Right. But at the same time, we do want to cultivate that kind of like at least background awareness and certainly some deliberate times where we slow down and become aware that this moment, the life that is in me, I am receiving as a gift from God, who’s willing me to exist right now, willing me to be alive in this body at this time. So for me to accept the body first and foremost means to receive it as a gift. But as we’ve already started to touch on, naturally, there are obstacles that come up to receiving the body as a gift.

[00:06:30] Dr. Peter: Yeah.

[00:06:31] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Right. There’s a lot of times in which, you know, the body, even if we do see it as a gift, it can be a kind of an unwelcome gift. You know, sort of the white elephant gift. Right. Can I exchange it for another, please? Can I steal somebody else’s?

[00:06:50] Dr. Peter: Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:53] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Right. So I thought it might be helpful for the listeners and for you and me to just to reflect on what are some things that come up for us that become like blocks or obstacles to receiving the body as a gift?

[00:07:11] Dr. Peter: Yeah. So the psychological barriers or the things that just get in the way of us embracing our bodies as a gift, right? You know, why is that difficult for so many of us? Yeah, because you even see this in the secular world, right? Body image issues, like there’s a huge field of psychology just devoted to body image issues, right? So this isn’t just, you know, this isn’t just recognized by Catholic psychologists. This is out there in the secular press, all over the place.

[00:07:40] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: So yeah, absolutely. Well, and understandably so because we’re with our bodies all the time. So it’s natural to become very aware of their flaws and limitations. And that’s the first blockage to acceptance that I wanted to talk about, is the fact that our bodies are imperfect and we are often very aware of things that we don’t like about our bodies. Things in our bodies that fall short of some ideal that we have. And so we can become sort of hyper-fixated on those imperfections, of various sorts. I mean, they could be, you know, surface level imperfections. I don’t like the way this looks or that looks, you know? Right. But they could be bigger flaws, bigger problems, you know, medical problems, you know, disabilities even, major problems with the body that indicate my body is not ideal. It’s not perfect. It’s not what I wish it would be. And that can make it very difficult to receive the body as a gift, to accept it as it is, when we naturally wish that I didn’t have this problem.

[00:09:01] Dr. Peter: Because if we take that a little deeper, what the psychological thing is that we’re ashamed of the body. We’re fearful of the body. Like, what would you say are like the top sort of psychological reasons why that acceptance of the body and its flaws is difficult?

[00:09:19] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. Well, I think you touched on a couple of good ones there. I mean, shame is huge. You know, shame has to do with that self-perception of my defectiveness, that there’s something bad or defective about me. And oftentimes it’s very much tied to the body. Yeah. You know, I’m too fat, I’m too skinny. I’m, you know, too this, too that. I’m not enough here or whatever, whatever. Right. I have these problems. And so shame is a big deal. But also, I think in a way we can look at the body sometimes as sort of an obstacle to my self-perfection. Like I want to be a certain type of person. I want to perfect myself in a certain way. And my body creates barriers and limitations to that. There’s only so much I can do with it.

[00:10:09] Dr. Peter: So a guy is like, the guy that’s short, right, has trouble, like because he’s five foot four, right? And he thinks if I were five foot ten or if I were six foot three, I’d be in a better position.

[00:10:21] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Right? For sure. For sure. Yeah. And so the body, you know, puts limitations on us in terms of what we can do. You know, and I guess you take this to an extreme, really this is a whole another topic, that goes beyond our conversation today, but you take this to an extreme and you can get into the urge to want to recreate the body through medical intervention. Right, to make it the way I think it should be. Right. And of course, there can be a role for medical intervention to correct, you know, problems with the body that are correctable, right? But we don’t get a blank slate. We don’t get a blank slate with which we can design and create the body and the identity we wish we had. Our body and our identity come to us as gifts, and we are called to receive them or accept them as gifts and make the best of them.

[00:11:22] Dr. Peter: So you would say, we’re not the masters of our body? Or is that fraught?

[00:11:29] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s tricky because we are called to self-mastery, right? But not mastery in the sense of I have complete license to do whatever I want with it. Right. Because there’s already meaning and order and purpose inscribed in our bodies, right. That’s part of what it means to receive it as a gift, is that I’m not starting from scratch, right? It comes from somewhere and it has a meaning and a purpose already built into it. And so we discover those things rather than creating them ourselves.

[00:12:05] Dr. Peter: So just to kind of review, the first thing is it can be difficult to accept our bodies because of the flaws, the limitations, the fact that it might not be the way that we want it to be, and so that was where we were. I think we were sort of wrapping that up, or is there more on that?

[00:12:23] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: I just want to say one last thing on that theme. This ties in very well with the theme of this whole podcast series as well. Because there’s a lot of things that come to us in life that we’d rather not experience, various forms of suffering, right? But we have to also recognize that even these are, in a sense, a gift, if we have the eyes to see it. If we really believe in a providential God, he works through our suffering in ways that sometimes are mysterious to us, but are meaningful and efficacious for our good and the good of others. And so even our imperfect bodies, as flawed as they may be, as wounded as they may be, as sometimes sources of suffering that they are, they still are gifts to us from our heavenly Father. One of the other, I think blocks or obstacles to accepting our bodies, to receiving our bodies as gift, is that sometimes we associate the body with sin or sinfulness. And I know you touched on this in one of your previous episodes, I think the first one on bodyset. You talked about, you know, some of Saint Paul’s statements about the flesh, right? And how if we really understand that rightly, what he’s talking about is our fallen human nature and that we have desires that sometimes lead us astray. And so we, though, in our experience can come to blame the body for that and associate the body with sin and so hold the body in distrust, which is understandable. And there’s some prudence to that. We have to be discerning certainly about the urges and promptings that come up to us or that we become aware of. But the body itself is not sinful or bad. It is good. It is a good gift from God, even though we do have concupiscence within us. Another area of blockage that I think comes up is the fact that our bodies link us to other people. And there’s some profound realities here to ponder. But it can also be a source of psychological difficulty. My body reminds me of my past. It reminds me of the family I came from. I may see in my body resemblance to other family members. And for some, that can be a, you know, a source of consolation and connectedness. Yeah, exactly. Here comes the “but.” Right?

[00:15:26] Dr. Peter: Yep. Yeah.

[00:15:27] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: But for others, it can be a source of pain, to look in the mirror and to see, for instance, a face that reminds me of my abuser, or reminds me of the parent who was an alcoholic or who abandoned the family or whatever. 

[00:15:45] Dr. Peter: Or to have other people remind you, you’re the spitting image of Uncle Jake, you know, or whatever.

[00:15:52] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. It can be so hard to hear that sometimes, right. But this comes with being embodied, that our body comes from somewhere, and it connects us to this past and to these people. And sometimes we don’t want that. We don’t want to be reminded. We don’t want to be connected to a history and to all these relationships. We want to be able to break free and to have a completely clean break. But our bodies and our identities, again, are gifts that come from God, but they come from God mediated through specific human beings. And our bodies remind us that we are connected to them for good or for ill. And related to that, I think a fourth blockage to accepting our bodies, receiving our bodies as gift, it pertains to how other people have treated our bodies. How other people have treated our bodies, how other people have or maybe even continue to react to our bodies, right? And so we can become, sometimes we can come to despise our bodies, and because of what it tends to elicit from others, and what it has elicited from others in the past. Whether that’s rejection or unwanted attention, unwanted touch or ways in which our bodies let us down when we needed to defend ourselves, but couldn’t. We weren’t strong enough. We weren’t big enough. Right? All of this can get wrapped up in our attitude towards our body and can make it difficult, psychologically speaking, to receive our body, our embodied self, as a gift.

[00:17:48] Dr. Peter: Right. Because it’s so connected to something that seems so bad, and in fact could have been morally really bad. And when you’re little, you know, you don’t make these fine theological or philosophical distinctions. You know, there’s just an association that gets locked in, right, that can often be lifelong. You see that with folks that have experienced trauma of various kinds to the body in childhood, you know? So yeah, and that’s really common. It doesn’t have to be that capital T trauma either. It can be, you know, the bullying on the playground, the mocking, you know, because of somebody’s body, you know, how many people have had, you know, their physical appearances criticized, mocked, or been teased about them, on the playground when they were little? That’s one of the first things that, that’s one of the first ways that people experience you. And they make these judgments right off the bat, you know, based on how you look, which is all body stuff, right?

[00:18:44] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s absolutely true. Yeah. I mean, I can personally relate with that. I went through a phase in late grade school, middle school, where I was overweight and, you know, I got a lot of, you know, scorn and ridicule and teasing from peers and, you know, it was very, very painful. And it did affect how I felt about my body for a long time. And probably still does to a certain degree. Makes it hard for me, I guess, to completely let myself go because I don’t want to be, you know, I don’t want to be back in that situation again. Right. 

[00:19:22] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. And also, as I touched on, you know, times when I wasn’t strong enough. Right? I wasn’t strong enough. And for me personally, being the youngest in my family, I was always the smallest. Right. Because that comes with being the youngest, until you get to a certain age, then it all kind of levels out, right? But for most of those growing up years, right, I was smaller and I had older siblings. And I was young also relative to a lot of my peers just because of where my birthday fell, you know, in the year. And I was also just kind of, I was late to have a growth spurt. So even among my peer group, I tended to be one of the smaller, weaker ones. And so that also, you know, was a source of shame and frustration for me in regards to my own body. And I’m sure many of the listeners can probably relate or have similar stories in one way or another.

[00:20:23] Dr. Peter: I can relate too. I had some very serious surgeries when I was 11. That was hard for me. That was really hard for me. And so these, again, don’t have to be like the classic experiences of sexual abuse, physical abuse. You know, they happen in almost everybody’s life, I would argue, in everybody’s life in some way or other. So yeah.

[00:20:42] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah, even going back to, you know, basic things like potty training, one of our early experiences of really wrestling with the body and sometimes the body in that, you know, phase can be a source of shame. You know, I can’t control this, right? And my parents are getting frustrated or whatever. Right? I mean, that’s just a very natural human kind of struggle that we all have to pass through. Right? But these things accumulate over time and to our attitudes towards our body.

[00:21:15] Dr. Peter: So if somebody were to come to you, Dr. Andrew, and they were to like really struggle with the body. And maybe they intellectually understand that the body is good, right? They intellectually understand that, you know, they’ve read the Catechism, maybe they’ve read some theology of the body. They know in their head, right, that the body is good, but they just hate their body. You know, they don’t want to hate their body, but they do anyway, because let’s say that they have an eating issue, right? And they’re overweight. And it’s compromising their capacity to play with their kids. It’s probably shortening their lifespan, you know, and they’ve tried everything they know how to do, you know, and they’re like really struggling with it. And there’s just the sense that this is, it’s my body. They just have that sense.

[00:22:06] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Sure. Yeah. I think the first thing I would want to do with someone meeting someone like that would be to really help them to tell the story of how they came to hate their body so much and treat it the way that they do now. Because I’m sure that the story makes sense, right? There’s a certain inner coherence to why we do what we do, even if we’re not always aware of it. And as we begin to delve into that story and to try to understand how I came to hate my body, oftentimes there are opportunities along the way to revisit painful moments and to get in touch with, what did I really need that was missing? And to grieve for that. Sometimes to do some therapeutic work in which we might reenter those scenes and things of that nature, or bring some of those things to God in prayer. And as we begin to do that, the feeling of hate or disgust towards the body often tends to soften and begins to gradually unravel. And in the process too, I think the patient is also beginning to experience through me greater self acceptance of the body. The fact that I’m not running away in disgust or abusing them can create an opportunity for, you know, a different type of experience.

[00:23:50] Dr. Peter: So you’re getting at the story and the pain and the wound kind of behind the hatred, you know, you’re getting at the deeper essence of what that wound is. Because the hatred of the body is a representation of some kind, right? It’s symbolic. It points to something else.

[00:24:09] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s right. I would treat it like a symptom. Right? It’s an important symptom for us to understand. But behind that there’s a story that needs to be told. And there are needs that weren’t met and there were wounds that were incurred. And that’s what we really want to get to. And so the body and our attitude towards the body is often a gateway to some really important deeper work, which you’ve illustrated really beautifully in a couple of your recent episodes.

[00:24:42] Dr. Peter: Yeah, yeah. JR got in touch with some things behind his back pain in the last episode, you know?

[00:24:47] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah, absolutely. That was really, it was really beautiful. I was very impressed by the work that he was doing. And I also really appreciated the clinical examples you shared a couple episodes ago from earlier in your career. Those were really wonderful examples of starting with some kind of bodily issue, bodily symptom, and discovering something much deeper that’s going on for the person.

[00:25:15] Dr. Peter: So that’s part of the gift, right? Because if that bodily symptom wasn’t there, that deeper reality might not be able to be accessed, right?

[00:25:22] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yes. That’s right. That’s another way in which exactly the body is a gift. You know, going back to the example that you posed a few minutes ago about the patient who comes in hating their body, one of the things we have to recognize is that the body is not entirely separate from me. It’s part of me. So if I’m hating my body, I’m really hating myself.

[00:25:47] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[00:25:49] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. And so, that’s really important for us to recognize, even when we have maybe to a less extreme degree a dislike of this or that aspect of the body, you know, that’s some element of dislike or, you know, lack of acceptance toward myself. Which as you’ve illustrated on this show, becomes a barrier to loving myself the way that I’m called to. Right? It doesn’t mean I have to, I think, like or approve of everything, right? But I do need to receive it as a gift and to love it because God loves it. Right? God loves our bodies just as they are. Right, and that’s a paradoxical thing, too.

[00:26:37] Dr. Peter: Yeah, yeah. God loves our bodies as well. And there’s another paradoxical thing, is that even if we think or feel that our body is our enemy, we’re still supposed to love our enemies. You know, like there’s no way there’s no way around this, right? You know, that’s Catholic, right?  

[00:26:53] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s right. Yeah. No, that’s a great point. Even if our bodies are enemy, we’re still called to love our enemy, right?

[00:26:59] Dr. Peter: Which our bodies really aren’t, you know, which our bodies really aren’t. Even if they feel that way, right, that doesn’t get us off the hook, right?

[00:27:05] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: We can’t even if we experience it that way. Yeah. I think also, paradoxically, right, God loves our bodies as they are, and he calls us to a glorified body later on. This is the paradox of acceptance of change, right? It’s like, I love you as you are, and I have better things in store for you? Right. And so that’s, you know, our attitude towards our body should reflect that. But we often have some work to do to get there, don’t we?

[00:27:40] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Well, you have some, you were saying to me before, when we were kind of discussing things before the show, you’ve got this exercise that I’m just fascinated with. And I’m curious about that.

[00:27:54] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. It’s an exercise that I like to use. It’s something I’ve kind of developed to help us receive the body as a gift. And it’s not that different from the exercise you’ve done previously on the show, but it’s got a little bit different focus. And I’d be happy to walk our listeners through it and walk you through it, yeah, if you’d like.

[00:28:21] Dr. Peter: I’d love to do it with you. And so this is focused on accepting our bodies. We’re not even to loving our bodies yet. We’re focusing on this, on accepting our bodies and kind of helping us through what psychologically is getting in the way of that.

[00:28:35] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s right.

[00:28:36] Dr. Peter: All right. So I’m going to, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to do this with you. All right. I’m going to do this right with you. And again, like anything we do on here, I just want to let folks know that if you’re uncomfortable with any aspect of this or if you don’t want to do this, or it doesn’t feel like it’s the right time or a good fit for you, you don’t have to do it. And this isn’t therapy. We don’t do any therapy on this podcast or in any of the Souls and Hearts thing. These are guided reflections that we do. And we offer them because, you know, we found them helpful to people and you don’t have to be in therapy to take advantage of something like this.

[00:29:12] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: So that’s great. So if you want to give this a try, first of all, it’s important probably to not be doing something like driving a car. Because this does require some inward focus and most people find it helpful to close their eyes. You don’t have to. But many people, myself included, find it helpful to do that so I can be more attentive to my body and to things going on on the inside. So let’s just start by taking a couple of deep breaths, in through the nose and try to bring the air as far down into the abdomen as you can. And then let it out slowly. And just do that for a few cycles. It’s a nice way just to settle the body when we breathe a little deeper, and especially when we exhale slowly. It’s a way to settle and calm the body. It’s soothing. And as you do that, just notice how it feels to breathe. Notice how that feels in your body. Gradually let your body, or your breathing rather, adopt a natural pace. We don’t need to control it anymore for the rest of the exercise. So just let your body breathe. It knows how to breathe all on its own. Just notice how that feels. And what we’re going to do in this exercise is we’re going to sort of check in with different parts of the body. We’ll go section by section. And as we do that, we’re just focusing on noticing whatever’s going on in that part of the body and receiving it as a gift.

[00:31:15] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: So let’s start with our feet and the lower part of the legs. So let’s say from our feet up to about our knees. So I just invite you to notice your feet. Notice how they connect you to the floor, connect you to the earth. And notice any sensations you feel in your feet and your ankles and the lower half of your legs. You might find tingles or hot or cold or pressure. You might feel your clothing against your skin. You might feel nothing at all too. That’s perfectly okay. But just try to be attentive to this part of the body for a few more moments. And as you do this, I invite you to say silently, as if in a silent prayer, the words, “thank you,” in rhythm with your breathing. It’s as if with each breath, you’re offering a little prayer of gratitude to God for this part of your body. Our feet and our legs are important gifts. They help us to stand and to walk and to run and to jump. Even if they’re sources of pain, they’re still gifts to us. So just take a moment and breathe into this part of the body, saying, “thank you, thank you.” And now let’s move up to the upper part of the legs from the knees up to the hips.

[00:33:13] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: And again, we’ll just take a few moments to notice whatever sensations you feel there. You don’t need to necessarily judge or control what’s going on, but just notice whatever sensations you feel there. And after doing that for a few moments, then again, come back to the breath and “thank you.” These part of our legs are powerful. They’re some of the biggest muscles in our bodies here, and they’re important parts of our bodies. So be thankful. Thank the Lord for that part of your body. And now we’ll move up to the pelvic area and the abdomen. This is such a delicate part of the body. And we may have all sorts of feelings about it. In fact, as we go through this exercise, I just want you to notice at any time, if it’s hard for you to be thankful. If you notice any resistance inside to being thankful to this part of your body or any part of your body. Just make a mental note of that. With the pelvis, the hips, the abdomen. Right now, just be attentive to what you feel there. Try to accept whatever you feel there. Maybe internal sensations, maybe sensations closer to the surface. You may experience them as pleasant or unpleasant, but just notice them. Notice them. And again say, “Thank you. Thank you for this part of my body. Thank you.” Just breathe into that part of the body.

[00:35:26] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Breathe that thankfulness into it. And as we move up into the chest, we continue the same process, feeling the movement in our ribcage as we breathe, noticing any other sensations you might feel there. Expansion. Contraction. Some people may even notice their heartbeat. You may feel the pressure of the chair if you’re sitting against a chair. Or whatever it might be, just notice and breathe and say, “thank you.” And notice if there is any resistance. Anything that pushes back. And now let’s go on to the shoulders and the arms and the hands, all together. Just noticing your shoulders, your arms, your hands. This part of the body we probably use more than any other. We’re constantly using our hands to interact with the world, to do things. So just breathe into this part of the body and notice whatever sensations you feel there. And with each breath again, offer that little prayer of gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you for my shoulders, my arms, my hands.” And as we move up now to the neck and the face and the head, I invite you just to become aware of whatever sensations you feel there. We have so many nerve endings all throughout our face, so many little muscles. It’s such an important part of the body. It connects us to other people, connects us to the world through our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, our taste. So just notice whatever you feel in your face and your neck and your head.

[00:38:18] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Allow those sensations to be there. And as you breathe, just say the words, “Thank you.” Silently offering that prayer of gratitude to God. And now let’s come back to the breath and feel the whole body all at once, from your head to your toes and back again. Just taking in the whole body. Receiving the whole body as a gift. Again repeating, “Thank you,” with each breath. With each breath you feel the life that is in you. You feel life in your body. You didn’t put that life there. That life comes to you as a gift. This moment, it comes to you as a gift from God because he loves you. You are alive because he loves you. And so just take a few more moments repeating, “Thank you,” with each breath as you feel the life in your body. And as we begin to wrap up the exercise, you might open your eyes and have a stretch, kind of reorient to wherever you are, whatever’s going on. And it may be helpful to jot down a little bit about what you experienced during the exercise, especially if you notice any resistance at any point, if there was some part of the body that you found difficult to accept, difficult to receive as a gift, you definitely want to make note of that because that’s something you can bring to prayer.

[00:40:30] Dr. Peter: Yeah, the memories I had, you know, I mean, I noticed there were a lot of memories coming up for me.

[00:40:35] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Good. Yes. So memories may have come up or other associations connected to different parts of the body. These are things that you can bring to prayer. These are things you could talk with a friend or loved one about, things you can reflect on, journal about yourself, or if you’re in therapy, certainly bring to therapy and talk to your therapist. But you want to notice whatever kind of pushed back or didn’t feel quite right while you were doing this, because that could be an opportunity to do some very fruitful and deeper work.

[00:41:11] Dr. Peter: So quick question for you, Dr. Andrew. When things come up, like impulses or desires or thoughts that come up, that sort of maybe come up. Are we supposed to pay attention to those? I mean, like, you know, I mean, obviously I have my own answer to this. But like, there could be some things that come up that, man, just don’t seem ordered or even seem sinful when we do something like this. Right? So how do we handle that?

[00:41:41] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yes, that’s a great question. And it’s a very common question, very relatable. We all experience it. So the first thing is that we still need to accept that this is my experience right now, except this is what’s happening right now, right? That’s so important because without that, we’re not fully grounded in reality. We have to accept that this is what I’m getting right now. The feeling that’s coming up, the urge that’s coming up, this is the thought or image that’s coming up for me. So we do accept it, and in that sense receive it as a gift, but we don’t have to approve of it or submit to it passively. We can notice it. We can try to understand it. We can even guide and redirect it. And in that way, I think it’s similar to what a good parent does, who listens to their children, right? And tries to understand and does accept them as they are, but also guides them, guides them according to what is objectively true and good for them. And the same is true for us, right? So sometimes it can be scary or shameful to get in touch with things doing exercises like these, that we wish wasn’t there, right? Yeah, I understand that. I can really relate with that.

[00:43:08] Dr. Peter: Yeah, but denial doesn’t make it go away. Just because you burn the map doesn’t mean that the territory has now disappeared. Right? If you get rid of, people can do that. They can force things into the unconscious. You know, there’s a variety of ways that we do that, suppression, you know, all kinds of things, denial, suppression. I mean, all that stuff drives stuff into the unconscious. And the problem with that is that then we get what’s called the revenge of the repressed, right? Then it comes back and it’s more likely to get enacted in some way because it’s outside of our intellect and our will’s domain. Right? We’ve taken it out of our capacity to like, use our intellect and our will.

[00:43:51] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Absolutely. That’s right. Yeah. And so when something does start to bubble up into conscious awareness, even if it’s something we wish wasn’t there, that is a real opportunity and a real gift for us to do some work to become more integrated. And we can pass on that, but to our peril, as you as you point out. It’s really an opportunity to do some healing, integrative work, you know, to bring this thing that’s coming up into the light of Christ, you know, to bring some healing to it, to integrate it into who I am and how I understand myself. We don’t have to be afraid. And, you know, this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from John Paul II, actually, from his opening homily, opening homily at the beginning of his pontificate. He talks about, you know, open wide the doors for Christ. And then he has this next line of, “He alone knows what is in man. He knows what is in man. He alone knows it.”

[00:44:57] Dr. Peter: So we don’t even know that. He’s saying we don’t even know what’s in ourselves, right?

[00:45:01] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yes. Right. That’s right. Yeah. He knows what is in the heart of man. He knows the thoughts and impulses of our hearts better than we do. And yet he still chose to become one of us. And he still wants to dwell in us and with us now. So we do not need to be afraid of what comes up, when we do this kind of work.

[00:45:23] Dr. Peter: Wow. I just love that. I just love that because oftentimes there’s just so much fear that comes up with that sort of stuff, or so much disgust or contempt or, you know, disregard. And you’re saying, hey, God can actually accept this. And I want to float a philosophical, no, a theological question to you because you’ve actually got a master’s degree in theology, right?

[00:45:46] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That is correct.

[00:45:46] Dr. Peter: Okay. So I have this notion that if we don’t deal with disorder in our body, you know, that we could have dealt with, right, our hatred for our body, things like that, and we die with that? Does that actually have to get resolved in purgatory? I mean, because nothing imperfect enters heaven, right? So nothing disordered enters heaven. So if we have disordered desires or we have disordered inclinations, or we have disordered, you know, attitudes towards our body, I mean, is that part of the work of the purifying fires of purgatory?

[00:46:21] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: I think so, I think so. Because inasmuch as we hate something that is actually good, then there’s something disordered about our affections or our or our intellect that we’re not hating something, you know, we should hate sin, right? But good is something that we should always be drawn towards and we should love. Right. So inasmuch as we’re hating something that is actually good, then there’s something off. And I do think that needs to be purified, either now or as you were saying, in purgatory.

[00:46:54] Dr. Peter: So there you go. You can actually work on it now or you can work on it in purgatory. Those are the choices if you’re going to make it to heaven.

[00:47:03] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Now or later. But it’s going to have to happen.

[00:47:05] Dr. Peter: That’s right. So that might be motivating for some people who say, why do I have to deal with this? Why deal with it in this life? Right. 

[00:47:14] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah, exactly.

[00:47:17] Dr. Peter: Well, good. This has been amazing. I really want to thank you for being here, Dr. Andrew. And we are actually going to do one more together, right? We still on for that, on love?

[00:47:30] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. Sure thing.

[00:47:32] Dr. Peter: We’ll do one on love, loving your body. And I want to invite, so first of all, thank you again. You can reach Dr. Andrew through the email for the podcast. It’s crisis@soulsandhearts.com. crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Let us know what it was like for you to go through that exercise. Let us know what you think of this podcast, things that you like, things that you didn’t like, things you didn’t understand, questions you may have. You can also call the voicemail, (317) 567-9594. That’s the phone number for the podcast. But definitely let us know what you think. And also make sure that you register at soulsandhearts.com so that we can get you on the Wednesday email list. We are very much looking forward to moving to community. We’re actually making some significant developments there. We talked a little bit about that in the last episode. And it’s going to be great to have Dr. Andrew with us for one more time. So Dr. Andrew and I are going to do the recording for the show coming out on May 1st on April 27th. Right, so if you happen to get your questions in before noon Eastern Time on the 27th, we may be able to include those on the show, right? So if you happen to hear the show in the morning, let us know if you’ve got questions. We will definitely be interested in answering them.

[00:48:50] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Well, and if there’s enough questions, I could come back another time and answer them with you.

[00:48:57] Dr. Peter: Oh, that’d be fantastic. That would be fantastic. Because I’m sure that our listeners are going to be. I put out a question not too long ago about how much more do we want to do about body, and every single response that I got was like, more on the body. So I think there’s a real hunger and a real need in our listeners to really understand what this is all about with our bodies. You know, how do we love our bodies? How do we reverence our bodies? How do we sometimes just basically accept our bodies like we were talking about today? How did we see them as a good thing? And even if we get that intellectually, how do we get that into our bones? How do we get that integrated into all of us? Right? I just think that’s so important for folks. So, definitely stay in touch and, you know, get in touch with us. And we will go ahead and invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.