Your Body

From my book Daughter Drink This Water

Photo by Kameron Kincade on Unsplash

Photo by Lisa Marie Theck on Unsplash

Bless you, Dear Soul,

As we move across Solstice, today’s reading is the passage, Your Body, from my book, Daughter Drink This Water: A Book of Sacred Love. I pray the words help to usher you home.

Today, in just a couple of hours from now, we warmly welcome you to DAY TWO of our global virtual Solstice gathering, Returning to the Body: A Gathering of Remembering. I will be pouring poetry medicine and guiding us through reunion and remembrance with our bodies. We invite you to think of the people in your life who might be blessed by this experience and invite them to register. Let’s practice behaving in collective ways. Bless you always.

Rirhandzu,
Jaiya

YOUR BODY

“Your body is not your body in the way that people possess animals they call pets, or children they raise, or land they presume to purchase. Your body is your body in the way sun is sunlight’s body. No ownership exists. No judgment. No mutilation or fear. Just a free existence of sunlight inside of sun. Of sun inside of sunlight. A peace of being. Your body is your body in this way. It is a duty you have toward the carriage of your soul.

Your body performs millions of miracles daily. It is the greatest healer and artwork you will ever know. It is worthy of your Love. My heart breaks when you misunderstand your body, desperately trying to control it through contortion, shame, pride, or abandonment. Your body is not a wildness to tame. It is yours to exist with, to marvel at, to garden and learn. It is not your possession. It is a burst of light, temporal and phenomenal, in your rich array of illumination.

Your body is your body. What you do with it is your sovereign right. You are a sovereign land. Your reasons for what you do with your body are roots that create your happiness, sadness, peace, and despair. What are your deepest impulses? When you show off your body for attention, this is not liberation, freedom, or empowerment. It is enslavement to attention, which is a fickle reward. Attention, money, social rewards—if these are roots for what you do with your body, know that such roots bear barren fruit. Each time you depend on such external things and receive them, you weaken your bond with your soul. You lose your inward Love.

Do you Love other people’s bodies more than your own? This is a recipe for suffering. It is possible for you to Love your body more, even if you feel far away from that. Cherishing yourself, any aspect of yourself, is innately built into you. A survival component. Cherishing is a form of Love, a pure valuing and longing. If you don’t feel this, it is because the feeling has been muted or short-circuited. By your living. This also means that your living can return you to a full, active Loving of your body.

When you reject your body and its features, you reject your own soul. You reject your ancestral inheritance. You reject life’s idea of your beauty. Do not let the world’s sickness become your own. Your skin is not your sin. Not Loving it is. Your shape is not a failure. It is a wonder, an endless dance. Your features and functions are for living, not for criticizing, hiding, regretting. Gently remove these sicknesses from your being. Return to bloom.

No matter how much melanin you are dwelling in, it means everything that you bathe in your glory. Love your skin. It is not just a covering. It is the organ that cradles you. See how it Loves you? You cannot Love you without Loving your cradle, your signifier of your ancestors, and the divine work of sunlight and shadow.

At what age does a young girl go from presenting her joy to the world to presenting her body parts? What does this change mean? Who benefits? Social attention may feel good. But if it is just another fix in your addiction, it sickens you. How the world values you and its perception of your parts matters not nearly as much as how you value your whole, and the rejection of being parted. You are not body parts. You are a whole divinity. Live an indivisible, entire life.

Every morning, she stood at the mirror
and praised every part of her body.
Her body didn’t change. She did.

Desire for attention is not superficial. It comes from the soul. Our great confusion is that we believe this desire is fulfilled by using our bodies, by seducing. The soul’s desire for attention cannot be quenched this way, for its actual desire is for attention from itself. Showing off your body for attention brings attention that does not feed the soul, but instead leaves the soul empty and yearning all the more. It is your sovereignty to do what you will with your body. Your soul flowers when this doing is driven by a profoundly private Love for yourself, a gardening no one else need ever know.

All your life the world has told you your worth lives in your body, your face, your hair. You see how slavery works? If they can get you to believe the lie of your value-location, they can make money from you. And pleasure and power and control. In this spirit, they cannot make Love from you. Only you can do that. Your worth lives in your soul, radiates out through your being, and touches everything. If you spend your life chasing your worth in your appearance, you will always be chasing. If you spend your life immersed in the worth of your soul, you will have freedom from the chase.

Your womb is not a physical location. It is a spirit-power concentrated in part of your body and running through your being. Honor your womb. It is the most awesome creative force in this world. Birth is not its only function. It is a clock on earth keeping time with the heavens. A timepiece orchestrating your dance with moon and sun. Your womb is a garden harboring all your sacred cycles. When you are not in touch with your womb, humanity is not in touch with itself. We are sent spinning off our axis, lost from our equilibrium. Wars happen when woman is not at the center of keeping peace. Not because woman is more peaceful. But because balance is a root of peace, and your womb, both physical and spiritual, is an instrument of balance.

If your shape suddenly turned into that of a bullfrog, would you mourn your old shape? Maybe you would begin wanting to be shaped like a better bullfrog—a new season of suffering. Your shape will always be an enigma. No one can possibly understand it. Including you. But what to do with this enigma? You could be in despair. Or you could laugh. Value ease, not the disease of dis-ease.

To dissolve the distorting, devaluing, dehumanizing, objectifying, prostituting, self rejecting seeds about your body planted in you over a lifetime, take a thousand spoonsful daily of these words: My body is sacred. I am sacred. I honor my sacred things. Wash the words down with spring water, lemon water, tears. At first, the words may taste foreign, bitter, unwanted. Soon your self hating taste buds will die. Self Loving taste buds will bloom. Your life will change. It will become something that feels, thinks, acts, creates, rejoices. Sacredly.

Your body is the architecture of your every ancestor. Behold your generations. No more looking for flaws. Bow down. Your shape and contours have been perfected over thousands of years. Praise your land.

Body Love is fruit from the tree of self Love. Vintage wine has nothing on you. Your vintage is measured in millennia. Bow down and cherish all of you.

When her yearning to reveal her soul
became greater than her yearning
to reveal her body, she was free.

As often as sunrise, honestly examine your desires, and how they relate to how you treat yourself. Clarify whether your desires are actually native to your soul, and not fed into you by a world that wants to devour you. If you use your body as bait, it is likely to draw piranhas. If you treat it as an altar, you can expect sacredness to arrive.”

Jaiya John
Daughter Drink This Water:
A Book of Sacred Love
Available at jaiyajohn.com
and booksellers worldwide.

A Two-Day Gathering devoted to honouring Black and Brown bodies, Indigenous African souls on the continent and throughout the diaspora, and all those longing to reconnect with themselves outside of colonised relationships to healing, productivity, and worthiness.

In a world that constantly asks us to disconnect from ourselves, this gathering is an invitation to return to the parts of us that have been silenced, rushed, hardened, or left behind in the process of surviving.

For Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies, survival has often required disconnection from feeling, from rest, from softness, and from the wisdom of the body in order to endure systems that benefited from centuries of our labour.

This gathering is a space for remembering the body as sacred ground. A space to practice returning to ourselves gently, honestly, and in community. A space where liberation is not treated as an idea, but as something lived, felt, and restored through the body.

This is not a spiritually bypassing wellness experience, but a space devoted to embodied truth, emotional honesty, and collective healing.

Elder Baba Jaiya John joins us in this gathering to pour word medicine for emotional freedom, soul remembrance, and liberation from systems that disconnect us from our humanity.

Together, across these two days, we will move gently through guided embodiment with Lerato, reflection, poetry, presence, and shared conversation.

The solstice as our witness.

WHAT’S SHAKIN’
HERE AT SOUL WATER RISING:

- My most popular book Daughter Drink This Water is available on Audible, along with my short story Ashia: A Soft Story of Pilgrimage and Peace.

- 40% Wholesale discount on bulk orders of my books. Offer my books at your shop, boutique, studio, library, course, training, or book club. Exclusively at my website.

MY BOOKS are available at booksellers worldwide and at my site. Get to know my books at jaiyajohn.com. Thank you for posting your copies, readings, and creative images and videos, and for sharing online reviews. It all breathes vitality into a book's life. I hope you will gift these books to your people. Seed by seed we see our garden.