"...and your very flesh shall be a great poem..."

— Walt Whitman

Growing up just outside Washington, DC resulted in my childhood having it’s fair share of visits to historical sites, such as Civil War battlefields, like Gettysburg.

If you’ve ever been to a memorial site, especially one where great loss actually took place, you know that you can feel it. What you’re standing on at these places is sacred ground and each has a powerful energetic fingerprint. Perhaps you’ve felt it while visiting the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, Auschwitz in Poland, or The Killing Fields Museum in Cambodia.

Sadly the world is full of sites where atrocities have left an imprint, physical or energetic.

In my early twenties as I was emerging victorious from my own battle with anorexia the only way I could relate to my body was as this sacred ground. While not visible to the eye, my body felt like modern day Gettysburg battlefield.

This flesh—my flesh—was where a war had been fought and won.

And what this meant to me was that anything less than sacred awe was not good enough.

In the years since then I have encountered in my life and in the lives of those I work with serious trauma. Childhood abuse. Sexual assault. Mental illness. Loss of parents and children. Battles with cancer. Amputation.

And it doesn’t take catastrophic incidents like these to leave trauma. Life is traumatic.

Life is traumatic and our bodies bare the brunt of it. They are our sensory input tool and they are where we experience (or repress) emotion. Our bodies are the tools or fight or flight...or freeze. Our bodies are the recipient of heinous cultural norms. Our bodies, depending on where we live in the world, aren’t even always considered our own.

Life is also miraculous. The ways in which our body heals, allows for connection, creates new life, and enables our lives is marvelous.

All this is to say: feel the sacred ground you are living in.

Feel that you are sacred in every cell of your body.

Stand in awe of not just what has happened on your ‘land’ but on what you have survived and created.

Stand tall.

Consider reverence as a new template for how you inhabit this flesh of yours.

Like Whitman says, your "flesh shall be a great poem".