A weekly invitation to transform from the inside out.
Happy Seed-Day!
Here's an idea (The Seed), a way to go deeper (The Soil), and a journal prompt (The Root) to explore.
I. The Seed
Most of us picture the soul as something small, hidden somewhere inside the body. What if it's the other way around?
The body is inside the soul.
The soul reaches past your skin and fills every part of you, which means nothing you do with your body is separate from your spirit. The meal, the walk, the sleep, the breath.
Care for the body and you are already caring for the soul. Neglect the body, and it is the soul that goes hungry.
II. The Soil
Read: The Spaces Between Us by Michael Graziano, a Princeton neuroscientist, on a part of you that science can measure and few people have heard of. Your brain keeps a map of the space around your body, not just the body itself, and it guards that space the way it guards the body. In the 1990s a lab in Japan trained monkeys to reach for food with a rake. The neurons that tracked the space around each hand began tracking the space around the rake's tip. The map stretched. Hold a tool and your brain quietly redraws where you end. Science will not call it a soul. It calls it peripersonal space. But it agrees on the shape: you do not stop at your skin.
Then sit with this: the brain's own map of you does not stop at the skin. You are larger than you look.
III. The Root
If the body is inside the soul, then how you treat your body is how you treat your soul. What is one thing you do to your body that you would never do to your soul?
Which part of your body have you been at war with? What would making peace with it look like, starting this week?
Until next week,
Jay Sueno
PS - There is a longer, more personal letter behind this one. The Long Paddle is my weekly writing on business, family, health, and building a life in Siargao. It is free at jaysueno.substack.com.
