My culture did not prepare me for body awareness. I obligingly accepted the teaching that I am to hide who I am under layers of cloth, even pretend that the outer layers said who I was, better than the flesh beneath. All along, I have been stuffed under those layers, masked from my own awareness and from those around me.
How refreshing and useful to be “natural”. To have those moments when I am simply alive under my skin. No pretense, no secret. These are all those times when I press my skin up against the world and it touches me. The level of intimacy thrills me.
I am grateful for all those times I have felt the world present against my skin, the rising sun striking all of me as I stood at the end of my dock, the water slipping over me as I swam in my lake, the warm fleece cloak against my skin as I sat on my cushion. Those are times I am awakened to the world present around me, and to my own presence inside my skin. I have learned to know what it feels like to be in my own body, inside my own skin.
Sometimes, all things on both sides of my skin become one. A lovely paradox. Breath-taking.