Divining the Body: Reclaim the Holiness of Your Physical Self

by Jan Phillips and Jan Phillips

Book Overview

A journey through your physical self that will empower you to transform the world around you and overcome self-defeating thoughts through positive, practical exercises that help you climb back into your body and honor it as the temple of God that it is.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594730806
• ISBN13: 9781594730801
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Skylight Paths Publishing
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Most Amazing Book!

Jan Phillips has a most wonderful way of explaining this so that you really "get" it. I have been trying to understand these things my whole life...now I do! Everyone should read this. It is written to a more female audience but most of the information is valuable for men too.

Jan Goes A Long Way In Helping Us Heal Our Damaged Selves

When I heard the title of Jan Phillips' new book, I thought of the word "divining" as a diviner finds water with a divining rod to know where to drill a well. I used the word myself in a poem I wrote calling "Divining Lake Louise," and in that context I was divining the truth. The Divine is also the Creator. In Jan's book, the word seems to apply to all the contexts: the well of wisdom inside us, the truth of our own authenticity and the Divine Creator inside. At the beginning of the book, the author writes, "We need to climb back into our bodies and honor them as instruments of our souls. They are the means through which the Divine takes shape in this world, crucibles in which the raging blaze of spirit is transformed into luminous thought, radiant creations, enlightened action . . . In the process of divining our bodies, we embody the Divine as the mystics did." As amazing as it is to be inspired by poets who lived long before our time (such as Rumi and Hafiz), it is just as inspiring to have Jan Phillips, a mystic in our own time, creating her own divine poetry. She ends her love song to the Divine with these lines: "So I am to you, Love, and you are to me. We dwell in each other, like salt in the sea." There is a lot of damage to be undone as women have been bombarded with media images that have nothing to do with our divine selves, but only our outer shells. Jan goes a long way in helping us to heal those damaged selves. Reading this book was a journey of reverence through the sacred terrain of the body. Jan weaves her own story throughout the book that is full of research on the body. That weaving is evidence of her expertise as the information cited blends, as if effortlessly, with Jan's memories and the stories from women she has met in her workshops. Each chapter of Divining the Body has some questions for reflection and some exercises, including writing prompts. Two years after Jan entered the religious community of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in 1967, she was dismissed as being a "radical." Her radicalism took her around the world on a peace pilgrimage, gathering stories and taking pictures. She wrote about that pilgrimage in "Making Peace." The peace pilgrimage, Jan says, became "an act of living prayer. It wasn't about changing the world or changing myself. It was about experiencing myself as an incarnation of a great force and being as true to my heart as I could be." Another of her books, Marry Your Muse, was winner of the 1998 Ben Franklin Award. Jan also wrote God is At Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art and Circling: A Guidebook for a Group Experience in Consciousness. All of Jan's creations including her songs, photographs, documentaries, are from the heart and make her a "part of the ever-spiralling flow of creation." It's how she loves, shares her joy and it's how she knows who she is. Jan's relationship to her body, particularly her back, changed dramatically when she was hit by a car that ende

Accomplishes what the title states

This book contained new information as well as reinforcing concepts I already knew. If refer to different pages often, as I feel a need to reinforce new beliefs. A futuristic book much in line with many advanced spiritual leaders.

A spiritual self-help guide especially for women

Divining The Body: Reclaim The Holiness Of Your Physical Self by award-winning author Jan Phillips is a spiritual self-help guide especially for women. Written to counter a negative culture of self-hatred by cultivating appreciation for the holy qualities of the physical body as God's temple, Divining the Body focuses on different physical parts chapter by chapter: the feet, legs, hands, back, generative organs, belly, heart, breasts, throat, ears, eyes and brain. Exercises and reflections offer means to dwell upon the sacredness in the body as a gift from God, and spiritual quotes in the margins from a wide assortment of authorities enrich this guide to life-affirming personal contemplation.

Profound And Timely Message Delivered With Exquisite Prose

"The Divine, being invisible, needs our bodies to become manifest in the world...we have to abandon, once and for all, the erroneous, small-minded, sacrilegious notion that the body is evil and keeps us separate from the Divine." -From the book For millennia, some forms of organized religion have taught that the body is the source of sin, temptation, and even evil itself-especially when it takes female form. The damage inflicted by patriarchal attitudes has created a culture of women who hate their bodies, and where parents give their children breast implants and liposuction as birthday or graduation presents. The cosmetics industry in America alone rakes in 8 billion dollars annually. Individuals allow their bodies to be sliced, stretched, lifted, tucked, reduced, or inflated so they can love themselves-or, more importantly, have the approval and love of others. In her newest book Divining the Body - Reclaim the Holiness of Your Physical Self, author Jan Phillips explores the graceful curves, sinewy muscles, sturdy bones, and pulsating aliveness of the physical self. Using the latest scientific research as well as mystical traditions and personal experience, she puts the glory and magnificence of the human body on proud display. This insightful, gentle guide attempts to un-do the damage we've sustained from living in a culture that teaches-and thrives on-our self-hatred by renewing a sense of wonderment, respect and appreciation for the rich terrain of the physical body. Phillips reminds us that the body is the "temple of God", and that the continuing creation of the universe happens through us as the "word made flesh". Indeed, energy medicine and quantum physics echo what mystics have known for eons: every thought and action we undertake directly influences the flow of our life force. Therefore, our well-being becomes a matter of mindfulness. This process of mindfulness is not the accumulation of facts, but the cultivation of feelings-for "there is nothing to learn, but much to unlearn." Through exquisite prose and poignant stories, Phillips throws a sacred celebration and dares the reader to join in. She recounts the bliss of photographing birds roadside, and the excruciating pain of burning flesh experienced minutes later as a car hits her at 60 miles per hour. She shares the pain of being dismissed from a religious community, and the joy at discovering that the path she thought she was destined to travel was really a thru-way to something greater. A breath-taking travelogue of the physical and metaphysical body, Phillips takes us on a tour of the feet, legs, hands, back, generative organs, belly, heart, breasts, throat, ears, eyes and brain. She deftly weaves scientific discoveries (such as those discovered at the Institute of Heart Math and the Max Planck Institute) with subtle-body observations ("Our throats are like the flue. When we don't open them up, speak our truths, blurt out our feelings as they arise, the fire within turns