Part 7: The Body as Temple – Awareness in Flesh and Form
Series Note: ✨ You’re reading part seven in the series What is Consciousness? Exploring Our True Nature. Each post is an invitation to explore awareness, not just in lofty ideas, but in the lived texture of daily life.
Breath: The First Teacher
Take a breath. Feel it enter, expand, pause, release.
Breath is such an ordinary thing we barely notice it — until it’s blocked, strained, or stolen. Think of the gasp after a sprint, the shallow breathing of anxiety, or the deep exhale of relief. The breath can stress the body out or bring it back into balance. It can be forceful, ragged, subtle, soft. And yet, it is always life-giving.
The breath is where inner and outer meet. Each inhale draws the outer world in, each exhale returns the inner world back out. Breath is relationship. Breath is awareness in motion.
The Body as Temple
If breath is the doorway, then the body is the temple itself. Every sensation, every perception, every ache and pleasure is awareness touching itself in form.
Think of hunger gnawing in your belly, the sting of cold air on your skin, or the way goosebumps rise when a song moves you. Think of the ache of grief heavy in your chest, or the warmth that spreads when someone hugs you tight.
And my favourite example ever — think of when your eyes see the face of someone you love and, in a heartbeat, before its barely registered in your mind, your whole inner world softens. Outer becomes inner in an instant.
The body doesn’t lie. It registers everything — not as concepts but as lived truth. It is lamp, vessel, temple, and doorway.
Awareness Moving Between Inner and Outer
Awareness doesn’t just watch life happen — it tastes it, smells it, shivers with it.
Bite into a ripe strawberry and notice how the sweetness blooms across your tongue, how your body leans into pleasure before the mind even names it. Step into the sun and feel the warmth spill across your skin, not out there in the sky but alive, immediate, pulsing through you. Meet the gaze of someone you love and watch how your chest loosens, your shoulders soften, your whole inner world rearranges itself in a heartbeat.
And here’s the wonder: even when nothing “physical” is present, awareness can still stir the body into response and make it “real”.
Picture slicing into a lemon, juice misting into the air. Can you smell it? Feel the sharp tang prickle your tongue? Your mouth watering as if the lemon were right in front of you?
Imagine burying your face in a rose, or peeling a sun-warmed orange. The aroma rises in your nostrils, undeniable, though no flower or fruit is here.
Remember the last time you made love — the way your skin tingled, your breath deepened, you fully let go and got lost in the presence of that moment. Just the memory, just the thought, can send ripples of arousal through the body.
This is the mystery of awareness: thought becomes sensation, imagination becomes flesh. The intangible translates into the tangible, and the body — this temple — makes it real.
Floating in Awareness
One of the most vivid ways I’ve experienced this is in a magnesium float tank — a pod of warm, salt-saturated water where you lie weightless in the dark.
When the water is the same temperature as your skin and you keep still, your body seems to disappear. You’re left floating in vast space, alone with your thoughts. You can’t hide from yourself.
But the moment you move — even slightly — you feel the water flow over you. You’re instantly back in your body, sensing the cocoon around you, like some lost memory of the womb.
For those who find meditation difficult, or who just need deep rest, a float tank is an extraordinary way to experiment with sensation — to feel both the dissolution of form and the return to it.
Why This Matters
Spirituality is often painted as something that floats above the body — as if the body is a distraction to be overcome. But the truth is, the body is how awareness experiences itself most vividly.
Every joy, every sorrow, every breath happens here, in flesh and form. The temple may be fragile, but it is sacred. And when we treat it that way — not with perfectionism but with reverence — even ordinary moments take on the shine of the holy.
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Try this with me.
Take a slow breath. Notice the coolness entering your nostrils, the chest expanding, the warmth leaving on the exhale.
Place your attention on a point of contact — your feet on the floor, your hand on your lap.
Ask yourself: Where does “body” end and “world” begin?
Rest there. Notice how the boundary begins to blur. The body and the world are both held in the same awareness
Next in the Series
In Part 8, we’ll explore: Time and Timelessness – Awareness Beyond Past and Future.
Further Reading & References
Bahá’í Writings – on the body as a lamp for the soul
The Bible – 1 Corinthians 6:19 (“your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”)
Yoga Sutras – on embodiment as practice
Thich Nhat Hanh – The Miracle of Mindfulness
Dr. John C. Lilly – pioneer of sensory deprivation tanks
✨ Reflection
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine biting into a piece of rich, dark chocolate with a salted caramel centre — feel it soften on your tongue, drip over your lip, the sweetness mingling with a hint of bitterness.
Notice how your mouth waters, how your body reacts, even though nothing has passed your lips.
This is awareness turning thought into sensation, imagination into reality.
The body is not separate from spirit — it is the temple through which awareness breathes itself into form.
