Strong in Every Layer: The Body as a Sacred Practice

World Championships, Malaga, 2018 — still training, still racing, still all in.

My husband was up at five thirty this morning, the same way he has been for nearly three decades, no alarm required. He was not locking notes from patient encounters or responding to medication refill requests before the house woke up. He was through his coffee and his meditation, out the door for a run with his training partners, and back home to lift weights before breakfast, all ahead of a full day seeing patients. He races the 800 and 1500 meters in the M50 division, and last week at the Oregon Track Club All Comers Meet he ran the 800 in 2:06, a time that ranks as world class for his age group. This week he competes at the USATF Masters Outdoor Championships in Geneva, Ohio, and next month he travels to Daegu, South Korea for the World Masters Championships. Watching him train for both has taught me something about spiritual practice that I did not expect to learn from a track.

The yogic tradition offers us a map. It describes the human being as five interwoven layers, called koshas, wrapped around the same essential Self. There is the physical body, built from what we eat and how we move. There is the energy body, the subtle current of breath and life force that animates the physical form. There is the mental and emotional body, where thought and feeling take shape. There is the wisdom body, the deeper intelligence that watches and discerns beneath the noise of thought. There is also the bliss body, the layer closest to the Divine essence that Unity teaching calls the Christ within and that other traditions simply call Spirit.

The insight I keep returning to is that these layers are not separate rooms in a house. They are more like concentric rings in a single pond. Strengthen one, and the ripple moves outward and inward at once. This is why a person who commits to steady physical discipline often finds their mind growing steadier too, and why a person who deepens their meditation practice often finds new ease in their body. The layers were never meant to be tended in isolation.

Most of us gravitate toward one layer as our primary practice. Some of us spend our energy on the spiritual body, in prayer and contemplation and study of sacred texts. Some of us live mostly in the mental and emotional layer, working through therapy or journaling or the long inner work of self-understanding. Some of us root ourselves in the physical body, through movement and rest and attention to what we eat. Every one of these paths is valid. Each layer is a legitimate doorway into the same Divine presence, and no doorway is holier than another.

What is rarer, and what I have had the privilege of watching for thirty years, is the person who tends all five layers with equal devotion. That describes my husband. He trains his body with the same discipline he brings to his morning meditation. He studies technique with the same curiosity he brings to scripture. He recovers and rests with the same reverence he brings to Sabbath. Nothing about his physical practice is separate from his spiritual one. They are the same practice, worn in different clothing.

It is not a small distinction, and Ayurveda has always understood why. In that tradition, the body is not a machine to be optimized or a burden to be managed. It is considered a temple, and more than that, a direct expression of consciousness taking form. What we eat, how we move, how we breathe, and how we rest are treated as spiritual disciplines in their own right, not lesser cousins of prayer. Ahimsa, the practice of non harm that has shaped my own life for forty years, extends this logic outward. If the body is sacred, then how we treat every body, human and animal alike, becomes part of the same devotion.

I think of this as Sacred Repatterning at the level of the individual life. Instead of treating the physical body as something to conquer or as an afterthought to spiritual life, my husband has spent decades reorganizing his relationship to it around reverence rather than control. He does not train to defeat his age. He trains because honoring the body he was given is itself an act of alignment with the Divine Order that placed him in it. The results, medals or personal records or simply another season of competing, are secondary to that deeper commitment.

There is a wider lesson here for anyone who has assumed, without examining it, that physical health belongs in a separate category from spiritual growth. Unity philosophy, grounded in the understanding of a panentheistic universe, has never taught that division. The Divine is not only transcendent and beyond us. The Divine is also immanent, present within every cell of the body and every breath we take. Charles Fillmore taught that the body itself is a temple of the living Spirit, meant to be cared for as such rather than dismissed as merely physical. To strengthen the body with intention is to honor the very place where Spirit has chosen to dwell.

Healing, as I understand it, is not the elimination of every ailment or the achievement of a flawless body. Healing is the steady movement from where we currently stand toward the fullness of who we came here to be. My husband's training is that kind of healing in motion. Each morning stretch and each interval on the track moves him closer to the wholeness that was always his true nature, layer by layer, until the physical discipline and the spiritual life are indistinguishable from one another.

This week, when he steps onto the track in Ohio, and next month when he steps onto the track in Daegu, he will be practicing something far larger than sport. He will be demonstrating what it looks like when a person refuses to compartmentalize the body from the soul. The extraordinary ones among us are not those who chose the physical path over the spiritual one, or the spiritual over the mental, or the mental over the physical. The extraordinary ones are those who understand, and live, the truth that every layer is sacred and part of One.

If you would like to follow him through both meets, I will be sharing moments from Ohio this week and from Daegu next month on Instagram and TikTok @claimwholeness.