Your Body is a Revolution, Tara Teng. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Summary: Written by an embodiment coach and somatic practitioner, this book advocates for re-connecting with our bodies and names the different ways we have been estranged from our bodies through beliefs about the body, shaming, traumatic abuses, and political oppression and how we can learn to listen to and reconnect with our bodies.

Tara Teng is an embodiment coach and somatic practitioner who helps people who for one reason or another are disconnected from their bodies to learn to lovingly come home to their bodies. She describes herself as a “bisexual, biracial Asian American cisgender woman.” Much of the book reflects her journey from the beliefs and experiences that shaped her early experiences in a purity culture-oriented evangelical church. She experienced shaming having to do with her female body and the impact of how she moved and the clothing she wore on men in her church. She grew up with a spirit-body dualism that told her that spirit was good, the body evil. For her, it was necessary to move away from these beliefs to begin a journey of healing. Yet she mentions how compelling the incarnation of Jesus is for her, not only for his own embodiedness but that he was embodied through the conception, gestation, and birth process, carried and pushed out by a woman in all the messiness and wonder of birth. Mary’s labor was indeed a holy act.

She speaks of learning to express emotion repressed in the body and to engage in embodiment meditation that expresses those emotions. She discusses the responses of the body to trauma: fight, flight, freeze, and faun, and how traumas can shape whole cultures, especially minority cultures. She engages in an analysis of the way political power oppresses the body, whether patriarchy, Jim Crow, and capitalist oppression of labor. She also discusses the journeys of disabled people to show compassion on their bodies as given rather than be subject to those who would “fix” them.

In her thinking about sexuality, she has moved to a place of gender fluidity, allowing people to embrace the gender and sexual expressions they feel most fully affirm their sense of self. She speaks in great detail about sexual dysfunctions, with an emphasis on those who are anatomically female, and how these often reflect traumas and how somatic therapies can help uncover and heal these traumas. She describes the foundation of her sexual ethic “is to do no harm and leave people better than I found them.” Her ethic is rooted in consent, doing no violence, and listening to each other’s embodied boundaries to give and receive the greatest pleasure. She invites people to reclaim their erotic selves and the goodness of their sexuality, however they would express it within the above mentioned ethical and physical boundaries.

Her concluding chapters concern learning to be an advocate for one’s embodied self, the ways she has reconstructed her spirituality around non-violent practice, and reclaiming right relationships not only with people but also the environment, her “non-human kin.”

Teng’s narrative underscores the terrible consequences of the history of Christianity’s distorted theologies of the body, including the mind-body dualism that was more Greek than Christian. She rightly intuits that in both creation and incarnation, there is a basis for the goodness of our embodiedness as well as right relationships with the rest of our physical world. There is so much in her work that I would affirm.

There are some places where I have reservations. One is that she draws upon a Marxist critique of the exploitation of capitalism on bodies. That, in itself may be warranted, but it needs to be turned on countries that have embraced Marxism in some form as well, which if anything have been far more exploitive of bodies. As much as I would join her in affirming the goodness of our sexuality and the pleasure the body affords, I would differ on matters of gender fluidity. Apart from relatively rare cases of gender ambiguity, the givenness of our bodies, our very embodied character often clashes with gender fluidity, as many feminist groups have observed. Also, working in university settings, I’m aware of how complicated the idea of “consent” can be–how fraught with contradictions it may be in many situations in which students find themselves. I’d hope we might have conversation about such things without pulling out “shaming” or “phobic” language.

The other, perhaps more substantive criticism I would make of this book as someone approaching the end of my seventh decade is the obliviousness of this book to older bodies, which are also good and may be delighted in with their wrinkles, crepe-y skin, and creaky joints. I wished and waited in vain for her to address agism and the forms of oppression imposed upon older bodies, not only in care facilities but in daily life. I would cite the difference between having physical therapy with a twenty-something versus a fifty-something who is far more acquainted with the realities as well as the potentials of older bodies. I would cite the attempts to scam me simply because of the color of my hair, the perception of my age. While we may be aware of changes, we also continue to derive great joy and pleasure in our bodies yet are also subject to forms of shaming, oppression, and abuse. This also needs to be named.

I want to acknowledge, despite my critiques, that this book made me think. I found many of the exercises helpful in listening to my body. Teng helps us discover how good our bodies are. She rightly challenges the defective theologies, practices and abuses of the church that have inflicted so much harm. Where we differed, or when I found myself ill at ease with an idea, she challenged me to figure out why. I read too many books that never do that so I valued this. I’m heartened with the growing interest in Christian circles on embodiment. I hope the critique and the alternatives writers like Teng pose lead to a ressourcement, a return to the sources and a recovery of a far more Hebraic understanding of the body, the vision undergirding the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.