Bodily Bypassing + How to Receive Fewer Emails from Substack :)
Reflections + helpful tips to declutter emails from Substack!
I’m going to take a little detour from our neurodiversity rabbit holes to see if I can untangle some wonderings that have felt like sticky knots in my body the past few weeks… Here’s what happened: While referencing someone having serious health issues pop up when they were supposed to be performing some sort of Christian ministry, I heard someone say something to the effect of: I mean, we can’t deny the spiritual warfare in this, right? The person was supposed to be ___________ [fill-in-the-blank of a spiritually-important-thing-to-do here] and ___________ happened [fill-in-the-blank of a serious health issue popping up that was perceived as spiritual warfare].
And in my body, I couldn’t help but wonder: If there is spiritual warfare at play here, might it instead be that so many Christians have been convinced that communication from their body is a signal that they are being attacked by an outside force, and they must pray and push through to continue to perform spiritual works, silencing their bodies — instead of caring for their bodies that God created and listening to communication from their bodies as signals for how they might tend to (and invite God to tend to!) fatigue, harm, heartache, and need, in ways that are actually quite similar to stories we see all over the gospels?
Cue the good Samaritan, the woman at the well, the bleeding woman, words about an easy yoke and God-with-us offering rest... How do we not see how much a western disembodied and workaholic mindset has twisted the way we view and respond to our bodies — all in the name of God’s work?! I’d argue that if we’re working under the premise that spiritual warfare is part of the picture, that right there might be the most harmful spiritual warfare at play: a bodily bypassing that tells us our bodies are annoyances to deal with, annoyances that can get in the way of the ministry we’re supposed to be doing — instead of embracing the entirety of our embodied being that is all intricately connected, that is not separable from who we are or any spiritual works we might ‘do’ — and that maybe our existence isn’t so much about doing…
Deep breath.
That might be the whole post right there… I have so many more thoughts on how this impacts faith communities where spiritual abuse goes un-dealt with for decades, how this shapes the ways we silence our God-given voices and knowing, and how our brains and bodies have been trained to view things through narrative-frames that distort and destroy… but I am tired after hiking many Scottish mountains yesterday, have some PhD work and retreat prep to tend to, and have a jet-lagged visitor in town who’s likely to wake up soon that I’d like to spend time with, so we’re just going to let this first tidbit marinade here for a minute…
If you’d like to chew on this more, just go back and reread that ever-so-long bolded sentence as many times as you’d like :)
Also, here’s a snapshot from those many hiked miles, and as promised, some tips on how to receive less marketing emails from Substack…
Alrighty, here’s the portion on receiving fewer emails from Substack:
I google-d this so hard… and from what I can tell, I cannot change the marketing emails that Substack sends people, but, each of you can disable these! Here are the best options I could find…
Controlling your own notification settings. Follow these instructions to go into your Settings, then Marking, and disable any emails/notifications you don’t want!
Some people prefer to download the Substack app and only receive notifications there so nothing comes into their email. You can do this and still receive notifications that certain authors/pages have written something, meaning you’ll only receive an app notification, not an email. Follow these instructions to learn more about how notifications work on the app and what your options are there :)
As I’m still learning how Substack works, if there are ways I can help make your Substack journey more enjoyable from your side of the screen, please let me know!