Healing is embedded within our DNA and within the DNA of all of Earth. What if, instead of resisting, numbing, or bypassing the signs of distress, we leaned in close? What if we gave our pain its overdue respect, and our innate, God-given wisdom its forgotten honor? What if we dared to believe that our communities, in the most unlikely, overlooked places, have already been given everything we need?
We could right our upended relationships from the cellular level, out.
We could become people who embody repair.
– My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World that Is Sick
As a writer, activist, and theology student, Lyndsey Medford was used to critiquing unsustainable systems from a theoretical perspective. But when her autoimmune disorder roared out of remission, she discovered that her own body’s systems lived at the very real vortex of all those systems’ dysfunction.
Learning to cooperate with her body would require her to change every aspect of her life–and in the process, to seek a radical reimagining of the world, from a place where sickness is an individual affliction to an interdependent ecosystem where sustainability is a community way of life. In this beautiful and inspiring book, Medford draws on her experiences with a rare autoimmune disease to illuminate the broader lessons we need to learn, in order to heal what ails us individually and communally.
My Body and Other Crumbling Empires points out the beauty and ubiquity of our limitations; the importance of accessibility, broadly construed; the interconnected nature of individual and public health; and the badly needed wisdom we have gained from living with our particular bodies.
In a society that creates a false binary between the sick and the well, Lyndsey Medford bravely turns toward her body with curiosity and finds prophetic wisdom there. My Body and Other Crumbling Empires reminds us that surrender is a form of strength, that gentleness can achieve what force cannot, and that we are deeply interdependent. Our embodied God models befriending and cooperating rather than controlling ourselves, each other, and the earth. When we need it most, Medford invites us all to engage in radical self-compassion and embodied repair.
Ellie Roscher, author of The Embodied Path, 12 Tiny Things, Play Like a Girl and How Coffee Saved my Life