Male Bodies As Permission
Remembering That Aliveness Is Physical
To be alive is, first of all, to be in a body. It is astonishing how easily this fact is forgotten.
People speak of life as something they have or manage, as if it were an account to be balanced rather than a pulse to be felt. Yet life has always been tactile—a rhythm of breath and heartbeat, hunger and satisfaction, warmth and weight.
When a man forgets that his aliveness is bodily, he drifts upward into abstraction. He becomes a set of opinions, responsibilities, and projections—a mental hologram of himself. The body, meanwhile, continues its quiet work of keeping him here, waiting to be noticed.
To return to the body is therefore not regression; it is remembrance. The Practice of Peace shows that this return is not achieved through analysis but through permission—permission to feel, to breathe, to occupy space without justification.
The man who grants this to himself instantly grants it to others.
When you stand comfortably in your own form, you become non-threatening. Others feel their own bodies relax in your presence. Your stillness becomes contagious.
You give off a kind of silent approval that says: you, too, are allowed to exist exactly as you are. This is not charisma; it is coherence—the resonance that arises when self and body are in agreement.
The body, then, is not merely a private territory but a field of permission. Every gesture, every breath, every act of ease communicates unconsciously to those around you.
In a world full of guarded postures, a single unguarded presence can change the atmosphere of an entire room.
To live this way is to teach without teaching. It is to embody peace rather than to speak about it. The work is not to instruct the world but to remember your own aliveness so vividly that others remember theirs.
The body is the ground remembering you. You are the breath remembering it.
