Iyanla Vanzant: Your Body Is a Portal, Not a Prison

The greatest lie many buy into is the belief that their body is betraying them. That it is weak, broken, or burdensome. In truth, the body is the most loyal companion you have ever known. It has kept you alive through everything. It wants to be listened to, not managed, not silenced, not rushed. The body wants to be understood and reverently honored. Spiritual Hygiene for the body means you make space for holy unbinding, letting the body unwind from what has offended or abused it. It means you must become willing to learn to be attentive to your body's language.

The language of a body is not always linear or literal, but it is always true. The language of the body is universal in its form but intimately personal in its meaning.

• A racing heart may signal panic in one person, but excitement in another.
• Tears may mean sorrow, but they may also mean freedom.
• Stillness may feel like safety to one person and shutdown to another.

This is why Spiritual Hygiene teaches us to listen deeply and to discern compassionately. No two bodies speak exactly alike, but everyone's body tells the truth of its experience with radical honesty.

The ninety days I spent with a plastic bag hanging from the side of my body were the longest, most significant days of my life. It was Nisa who helped me put it on and take it off. I had a deep aversion to the sight and the smell. She handled it as if it were a common, everyday event. It was Nisa who rescued me from the restroom at my hairdresser's the day I put the bag on incorrectly and left little piles of poop in the corridor on my way to the salon. I had lost a great deal of weight—thank goodness, because with that bag protruding from the side of my body, formfitting clothes were a thing of the past. That was my everyday experience. On the spiritual level, I recognized with painful awareness that I had not been nice to my body. I didn't drink or do drugs, but neither did I eat regularly or rest properly.

Around week two, when I could get the bag on and off without support, I had an epiphany: For most of my life, I had been holding on to a lot of s#*t. My grandmother's meanness toward me, bordering on emotional abuse, which was often demonstrated as physical abuse; my brother's silent support of the way Grandma abused and neglected me. My father's silent accommodation of his mother's, my grandmother's, mistreatment of me and her inappropriate coddling of my brother. My aunt, making me her emotional sounding board and insisting that I continue calling my uncle "Daddy" after she knew he had raped me. The silent whispering about my "mother," who was actually my stepmother, because she was "light-skinned" and had "good" hair, and all the other inappropriate conversations I was privy to and was expected to remain silent about. These sudden flashes of remembrance also gave me a deeper insight: Even as a child, I was usually the sanest one in the room, which no one appreciated.

Another thing I learned during those ninety days was how careless I had been about what I ingested, not just with my body, but also with my mind. When you're forced to see everything you put in your mouth, you gain deep clarity about what to eat, when to eat it, and what it will look like when it comes out. You get very clear about the importance of chewing well so that your food will digest completely. It's one thing when you are talking about food, which you can monitor and control, but when it comes to what you see, hear, and feel, you are upping the ante. I had heard and passed on gossip and malicious speaking. I had tolerated and engaged in name-calling and intentional misrepresentations of myself and others. I had rehearsed angry conversations in my mind that never made their way to my lips. I held on to them. I replayed them. I expanded them, and eventually, I owned them as my truth. I was stupid. I was ugly. I always thought that I was better than everyone else. I was ungrateful and arrogant. I needed to stay in my place. My big ideas and I were headed for a great big fall.

There were hundreds of them floating around in my mind. Things I had heard or been told that I ingested and digested without any consideration for their impact on my body. During those ninety days, that bag hanging off my body brought me face-to-face with every fear I had ever experienced. I finally understood why I hesitated when the time came to execute a plan. I also became aware that once my mind had figured out how to move through the voices of the trauma, I drove my body like a Mack truck, an eighteen-wheeler, determined to reach my destination in record time, at any cost.

What Is the Language of the Body?

The language of the body is not made of words. It is made of:

• Sensation (tightness, tingling, heat, numbness)
• Emotion (tears, joy, fear, rage)
• Impulse (the urge to move, to cry, to rest, to scream)
• Rhythm (breath patterns, heartbeat, energy levels)
• Posture (how you hold or protect parts of yourself )
• Symptom (pain, fatigue, illness, disease)

Pain, tension, hunger, and fatigue are not enemies. They are nuggets of information. When you ignore or deny the body's language, you will become "neck-down-dead."

"Neck-down-dead" is the condition of being energetically disconnected from the body while still functioning in the world; alive in thought, moving through tasks, but numb, silent, or shut down below the chin. It is the state of spiritual and emotional disembodiment, where the body becomes a vessel of function rather than a sanctuary of feeling, flow, and Divine presence. In Spiritual Hygiene, this phrase reflects a soul that is no longer listening to the wisdom of its own body, a self that has become so mentally dominant or trauma-protected that the sensations, signals, and sacred messages of the body have been muted or ignored.

When you are "neck-down-dead," the mind becomes the ruler, and the body becomes the servant. You might be able to speak truth, teach wisdom, or offer help to others, but you do so while being unavailable to yourself. This condition often arises in:

• Survivors of physical and sexual trauma who learned to detach from bodily pain or threat
• Highly spiritual people who prioritize transcendent theory over sacred embodiment
• Over-functioners and caretakers who tend to focus on others while neglecting their own needs

The cost of being "neck-down-dead" is that your inner altar goes unattended. You stop feeling fully. You know what to do to get things done, and it becomes the priority. You may lose desire, passion, pleasure, or vitality, or you may be overcommitted, constantly moving, too busy to feel, so you think about what to feel and perform that outwardly. In the process, the body begins to store grief, shame, fatigue, and inherited pain. Over time, this becomes spiritual smog and emotional clutter. It can also manifest as autoimmune issues, inflammation, hormonal imbalance, and physical stagnation. The path back from "neck-down-dead" is not mental. It is movement, breath, sound, scent, sacred sensation (i.e., massage), and ritual. To return to life, you must return to the body.

Spiritual Hygiene for the body requires reverence. It means treating your body as a sacred space. Listening to it. Speaking kindly to it. Nourishing it with food and rest. The body does not lie, nor does it hold grudges. As I learned in Jamaica, it does not wait for approval or the most convenient time to speak. This incredible vessel that we have been given to journey through life tells the truth about how your soul is doing, every single day. Learning the language your body speaks is about communion. It is how you return to yourself with reverence.

Learning Your Body's Language

Learning your body's language means becoming fluent in the subtle messages it sends: the flutter in your belly, the tightness in your throat, the ache in your chest. These are not random signals; they are sacred communications from your inner world. To learn your body's language is to build trust with your own temple, to honor what it feels, and to respond with presence instead of dismissal. This is the foundation of embodied Spiritual Hygiene.

Track Sensations Instead of Stories
Instead of saying "I feel anxious," say:

• "There's tightness in my chest. Body, what do you want me toknow?"
• "My jaw is clenched. Body, what are you feeling right now?"
• "My belly feels hot. Body, is there something you want me to know?"

This helps you learn to decode the body's signals without layering interpretation too soon.

Honor the First Impulse
The first movement your body wants to make is often the most honest.

• Stretch?
• Lie down?
• Walk fast?
• Rock back and forth?

That is the body speaking. Listen to it. Let it do what it is requesting.

Journal the Messages
Keep a Body Language Journal. Ask each sensation:

• "What are you trying to tell me?"
• "What do you need?"
• "What are you holding that I haven't acknowledged?"

Ritualize the Response
Once you receive the message, offer a response.

• If the body says: "I'm tired," rest becomes your Spiritual Hygiene.
• If the body says: "I'm holding grief," tears and movement become your ritual release.

Excerpted from Spiritual Hygiene A Practical Path for Clean Living, Inner Authority, and Divine Freedom. Copyright © 2025. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.