the life of the body

I don’t know the sauna stove’s name: but I’m sure she has one.

The Finnish word for her is kiuas and she very definitely has a strong character all her own.

We are slowly learning how to light her; and we are beginning to recognise her phases and her moods.

She sings when she is happy; she grumbles when she is discontent.

She throws out the most beautiful glow; she creates the most wonderful heat.

She has such profound lessons to teach us.

I was taught such disastrous lessons about my body when I was young.

I was never taught how to find ways to give or to receive pleasure; instead I was taught how to endure pain.

The discomfort and bodily shame to which I was subjected was apparently part of the process of turning me into a man. Or at least a strange distorted image of one…

Early on we were detached from our mothers as if a mother’s love was a thing that could damage us.

And every Saturday we were put in a classroom with a teacher and made to write a letter home which the teacher read before sealing the envelope.

Years later, I came across a cache of letters which my grandfather had written almost a century before, and which his proud and grieving mother had collected and kept.

I discovered he was undergoing exactly the same discomforts as I did - the freezing unheated dormitories, the iron beds, the hideously uncomfortable school uniform and the disgusting food - and that they were part of the same training to succeed through competitive examination and become part of the ruling elite that governed the British Empire.

And as he rose through the ranks of the British administration in India, he kept writing the same letters home.

And reading his stilted and emotionally damaged prose, I realised that I, too, had been trained to govern an empire. One that no longer existed.

And that in order for me to learn how to oppress other people, it was necessary for me to suffer oppression myself.

And the abuse and the oppression was rooted in bodily shaming and self contempt.

Of course this is not something that just happened to me: it happens to all of us in the Anglo-Saxon world.

We learn through suffering oppression and judgement to oppress and to judge our fellow human beings.

But the stove in the sauna will have none of that.

She gives us an invitation. An invitation to be present, and to feel the heat, and take pleasure in it.

An invitation to listen, listen to the body. Not overcome it or ignore it, or dislike it.

But just to listen. To be gently curious.

Is the heat making you uncomfortable?

Very well then, leave. Go to the next room, where the water is, and wet yourself. Cool down a little.

Or if you want to, go out into the snow.

What an interesting sensation.

And I find myself enjoying the snow as much as I am enjoying the heat, and that it is possible to pass gently from one to the other.

Always present, always listening.

“I feel as if I’ve got my body back”, say my friends in the sauna. “For the first time in years I don’t feel as if I have to be this, or I have to be that…”

Because there is no judgement in this space. There is no need to have a smaller bum or a bigger bum or lose weight or gain weight or overcome the body’s weakness, or make it conform to society’s expectations through surgery or through diet.

Especially important for me, perhaps, to learn not to be frustrated or frightened by the limitations of my ageing body; and to learn not be frightened or ashamed of my bi-gendered body and my bi-gendered self.

But important for everyone, I think. Every one of every gender suffering bodily exploitation and shame.

A particular pleasure, I find, is the gentle ladling of water onto the hot stones above the stove to make steam.

Such a pleasure to give, such a pleasure to receive.

More than pleasure. The Finnish word is löyly. An ancient word of rich meanings.

As my dear friend, the Finnish photographer Tiu Makkonen, puts it:

“Löyly means life force: the warmth of our bodies and the breaths we take. The breaths received at the moment of birth and the breaths that leave us at the moment of death.

And that is what you have in sauna.

Life.”

(Huge thanks and love to Tiu. Her work is beautiful: you can find it at www.tiumakkonen.net)