Given the belief that “I am not a Body”, how do account for all these medical swings of feelings,, pain and lethargy?
That’s a fair question, and it goes right to the tension between spiritual insight and lived experience.
If you take the idea “I am not a body” from A Course in Miracles seriously, it doesn’t mean the body disappears or stops having sensations. It means the body is no longer your identity, even though it remains part of your experience.
Those are two very different things.
You still feel pain.
You still experience fatigue, energy shifts, illness, recovery.
But the question becomes: Who is aware of these changes?
That awareness itself does not swing the way the body does.
Think of it this way. The body is like a weather system:
- Sometimes clear
- Sometimes stormy
- Sometimes heavy and slow
The weather changes constantly. You don’t deny the storm. You don’t pretend the rain isn’t there. But you also don’t say, “I am the storm.”
You say, “I am the one noticing the storm.”
From that perspective, the medical swings don’t contradict the idea that you are not a body. They actually highlight it. The very fact that you can observe the changes means you are not identical to what is changing.
Now, that said, this is where people can go off track if they’re not careful.
“I am not a body” is not a reason to:
- Ignore medical care
- Dismiss symptoms
- Pretend pain isn’t real
The body still operates within physical laws. It still needs attention, treatment, rest, and sometimes intervention. There’s no conflict in saying:
- “This pain is real at the level of experience”
- “But it is not what I fundamentally am”
Both can be true at the same time.
In fact, holding both tends to create a healthier relationship with the body. Instead of fear or over-identification, there’s a kind of respectful detachment:
- You care for the body
- But you don’t define yourself by its condition
And something subtle happens there.
Pain may still be present, but the suffering around the pain often softens.
Lethargy may still come, but the story about it loses some of its grip.
So the question isn’t “Why do I feel these things if I’m not a body?”
A more useful question is:
“How do I relate to what I’m feeling?”
If the answer is:
- “This is happening, and I will respond to it wisely, but it is not who I am,”
then the teaching is being applied—not as denial, but as perspective.
You’re not trying to escape the experience.
You’re changing your relationship to it.
And that’s where the real shift begins.