Most of the forms of meditation that we have with us today were created by and for men. But who said the body was not a place God could reside? Bodies take the world in, transform it into energy, and dispel waste. Bodies heal, a lot of the time, on their own. Some female bodies gestate and produce life. Patriarchal religions, it could be said, do an awful lot of stretching the imagination to see God in a man’s image. 

It’s not our fault that we are so bad about being with each other in our difficult emotions. Of course, we don’t want to see the people we care about suffering, and gratitude feels like a quick way of getting away from suffering. Also, most of us don’t have a great capacity to feel our uncomfortable emotions because our society does not want us to. If we all deeply and genuinely felt our sadness, anger, and disappointment about the world, we might want to change things. We might connect with each other more deeply. We might feel more richness and sweetness from simpler things. And then we’d need to buy less stuff. Our culture revolves around stuff. How are we supposed to live if everyone is out here feeling their feelings instead of buying stuff?

Most of the time we assume we make decisions with our minds. We weigh the information. Maybe we talk to a friend. And then we come to a rational decision about what to do. That’s how it works, right?

Well, not really. Some of that happens, sure, but there are many decisions that we do not make with our minds, even when we think we’re doing so. Our bodies make our decisions for us more often than we’d think.

There are many treatments available, however, including hip-opening stretches (as the piriformis muscle is sometimes to blame for the nerve compression) and strengthening to rebalance the structures in the hip and pelvis. We understand all this from a physical perspective. But what about the spiritual meaning of sciatica?

This year, loss has been a major theme, not only in terms of the mortality of a long pandemic season but also in terms of our everyday routines and the many things we took for granted before. As the days get shorter and darker, we are moving into the fall and winter seasons, which are natural times to think about grief and loss.

Money is also a strange substance when you think about it: material yet really imaginary. It can grow when we have it and shrinks faster when we don’t. We certainly don’t think of money as being spiritual or having a soul, and that’s part of why so many of us have deep pain and unresolved issues related to it. So, what is the spiritual meaning of money?

No matter how we gave birth, the body needs time to rest and heal. Take a few minutes for yourself to breathe and observe how your body is already in the process of healing from your experience. Tap into a white-light energy to cultivate that process and rest well.

Babies require a lot of carrying around, looking down at, hunching over, and nursing or bottle feeding. All of these things can shape the postpartum upper back into a bit of a hunch, causing pain in the neck, in between the shoulder blades, and in the chest. Sometimes we even get tingling down the arms or into the hands. The neck and shoulders are so intimately connected that when something is off in one place, the other place usually goes off, too.

But Death is not always a harbinger of horror and loss. Other decks show the image a little differently. For example, in Liz Huston’s Dreamkeeper’s Tarot deck, the Death card depicts a skeleton woman shrouded in a thin veil that could be a coffin or an egg. She is growing out of a pond full of lily pads, embracing a skull close to her heart. This image reminds me that death is always a mother: that new birth cannot happen without appropriate death. The coffin is also an egg: endings always come with some kind of new beginning.

Pelvic floor pain is most common for people who have been pregnant, but pelvic floor issues can affect anyone, the major symptom being pain. Physiotherapists can help identify the physical symptoms and recommend good exercises for your particular condition. But what’s the spiritual meaning of pelvic floor pain?

Food and love are inextricably linked. The association is old: when we are babies, food almost always comes alongside touch, with the closeness of a caregiver. Most babies quickly learn that when they cry, they generally get milk. We learn early on that food soothes. When we get older, food can become a replacement for love.

Get Out is a delightful, genuinely scary “social thriller,” as its director Jordan Peele calls it, that cost $5 million and grossed $172 million. It is 2017’s most profitable film, according to TIME. That’s because Get Out does what every good horror movie should do: it pinpoints something about our culture that makes us feel really uncomfortable and then it makes us feel better about it, all while confirming a moral structure we already agree with.

Blade Runner 2049 depicts a world so steeped in misogyny that the women are mostly either naked and helpless or murderous bitches. The men don’t fare much better: they march along melancholically, covered in blood and dirt, following orders. Some are human, born of mothers, but many are replicants, powerful bioengineered androids created for human use, made to look, act, and even feel convincingly human. This is a world where no one’s body really belongs to them, so loving can truly only mean being a stranger. In this way, Blade Runner 2049 does what the best speculative fiction does: it warns us about the dangers of the world we already live in.

Which is when I realized the true reason women like me love RuPaul’s Drag Race and Queer Eye: we get to watch all of our traditionally feminine anxieties about having a perfect body, a perfect wardrobe, and being a flawless homemaker displaced onto men. We get to feel delighted by the runway looks on drag queens and then judge them savagely, shouting at the screen with a slosh of wine in the safety of our own homes. We get to consume the trappings of femininity we’ve always been sold while projecting the attending anxieties onto men’s bodies instead of our own.

The ghost of George shadows Joe, highlighting what I’ve learned from movies and TV about what I’m supposed to want from romance. You points to the monstrousness of men like George and Friends’ Ross, the men we’re supposed to see as harmless, willfully blinding ourselves to the violence and entitlement seething just beneath the surface. But it doesn’t give me an example of what I could want, if I could step outside of the narrative of possessive, violent romance.

I’m sure contestants can leave whenever they want (and there are quite a few people that we meet in the first episode who we never hear from again) but there’s a distinct feeling that the only way to escape this dystopian dating prison is to propose to someone. And it makes a sort of sense, even within the bananas logic of the Love is Blind universe: getting engaged does feel like the key to escaping the terrible merry-go-round of swiping, meeting, dating, and hearts breaking. Love is Blind appeals to an audience of online daters: people with excessive options paralysis, for whom the next better option just might be around the next corner. Perhaps the heart of the show’s experiment is: If we were forced to commit, could we let go of the anxiety of options?

Perhaps the reason the ocean chooses Moana is that she is excellent at the sort of emotional labour that’s needed to get a huge jerk to do what you want without getting hurt. Throughout the film, Moana employs her super skills of intuition, listening, cajoling, placating, agreeing and being generally cute and non-threatening (not to mention tiny). These skills get her past her angry father, the demigod Maui, the fire-throwing Te Ka, and even the crabulous drag queen Tamatoa, who “loves bragging about how great he is” and can be distracted by a good listener asking the right questions.