How the Body Teaches the Soul with Justin Whitmel Earley
Episode Notes
Episode Show Notes
What happens when your body starts telling a story your mind cannot ignore?
In this deep-dive episode of The Best of You, Dr. Alison sits down with author Justin Whitmel Earley to explore the connection between spiritual formation and the everyday rhythms of our bodies.
From the outside, Justin’s life looked stable and successful. But anxiety and panic began surfacing in ways he could no longer explain away. What followed was a deeper question many of us carry: what if our bodies are revealing something about how we are living?
Together, Alison and Justin explore the forgotten wisdom of embodied faith and how small daily practices shape the soul over time.
In this conversation, they explore:
- Why anxiety sometimes appears even when life “looks fine” on the surface
- The surprising ways your body may be revealing deeper patterns in your life
- What modern faith may have forgotten about the role of the body
- How simple daily rhythms can slowly reshape who we are becoming
This conversation is about learning to listen.
Because sometimes the path toward healing begins by paying attention to the wisdom already present in your body.
More Resources:
Connect with @justinwhitmelearley on Instagram
Order Justin’s latest book The Body Teaches the Soul.
Connect with @dralisoncook on Instagram
Join the 80,000+ soul menders in our email community and receive weekly reflections and gentle practices here.
If you liked this episode, then you’ll love:
Episode 186: Stuck in Overthinking? A Simple Practice to Interrupt Stress, Overwhelm, and Habit Loops
Episode 184: Stop Running From Anxiety - How to Tell Normal Stress from Unhealthy Anxiety and Find Peace Over Panic
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Beautiful office, important job. I'm getting paid more than I've ever gotten paid in my life. I
have a wife and... two children and everything is going right in my life if you look from the
outside but in my mind i was a house on fire everything is closing in everything is ending i justa
wish i knew that there were physical practices i could engage in that would calm that emotional
state if a doctor can get you to uh exercise be in friendship often throughout the week you know
take walks outside and eat right and not work too much and sleep eight hours like that is going to
be far better than any pill that could ever give you
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. I'm Dr. Allison, and I'm
so glad you're here with us this week. If you're new here, I'm so glad you found us.
This is a space for anyone who's interested in a wiser way of being human, a place where we honor
the complexity of real human lives grounded in modern science and ancient wisdom. And this is our
Thursday Deep Dive episode, where we slow down and explore one topic more fully.
If you haven't already, I'd love for you to to join us each weekday. For the best of you every day,
this is a short eight-minute reflection rooted in scripture and shaped by psychology and spiritual
wisdom. And for those of you who are following along with the daily reflections, today's
conversation is meant to feel like a natural continuation of that path where we pause and take a
little more time to go deeper in conversation with other guests and experts and sometimes just me
to look at how that wisdom actually shapes our lived embodied lives.
Today's scripture is Genesis 2-7, and we'll touch on it in the episode today in a powerful way.
The scripture is, Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. It's a verse...
of us know well, but we don't always think about in the context of what we're carrying right now.
Because what if this wisdom is physical? What does it mean that God gave us a body,
breath, and bones, rest, and rhythm? And that question sits at the heart of today's conversation.
Today we're talking about the body, not as something to manage, fix, or overcome, but as something
that teaches us. Many of us were formed to believe that wisdom lives primarily in the mind,
in right beliefs, right thinking, right theology. But what if wisdom also lives in breath, in
sleep? and rest in the rhythms we repeat every day without thinking.
My guest today is Justin Whitmull Early, and his story brings the question to life in a powerful
way. Justin is a lawyer, an author, a husband, and the father of four boys. He's the author of The
Common Rule, Habits of the Household, and his brand new book, The Body Teaches the Soul.
He's someone who deeply valued the life of the mind, faith, theology, vocation,
calling. And from the outside, his life looked really good and together. But in his early 30s,
his body began to tell a different story. That moment became the beginning of a long journey,
one that led him to ask a question many of us carry. How can I believe a gospel of peace and
goodness and yet live with a body ruled by anxiety? Justin's new book,
The Body Teaches the Soul, grows directly out of that question. It's not a self-help manual.
It's not a productivity guide, though it's incredibly practical. It's an invitation into wisdom,
the kind of wisdom scripture has always pointed toward that we talk about in these daily
devotionals where body and soul. connect. In the book, Justin explores how simple embodied habits
shape us spiritually over time. And he challenges the two errors many of us fall into when it comes
to the body. And he invites us to reclaim the body as something sacred, as a place where God's
wisdom meets our daily lives. I'm so thrilled to bring you my conversation with Justin Whitmull
Early.
thrilled you're here i i would love to dive in to our conversation where you dive in in the book
because it's so powerful you open in the er i think yes you're unfortunately yes yeah you're 48
hours without sleep you're in a full and panic mode um kind of in my words i would you know you're
you're there's a dissonance between what's going on in your mind and what's going on in your body.
Can you put us back in that moment? Tell us what was happening and how that led to this book that
you've gifted us with now. It was a moment I will never forget. It changed the course of my life.
It led to me writing.
When I was in that moment, I was about 30 years old. I had been a missionary in China for a couple
years of my 20s, almost five actually. So I was a serious Christian,
so to speak. My faith was really important to me. Law school had been an interesting time.
I had felt called actually to leave the mission field and go live and work missionally within
lawyering. So I had come at law school as a serious Christian again.
What I didn't realize during law school was that it, like the rest of the world,
is a... machine. It did not just teach me new information about how to be a lawyer.
It shaped a way of life that I was unaware of until it changed me,
until after the fact. And what law school did was encourage me to stay up later,
wake up earlier, fit more work in everywhere, be constantly tethered to my screen. The typical
stuff of modern working America, but For, you know, top law school students,
and for better or for worse, I was one of them at a top law school working towards a top lawyering
job. These were all blessings. These were good things. But the formation is pretty extreme there.
And so I came out as a 29-year-old turning 30 lawyer with a great head on my shoulders,
like great worldview. But the architecture of my habits at that time, the way I lived my life,
the formation that had occurred, and I didn't know about it, was just like everybody else's. And at
the age of 30, I wake up one night in full-on panic attack. And I didn't even know,
Allison, what a panic attack was at the time. I had no idea what was happening to me. That's why
I'm in the emergency room thinking I must have eaten something, something must have gone wrong. And
I was really scared because in my mind, I had never put my quote unquote identity in work.
In my mind, this was not the most important thing in life. In my mind, I was a calm, normal,
sincere Christian. But in my body, I had become wild.
I mean, I was totally, I now see the words like disintegration and dysregulation and all these
things would apply. I just didn't know those words that I had no idea was happening. Yeah. I
relate. My listeners, I've told this story and I've been telling it more very similarly.
And if it makes you feel better, I was in a psychology doctoral program having that kind of living
so much in my mind, thinking I could analyze health, analyze spiritual formation,
analyze my way into wholeness. only to find myself having extreme panic attacks.
So when I read that, a part of me was like, oh, I get it. There's that wonderful left brain kind of
mind-oriented part of us that, especially as Christians,
isn't bad. And it can be the part of us that's very theologically minded and doctrinally minded and
doing the right thing minded. But man, does it have to be brought. into relationship with the rest
of us. And so that's right. I just appreciate that story so much that you shared that as the
anchoring. And for me, I think it was particularly acute because as a former missionary,
sincere Christian and lawyer, and by the way, English literature major and aspiring writer,
I've always loved writing. I thought that's how life work. Like you believe the right things.
You get the words and the ideas right in your head and it will trickle down to your body. I never
would have said that because I never doubted it. I didn't need to say it. It was just assumed,
right? And so two things that happened to me in the wake of that, Allison, have been the most two
important changes in my life. And the first one was realizing that your head can go one way while
your habits go the other way and your heart will tend to follow the habits. That was a really
important realization. And that explains so much about life, why I don't just feel the way I say I
feel, but rather I often feel the way I practice myself into this emotional place.
Another way to put it would be you can't think your way out of a problem you didn't think your way
into. You practiced your way there, so you need to practice your way out. So this was really
important for me. in the context of formation in the spiritual disciplines so that's actually what
i went on to write about as i started to recover in my mid-30s but the second part of this that
came a little later and i realized oh my gosh this is just as important if not more was the whole
embodied part of that that you can't actually really talk about spiritual formation and habit
without talking seriously about embodiment because we're talking about dysregulation between what
you truly think you believe and what your body is trained to experience we're talking about the
difference between worldview and education upper and lower and that led me to an embodiment place
and i would say now oh my gosh this is not just a realm of spiritual disciplines this is a realm of
physical disciplines this is actually the question of what do you do on the daily with with your
body and why is everything you do physically far more spiritually important than you think,
and everything you do spiritually far more physically important than you think. Just one more way
to sum that up, kind of like I said earlier, is when your head goes this way and your habits go
that way, your heart tends to follow the habit, right? And I think another way to put that is when
your thoughts go one way. But your embodied practices go the other way. Your brain tends to be
formed by the embodied practices as much, if not more than the thought part, like it's a joint
effort. So I didn't realize that. So a lot of my practice and writing and life has become really
attentive to spiritual and physical discipline and how they're forming me emotionally and thought
wise and belief wise far more than I ever knew. I want to get the book is very practical and I want
to get into some of the practicality of that. But it sounds like. The mind part, because you talk
in the book about, you know, I'm a serious Christian, reciting scripture. Your mental habits,
for lack of a better word, were not bad. No. In that sense.
Yeah. I do say so myself. Yeah. Right. It still just wasn't enough to where it was also,
it was unintegrated. It was fragmented from the physical. Is that how we could put it? That's a
great way to put it. For example, I remember another iconic moment during that time where I was
sitting in my 18th floor office in my new law firm. I think I'm a second-year associate.
Beautiful office, important job. I'm getting paid more than I've ever gotten paid in my life. I
have a wife and two children. From the outside, everything should be great. I even remember it was
a beautiful day outside the window. I'm overlooking the river. It's incredible. Everything is going
right in my life if you look from the outside.
But in my mind, I was a house on fire. And I didn't know why.
Everything that I thought about my life, it's like, this is good. I've got a great job. I've got a
great family. I've got a great future. But my mind felt like,
my body, like my internal life felt like everything is closing in. Everything is ending.
And I didn't know the word for... then you know i didn't know the word for dysregulation i i now
realize i was having sort of constant panic attacks induced by insomnia induced by a hurried and
anxious way of life but i thought i was just losing my mind and like this was a one-way street
towards the insane asylum and and that really started to scare me and i just wish i knew then that
You know, the title of the book, The Body Teaches the Soul. I just wish I knew that there were
physical practices I could engage in that would calm that emotional state.
Because I kept trying to solve it with saying more Bible verses. The problem was I already believed
them. I just wasn't putting them into practice. And we were made to be this, you know,
divine union of... and physical, this divine union of head and body and heart. And that's why we
have so many words for it. I was disintegrated. And now I've learned so much more about how to
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How did you, when you got out of that ER moment, you had to face the reality,
when you reached out for help, what did you find? How did you begin to put the pieces together?
And I like to ask this question for so many of my listeners. Sometimes you receive advice that's
not helpful. And I think that's helpful to name. So what was helpful and what wasn't helpful as you
started to realize, I've got to change something? Yeah. I think what wasn't helpful was that most
people around me had the same either myopic or one-sided view of my struggle that I did.
So far from blaming them. I just think we didn't know enough physically and spiritually.
at that time now this was only 10 years ago right but i do think we're kind of having a renaissance
and neurology and spiritual formation and understanding of how these two things go together i think
i grew up in a in an era i mean the 20th century is absolutely a gnostic era where where and we can
get more into this if you want but where people tend to over spiritualize the bible and
christianity and tend to minimize the physicality this actually happening secular culture as much
as christianity so a lot of people around me had the similar kind of problematic viewpoints so
practically speaking when i went to the emergency room they saw it strictly as a physical anxiety
problem here are some sleeping pills yes psychology did it too that's right they were like the
appeal wasn't just the religious community that's right they that was the best answer they could
give and i don't Don't necessarily blame them. When I went to a lot of my friends and even
counselors, they were like, you know, this is your identities and work and, you know,
you're believing the wrong things. And they weren't wrong. Again, it had become just not in the way
that we thought. I mean, again, with what hands did I pick up my heart and place it in the identity
of habit or in the identity of work? I think by habit. Right. So it wasn't a belief problem.
It was a habit problem. And all these things were.
Yeah, not super helpful. But let me say what was really helpful because I think this is also really
important. And I don't want to like dunk on culture or my friends or the counselors and just say,
you know, I already had it wrong and I finally figured it out. You know what was helpful is I
talked to a ton of people and a ton of people listened to me and a ton of people had empathy for me
and a ton of people wanted to pray for me and a ton of people wanted to help me. And in the
aggregate, the Lord used those conversations to start to put ends together that I had never put
before. which is why I went on to write about it.
Their presence was extraordinarily helpful. They didn't need to know all the right answers, and I
don't blame them for not. So I'm very grateful I had people to talk to. And if anybody's
experiencing something like this, you have to talk to people, therapists and friends included, even
though, as it turns out, a lot of them only had kind of one side of the answer. But you were about
to say something I noticed. So what were you going to interject with? You're saying so much good. I
want to... underline it for the listener that so often when there is that that divide between and I
love how you talk about it the the mind or the belief and the habits of the body it's not that some
I love how you're saying it it's not that Because if we leave it in the mind, it's all about I
should just have less idolatry or I should just be able to practice this,
take a pill, which sometimes does help and is sometimes necessary. But what we're missing, and you
used that word Gnosticism. Tell us a little bit more. I want to anchor this discussion.
That was a heresy in the early centuries that we fall into as Christians. And for the listener,
what happens is if you're dealing with anxiety, If the body isn't part of the healing conversation,
we're missing a huge piece of this. So tell us what you mean by functional Gnosticism and how that
actually, how we're kind of living that inadvertently in many ways in our faith communities,
also in therapeutic communities, but particularly sometimes in faith communities. Absolutely. And
this is the core of The Body Teaches the Soul. This is the theological foundation upon which all
the practices and habits are built. Genesis 2-7. lays out the view of a human person.
It says God created Adam out of the dust, that is physical stuff, and then breathed the spirit of
life into him. That is a spiritual miracle. And the combination of that physical and the spiritual
is a soul. The King James Version says a living soul was born.
And we could go a lot of different directions, but I'm going to keep this short and basic. That
means what Christianity has always believed and what the Bible teaches over and over is that a
human being is a divine combination of the spiritual and the physical. It is unlike anything else
in the universe. This is kind of why we are the image of God in a unique way.
We are just... wildly beautiful and wonderful and complicated and, by the way,
mysterious. We are a divine union of the physical and spiritual, and that's not really a math
equation. It's a spiritual reality that we're always digging deeper into. But it means you can make
two major heresies in the world, and it's been happening for thousands and thousands of years.
You can make a spiritual heresy and sort of say, essentially what we are is really,
at the end of the day, just spiritual. And we call that Gnosticism, also Manichaeism, lots of
different names. But it's recurrent. It happens all the time. It's happening now as much as it was
happening in the era that the New Testament was written. And lots of Paul's writings are actually
combating this. Lots of the early church fathers were combating this. They were like, no, you can't
just say Jesus was God and not actually a human body. He was human. This is really important.
Because they were combating this idolatry of the spiritual side of us. We also know there's another
side of that idolatry. you can say actually everything's material it's not spiritual and we see
this all over the 20 21st century um it actually started to really come about in the enlightenment
and darwinism this is not new but it's accelerated to a pretty wild extreme where you get people
literally saying i'm just the atoms um and the bible of course preaches against that like no no far
more than your body but you are your body you know and so where you you end up is you say we
christians can't make these errors we can't ignore the spiritual but nor can we idolize the
material we need to and you can picture a triangle here those two at the bottom like ends of the
extreme you want to picture a triangle up towards something that is different but combined and that
is we want to image god which means we're always going to be attentive to the spiritual and the
physical and if you are trying to solve your mental health crisis just by reading bible verses
you're probably ignoring the gift of the body that God gave you. And you're trying to solve your
mental health problem just by taking pills. You are ignoring the gift of the spiritual brain that
God gave you. And if you're trying to come at it as an integrated whole, okay, you're not just
doing something wise. You're doing something biblical because that's who you are. Oh,
that's such a word. You could even add only through talk therapy.
that yes you can't incorporate some component of the nervous system the body the breath yeah yes
actually you know and probably a lot of listeners will be familiar um reading the body keeps the
school which was actually originally the inspiration of my title.
I was trying to play on it a little bit by saying the body teaches the soul.
You get some great outlines there. I mean, people generally are starting to realize two things,
that the pill revolution is insufficient. If you're not doing real talk therapy,
addressing the truth claims in your upper brain and how they bear on the lower body.
then you're missing something. So increasingly, even though it's kind of a popular heresy, like,
oh, you just need a pill to solve your depression problem. What I found in all my research is that
no psychiatrist worth their salt really thinks that. They think,
oh, you absolutely need good talk therapy, which is another way of saying you need spiritual truth
claims. You need to be in touch with what reality actually is. But hopefully those same people
would realize that there are times when talk therapy is not enough. In fact,
if a doctor can get you to exercise, be in friendship often throughout the week,
take walks outside and eat right and not work too much and sleep eight hours, that is going to be
far better than any pill they could ever give you. They would much rather have you doing that than
almost taking any pill. They recognize those are more successful things. So people want this upper
-lower approach. And I think the great joy for me working on this book was realizing It's what the
Bible's prescribed for years. And all these things that we ought to do, sleep and exercise and
breathing, which I write about in the book, these are chapters, are dignified with the spiritual
gifts of God. Like, this is what we're doing. Yeah. I love that you're taking it all the way back
to how we were made in the beginning. That's so powerful. I had Dr.
Hilary McBride on the... podcast and we were talking about to your point in psychology i learned
the top down approaches and the bottom up approaches to healing and you and some therapists lean in
different directions and that it takes different forms of feeling but the top down is the let's
let's look at the cognitive let's look at the thoughts let's look at and you can apply this to
spirituality as well the top down is sort of the the thinking and the kind of what happens you know
in the in the in the upper part of our brain and then the bottom up is starting with the body
what's going on in the body and that's the part that yes was neglected yes and is now coming back
into your point and and i'll i will say that you know different people different people ask me i'll
all Sometimes you need one more than the other. In your case, you didn't need that.
You needed the bottom up. Same with me. My thoughts were good. That's right.
They were perfectly logical. They were just completely disconnected from my body. That's right.
And likewise, I meet plenty of people at my gym, for example, who are living a great,
healthy lifestyle. They're doing the right things. They know about this. And they are crumbling.
Yes. Because they think at the end of the day, they are a conglomeration of atoms and love in the
world is an illusion. Yeah. I mean, they're falling apart because they're trying to say, how do I
explain my love for my children? How do I explain the problems of my marriage? And I'm like, truth
claims, worldview, formation, Christian evangelism. This is back to the basics. But, you know,
sometimes people need that. But I find a lot of people in Christianity like me are doing okay on
the worldview. Yeah. That's a huge generalization. But I meet a lot of people like that, but
they've completely ignored their body. The part of their worldview that's not working is they're
kind of Gnostic in their worldview. So take us there, because that's where much of the focus of the
book is. Because even in psychology, we've kind of begun, like you said, there is this renaissance
these last several years in understanding this. But let's flip it to spiritual formation, where I
still think we're a little behind on that. We're not often going into...
church services. And again, I love how you said that, like we're all doing the best we can.
But for those listening, you have this metaphor of gardening the body.
And this is spiritual practice, right? This is not separate from your,
these habits are not separate from your spiritual habits. Talk us through what that looks like for
you and how you practice it. You bet. I'll give you the first. five, six chapters of the book,
and then I'll try to give a short example of one, and then you can decide which one you want to go
to next.
After all that introductory work that we just talked about, the book is very practical. Breathing,
thinking, eating, sleeping, exercise, sickness, sex.
Those are the first seven, if you will.
Breathing was huge for me. The book starts with breathing because breathing is the place where the
upper meets the lower in an extraordinarily unique way. And we could do an hour-long podcast just
about the miracle of breath, spirituality of breath in Genesis 2-7, the wild integration of the
upper and lower in breath. Breathing, of course, is the one vital life function that your upper
brain can take control of and then regulate your lower body through. And so I went from a place of
thinking breathing exercises. And breath prayers were kind of woo-woo and suspect and maybe
Eastern to realizing, oh my gosh, this is fully Christian. No wonder so many other people realize
the importance of breath. And breath prayers became, and still to this day,
you know, yesterday I was doing some breath prayers. It's just become an integral practice for me
because what's happening in a breath prayer, and I like to do box breathing where you sort of
breathe up for a couple seconds, inhale, hold for a couple seconds. Exhale for a couple seconds.
Hold for a couple seconds. Probably most of your listeners have heard of this. So that's a lower
body exercise, right? And I like to combine it with Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd on the
inhale. I shall not want on the exhale. And for me, that is not only effective.
It has saved me from so many panic attacks. It's helped me re-regulate to get back to my kids in
the house and out of angry moments. But it also... integrates the upper and the lower.
We're talking about bringing the spiritual truth to a lower body exercise. And I could talk about
it for a long time, but that's a great example of how just in one place of the body, this theology
is being applied into a spiritual physical discipline.
If you've been around here for a while, you know I talk often about becoming the best version of
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emotionally regulated version. And one of the most overlooked foundations of that version of you is
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Did
it take you a while to learn to trust that?
It took me a while to trust the breath. Did it take you a while?
And I'm thinking of the listener who maybe has tried it and it initially can feel a little,
we're so used to being in our minds. I'm just curious how your journey was with that. It took me a
lot of practice. And if you think about it, this is going to make sense in every area of life.
If somebody says, hey, you should really exercise or sleep differently. If you understand right,
it's not going to be right the first time you go to the gym. You're going to need a lot of
practice. And this is kind of Allison where the gardening metaphor becomes so important. The
gardening metaphor runs throughout the book. And it's the idea that the best way to think about
your body. is a garden the original vocation in eden is you we were gardeners we still are and the
gardening metaphor helps you in a couple different ways one you know that no gardening work is fast
like nothing ever happens overnight nothing ever is automatic anything regarding your body is going
to be happening at the pace of a garden but we also know from working in gardens that there is real
change this is where the The difference of, I think you solve the agency problem when you take the
gardening metaphor. If you do nothing to your farm, you know what's going to happen. It's going to
become a desert or a jungle. A gardener knows that they have to act. And when it comes to our
bodies, if you want a different mental health outcome,
then you need to practice breathing. You need to practice sleeping. You need to work at the pace of
a garden. But importantly, gardeners also know something else. It's not autonomous.
You don't have complete control. You're dealing with the soil that you were given. You're dealing
with the weather patterns that you have. And that means you're dealing with the body that you're
given. We're different. Our bodies are different. And you've got to garden yours, not someone
else's. And you've got to realize, man, they have different soil here. They won the dopamine
lottery. I didn't. But that doesn't mean you stop gardening. That means, okay, what do I do with my
plot of land? And the Bible is full of parables talking exactly to this. How do you be faithful
with what you've given? How do you garden what you've been given? This is why Jesus talked in
farming so much, because spiritual growth, what do we call it? The fruits of the Spirit. It's
fruit. You stay connected to the vine. So think about gardening. You're working in conjunction with
God, and that means any practice like this is going to be slow. It's going to take practice,
but it's very real, and there's very real fruit. I love that. I love that.
It's a slower way. We say in Boundaries for Your Soul, it's a slower way to get to where you want
to be.
That's great. I love that. It's a slower way because if you don't do it,
you're never going to get to where you want to be. But it is patient work.
Before I let you go, I loved this chapter.
It's just a beautiful chapter on sickness and lament. But in particular, you talk about learning to
cry as a discipline. Yes. And I thought that was just really beautiful.
How tell us a little bit about that, what that was like for you. And I just I thought it was really
what a beautiful way to think of tears as a embodied spiritual practice.
Yeah. You know, I think I probably had a overdeveloped view of the fall before I realized the
goodness of the body. So I've always been kind of solid, so to speak, on, hey, we fall apart.
Our bodies are dying. There's tragedy in the world. Cancer happens.
And then as I started to realize, oh my gosh, but our bodies are beautiful. They're important.
They're given. God created us with bodies. He redeemed us through the body of his son. He's going
to resurrect us to new embodied life. Clearly he loves bodies. So a lot of the book is in that lane
of saying your body is a gift. It's good. You should be stewarding it, gardening it, eat
differently, sleep differently. But you don't want people to think about this. without really
wrestling with the other reality, that it is broken, it is fallen. And that needs to be squarely in
the middle of your embodied theology, which is why I put the chapter literally actually squarely in
the middle of the book, because if you don't understand the fall and how your body's broken, you
get all this wrong, right? And so it's not a chapter of answers. I mean,
this is the problem of... This is the problem of sickness and the problem of fall.
And better theologians and writers than me have not solved it, right? The best answers we have is
that, well, God is with you in the pain.
He's with you. And guess what? He cries just like you. One of the wildest verses in the Bible,
also the shortest. You learn it as a kid, Jesus wept. And that idea is at the core of the chapter,
that if we don't learn how to, like Jesus, go to the tomb of Lazarus.
And that means that, like Jesus, you walk to the dying body that you have. And your first response
is not, don't worry, it's going to be resurrected. Don't worry, we can do something about this. Oh,
we're going to fix this. First response is to be like, this is called suffering. This is called
pain. Let's cry. Let's cry. Let's weep over this. This is not how it's meant to be.
All answers are going to be hollow if you don't learn to cry like Jesus. And as it turns out, Your
body's meant to do it. It's kind of fascinating, right, that we cry externally at our eyes where
everybody's looking. It binds us to each other. It shows that we are hurting and other people
notice it. I mean, you know, every time I write about this or talk about it, even right now, I'm
like, I kind of want to cry because I need it. I need it. And you were meant to.
So everybody needs to learn it. Everybody needs to learn to lament. And then you need to get to the
work on gardening your body and hope for the resurrection. It is a softening and it's so
fascinating. It's a physical softening that leads to an emotional and kind of mental release
because it is that tears is that release of I can't I can't solve it. That's kind of the whole
point. Yes. I have to to grieve it. What would you say as we wind down here,
Justin, for the person listening who whose body is. tired or anxious or maybe numb,
what would you hope they most understand? You've given us so many gems,
but just speaking to that person now, what do you hope they most understand about how God meets us
through the body?
I like to sum it up like this, and I put it in every chapter in the book, that your habits won't
change God's love for you, but God's love for you should change your habits. And that's it.
And applied, that means right where you are right now and all your brokenness and all your struggle
and your suffering, God loves you. He's redeemed you. He has no questions in his mind about how
much he loves you, how carefully he made you, and what he's going to do with your future in life.
You have a lot of questions, but he doesn't. He loves you. And you can't change that. This is the
wonderful doctrine of grace, of justification by faith alone. saved by any of this but a real if
you believe that if you agree and amen with everything i just said you have something to do you
have something to do god's love for you should change your habits and that's the most hopeful non
-legalistic thing i could ever tell you because it's the reality the beautiful reality that god has
called you into agency over your body he's called you to garden it Which means you have the
delightful ability to get to work, to go do something. You are not stuck with the depression you
have right now. You're just not. If you think you are, you're actually believing a plain lie from
the enemy. And it might be a spiritual attack or it might be a doctor who told you, you know,
you're just like this. But you're not. God has built the grace of neuroplasticity into your brain,
which is kind of the coolest thing ever. You're not stuck with the patterns you have, the brain you
have, the addictions you have. He wants to change you, mind, body, soul. And that is such good
news. So I would just invite you, rooted in that love of God, to get to work,
start the gardening process. And the body teaches the soul is hopefully a really practical primer
on how to do that. It really is. And I love that you start with the breath because that is
literally the next, you know, that is something we can all. do. And it is so powerful.
It is such a practical book. It's just so well organized and structured and accessible and grounded
in biblical and theological wisdom, but just such practical takeaways.
Tell my listeners where they can find your work and this book in particular,
but also some of the other things you've put out into the world. They're all really, really great.
Oh, thank you. You can... Go one of two directions. You can go to my website,
which is justinwitmoreearly.com. Very Google-able. Justin Early, author, lawyer. We'll get you
there. And because, by the way, we didn't talk about this in the conversation. I still practice
law. Sitting in my law desk right now, taking a break between client meetings. But you can find my
website there. Join my email list if you kind of want to follow along, long form. And all my books
are listed on the website. I also do post on Instagram. So you're welcome to follow me at Justin
Wentmore Early. And I post a lot of short form habits for parenting, spiritual disciplines,
body teaches the soul stuff like we just talked about. I mentioned in my story that I wrote about
spiritual disciplines before I ever got to physical disciplines. So if you go on my website,
you can see earlier works on spiritual disciplines for everyday workers. Spiritual disciplines for
parents spiritual disciplines for friend groups But this one the body teaches the soul is really on
physical disciplines is particularly for mental health We were talking before we started recording
about being bivocational, and I really appreciate that because you work. I mean,
you're a dad and you're a full-time attorney, and you are living these truths that you write about
and speak about. They're really coming from, it's not like you're sitting around, you have to put
this into practice in very real circumstances. And it's a great gift to me.
I'm sitting here at my desk. I'm the CEO and one of the founding partners of our law firm. It's
called a vote illegal. If you want to go look it up, we do all kinds of law. And this is not an
advertisement, but we work with regular people. I help people buy and sell companies. I help people
write contracts. I'm a business lawyer. My partners do all kinds of litigation and employment law
and all this stuff. But that means I live in a realm where I'm not paid to go think about.
I don't know, having a quiet time for two or three hours. I'm not a missionary anymore in that
sense. You're in the real world. And that is no shade on anybody in full-time ministry.
We need you. We need your writings, and we need you to be spiritually healthy, so go do it. But I
sort of sit in a place where my readers are more or less like me. They're wrestling through how
hard it is to be a young parent. My boys are between 7 and 14 right now.
It's tiring. I wrestled through running a law firm and making payroll next month and getting
clients. And that's hard on your mental health. And so all of this stuff for me is born out of I
need to be a healthy human body and I need to be a healthy spiritual being,
which is to say I need to be a healthy soul. If I'm going to be a good CEO of Avoto Legal, if I'm
going to have anything worth writing about, I have to guard in my body and my mind to bring it to
the task. And lots of us. forget we think we'll give it all to our kids you know we'll serve them
and we're trying to do a good thing but your kids need a mentally healthy mom you know your kids
need a dad who's not a workaholic and by the way those are the two things i struggle with being
mentally unhealthy and being a workaholic so i i don't i don't write about anything i'm not deeply
struggling with so if you read my works you're going to read about the struggle not about the
idealized version of how this happens yeah it's just a really like you said we need all different
types of people but it is a really unique angle that you bring and um just such a grounded in in
like you said just a very full life um this is for everybody oh it's full my main struggle right
now is uh How to not live a super unhealthy life doing two jobs,
writing, lawyering, while writing about a healthy life. Oh, boy. The irony is not lost on my wife
and I. It's hard. But I do believe, and I told you this before we started recording,
Allison, I really do believe the Lord has called me to this because I think it's that place of
struggle. How do you do this well that gives me anything to write about in the first place? So if
anybody wants to follow along. I'll be posting on my website, and I'll be lawyering at a vote
illegal, and you can watch me in the struggle. But I'm going to speak to you out of the struggle,
not out of the perfection. I love it. That's the best we can do is just honor it. Honor it honestly
and openly and with our bodies, you know. Yes, yes, absolutely. For me,
the open hands is one of the most just reminding, oh, you know, it goes with the breath,
the open hands. It does. It really helps, the physicalization of that. I'll tack this one on right
to the end. I was always a little bit, I grew up Presbyterian. I was a little bit nervous to open
hands and lift hands because I was like, I don't know, it's performative, it's a fad. And then I
learned all this stuff about the body and how your mind changes. You're more open. You actually are
in posture of reception. You learn better. And I was like, oh, I need to get my body to the work of
worship. All right, let's put the hands up. It's really changed me. It's a good habit.
I really love that framing. It is. And by the way, that's chapter 9 in the book,
how you need to worship differently at church because of your body. Whoa, okay.
That's a good teaser. Well, thank you, Justin, for your time, and we wish you all the best as you
head back into the rest of your day. And pray that this conversation goes with you. And we're just
so grateful for what you're putting into the world. And we're glad to be here with you in
partnership in this work of soul mending and soul tending. Thank you, Allison. It's been a delight.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you
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