Your Body, My Temple

Story:

I never believed my body was anything sacred. It was just a thing I carried around, like a bag holding the important parts of me: my thoughts, my music, my dreams. I ignored its aches, dismissed its beauty, and silenced its voice whenever it cried for rest.

Until I met him.

He wasn’t a preacher or a guru. He didn’t talk about chakras or energy or soul alignment. He was a cellist. Quiet, soft-spoken, with the kind of presence that made you feel like he truly saw you, even when you weren’t performing.

We met at a music retreat in the countryside, surrounded by silence and trees. On the second day, I found myself sitting next to him during breakfast, coffee warming my hands, my voice still raw from singing all night.

“You sing like you’re trying to get out of your own body,” he said softly.

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It’s beautiful,” he added quickly. “But it’s like… you’re escaping. Like your voice wants to live somewhere else.”

No one had ever said something like that to me before. And for some reason, it stuck.

That night, I stood in the field behind the retreat center and listened. Really listened — not just to the trees or the wind, but to myself. My breathing. My heartbeat. The way my body felt as I stood still for once.

And I realized: I had never thanked it. Not once.

My voice had taken me to stages and studios, but my body had carried me there. My lungs had shaped every note. My ribs had expanded for each phrase. My knees had held me up under pressure. And I had treated it like a rented house I didn’t plan to stay in.

The next morning, I began something new.

I started singing not to escape my body — but to honor it.

Each breath became a gift. Each note, a form of worship. My vibrato was no longer a trembling of fear but a shimmer of reverence.

I wrote a song called “My Temple”. It wasn’t for performance. It wasn’t meant for anyone else. I wrote it as a hymn to myself.

The first verse went like this:

I used to run from every bone,

From every scar and every tone.

But now I see the grace inside —

This body’s not a cage, it’s wide.

The chorus was simpler:

Your body is your temple,

Your soul’s quiet home.

Let it breathe, let it tremble —

You are not alone.

He heard it one morning when I was rehearsing alone in the garden. I didn’t know he was listening.

“You found it,” he said when I turned and saw him.

“Found what?”

“Your voice. The one that lives inside your skin.”

I smiled. It was the first time I truly believed my voice belonged where it was — not floating somewhere above me, but rooted, grounded in this body that had always been trying to love me.

Weeks passed. Then months. I returned to the city. Life resumed its ordinary rhythm: gigs, rehearsals, rejections, applause. But something fundamental had changed. I no longer punished my body for being tired. I no longer wished it looked different. I listened to it.

One day, during a recording session, the producer stopped the track halfway through.

“Whatever you’re doing today,” he said, “keep doing it. There’s truth in it. It feels... holy.”

I smiled to myself.

That word again: holy.

Not perfect. Not flawless. Just sacred. Human.

Because there’s something sacred about showing up in your own skin — about singing not in spite of your body, but through it, with it, for it.

Months later, I saw the cellist again at another music festival.

We played together onstage for the first time — just a voice and a cello. No tricks. No filters.

After the performance, he handed me a folded piece of paper. Inside was a drawing: a temple, open-roofed, and in the center, a heart pulsing with light. In delicate letters, he had written:

“Every note you sing builds a home for someone else’s spirit.”

I keep that drawing on my wall now.

On the days when I feel tired, bloated, stretched thin — when I forget that this skin is sacred, that these lungs are miracles — I look at it. I place my hand over my chest, feel the rhythm of my own living temple, and I sing.

Not to escape.

But to return home.

SHOHEL RANA