Hello lovely friends!

Today I’m delighted to introduce to you Alisa Keeton, whose latest book, The Body Revelation, provided me with revitalizing insights into how to use times of both stillness and motion to process the hurts of life. Thanks to what I’ve learned, I’ve become much more intentional about naming what my body is feeling, and what my mind is thinking, especially as I move. And this has resulted in increased intimacy with God, and therefore greater joy.

Alisa is joining us for a glimpse behind the book, and some quick Qs for us to get to know her a bit as well.

Behind the book

Q. Alisa, welcome! The subtitle of your book—Physical and Spiritual Practices to Metabolize Pain, Banish Shame, and Connect to God with Your Whole Self—tells readers that The Body Revelation offers something unique in addressing body-dissatisfaction issues. Can you unpack that a bit for us here?

A. Seeing more mental health books written from a  biblical worldview is great. But many of these books only address the issue cognitively, as if more talk about our issues can help. As helpful as talking about our hurts and personal hang-ups can be, we need something more. Before we had words to describe the world, we had a body teaching us. Before we have words to explain our thoughts or feelings, we have a body experiencing the world around us. Our bodies talk to our minds and our minds talk to our bodies. Healing happens on a two-way street.

At Revelation Wellness and in the book The Body Revelation I address the hurt we carry in our bodies in a way that is “bottom up.” People come to us about their body concerns, whether it be poor health or weight they feel like they need to lose, and we meet them right where they are in whatever condition they find themselves in. And we gently guide them to get moving in a way that is gentle and successful for them.

After thirty-plus years of helping people improve their physical health, I have noticed that something special happens when people get moving. When people are moving or shortly after, they are more likely to open up and share what they feel. Although I have no proof of why this happens, I have my biological scientific suspicions. When we move our bodies, we occupy the limbic portion of our brain, where our emotions are primarily experienced. When we occupy the body with some form of movement, I suspect that the higher parts of our brain, known as the medial prefrontal cortex, is more accessible since the brain stem and limbic portion of our brain is engaged with the body. This is why I ask people to not just read the book but to do the book, as each chapter includes some doable physical movement to help synthesize and apply what they just read. Information alone does not change a person. Information with emotion while doing something new creates change.

You can tell people all day long that their body is good and God made them very good. They can believe that conceptually in their head, but until it’s a lived out experience in their body the healing presence of God seems like just a concept when it’s meant to be a reality.

Q. Most readers are by now probably familiar with Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal studies on trauma, which he writes about in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Key concepts found in his book provide a springboard for much of what you talk about in The Body Revelation. You spend many chapters on this, but how would you summarize the pertinent connection?

A. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk shares that when a person lives through trauma (also called trouble or adversity), it doesn’t just happen to their mind. It co-occurs with their body because in a moment of adversity the body feels overwhelmed and unsafe to be. Since trouble affects our bodies and our bodies are always with us, we can feel unable to rest, let our guard down and be. When our bodies feel like an unsafe place to be, disassociation and cognitive dissonance are likely to occur to help us survive another day.

In John 16:33, Jesus tells us that in this world, we will have trouble. In my book, I pick up where van der Kolk chooses not to go. His book contains terrific insights and knowledge from a clinical perspective, but we are not God’s science experiments. We are His beloved children. Not a day has occurred that He hasn’t signed off. God knows the trouble we will live through and already has a plan in place for us to overcome and that plan begins by coming to Him.

In The Body Revelation I don’t give just clinical knowledge and research back practices on ways to heal. We take those precepts of truth in neuroscience and psychology and humble ourselves before the God who made our bodies and knows how they work. Knowledge and personal development without humility puts us at risk of thinking we do not need God. We risk spending time, money, and energy focused on fixing temporal things while the eternal matters of our heart that feed our sickness and dis-ease need attention for healing.

In The Body Revelation, we address our physical bodies through a biblical worldview that focuses on the unseen more than the seen.

Scientific and psychological truth does not heal, Jesus does. Jesus invites us to bring all we know to be true and what we have lived through in our bodies to Him. In bringing our whole mess to God, in humility, we can receive wholeness.

Q. I found one of the more surprising and helpful takeaways of The Body Revelation to be how God meant for our bodies to be our allies, not our enemies. You say, for instance, that “Getting in touch with your felt sense can help you befriend your body as the ally it is” (p. 97). Practically speaking, what does this look like in moments of stress?

A. In a moment of trouble (stress) the first thing we need to be able to do is recognize the moment we are in and the feelings we feel. If we are paying attention and in tune with our bodies, our bodies are often first to give us information and it shows up in a felt sense – what the emotion feels like in your body. For example, when in a heated moment, your teen talks back and says something their underdeveloped brain doesn’t mean, you might feel hot and tingly in your chest, or head. Other descriptive words for what an emotion feels like in your body, your felt sense, are: buzzy, airy, heavy, flooding, pulsing, achy, and ridged. The list goes on and on. I like to tell people the words to describe how you feel don’t have to be actual words. Feel free to make up words to convey your body’s felt sense. We are quick to reach for words as our weapon before we’ve even given ourselves a moment to feel what we feel. I like to tell people, “Don’t be rude to your feelings.”

Feelings, emotions, and felt sense are helpful to people who want to live whole. People who feel hurt know where to get their help and to go before a painful word is said and becomes the spark that causes a forest fire of pain to themselves or someone else they love.

Q. To me, celebrating beauty in the midst of brokenness means living a life that reflects a beautiful God, even when life is painful. How does this theme play out in The Body Revelation?

In The Body Revelation, I get pretty rowdy about the belief that the people of God can’t live according to what they see. We put a lot of stock in what we see. And we often see a lot of pain and brokenness, and our brains are hardwired to help us understand the world around us to keep us safe. To live a life reflecting a beautiful God, even when life is painful, our heart, mind, soul, and body need to look for the beauty we can see while asking, seeking, and knocking for more of His unseen Kingdom to come.

The righteous shall live by faith (Romans 1:17). And faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1). Satan, God’s enemy, hates beauty and makes it his job to break beautiful things. He makes messes and then tries to get us to blame it on God. This Evil One likes to keep us focused on what is going wrong, rather than seeing all the good that God is and does. Our bodies are good no matter what the world says. When we remain more confident of what we do not see rather than what we see, we build faith on the earth. And through the physicality of our bodies, we make the goodness and beauty of an unseen God seen.

Quick Qs

• FAVORITE PLACE TO WRITE – Anywhere with sunlight, allowing me to see outside. I also need to be able to get up every 40 minutes or so to move my body, stretch, bend and breathe.
• EARLY BIRD OR NIGHT OWL – early bird
• COFFEE OR TEA – Kombucha tea
• MOUNTAINS OR SEASIDE – Seaside. Any day, all day.
• FAVORITE WAY TO SPEND A FRIDAY NIGHT – A good meal that my husband and I ride our Vespa scooters to.
• ONE THING YOU LOVE ABOUT WHERE YOU LIVE – I love the desert’s dry, arid, and spacious beauty
• SECRET SUPERPOWER – Faith in God
• MOST MEMORABLE PLACE YOU’VE TRAVELED – One special night in NYC
• DREAM DESTINATION – Europe
• FICTION OR NONFICTION (ON YOUR NIGHTSTAND) – nonfiction. Too many to read, but I love and can’t stop buying them.
• CURRENTLY READING – A Body Of Praise by W. David O. Taylor
• ONE GOOD BOOK REC – What Happened To You? by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey
• ONE MEMORABLE MOVIE – The Shawshank Redemption
• AGE YOU CAME TO JESUS – 13
• ONE MEANINGFUL BIBLE VERSE – “Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your sou.” 3 John 1:2 ESV

Thank you, Alisa! 

About the book

Do you sometimes feel as though your body is a problem to solve? Discover how to make it part of the solution instead. It’s now known that the emotional and relational pain we’ve lived through has a profound negative physical effect on our bodies. Alisa Keeton, popular fitness professional, proposes that the reverse is also true: What we do with our bodies can have a dramatic positive effect on our emotions, relationships, and our connection with God. In The Body Revelation, she shows us how to use our bodies as a means of healing past pain and promoting physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

Too often, people of faith are taught to ignore, avoid, or forget our bodies, but Alisa reminds us that God calls our bodies good and cares about our pain. Offering a variety of physical and spiritual practices as well as stories from her own journey, Alisa

• walks us through six steps for metabolizing personal pain;
• shows us how understanding the mind/body/soul connection can help us make healthier choices;
• teaches us how to achieve well-being and live for more than a number on a scale, and more!

Other features of this book include:

• adverse childhood experiences questionnaire for helping you process past pain
• movement calendar
• food journal template

You can enrich your life, celebrate your body, and find holistic wellness. Journey alongside Alisa, and discover scientifically based, biblically-sound mind-body tools to forever change how you process pain so that you can experience emotional freedom, physical renewal, and spiritual transformation.

About the author

Alisa Keeton is a leading certified wellness professional with more than 20 years of experience. In 2011, Alisa launched Revelation Wellness, a nonprofit ministry that uses fitness as a tool to spread the gospel message and invites participants to become their whole selves, designed by God. Learn more about Alisa at alisakeeton.com and Revelation Wellness at revelationwellness.org.

Happy reading!

❤️ Katherine

Thanks to Tyndale Publishers for providing me a free copy of this book for review. All opinions are mine.