I first heard about Body Worlds a few years ago and immediately wanted to go.
I was curious to see what the body looks like beyond the skin. More than that, I hoped it would help me loosen my hold on the body. I wanted it to help me see past it and become less attached to it.
A friend kept an eye out for its return to London. Yesterday I finally went.
I didn’t get the detachment I was looking for. Instead, what I got was a valuable surprise.
The displays and the surprise that came with it
One display stayed with me. I fondly remember it as the skateboarder. You could see the muscles, ligaments and bones working together in a single frozen moment of movement. It was beautiful and strangely intimate. Looking at it, I felt both awe at the body’s intelligence and a quiet recognition of how tightly I still hold onto my own.
Most of the displays didn’t just show anatomy. They kept linking the body back to the mind. The plaques kept referring to how the two are connected. For example, they referred to how our mood affects the body, how constant stress leaves a physical mark, how movement, food, purpose and even the belief that “we are not our genes” shape what happens inside us. I had assumed the exhibition would be purely about the physical body. It turned out to be far more emotional and thought-provoking than I imagined.
Since having Long Covid, I have learnt about the nervous system and vagus nerve, amongst other things, so it was particularly interesting for me to see these issues being referred to in the labels.
Miracles
Another section that wowed me was seeing the journey of an embryo to a child. I have often thought of it as a miraculous thing, but seeing the stages of development made that feeling even stronger. Connected to this, there was a display that showed how lucky we were to be born.
There’s a large panel showing a huge number of grains of rice. Each grain of rice represents one sperm cell, and although they all tried, only one of them successfully fertilised the egg and led to the ‘you’ in the title of this exhibit: Lucky You.
It shows that we are a statistical miracle! If a different sperm cell had arrived just a millisecond sooner or later, a completely different person would be standing in my place! Our existence isn’t standard. It’s a win against impossible odds. We didn’t just win a race; we won a lottery where the ticket was 1 in 300 million. This made me think of the Nigod. Jainism describes it as a space where uncountable Souls exist, and their sole chance of escaping this place occurs when another Soul attains Moksha. That’s when they win the lottery and leave Nigod! The display in the exhibition helped me visualise this.
I left without the detachment I thought was a dead cert, but what I took with me was a reminder about how the mind and body are deeply connected. Surprisingly, I also have a deeper value of the body. More below. 🙂
Where do I stand with the body now?
This exhibition also made me realise the importance of the body. Now, I know that this may sound like the complete opposite of what I wanted, but it isn’t. It is when the Soul leaves Nigod that it works its way up through the one-, two-, three-, four- and five-sense beings, after which it enters the realm of humans, which is where we can make the spiritual progress that’s needed for liberation. Therefore, this body is hugely important and needs to be looked after, but one doesn’t have to be attached to the human body even though it’s the key to attaining Moksha.
Therefore, I will continue working on cultivating detachment. I want to avoid getting distracted by positive and negative experiences involving the body, the senses, and the mind, and instead, utilise this body and this birth to progress spiritually
If you go…
Where is it? BODY WORLDS in London, UK until March 21, 2027
We were welcomed by our host, who gave us directions and information about the exhibition, including the number of rooms, length of time, do’s and don’ts. She said we could see the entire exhibition in 1 hour. It took us 2.5 hours, and we resorted to photographing some of it instead of reading it there.
Visitors are allowed to take photos. In fact, they encourage us to do so.
Why have they talked about happiness? They recognise what many people don’t. They know that emotions have a direct physical basis in human anatomy and a deep impact on overall health.
Who made this exhibition possible? The German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented plastination in 1977 at the University of Heidelberg.
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