Skin Deep: A Summer Reflection on Illness, Pleasure, and Healing

Skin as sacred boundary, tender message, and sensual threshold of healing.

What Is Skin, Really?

Skin is the body’s largest organ, the visible and tactile frontier between the inner and the outer world. It protects, senses, breathes, and expresses. Skin keeps our organs in place, holds moisture in, keeps invaders out. It sweats, shivers, scars, and heals. It wrinkles with time and glows with health. It is, quite literally, our interface, the membrane through which we touch and are touched, both physically and emotionally.

But skin is never just skin. It is deeply symbolic: a canvas of identity and memory. Our skin tells stories: of age, ancestry, experience. It blushes with embarrassment, pales with fear, and warms with pleasure. We speak of having "thick skin" or being "thin-skinned." We "crawl out of our skin" with discomfort, or feel "comfortable in our own skin." The language itself reveals how intimately we equate skin with emotion and selfhood.

Spiritually, skin is the sacred boundary of incarnation, the veil between the soul and the world. To be in skin is to be human, embodied, vulnerable. It is through skin that we feel, literally feel, the wind, the sun, the kiss, the wound. Skin is the threshold between the invisible and the seen. It teaches us about separation and connection. It reminds us that, although we may each be wrapped in our own distinct body, we are constantly brushing up against each other’s existence.

In many traditions, shedding skin, like a snake, symbolises transformation, rebirth, or release. Skin becomes a metaphor for what we outgrow and what we must leave behind in order to step into a new phase of self. And yet, we never leave all skin behind. We always carry this boundary, this blessing, this sacred container of sensation and soul.

Living with Psoriasis

Now I have psoriasis. A skin disease.

Experiencing psoriasis means living with a chronic, autoimmune skin condition in which my immune system mistakenly accelerates the life cycle of skin cells. This results in raised, itchy, inflamed patches often covered with silvery-white or scaly plaques, the most common form, plaque psoriasis, affecting areas like the elbows, knees, scalp, and lower back, though flare‑ups may appear anywhere on the body.

There is no cure, but treatments such as topical creams, phototherapy, biologics, or lifestyle adjustments can help manage symptoms and support remission periods.

On a symbolic and emotional level, psoriasis can be seen as a powerful metaphor for defence, separation, and transformation. Spiritually, the skin forms the boundary between my internal world and the outside, a place of contact and of armour. Some traditions describe psoriasis as an overactive layer of skin produced as cuirass when one feels attacked, criticised, or emotionally vulnerable, erecting a thick protective shell that shields but also isolates.

In much the same way, emotional-empathic body‑mind frameworks describe psoriasis as emerging from fear, fear of hurt, separation, or rejection, leading the soul to harden the surface to prevent further wounding, yet paradoxically blocking tenderness and intimacy.

For me, living with psoriasis has meant armouring up in order to survive. Yet this armour is not fixed… It flares, subsides, and sometimes sheds, echoing the spiritual possibility of transformation: to shed hardened layers, heal wounds, and soften into receptivity once more.

Integrating the physical, the symbolic, and the spiritual, psoriasis invites me into a deeper dialogue with my skin, as boundary, as shield, as message. It calls me to explore what defences have formed to protect my soul, and what fears these defences hint at.

The Season of Sensation

Summer is the season when skin remembers its wildness. When layers fall away and warmth wraps around us like a lover’s whisper. The sun kisses shoulders, thighs, collarbones — parts of us that spent months hidden now stretch toward light like blooming petals. The air itself turns into a caress, brushing bare arms and ankles with a slow, delicious confidence. There’s something primal about it. We don’t just walk through summer: we wear it.

With heat comes sweat, not shameful, but sacred. A reminder that we are animal, alive, pulsing with water and salt. Skin glistens. We feel ourselves, truly feel, again. When we swim, water becomes silk and ceremony. Whether it's a river, the sea, or a garden hose, that first immersion is baptism and surrender. Skin, buoyed and tingling, drinks in the sensation, every nerve ending wide open. This is not just refreshment; it’s communion.

Then there’s the ground. To lie in grass, on warm rocks, on sandy earth, to press one’s skin against the body of the world, is to remember that we are not separate. Skin absorbs the heat of the day, the stories of soil, the pulse of the planet. Lying under stars or clouds, we are wild again, cosmic again, completely here. Every breeze, every ant trail, every distant bird call becomes part of the symphony playing across our surface.

To feel the season this way is a ritual. Skin is not just a boundary: it is a gateway. A living altar where sun, breeze, water, and earth make offerings. And the body, holy and whole, says yes.

Choosing Wholeness

In summer, I find myself touching my skin more, not in critique, but in quiet celebration. I trace the curve of my shoulder, the length of my arm, the softness of my belly, not to judge or change, but simply to feel. The sun has warmed me into presence. My skin is golden in places, freckled in others, and it carries stories, yes, but also a softness I’m learning to cherish. There’s a kind of sensual intimacy that summer invites, a permission to enjoy myself in my skin, here and now, without apology.

And in that tender, slow, reverent touch I make a choice. A conscious one. To focus not on what aches or flakes or flares up, but on what is working, what is glowing, what is alive. Wellness, for me, is no longer a fixed destination but a practice of attention. A whisper of wholeness that I return to again and again, especially on the days when the old voices of illness want to be louder. I choose to notice what is well, the breath that moves, the feet that walk, the skin that feels, and let that noticing become a kind of prayer.

I am learning to celebrate what is not as a consolation prize, but as the very first step in the art of becoming. Gratitude isn’t passive. It’s magnetic. When I name what is already good, this sensitive beautiful skin, this easy breath, this moment of joy under the sun… I open the door for more to arrive. I anchor myself in now, in sensation, in truth. I say: look, this body is not broken. This life is not lacking. This skin, this day, this self, they are already radiant. And from here, from this place of enoughness, miracles begin to bloom.

I’d love to hear how this lands for you. Does your skin tell stories too? Leave a comment. I always read them.

So much for today …

See you soon, for my next online adventures!

Until then I send you love, light and gratitude.

Isaya

PS: if you want to read more about that topic… https://isayabelle.com/unweaving-weight-and-skin-disease