You cannot hide your body, nor can you hide from your body. Whether you perceive yourself to be able bodied or not, fat, thin, strong, weak, flexible, stiff, healthy or lacking in health, your body is an intimate part of your person and your soul.
How easy are you in your embodiment? How confident in your motion or your stillness? How compassionate are you with your pain and how much honor do you offer your abilities?
We try to shrink or grow ourselves according to cultural fads. We try to mask perceived flaws. Too tall? We ruin our spines with stooping. Too short? We ruin our knees with heels. Too old? Too young? Uncomfortable with assigned gender role presentations?
On and on, our list of discomfort or even failure grows. On and on, self-loathing leads to harm: to our psyches, our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies, and to ourselves, our children, and our friends.
Today, I want better for us. Today, I want some body love.
No one way of acting, moving, eating or of self-presentation is wrong. What I am writing of here is, as always, relationship. Is it time to apologize, step up, or renegotiate? Because we sure as hell can’t break up with ourselves. What choices can we make? Choosing is a powerful act of magic. Liberation starts with every spoonful eaten, and every movement made. Our bodies are not machines to house our spirits. Body is a part of soul.
Your body is not your enemy, in fact, your body is yourself.
Be well.
(photo of Alexandra Beller by Robert Maxwell)