Women at War With Their Bodies
The moment she said it, something shifted in me.
I was fairly new to yoga, so I wasn’t used to wise instructors’ words resonating so deeply.
“Thank your body for all it does for you every day.”
“Thank my body?” I thought to myself. It felt so odd to me. No one had ever invited me to thank my body for what it does. I never considered thanking my body at all.
Then and there, however, I began to think about my body, my embodied self, in new ways. I also began to realize the layered relationship I had with my body. I began to consider that I had a relationship with my body, period.
Throughout the first several decades of my life, I had been taught via popular culture, advertising, and diet culture what my body should look like, what exercises I should do, or food I should restrict to change my body. What had resulted was a very critical, judgmental, and harsh relationship.
So, when someone invited me to thank my body, you can imagine how alien it felt to me. My body had not suddenly met all of the goals I had imposed upon it, so why thank it?
More yoga sessions came and went and steadily the small shift that began with that first wise instructor gave way to seismic shifts in my mind and also in my heart, strangely enough.
I began relating with my embodied self with a heart of compassion and gratitude. I steadily moved away from my body’s “goodness” being defined by a broken, unrealistic cultural standard to its “goodness” being defined by its mere existence, its remarkable steadfastness.
I started to consider things like my breath. My heart beat.
No morning do I wake up and say, “start breathing” or “heart, start beating.” Those things are simply gifted to me without me doing anything. So far, I have the gift to walk, to dance, to sing without any particular conjuring on my part.
If you are like me and have ever sat in the hospital with a loved one where something isn’t working right or a host of things aren’t working right, it’s a bit easier to recognize the complexity of our bodies. And the miracle that all of those complex parts somehow work together to sustain us. Every second of every day.
Don’t get me wrong; I am still on this journey.
In America, we are inundated with messages and media that taint our relationships with our bodies. So, it’s hard to work toward compassion and gratitude when being directly and indirectly coaxed toward aesthetic “perfection.” Furthermore, these same mediums seek to convince us that the closer to “perfection” we appear, the healthier, happier, and more socially viable we will be.
In this way, compassion and gratitude for our bodies are rather counter cultural.
I think we are all up against these currents as women and my hope would be that I not go this journey alone.
Thankfully there are some wise women who are a little further down the road, brave people like Hillary L. McBride who remind me that our bodies are so good, various yoga instructors who have taught me the art of self-compassion, women like Christy Harrison who have taught me about the reality and perils of diet culture, advocates like Jean Kilbourne who teach me the sneaky and powerful effects of advertising on body image standards, and wise people like my mom who constantly model a deeper beauty.
Long story short, what we think about beauty matters.
It changes our relationship with ourselves, with our bodies, and even the world around us. If our sacred and beautiful minds are busied with how we do or don’t measure up with aesthetic “perfection,” we will assuredly miss out on so much. The miracle of our bodies. The miracle of life.
Will you be brave enough to make some shifts toward compassion and gratitude in your life? Toward yourself, toward your body. The “beauty” and the “perfection” we are being sold is flawed and so very broken. Will you join me in shifting the current, so it doesn’t feel like such a fight against all of the unhelpful cultural messages and such a fight against our bodies that are indeed very good.
Are you tired of being sold a broken brand of beauty?
The brand of beauty we are so often sold as women is way too small. It divides and dis-integrates us. I am on a mission to expand and re-discover beauty, authentic beauty. I believe beauty is the life of God at work in us and among us. Will you join me in exploring that kind of beauty?
Sign up and follow along on my journey. Let’s re-define beauty. Together.