Body Politic

I just want to feel good. Don’t we all? I am trying to come to terms with all the years that I didn’t feel good. In my upbringing in conservative Christianity, i adopted the belief that the body was inherently sinful, that it was something I had to deny in order to attain a level of holiness and purity. That messaging, along with a few close people in my life making disparaging comments about my body, as a child and teenager, set the stage for years of body shame. My body took center stage. I remember being an 11 year old who attempted to restrict my food intake for weeks before going on a Disney Cruise with my family. I remember being a gymnast and a figure skater who scoured food packaging for calorie counts and felt guilty for eating more than half a bagel after church on Sundays. I wonder sometimes if this belief in the wrongness of my body set the stage for autoimmunity. I wonder if my myriad food intolerances came as a result of all the stress that feeling so much guilt and shame surrounding eating produced.

I tried desperately to control the size and shape of my body through food intake. I felt desperate to influence the opinions of others, to make them love me more through manipulating my body in an attempt to be beautiful. It felt like a hopeless enterprise, and when something feels hopeless, you feel controlled by your belief that nothing will change and so you support the belief that you are bad by fueling behaviors that make you feel bad. Living in a culture that tells women that they are only as valuable as they are beautiful and that they can and should change by spending endless amounts of money on products promising to change them or subscribing to restrictive, dogmatic, and misguided food guidelines, only fuels our belief that somehow we are inherently not right as we are. That’s what we are sold. That becomes the house we live in. That was the house I lived in and still have to consciously choose against.

Our lives are far more than our bodies and our beauty. But, our bodies are the vehicle that house our souls, our intellect, our hearts and our desires and those things matter. We are here to contribute unique gifts that only we can. That’s why learning to feel good in our bodies, these vehicles that allow us to experience our lives and to make a contribution is, I believe, of the utmost importance. As much as I grieve the years that at times feel lost, swallowed up by chronic illness and body shame, I also bow to those very things, because they have given me a mission. I feel more than ever, that learning to support ourselves, learning to really truly feel good in our skin, learning to become embodied, here and now, not distracted, not in denial, but present to the realities that we are facing both personally and collectively is paramount. If we want to thrive now, to experience joy, pleasure, community, intimacy, connection and purpose, and to make it possible that future generations can inhabit this planet and experience the same, befriending our bodies and loving them, feeding them, nourishing them, nurturing them, and honoring them as the incredible vessels they are is the best place to begin.