Filled with Awe
People – mainly women – sometimes ask me what could help shift their relationship with their bodies. “I only think I’m attractive or lovable when I look a certain way,” they say. Or, “I’m distracted by thoughts on how my body looks, and then I can’t get turned on, much less enjoy sex.”
It makes sense. We live in a society that deems very specific bodies (young, lean, taut, smooth) worthy of love and pleasure. Even if we’ve worked hard to love the skin we’re in, we’re surrounded by predatory opportunities – social media, the glossy covers of magazines at the grocery store – for comparison. Few of us are immune.
“It’s a hard one,” I find myself saying to these women, knowing they will likely be unsatisfied by my, “I’m with you,” response. There is no silver bullet here. Changing your relationship with your body to one of love and appreciation and rendering yourself inhospitable to the expectations of dominant culture is a daily practice. It will likely involve staying away from the places where you are force fed images that reinforce expectations while also cultivating a relationship with your own body that comes from the inside out. A relationship that has you inhabiting your body rather than only ever looking at it.
One thing that has been instrumental in shifting my own relationship with my body is actually seeing other women’s bodies. Real women, in the flesh, right in front of my eyes. Women without lighting techniques, makeup, posing or positioning, and certainly without airbrushing or post-production of any kind. Women going about the mundane tasks of changing their clothes at the gym, telling stories, laughing, making coffee.
Through my work as a Somatic Sex Educator and faculty of the Verdant Collective, I have the honor of seeing and touching the bodies of women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors, and of hearing and holding their stories and experiences. As I witness these women in their totality, I cannot help but fall in love with each and every one of them. I am filled with awe at what women carry in their skin and in their hearts, and at the variety of sensation and pleasure available; their bodies exquisitely beautiful and precious because of their capacity to do, create, birth, feel, express, and experience.
Witnessing women in this way created an unexpected feedback loop. I began to see myself the way that I see other women: precious, beautiful, tangible, and whole. Not because I happen to fit into our society’s beauty standards, but because I was no longer relating with myself as an image or an object, but a living, breathing being, with a story.
I want to be real with you here: I’m not cured. The work is not done. There are parts of my body that I would like to wave a magic wand and change, and days when I feel annoyingly distracted by my appearance, seeking out my reflection to check and make sure everything is in the right place. What’s different is that I have a different culture to lean back into that sees me and all women as more than the sum of our parts.
One place to participate in and infuse yourself with this kind of culture is our upcoming camping immersion, Taking Our Bodies Back, September 9th – 12th, 2021.
