The 45 Project, part 8: Befriending My Body
Catching up with a friend on the phone the other day, she asked me: how is your body? She was asking about my recovery from fibroid surgery earlier in the year, but the question stopped me in my tracks. How is my body? It’s a question that I’ve only even learned to ask myself in the last 5 years. Most of my life, I’ve either ignored, hated, or been in active warfare with my body.
When I was a little girl, I remember feeling strong, powerful, fast in my body — I loved to run, to race my friends, to beat them with my longer legs and then eventually to be humbled by the superior speed of the older kids.
When I entered middle school, a time when many girls lose their self-confidence — seriously, is any era of life worse than middle school??? — I had my first experience with being deeply critical of my body, with wanting it to be different than it was. I was one of the only Black kids in the magnet program at my school, and one of the only Black kids in my immediate neighborhood for that matter — my parents had gotten a great deal on the smallest house in a neighborhood with great schools, and that was the trade-off. I studied the popular kids, the golden ones — blonde, pale, skinny — because they seemed so utterly happy. I judged all the things about me that were different from them: my curly frizzy hair, my freckles, my dark elbows and knees, my skin. I could buy the right shoes and jeans and even learn to say the right things, but I couldn’t ever really belong with them, and any look in the mirror could tell me the truth of that. In high school I read a lot of books about what it means to be Black in America, and the only words I have for the experience: I woke up. I learned to see the system around me that tried to teach me there was something wrong with me, learned to recognize and fight the conditioning and the internalized racism that planted self-doubt. To this day, I still believe that consciousness, waking up, is the key to our freedom, because of how powerful it was in my own life.
In college a new dimension of criticizing my body emerged, when I gained a lot of weight — as one does — but couldn’t lose it quickly the way so many others did once they calibrated. In the years since, I’ve lost and gained the same 30 pounds with a variety of strategies and struggles, and the accompanying self-judgment. I’ve wasted a lot of energy in anguish over the number on the scale — and when I look back at pictures of myself when I thought I was so overweight, I can see that I was still beautiful and just couldn’t see it. The deepest, most holistic weight loss programs teach you that you have to learn to love your body as it is before you can change it sustainably, which honestly seemed like a cruel joke for many years. I found it so easy to blame my body, even as I asked it to literally carry the weight of my choices and my unhealed pain.
When I wasn’t hating my body for not being perfectly slim thick, I was ignoring it. In my workaholic years, my body was simply a vehicle for carrying me to my meetings. If it was hungry, if it was tired, if it had to pee — who cares? There was work to do. It was my work vs. my body, and my work always won. I developed a superhuman ability to hold it for hours when I had to go to the bathroom, and a subhuman disconnection from my most basic responsibility to take care of myself. I remember taking an online course on self-awareness during that time, and as the facilitator guided us through meditations about our feelings and thoughts she would sometimes ask “where do you feel that in your body?” I remember thinking: what the fuck does my body have to do with it? I don’t feel things in my body. That’s a dead place. We don’t go there.
In December of 2012, 10 years ago this week, I went to my first yoga class. I was experiencing epic levels of work stress, and I’d decided to use my week off at Christmas to try different stress management strategies (looking back I can only roll my eyes at how I used a work tactic to try to solve the problem of work-life imbalance, and did it on my only break). I went to a meditation class, an art class, and a yoga class. I only even agreed to go to a yoga class in the first place because everyone kept suggesting it, and I wanted to be able to tell them that I’d tried it and didn’t like it. I was sure it was not for me, given every image I’d ever seen about it featured a tiny White woman. To my surprise, I did like it. I loved it. I started to crave it, going every day of the week that I could fit it into my schedule. I could write a whole separate piece about all the dimensions of what yoga has meant to me, but what it did for my relationship to my body was introduce gratitude — my body was strong, and flexible, and capable of doing this thing that was so good for me — and alone on my mat without my two phones and anyone else’s expectations I could experience actual peace, actual acceptance.
Five years later, when I burned out and put myself on sabbatical, I went to a yoga therapy class where the teacher said that our bodies communicate with us and we could learn to listen to them. I told her after class that I didn’t think my body would be willing to communicate with me anymore, after the way I’d treated it. She said as long as I could still tell when I was sleepy or had to go to the bathroom, not to give up hope.
So I practiced listening. For the first time in my life, I cultivated a relationship with my body. And it turned out that my body did actually have things to say. It doesn’t communicate in the comfortable language of my mind, but it does speak. In fact it has strong opinions. I learned specific exercises for discerning what yes or no feels like in my body from Martha Beck and LiYana Silver, and I discovered others from my own exploration.
In the moment when I decided to become trained as a yoga therapist myself, I felt a huge swell rise up into my chest, like a burst of fizzy iridescent champagne bubbles. In the moment when I considered giving a guy I’d met online a second chance after a series of red flags, my lower back started seizing up. Just last month, in the moment when I was considering whether to re-do my website for good reasons even though it hadn’t been in my plans, I asked my body and it is the one who said yes, and who turned out to be right. (Link in bio! I love it so much.)
It’s become incredibly important to me to trust my body, to listen to my body, to prioritize what my body needs. After so long as a poor steward, I want to make sure my body knows I’m trustworthy now. And it’s particularly poignant in this fertility journey, when I’m asking it to undergo all manner of things to try to get pregnant. Then I’ll ask it to carry a baby (which seems kind of crazy to me even though I know it’s how we all get here). Then I’ll ask it to start parenting in ripe middle age. What does it need to do that? Can I put it first and make sure it gets it? Is it ready and willing?
So how is my body? Tired, but catching up — feeling more rested by the day, but also yearning for more nights of long, deep, uninterrupted sleep before the rush of the new year begins. Achy and tight from not sticking to my morning routine of yoga. Heavy from the extra weight of pandemic years, of getting too sedentary, of the blessing of a husband who loves to cook. But still strong. Still capable. Still alive. Still ready to move with me, still willing to try again, still open to a new beginning. Still here.
One of those weight loss programs I participated in years ago coached us to create an affirmation that could shape our relationship with our bodies. Here is mine:
Every day, my body gives me everything I need to be and move in the world. Every breath is made possible by the miracle of life, and contains all its possibilities. My body holds a universe, and its magic carries me through and into life and toward my purpose. My body is the vehicle that lets me walk, talk, think, feel, learn, sing, dance, laugh, love, and live live to the fullest. It endured years of my benign neglect and active loathing and still: it came back to me. It holds all my memories, including the consequences of all my beliefs and life choices, and still: it always does its best for me. It knows everything and never lies. It guides me true. It wants to show me all the beautiful things the world has to offer. I am very grateful for my body, and will accept it, respect it, and love it 100% each day.
This is part of a monthly series, The 45 Project, reflecting on my first 45 years — find the first seven installments here.
