I have just completed a month-long Body Grievers body image course with the incredible Brianna Campos. It was an incredible group of women, all at different points on the path to body acceptance and body liberation.
One of the things that I noticed right away, was just how much suffering and distress can come up when our bodies don’t meet the supposed picture of health/wellness or beauty. I quickly came to realize that this truly is necessary work for ALL of us, not just those who are suffering the most.
So, after diving super deep in to body image work over the past month, here are three reasons that body image/body liberation work is important for ALL bodies:
Your body is constantly changing!
Believing that we can control our body creates suffering. Now, that doesn’t mean that we stop caring for ourselves. It just means that we care for ourselves without expecting that care to lead to a certain body shape/size, stop us from aging, or preventing us from every possible illness.
When we do the work of creating body image resilience and body liberation, we stop judging other’s bodies.
Weight bias/stigma is on equal levels with race bias/stigma in this country (or higher in some areas). That means that people in larger bodies are marginalized in similar ways to those in other marginilized bodies- larger-bodied folx are hired less often and for less money than straight-sized peers, receive poorer heath care from medical professionals, and are more often the victims of bullying, shaming and violence.
We, as a culture have been taught to fear living in a large/larger body, so often, by engaging in negative self-talk bout our own bodies, or the bodies of others, we are perpetuating this racist, classist and mysoginistic view of bodies without even knowing it.
When we do the work of un-learning those views of our own bodies, we break the chain and stop the spread (just a little COVID analogy there…see what I did? 🙂 ).
Body image/liberation work teaches us to look at our core values, like compassion, fairness, non-judgement, non-violence etc…
… then to compare the values of a body-obsessed culture with our own, and see if they match up.
As a long-time yoga practitioner, I often refer to the Yamas and Niyamas (morals and ethics) outlined in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. This ancient philosophical text tells us that over-identification with the body is a form suffering that has roots in the fear of death. OOF!
It’s incredible that a text compiled in the 2nd century, BCE specifically calls out over-identifying (obsessing) over the body as a form of suffering to look out for and avoid. (side note: Trust me, the irony of today’s “Instagram Yogi” is not lost on me!)
In today’s world, this looks like body- comparisons/ body checking, feeling shame or hatred toward our own body, chasing after every super-food or ‘health food’ kick, over-exercise, and pursuing weight loss as a means of attaining higher social status or better health, and so much more.
If you’d like to learn more about the ways that you can re-frame and re-create your body image, I can help. I offer individual appointments and an ongoing monthly membership focused on liberating us from the ways that we suffer in our relationships with food and our bodies. I’d love to support you as you take this new path.