My own healing journey has brought me to a bone-deep experience of body sovereignty and has inspired me to create The Gifts of Body Sovereignty online course to support others who also want to deepen their experience. Using the tools of guided meditation and artistic expression through the creation of mandalas, this course will provide the space for you to do the work that will deepen and enhance your journey back to a healthy and positive relationship with your body.
Body Sovereignty has been my saving grace, blessing me with many gifts such as reclaiming my inherent right to exist in, engage with, and dare I say, enjoy my body. Which is revolutionary because I live in a body that doesn’t fit under current ideals of beauty or even current ideas of what health and vitality look like. And what is so very exciting is that these gifts are everyone’s to reclaim. However it isn’t easy. Reclaiming Body Sovereignty takes persistence and dedication because the barriers that keep us from fully living in our body are deeply entrenched in our culture.
This journey began for me, as it does for many people, by encountering new ideas that challenged my way of thinking about body size, health, and beauty. These ideas excited my mind and caused my heart to flutter with hope. Learning that my body wasn’t ugly or inherently unhealthy because of it’s size was a revelation to me. Whole new worlds opened up and I was invited to consider a different relationship with my body, one that resonated with my values of diversity and social justice and rejected shame. It just made sense.
But that was just the beginning, admittedly a kind of honeymoon phase. These new and liberating ideas, as exciting and life changing as they were, did not immediately erase the impact of the pervasive body expectation messaging of the wider culture that had made itself at home deep in my psyche and my soul. For many years, I found myself in a similar space many of the people I work with now find themselves in. Of feeling excitement and hope at the thought of what unconditional positive regard for their body might mean but after a certain point, feeling stuck. It is important to know how difficult this journey can be and the work it takes to resists being called back into the merry go round of body shaming beliefs and diet mentality dominating our culture. But we must keep going.
Which I did. And as my journey progressed, I found my understanding and expression of Body Sovereignty has grown and deepened. What started as an intellectual understanding and a hope fluttering in my heart has become a deeply felt, almost visceral experience of Body Sovereignty. It is this deeper understanding that I believe has allowed me to come to a place of standing on more solid ground and able to fully open myself to experiencing the Gifts of Body Sovereignty. If you are looking to deepen your work and bring your body sovereignty journey to a new level, I offer The Gifts of Body Sovereignty as one tool to get you there.
~Sydney