Valentines Day. Yes, perhaps a mass market holiday, but we can embrace it as opportunity to pause and consider how love factors into how we feel about our body, if at all. The struggle to feel love for our body is a common one, but many of us struggle with the very *idea* of it, where feeling love for our body is something that can’t even be imagined, let alone aspired to. And because we cannot picture ourselves ever loving our body, we despair of leaving behind body loathing and fear staying stuck in our negative patterns and beliefs. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
One of the biggest traps in our journey to body sovereignty is our cultural tendency to think in ‘all or nothing’, black and white terms. We do this with food…either what we are eating is deemed ‘healthy’ and therefore ‘good’ and anything else is ‘bad’. It’s the same with how we perceive our body. If we are not ‘thin’ (good) then we must be ‘fat’ (bad). We tend not to allow for shades of grey in our thinking, or in our experience of our bodies. I think that is why bodylove feels like such an alien concept for many people. We feel if we cannot see ourselves completely falling in love with our body, rejoicing in our curves and proudly displaying our visible belly outline or rocking a bikini, then any kind of feeling good about our body is beyond us.
So, for those who feel like loving the body is beyond the realm of possibility, I offer some shades of grey in the journey to Body Sovereignty. We do not have to live in the trap of extremes when it comes to how it feels we feel about our body. There are spaces between bodylove and body hate that can support us quite well in becoming body sovereign, and here are some ways that could look:
Respect. Body Respect is a term I’ve really resonated with and used quite a bit. We may or may not love our body, or wish it looked different than it does, but when we work at respecting our body we aim to make choices that support our personal autonomy. We show respect for our body by doing our best to care for it by considering nutrition, activity, reducing stress and other health supporting behaviours. We are also attentive to our motivations for any actions we take and work to ensure they are guided by growth and positivity rather than negativity and shame?
Trust – Trusting our body is an amazing pathway to body sovereignty. We trust our body when learn to once again listen and respond to our body’s signals. We notice respond to hunger and fullness signals. Or signals to sleep when we are tired. We become our own experts on our body, rather than relying on others to tell us what, when and how to eat. Mindfulness is a great tool to build body trust.
Neutrality – For some folks, the path to body sovereignty is one where we come to a relationship with our body that is neutral. We can become more body neutral when we shift away from a focus on physical appearance, where we embrace a more functional view of the body.
Here is a great reflection body neutrality: http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/body-positivity-vs-neutrality/
And there are many other ways to think of a positive shift in how we feel about our body. We might resonate with terms like body acceptance, or body positivity. What it is important is that we are comfortable with whatever term we embrace. As we journey, some of us might indeed end up in the space of feeling love for the body we live in. And some of us may not. But as long we are able continue to actively work towards fully inhabiting our body and claim our space in the world we can continue to make strides toward a positive and healthy relationship with our body.