How's Your Body Image Doing?
4 quick questions (a new question is in the mix!) + this week's body image lesson
May 4-6: I’ll be Colombia presenting at the Bogota International Book Fair.
May 25: “Sniff & Write: An Embodied Writing Workshop” at The Radical Cat in Reno, NV
June 5: "Learning to Talk About Fatphobia" at the South Berkeley Library
June 22: “Sniff & Write: An Embodied Writing Workshop” at gorgeous Tenfold Farmstand in Petaluma, CA - 50% off registration for early birds through May 8
Here's How I'm Rebuilding Food Trust Through Trips To The Grocery Store
Welcome to the fifth installment of my Substack vertical, VOLUMINATI. This vertical is a monthly series of experimental audiotextual (audio + text) essays. The full essay is available for paid subscribers. You can listen to this month’s edition by scrolling down to the bottom of the article and hitting play.
Checking in weekly with your body image can help you feel less overwhelmed and may even help you spot positive or negative patterns. Let’s do this!
No matter how you answered, kudos for taking the time to notice how you feel. Next question…
Trying to locate where your body image feelings live is a great practice in self-awareness and embodiment. Next question…
Having a small, easy action item helps you learn to take care of yourself and your body image. Ready for your last check-in question?
This week, notice if checking in with your body image helped you feel more clear or empowered.
Scroll all the way down & hit play to get a quick grounding exercise + pep talk from me and listen to this week’s body image lesson, or keep reading…
Before we get started, let’s ground a little:
Wiggle your fingers.
Wiggle your toes.
Unclench your jaw.
Unclench you shoulders.
Unclench your belly.
Unclench your thighs.
Now take 4 big, slow breaths. As you inhale, I want you to make your belly as big as possible and on the exhale, imagine you’re slowly blowing out a candle.
Your body is made of the same stuff that the stars are made of.
Your body shares DNA with flowers.
Your body shares DNA with bumble bees.
Your body shares DNA with the giant redwoods on the west coast.
Your body shares DNA with the cutest corgi.
Let that sink in.
This week, let’s apply the theme of IMAGINE to our body image work.
“May you be led by bold dreams and intuition. May you seek the possible in the impossible. May you look beyond what can be seen.”
- from the Sea Soul Journey Oracle Deck entry on IMAGINE
We are actually always reconciling the possible and the impossible. Every single day that we exist in our bodies is a little, improbable miracle. It took so many things to go exactly right for millions of years for your cochlea (located on the inside of your ear) to look like a seashell, for your eyeballs to capture light in just the right way, for plants to produce oxygen for our lungs to breathe, for each of your fingernails to exist.
It’s easy to forget in our fast-paced, disposability-oriented and fatphobic culture that we are already walking proof of some kind of cosmic, divine, universal imagination!
I recently started a book called The Science of Storytelling and it opens with a simple, confronting fact: we all know deep down how our story is going to end. Everyone we know and love will pass away, and so will we. The earth, like us, will end. Admittedly kind of dire! However, he follows up by saying this: we live as if we don't know how our story will end because our brains are incredible storytelling machines, meaning our brains were designed for this big imagining, big dreaming, big hopes! In short, he's saying: every single day is an act of brave and dazzling imagination - nothing short of a miracle.
When I think of our body image journey, I can't help but draw parallels. We all know deep down we are aging everyday. Everyday we are marching slowly toward having a body that our society will not value, toward a body that ails, toward wrinkles, sag, scars, wobbly bits, slowness. This process unites us as humans, plants and animals. It unites us with earth itself.
An inevitable event like aging is a wondrous invitation to be who we were meant to be, to pursue what matters to us, to do things that make us feel joy and pleasure and connection.
So as we reflect on the idea of imagination, I’d love to ask you: What feels impossible in your body image journey right now?
And now I want you to imagine that it isn't impossible. I want you to dream the biggest dream of making peace with your body, and just allow yourself to feel that peace even if it’s just for a second.
Finally, I want you to imagine every miraculous part of your existence, every improbable thing that had to happen for you to be here reading this Substack, and I want you to let go for a just a moment that sense of yearning for any other body than the one you have right now.
Press play to do a quick grounding exercise with me and listen to this week’s body image lesson:
xo,
