What’s the relationships you have with your body?

This past weekend I spent time in a workshop with Michael Neill. It was a conversation about health, and it got me thinking about the relationship we have with our bodies. And so today, I want to invite you to consider: what is your current relationship with your body?

I was raised to hate my body and to be ashamed of it. I have spent years of my life being at war with my body. I loathed what it looked like. I pushed it too hard, and tried to make it do what I wanted it to do. My methods of getting my body to what I needed it to do included shame and “discipline” (read “torture”, because there was nothing kind about how I related to my body.)

Then three years ago, I stumbled on breathwork while in Costa Rica for a program with Amber Krzys. At the time, I was in so much physical, mental, and emotional pain. My body was rebelling against me, after receiving years of punishment. I had such severe back pain that it was difficult to walk, stand, sit, or move. And I had enrolled in the Discover Live Trust Your Truth program with the intention to heal – heal my trauma, heal my broken heart, heal the pain in my body. I completely surrendered to the experience, not knowing what I was getting myself in to.

I left my first breathwork session – after having sobbed and screamed – feeling lighter than I had felt in years. And it was only then that I had realized – really understood in my body, not just intellectually – that the body keeps the score. In that first breathwork session – and the sessions that followed – I worked through so much trauma that was stored in my body from years of physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual abuse. I did not realize how much I was holding on to, until I released it through breathwork, and left those sessions feeling lighter than I had felt in years.

Suddenly, I understood at a much deeper level how much my body had done for me – how she had taken care of me through all of it; how she had had to adapt to every new challenge, and absorb the shock of what my system was enduring. I left all those years of pain in that room and walked out feeling freer and more connected to myself than I had felt in years. And for some reason, I had the intense desire to be submerged in water…

Instead of ignoring the desire, I listened to it, and went for a long swim. I swam many laps. I submerged myself under water. I stayed in the pool until I felt satiated. The next day, when I shared my experience with Kendra Cover, she pointed out that our bodies need water after breathwork. It’s actually quite natural to want to be in or close to water afterwards.

I started to understand the connection between our bodies and nature – in particular water. In that moment, it made complete sense to me. We spend the first nine months of life submerged in water. It’s not unsurprising that we find water soothing. At least, for me that is true. You might have your own experience that is entirely different. I have just always felt calmed and soothed by water. I feel deeply grounded when I’m close to large bodies of water like lakes, rivers, and oceans.

Why am I sharing all of this with you? I feel compelled to share my evolution in my relationship with my body, because it has also laid the foundation for the group I’m leading this year, called THRIVE. Michael Neill said this past weekend, “What our health seems to thrive on, is loving attention and presence.” And that resonated for me. I believe that part of our ability to thrive is directly connected to how we relate to our bodies, and to what we are paying attention to.

Our bodies are the vessels we use to navigate this world. We have many options when it comes to how we want to cultivate this relationship. The first option is to be in an adversarial relationship with your body, and to treat it with disrespect, disgust, contempt. This is the option I practiced for many years of my life. It was what I was taught. My body was acceptable only if it looked a certain way, and met certain standards of perfection. And it was wrong, shameful, disgusting, and disappointing when it did not.

Then, my body did something miraculous. It helped me grow my babies. It helped me heal from one of the most brutal surgeries I have had to endure, and it kept showing up for me. I was able to grow, birth and feed my babies. I was able to heal from incredible pain. And I started to see that she was working so hard to show up for me, to get me to notice that she was supporting me. This is the trouble with running on expectations, we take for granted what our bodies do for us, when we simply expect them to do what we want. We don’t even appreciate just how much our bodies actually do for us.

A second option you have when it comes to how you choose to relate to your body, is to just let it be, and do what it needs to do without interference from you. What I want to note here is that it’s not the same is simply neglecting your body, which is a third option you have. You could neglect your body and choose to pay little to no attention to it. What happens then, is you tend to just drag it along. You treat your body as a thing that you have to dress and feed. It’s still not a relationship of respect or honouring. It’s merely a relationship of tolerance and indifference.

One of the challenges you might have in trying to simply let your body do what it needs to do without interference from you, is that you may not even know what it is that your body actually needs, or what it’s trying to communicate. Years of not paying attention to my body meant that I didn’t understand her language, and couldn’t even figure out how I would let her do what she needed to do. Yet, at times she was doing what she needed to do anyway – like when she was giving birth, or healing from an infection, or purging toxins from herself after eating or drinking something that was not good for her.

There is one more option here. And this is the option I am now consciously choosing, because it’s what I’m committed to now at this time in my life. Partnership. You can choose to be in partnership with your body. You can choose to appreciate that there are things your body can do for you, without you needing to think about it or control it, and there are times when you can actually support your body to do things you didn’t think was possible. In partnership your body is also available to support you.

Now, I want to caution you here, because I’m not talking about performing partnership. I’ve seen many people take the moral high ground and do things to support their bodies, and yet, they are not getting the results they are looking for. Here’s why. If you are performing by doing the right things because you believe they are the right things to do, or because you think you have to be a certain way to be spiritual, or to be a better human, you still haven’t truly shifted the way you relate to your body.

I have had clients complain that they are sleeping eight hours a night, drinking water, eating healthy, and exercising, and even practicing lots of self-care, and yet, they don’t really feel like anything has changed. And that is because they are trying to do their way into a relationship with their body. They are not truly in relationship with their bodies. They are doing it because they think that that is what they are supposed to do.

Here is what I want to offer for your consideration, none of the options I’m sharing here is better than the other. None of the options is the one you should practice. I’m choosing partnership with my body, because I am tired of being at war with it. And, it’s completely possible to live a full life not being in partnership with your body. The key is to have it be a conscious choice, instead of an unconscious one.

The key is to consider what you actually want, and how you want to feel as you move through life. I find I’m more at peace, and experience more joy and gratitude, when I lean into trusting my body instead of relating to it as my enemy. I will also highlight that this partnership was hard won, and required an act of human spirit on my side. When I started this work, I did not feel safe in my body, and preferred to not be in my body. I have had to make the conscious choice to cultivate safety with myself and within my body.

I had to make the conscious choice to put down the stick I was beating myself with every day, and to lean into unconditional love and appreciation. Are there days where I still feel my thighs are too big, or my hair is a mess, or when I feel I don’t have anything to wear that doesn’t make me look like an ogre. Of course. I’m human. So, I have an Inner Judge that will constantly want me to go there and judge myself. And I make the conscious choice to come back to compassion and kindness when I catch myself in that spiral of negative thinking and judgment.

I ask myself how I would respond to my children – whom I love and appreciate, whom I think are simply perfect just they way they are – and I choose to treat myself with that same compassion, kindness, and positive regard. I choose to forgive myself for my judgements and for the moments that I self-abandon, and I come back to this body, and acknowledge how much she does for me every single day, and what an incredible gift it is to be alive and to have a body.

Watching my father suffer through his renal failure, as every one of his organs shut down, watching him struggle and die, opened my eyes to the gift of having organs that work, having a body that serves you without you even having to think about all it does for you – breathe, digest your food, and transform nutrients into energy, circulate your blood, remove toxins, fight off infections, etc.

I have often observed that motherhood can be a thankless job. You do so much for your kids, and sometimes they don’t even know how much you are doing. So, I think of my body as the ultimate mother. She is kind. She serves. She forgives over and over. And all she wants from me is for me to listen to her. To hear her when she is expressing her needs, and to be willing to provide for her needs so she can continue to serve me.