About a year ago, I decided I wanted to get curious about what it means to love my body. It was something I started thinking a lot about around my 38th birthday and within a month I had decided it was going to be my New Year’s Resolution for 2022.
I did feel like I loved myself, but I wanted to understand more about what that meant and if it was as whole as it could be. The older I get, the more I treasure the relationship I have with myself. I am, after all, the only person I love that I can change and get to know as much as I want. The other people in my life who I get to love are their own individual selves and while our relationships can grow and change, accepting that their personal growth and journey is out of my hands is really very freeing. I’ve been on a journey of self curiosity for a few years now. I’ll explain a little bit more about what I mean by curiosity. It’s different than looking for answers or getting to the bottom of who I am. Instead, it’s accepting that there is no final answer to that huge question. It’s an ongoing practice. A practice I really embarked on during my time spent training to be a yoga teacher.
Here’s what I started to notice. In our world, we want answers. I was no different. I was used to finding an explanation, a study, a lesson plan, a google search, a guru and a reason for everything. I started realizing that I was predisposed to think like this about everything, including my body. Have you ever been in a yoga class when the teacher asks you how something feels in your body or, even more terrifying, asked you to listen to your body? When I first started practicing yoga, teachers would prompt me to ask my body these questions, which I did, and then I’d want answers. I would ask the question and then pause in my yoga pose waiting for my body to tell me exactly how it felt, in English, maybe I even wanted it out loud. I’m used to having answers. I remember wanting to google “am I pregnant” even before I took a pregnancy test. We have information at our fingertips like never before and we are able to answer a lot of questions. Science, research, data – they are all amazing, but I believe we haven’t even begun to scrape the surface of how our bodies operate and function. Take the link between mind and body for example. We tend to separate these two parts of us and, while we understand how the brain connection works to a degree, we are slowly starting to realize the mental and emotional load our bodies take on, as well. So while I think science is amazing, I think we may be forgetting, as a species, how to be curious.
As we human-beings grow up, we start trying to understand the world more and being able to compartmentalize and explain things helps us make sense of what is happening around us. We like things organized. It’s less confusing and chaotic. We want answers, not open ended questions.
Yoga brought me to the practice of being curious by encouraging me to listen to my body. I used to have a hard time with this because I thought I should be listening for answers. How did that pose feel? I would ask my body. No response. I don’t like it when people don’t respond. It leads me to stop wanting to engage, so I did. Then I realized that it’s pretty arrogant and ridiculous to assume that my body speaks the same language that I’m listening for. It understands my language, but it may not answer back in it. It speaks its own language of breath, ease, energy, pain and many more sensations.
I started getting curious about what other languages it could speak and what it might be trying to tell me through a different form of communication. Shavasana (the time spent lying on the ground on your back at the end of the yoga class) is a great time to get curious. I changed my engagement from a specific question to an invitation. “I’m listening, body. For the next few minutes, I will be listening.” It wasn’t immediate. It still is not consistent. Sometimes, I hear something or sense something. Sometimes, my mind wanders off to the next thought. I’m human, I’m trying and my body knows this.
So, about a year ago I started to turn this curiosity toward what it really means to love myself. And specifically, what it really means to love my body. I have always had a positive relationship with food. I’m so thankful for this. Even during times of my life when I ate food that wasn’t very nourishing, I usually saw it as a form of support and energy.
I won’t say that I have always had a positive relationship with my body though. I wonder if anyone can say this. Personally, I’ve vacillated somewhere between neutrality and aversion. It's not loathe, but it's not LOVE either. At least not in a big capital letter, radical way. Logically, I did appreciate it and sometimes I even liked it, but I didn’t radically love it. I went on a mission to get curious about what it would mean to do so.
I wanted to love it and I wanted to love it exactly as it is. I want to be really clear about this. I wasn’t setting a resolution to change my body into something that I thought I could love. No, no, no. This doesn’t work. You can dream about a different house, imagine what you think it should like, and even make a plan to get there, but it’s not until you take care of the house you have that you'll truly fall in love and know a home. I also know that trying to change something doesn't feel loving to me. It never has. What if I changed my body and still didn't feel the love? That sounds like a toxic cycle and that's not loving either.
Instead of focusing on change, I started with curiosity. I was curious about what it means to love anything and everything. I think I have written about this before and I accept that it sounds like such a cliché, but I, like many parents, believe that I really learned what love is when I had my kids. I loved my kids when they were born, but I love them exceptionally more now. Sure part of that is because they have big personalities now and they are much better at reciprocating love than newborn babies. But the real reason is because I have been actively loving them for years now. I show them love everyday. Love is a verb.
I love them by making them food. I love them by tucking them in at night. I love them by listening to their stories about unicorns and Santa Claus for the 100th time today. Being a parent to a young child takes a lot of work. Work that is defined as love. It’s love in action. Yes, I feel a feeling of love for my children, but it is not a chicken and egg situation. I know what came first. I fell in love with these tiny humans because I’ve spent everyday for the last five years loving them through actions. So I knew, love is a verb and love takes action. I knew I could translate that into how I wanted to love my body.
I want to pause again and say that this isn’t only about how my body looks. It’s also about how it functions. I want to call out my privilege here. I’m healthy and my body functions pretty damn well. I haven’t experienced the feeling of my body failing me or getting sick for reasons that I don’t understand. I’m not saying that those things will stop anyone from loving their body, but this is my experience and possibly not the case for everyone. I also know that my body ages everyday. It will be different in years to come and that’s part of why I wanted to explore my relationship with it now. It’s time to love it today, so the loving action can grow stronger in the future.
So, I started thinking about how I love my body. Not the thoughts of love, but the actions. I thought back to the way I love my kids, specifically when they were newborns. I would spend all day holding them, feeding them, making sure they were comfortable, making sure they got the right amount of fresh air, sleep, nourishment and cuddles. I would talk to them. I would sing to them. I would bathe them. I would even schedule time each day for them to strengthen the muscles in their little tiny necks so they could learn to hold their heads up. If that’s not loving someone, I don’t know what is. Luckily, the newborn phase doesn’t last forever. But the question now is, have I ever cared for myself in this way? I wasn’t considering stopping all other facets of my life to care for my body in the way that a newborn requires. That’s obviously not possible. I did want to find out more about what loving my body would look like. It’s an individual thing. For me personally, what are the actions that my body needs to feel loved?
One thing I knew right away is that with my body, movement is a big deal. I need to move my body to show it love. I’ve also learned over the last decade that eating nourishing food is a form of love. So is taking a hot bath and drinking a cup of tea. And importantly, finding a moment here and there to pause and acknowledge that these actions are happening is important. Doing this allows my nervous system to relax a little. Drinking enough water, getting outside, stopping the doom scroll through the news. These were all important forms of love too. Some of my love actions were easy, like going for frequent walks. Some were harder, like drinking less alcohol and doing absolutely nothing from time to time. I also found out that saying out loud “I love my body” is an important love action for me. So, I do that sometimes. These actions are not that different than if I were working on a relationship with another person. And if we do look at the data for one of the most important things you can do in a relationship, it points to listening. Listening is a huge form of love. It might be one of the best ways to love others and to love my own body. That’s where I started on this journey and if you are interested in your own body love journey, that’s where I’d recommend you begin. A simple prompt to let your body know “I’m here. I’m going to listen for the next minute”. After that, it’s patience. Turns out that’s a love action, too.
If you’re wondering how my journey is going, I do love my body now more than ever and the love keeps compounding. The more love actions I do for my body, the more love I feel and the more I want to take care of it. And as it changes, I want to stay curious about what love actions it needs. As we enter another year, I pause to appreciate the work over the last year to be curious about loving my body, to show my body more love and to love it more radically. The curiosity worked. Not because it gave me all the answers, but because it opened me up to a new version of myself. The journey to love my body will be lifelong, but I know it’s worth it and I know it’s never too late to start.
I'm Britta, a Wellness Coach, Yoga & Pilates teacher, nutrition lover and writer. If you're interested in exploring your own wellness and body-love journey, I'd love to talk!
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