The Anguish Of Not Loving Your Body
Sometimes I feel so much sadness and regret when I think about how I’ve lived so much of my life in an intensely painful argument with myself and my body.
I spent years in deep disgust at who I am, and in deep shame about how my body was formed.
In anguish about all that has befallen my body – stress, health challenges, pain, imprints of trauma.
I couldn’t see myself as others saw me. I couldn’t awaken the love in my heart for my body. It didn’t matter what people loved about me, that love never truly penetrated my being, because the shame that riddled my body kept it locked out.
There was no feeling of safety in my body. Simple tasks of looking after myself, of tending to long term health problems, would create such intense spirals of shame and despair that I wouldn’t attend to my body’s needs.
In fact, I was mostly disconnected from it.
One of my deepest yearnings in my life was to learn how to transform my relationship with my body so that instead of embarrassment, distrust, spikes of hatred and anger, I could have a deep sense of vitality and aliveness – a love for the body I inhabit – whatever it’s weaknesses, problems, pains.
To connect to the vibrant, excitable, talkative, funny and smart woman I knew I was – deep down, under the layers of torment.
For too many years I had been involved in a sort of low level abuse of my body – punishing it for being not what I wanted it to be; of drinking too much into too many late nights, not listening to what it deeply needed, not looking after it and feeding it how it yearned to be fed.
For most of my life it was too much of an ask – to feel comfortable in who I was.
And then I stumbled upon a loving and healing space with my coach, that helped me gently and beautifully unravel so much of the darkness I had been carrying.
That helped me unfold, like a flower, into the person that I had been completely disconnected from.
Why do we have these patterns of anguish over who we are and the bodies we live in?
Why are so many of our foundations so rocky?
Why do we feel such a piercing feeling of disgust or dislike about our bodies?
For many of us, it requires a journey back to the foundations of our being. And it’s learning how to heal from our disconnection from our truest selves.
It’s learning how to heal the effects of emotional unsafety and trauma that has created the persistent abundance of harsh, painful emotions – like guilt, shame, disgust, despair, loneliness.
It’s knowing that many of us are steeped in shame as a coping mechanism, as a desperate attempt to stay connected to a feeling of safety.
Many of us arrived into adulthood with a disconnection from our true selves – and therefore we have limited skills and limited abilities to hold all the emotions and pressures and stresses of life.
When we don’t know how to hold all the emotion that life brings, when we are often living in a survival state of stress – we can’t be in a deep loving connection with our bodies.
Our bodies become a playground of control, abandonment and punishment.
When we don’t know how to reconnect to who we are – we are adrift, unsafe, unmoored from that loving connection with both ourselves and others.
We seek safety outside of us – in other people, in trying to stay in control, in working or sex, in food, through worry or many of the other ways people try to stay safe.
So many of us are living in bodies full of stress chemicals.
We don’t know how to stop, regulate, get calm and then navigate our own healing.
We don’t know how to be loving, kind, gentle and connected with our bodies.
This is not a journey that is completely over for me now. Like all humans I am a work in progress. I am perfectly imperfect. I have days of total vitality – where my body and I are one. Where we dream of beauty and energy.
Then there are days when I must use the tools that I teach with great patience and persistence. Where I have to support myself back onto the loving path.
Where I am continuously tending to my needs, allowing my emotions, giving myself unwavering support.
As time flows on this journey each day, each month, each year I follow this path and my relationship with my body is transformed.
I learn about her needs. I learned about her desires. Her wants and her pleasures.
I learn how to be both in deep connection with myself so that I can also turn to others and be in deep, safe connection with those I love.
And I can make choices and decisions now about how I care for, and tend to, my body that I never thought possible. Where I am not loaded down with too much emotional pressures.
It has been a journey of deep unravelling.
We bring to our bodies what we have been taught about ourselves, emotions, safety, love, pain and each other.
The reason for the lack of love is that that foundation hasn’t been laid for you.
The reason for the lack of steadiness, acceptance and calm is because that hasn’t been imbued into who you are.
But because we humans are always able to learn and rewire, and our brains are malleable and able to relearn and reconnect – there is always the possibility of transforming our relationship with who we are.
If you would like to join me on a journey to explore, learn to work with and heal what you are carrying within your relationship with your body, I would love to invite you to be part of my new course, The Body.
This will be a 4 week journey where I will share insights into the most prominent topics that show up for my clients – shame, trauma, emotional processing, safety – and of course creating a loving connection with our bodies.
We will use a variety of exercises to explore and develop your relationship around any aspect of your body that you are navigating – including the common challenges of health, sex, food and feeling safe.
The course will be presented live on Zoom, with recordings for permeant access or if you can’t make it live. There will be space to ask questions and workshop your personal experiences if you feel you’d like to do that.
Or you can simply listen to the course, follow the guided exercises I will take you through and do the small homework assignments.
My desire for this course is for you to step into a loving and empathic space where you feel completely understood and accepted.
When you can learn how to disentangle what you’ve learnt about how to ‘survive’ and journey back to that person that you truly are. That authentic being. The person who knows their body is a useful tool, a portal of pleasure, a keeper of our loving spirit and soul.
Each session will be 1.5 hours to 2 hours. This will include the lesson content, guided exercises, emotional processing & nervous system regulation as well as Q&A and live examples/workshopping.
I am also available for questions throughout the week on our shared Facebook group.
These workshop spaces that I create are really sacred and beautiful. They are places where we can see how connected we all are in our shared challenges. How similar and familiar our mutual struggles are. And how we can unravel, with commitment and a space of love and empathy, all that we carry that is disconnecting us from a healthy and vibrant relationship with our bodies.
Join me for a 4 week exploration into the emotions and experiences that we have with our bodies. How do we feel about them? How do we treat them? How do we care and tend to them?
How do we create healing in our bodies that are imprinted with trauma and reconnect to the pure expressions of what they mean to us?
This course will bring deep emotional releasing and nervous system regulation into the relationships we have with our bodies so we can release what is holding us back from celebrating the bodies that we have.
Let us start and build on that journey of creating a confident, loving and empathic relationship with the beautiful being that we are (but so often can’t connect to).
Sending you so much love,
Diana
