My heart goes out to you if you are in pain. I shed my fair share of tears yesterday and I am sure there are more to come.
My prayer is that all of the people who are suffering experience some ease in their pain. I am not referring to just the victims of violence, but to all people who are suffering. I am praying for everyone, including the people who are doing acts of violence because in order for our society to move in a positive direction, these people need forgiveness and they need recognition of their own pain. We cannot banish them to Mars, hurt them, or lock them all up, so there needs to be another way.
So, I’ve really been wanting to take my clothes off lately. In my house, in my backyard, in other people's backyards, at the beach, and during yoga, to name a few. “She is cray”, you might be saying to yourself or to your BFF, or to your dog, and though you may be totally correct in assuming so, that doesn’t make me want to take my clothes off any less. Hear me out.
Since I can remember, I have hidden my body. Really. I keep what’s hidden under clothes locked away tightly for not a soul to see. In fact, I am such a mcguyver of skin coverage, that it wasn’t until last year that ANYONE (including my ex-boyfriend and roommate of 5 years) saw me naked. You heard that right, my boyfriend of 5 years was not allotted the pleasure and love of experiencing his girlfriend in her full frontal truth. Like I said, Cover-That-Shit-Up-Master in the house.
A couple of days ago I got some really bad news. Some painful, cringe-worthy, gut wrenching, truly terrible news. I thought I was going to lose someone I loved. I went into a tailspin of emotion. I literally collapsed on my bathroom floor wailing. I remembered this feeling. I’ve been on the bathroom floor before. Wailing. Crying out in pain. Asking God why. I have to write about it because it’s real and I am not afraid to go there, into the darkness of the cycle of life that we ALL share and accept it because I know that’s how healing happens.
Why am I even sharing my secrets right now? Because. Growth, people! Growth :)
“You cannot get to happy over there if you’re unhappy over here. Unhappy over here will have your attention. Unhappy has a vibration and if you are offering an unhappy vibration, you will bring in an unhappy vibration." -Esther Hicks.
Dude, what?
A Really a big shift is happening inside me. I think I am starting to really let go. I think I am starting to really trust. I feel a flow through me. A beautiful river of loving, heart centered choices. If you take my yoga classes you have most likely heard my new favorite phrase a few.... million times.
Heart. Centered. Choices.
This has become everything to me and I am leading my days with buckets of heart centered choices right now. Let me explain...
Story time!
I recently did a podcast with my good friend, RD and Intuitive Eating Coach, Jessi Haggarty. In this episode we discuss...
• How I experienced weight stigma as a child, and how that set me on a path to disordered eating.
• How I found dance and yoga in a dark and sad time in my life and how it made me feel both connected and disconnected to my body at the same time.
• How I was suffering from anorexia for months, and simultaneously being praised by colleagues and friends on my “dedication”.
• How I worked with an eating disorder therapist and dietitian to help me recover.
• How I found freedom in loving my body as it is in the moment, every moment.
Read MoreThis is a reminder to myself that the voice in my head, telling me that i’m looking a little “big,” or that my clothes don’t look right on my body, or that I need to “fix” any part of my body, is not me, but actually an imaginary, total bitch that I need to name and claim as such. Let’s call her Cruella McBwordAwordStupidDooDooFaceMagee. Excuse my French. CMA for short.
Sometimes (okay pretty much everyday) I wake up and the first thing I do, even before opening my eyes, is put my hands on my stomach to see if, overnight, it has gotten bigger or (fingers crossed) smaller! My day begins with the presumption that I have somehow gained weight overnight from eating too much or from, well, just being alive and if I have in fact, become larger during the past 8 hours, it will impact the rest of my life for-ever, I will die alone, unsuccessful, and everyone will judge me. Here are the following steps to unravel this not so loving mental conditioning I created as a 10 year old girl that I have compassionately cultivated and revised as a 31 year old WOMAN. Yes, I am a woman now. Hear me roar.
I will never forget being the fattest kid in Jazz class. I wasn’t a huge kid. I was just, well, big enough. If you can remember the main character from the movie, Little Miss Sunshine, specifically when she stands in front of a full length mirror at the beauty pageant (vomit) with her cute tummy protruding out and her adorable puffy cheeks, the point in the movie where she realizes she is "different" from the others, just pack on about 25lbs and that was basically me. I didn’t have a grandpa coaching me to strip , but I certainly had the same, if not more, chutzba, sass skills, and pelvic thrusting ability.
Read MoreA couple of days ago, a student came up to me after class. She looked at me, lifted up her shirt, grabbed her lower belly with both hands, pulled it forward, and tightly squeezed her fingers deep into her flesh. “Look how fat I am! I am disgusting! I hate my body!”
My heart broke into a million pieces and dropped deep into the pit of my stomach right then and there. I flashed back to being 12 years old and standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom, completely naked, using a magic marker to draw dotted lines along the parts of my body I dreamed about someday having liposuctioned. Once, I took a knife to my stomach thinking I could actually cut out some of the fat (thank god I was smart enough to not go through with something so ridiculous!) I remembered the hundreds of hours of self-hating, angry, defeated, rageful internal hate talk that I wasted so much energy on, so many days of my precious life being taken for granted all because of my obsession with not looking good enough.
I'm about to get really fucking real with you. About seven months ago, I started the most painful, lifelong journey I've ever chosen to go on and it's opened my eyes, mind, and my heart in epic ways. This post isn't sexy, or hot, or about how to get a big round ass and a tiny waist, and because of that, I believe many people will pass it by without a thought, because our worlds are often run by what we choose to see, ignoring the vulnerability and pain of ourselves and others; ignoring what makes us terribly uncomfortable, and what we consider to be unattractively real. What we've been ingrained since childhood to pay attention to, the easy stuff, the advertising and media lies we swallow, often removes us from connecting to the utmost strikingly beautiful, magical, energetically bountiful, and sometimes aching layers of our existence. It also hinders us from connecting to each other on a deeper level and I'm so over that kind of an existence.
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