A 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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