My job lately has become not questioning my body. I’ve become extremely good at questioning over the years, but have lately put in a great deal of work to un-do and disregard the voices that made me begin to question myself in the first place. Largely diet culture ones, but others as well.
The work seems to be paying off, because the voice of my bodily intuition has only gotten louder recently. This was reinforced by eating roasted sweet potatoes and cabbage recently even though I knew it wasn’t what my body wanted because I “should” be able to, and then promptly throwing up after an extreme wave of nausea washed over me. I humbly thanked my body and took note.
Or I will start a podcast that looks interesting, only to be told that maybe a walk in the forest and disconnection is what I really need. I will contemplate journaling, then be drawn to a breakup playlist instead. If I’ve just woken up from 12 hours of sleep but still need to rest, I am learning to no longer ask (in much the same way I’ve been questioned by others on the validity of my experience), “but how can you really be feeling that tired? You should feel fine after so much rest.”
Now, there is an important distinction here between questioning ourselves vs questioning the truth of our body. When there are a lot of voices in our head it can get very messy and feel near impossible to distinguish what really belongs to us from what we’ve taken in to be truth based on cultural ideas and others’ opinions. For me, the feeling of relief is what marks a “successful” pivot, the relaxation that comes with going with the flow, instead of forcing against it. It’s an ongoing experiment and inner dialogue that will look different for everyone, one that above all else requires building trust and the safety to make mistakes.
Meditation
When dealing with pain.
I remember reading once that relaxing during a vehicle collision would lessen the probability of injury, or even death. While there is some dispute around that particular fact, relaxing when we least want to has been an important reminder these past two weeks.
I’ve been experiencing an extremely high level of physical pain lately. A severe systemic nervous system inflammation, followed by another very inflamed back tooth, has led to feeling elevated pain day in and day out. While this is not something I would wish to prolong, and there’s no sugarcoating the rawness, it has forced me to become very embodied. When painkillers make only a dent, there’s no running away from the experience. There’s no way of distracting oneself, and, while it’s exhausting, it’s also very grounding.
We can become so used to resisting pain when it arises, whether emotional or physical, and often without even realizing that we’re doing it. We instantly label it as wrong. Often we blame ourselves. But what if we relaxed into the pain? What if it became a neutral experience? This does not mean ignoring the message. I definitely went to the dentist for my tooth. It means relaxing enough to hear what our body is telling (or shouting at) us, to be with ourselves in a softer way when there’s no instant fix.
Errors.
The inevitability of making mistakes as a human can be a tough pill to swallow.
When we accidentally hurt someone, when we are reactive, when we are reminded of our own messiness- do we armor up, become defensive, look away and pretend it never happened? Or can we sit with humility and allow it ground us, to further open us to the world?
Instead of categorizing them as failure, we can take the necessary steps to move forward and remedy our errors with grace. We can bow our heads and acknowledge that, even though we do the best we can, we always have more to learn, and that there is nothing wrong with that.
Loss of the fantasy.
Warning: eating disorder trigger.
When we experience grief over the loss of a person, environment, identity, etc, what we’re often grieving is the loss of the fantasy that whatever it was represented for us.
This was my experience with the loss of what I had come to think of as “the perfect” (aka thinnest) body. When restriction failed me and I gained a lot of weight, I grieved the feeling of being untouchable and forever in control. The numbed out fantasy world that I was floating in evaporated, and I landed flat on my face.
Fantasies are there for a reason. They give us perceived safety from a reality we’d rather not living be in. When the bubble bursts it’s frightening and might feel excruciating, but it’s from there that we are given the opportunity to build a life we won’t need or want to run away from.
Fun and nothingness.
Re-learning how to engage with expression for fun and nothingness right now, rather than as a means to an end.
After experiencing severe burnout from forcing myself to draw literally all day every day, I went multiple years without doing it at all. Before I had a logical “reason” for, say, spending the entire morning on a watercolor of a vase. “I can justify this because it’s for my animation portfolio. It’s work. It’s acceptable because it will eventually earn me money”.
The picture in the photo is an example of that. It was a birthday card for my grandma almost exactly a year ago, and it gave me a valid excuse to sit at my favorite cafe and lose myself in drawing the tree for 2 hours (or find myself, depending on how you look at it). ;)
It can feel scarier to do something just because we want to. Because it’s fun. Because it’s a necessity that we don’t understand but never goes away. This is when we enter the mystery of life, when we begin to admit to the existence of forces beyond us that we can’t wrap our logical minds around no matter how hard we reason. It becomes our invitation to wonder and to experience the world with new eyes.
It was never your fault.
My mentor and I were chatting today about the law of attraction, and the widespread idea that you need to take responsibility for vibrationally magnetizing the experiences in your life.
Unfortunately this is a very widespread notion in the new age spiritual world, and can cause large amount of emotional/psychological damage. It can make you feel terrible about yourself whenever your life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, because your immediate thought becomes “what am I doing wrong to be attracting this?? Must. fix. my. vibration!!”
My dear, relax. The reality is a LOT more complex that that.
The truth is that it was never your fault. If you have been wrongfully treated, abused, etc, it was not your fault. You did not cause those experiences to happen. You did not deserve them because you were not meditating enough, or because you do not own enough moonlight charged crystals. While I am all about taking ownership and responsibility over what we CAN change in our lives, and while we can fiddle with the subconscious beliefs, energetic signatures, etc that are influencing you in a way that has a major impact on your quality of life, we also live in a reality and in a system where some things are simply out of our control. Covid is a perfect example of that. We can choose not to wear masks or get vaccinated, but the result is that certain environments, people and activities will then be off limits to us. We can find this angering and unfair, but it is the reality that we live in right now.
So let yourself off the hook. Keep a safe distance between you and anyone who tells you that you caused horrible events to happen. Take ownership of your life and remember that you are an extremely powerful being, while finding the relief in not needing to take responsibility for everything.