A good few years ago now an experimental-theatre oriented pal of mine took me to see a performance that changed my relationship with my body forever.

In Nic Green’s ‘Trilogy’ the first section opens with a group of around fifty women dancing with complete wild abandon to the euphoric Pixies’ track ‘Into the White’. They were completely naked. These women were voluntary participants in the project and ranged from their early twenties to well into their sixties. They varied from young to old, tall to small and svelte to voluptuous. As I watched them dance their deep knowing, with sparkling eyes and ALIVE smiles in their raw, fully embodied and empowered celebration of the female form -Goddess/Priestess/Wild Woman/Mother/Daughter/Grandmother- in all its wonderful myriad manifestation -each one of them as beautiful as the next- my entire body vibrated on a cellular level with the most intense yearning to be up there with them. I wept tears of joy for them that they were able to emanate and display such a powerful and radical acceptance of their own diverse bodies, and I cried tears of grief for myself as I knew that my relationship with my own body was anything but that.

At the end the cast invite the women in the audience to join them in stripping off too, in brave and joyous communal celebration of the female form. I couldn’t do it. I sat there, arms crossed across my stomach (the size of which I was not altogether happy with at the time, I had been going through one of my ‘heavy drinking’ phases). I felt the pull of liberation and the offered hand of solidarity, but my insecurities kept me firmly rooted to that seat. In the end I think only one woman stood up (it appears I wasn’t the only one who’d been overpowered by her insecurities that night.) My friend -a gloriously unashamed extroverted-yet-sensitive-male-feminist- was deeply saddened by the audience’s reluctance to participate, being in possession of a penis he wasn’t invited of course, but he would have been straight up there if the invitation had been open to both sexes. But I couldn’t do it for me, and I couldn’t do it for him, or for the performers. Despite my inability to bare all, in that moment I felt my deeply ingrained repression in relation to my body palpably and consciously for the first time. And I knew it was a limitation that had to go. I wasn’t quite ready to break through it, but I also felt a deep recognition that this was the catalyst that was going to crack my life-long troubled relationship with my body wide open, and it was going to be messy, there was a LOT of stuff to work through. And I’m going to share the journey with you. (As with my other blogs, I feel I should warn you that before we get to the light we have to traverse through some pretty dark shit, so brace yourself, it’s about to get a teensy bit uncomfortable -there’s quite a lot of former self-hatred to wade through- but I get there, I get comfortable, and hopefully you will too by the end.)

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‘I feel fat today’

You will rarely come across these words in the journals I keep today (I scribble in my journal like a fiend, it is an unwavering friend as I traverse my recovery from a Chronic Illness—I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—and beyond that it is simply the best way I have found to really get to know myself on the deepest level possible, at the level of the soul. Well, that is, it’s the best method I’ve come across apart from meditation). I call my journals these days ‘The Compassionate Witness,’ and in them I strive to be exactly that. I sincerely hope to get them published one day. There’s a LOT of full on, unabashed CRAZY in there, but it must be said, there is also a hefty dose of liquid gold WISDOM, which just increases with each new volume.

The same cannot be said however for the diaries of my teens and early (and even mid) twenties, which were more accurately firstly vehicles for me to express the ‘it’s so UNFAIRS!’ of life; the dramas pertaining to the boys I fancied; the ups and downs of trying to be the perfect student at school, and extra-curricularly; and the pain of puberty. Overall my teenage diaries were a merciless cutting down of everything I had done wrong, every way in which I had been wronged, and every which way I was just simply not good enough, not lovable enough, not worthy enough… in other words these were the tales of my complete and utter self-loathing…Can you tell there was not a lot of unconditional love being banded about in my childhood? You might call these ‘The Judgemental Witness,’ or the ‘Self-Flagellating Witness‘ maybe… I threw these out years ago, a part of me wishes I still had them, but a wiser part of me is relieved that they are gone as I shudder to think how emotionally fraught it would be for me to re-visit just how much of an unforgiving self-critic I was.

Years later, when I started keeping a diary again in my mid-twenties, it morphed into a nightly run-down of ALL THE THINGS I DID and ALL THE PEOPLE I saw each day and ALL THE WORK, and ALL THE EVENTS, and ALL THE PARTIES, and ALL OF THE BOYS, and how EXHAUSTING and EXHILARATING it was (in hindsight, mostly exhausting, and when I read them back, practically devoid of emotion too.) Maybe these could be called ‘The Disconnected Witness‘? Or ‘The Superficial Witness’ perhaps? In both eras, countless were the ‘I feel fat today’s’ that littered the pages (more often that not in the days leading up to my period, of course). These words appeared so often that they could have almost been etched in stone (as opposed to my trusty liquid-gel liner pen). And on a much more damaging level, they were definitely forever etched in my psyche as a result.

Looking back through the diaries I’ve held onto, other words and phrases I’ve noted that pop up repeatedly on these ‘I feel fat‘ days are: ‘unattractive, ugly… like a beached whale… my skin has broken out SO badly…’ and I have to admit to more than once finding the ever-so-slightly-overdramatic phrase ‘I feel like the fattest, ugliest, most unattractive person in the WORLD today’… Yes, I’m mortified to say that’s a direct quote, Oh dear. And I should say that these cruel self-directed insults that I quote are not taken from the diaries of a teenage girl (I dread to think of the cut-throat self-inflicted insults that peppered those pages), no, these are taken from the diaries of a twenty-five year old woman. And a woman at that who has consistently been somewhere between a dress size 8 and 10 since the age of 13, and who at the time of writing, looked something like this:

Body Dysmorphia

The medical definition of Body Dysmorphia is as follows:

‘A pathological preoccupation with an imagined or slight physical defect of one’s body to the point of causing significant distress or behavioural impairment in several areas (such as work and personal relationships). People suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder perceive themselves as ugly, fixating on a slight abnormality or an imagined flaw’ -Charles Q.Choi Scientific American , Feb 2008.

Throughout my life I have suffered with a pretty severe case of this. But it seems so STUPID, right?! I mean, come on! Ok, so the above photo is a pretty good one, I must admit (my ego picked it, of course), and my rational brain knows that even on my ‘I feel fat‘ days, I am, by many people’s definition of the term, an ‘attractive’ woman. But, despite this, there is a deep, dark, cruel, callous, harsh and inhumane part of my psyche that is fiendishly good at convincing me otherwise. As neurotic and irrational as it sounds my truth for many, MANY years was that I could feel attractive and comfortable in my body one day, and just a day later feel like the ‘most unattractive person in the world.’ Several times over the years I worked myself up to almost panic attack stage about how hideous I looked and it would only be upon looking in the mirror that I would realise it was all in my imagination and that the reality was completely different, and I would calm down. (Isn’t that funny? I had to look in the mirror to feel ok. You’d think it would be the other way around, right?) Of course, sometimes even looking in the mirror wouldn’t convince me otherwise. And of course, sometimes it was what I saw in the mirror, or worse, an objectively taken unflattering photograph that would send me over the edge: a roll of fat, a double chin, a spot too many, or my own personal worst offender in the body dysmorphia stakes -my ‘slight physical defect’ that can cause ‘significant distress’- my arguably more than ample lower half: Beyonce’s bottom or strong Amazonian Goddess thighs on a good day/Elephant on bad day. I also could look at photos of myself one day and think they were really flattering, and then look at them a few days/weeks later, when I was having a ‘bad’ day, and think they were absolutely horrendous and should never be allowed to see the light of day ever again.

Oh dear, oh dear.

My weight would fluctuate in the realms of half a stone or so. If I could ‘pinch more than an inch’ of belly fat I would convince myself that I had put on an absolutely unacceptable amount of weight and I would hurry to the chemist, palms sweating and heart-racing and weigh myself on their machine (it was too dangerous to have scales in the house, I’d be on them multiple times a day). Once I’d kicked off my shoes, dumped my bag and every layer of clothing it was acceptable to remove beside the machine,  I’d try to ignore the other shoppers in the store and wince with embarrassment if the automated female voice unexpectedly BOOMED out, saying over and over again ‘measuring your BODY FAT! MEASURING YOUR BODY FAT!‘ And every time, when that little receipt popped out the bottom telling me my weight and height, without fail, I would be more or less the same weight, somewhere within the region of 8 1/2 to 9 stone, maybe a lb over 9 stone at most. And I had convinced myself that I had gained at least a stone. When it was in reality, probably something more like 3lbs.

Those 3lbs often meant the difference between sanity and insanity for me.

Eating Disorder

I developed an eating disorder around the age of 13, but the dye was cast much earlier than that. When I was 8 years old I got fat, it was more than puppy fat, but I don’t think it quite reached ‘obesity,’ honestly, I have few memories from this time of my life, I’ve blocked a lot of it out. When I went hunting for photographs of this time it also appeared that I had destroyed most of the evidence (surprise, surprise) this is the only thing any where near proof I could find:

Why do children and adolescents develop issues with food and their bodies? For me personally, I have realised since I went into therapy that the reason I gained so much weight at such a young age because my parents got a divorce when I was 7 years old and I ate to numb the pain. What does a poor, frightened, abandoned, wounded inner child do? A soul who is lacking in love? Anything and everything they can to protect themselves, to make the pain go away, to cushion themselves from the harsh nature of the big bad world (or even to protect themselves from people -and even people who are supposed to love you- when you find out for the first time that they can hurt one another, and you).

So I ate.

Then when I went to high-school I lost all the weight…and then some. I got skinny, I got really skinny, and I liked being skinny, so I started starving myself from time to time, or I’d make myself sick when I felt that I had eaten too much, and then as punishment I’d starve myself again for a while, or I’d take laxatives… But then I’d yo-yo back the other way. I’d get down about something and I’d seek solace in food, I’d comfort eat to make myself feel better and I’d put on a few pounds, a few more…

but then the scales would tip and I’d be horrified at my gluttony, and once again I’d starve myself/make myself sick/take laxatives. This went on for a few years until I found other ways to ‘maintain’ my weight- e.g. liquid dinners (drinking alcohol and not eating), smoking to curb my appetite, and then snorting coke and taking pills and MDMA; junkie chic.

And what was the reason for this? Well, if comfort eating is symptomatic of a wounded soul, then self-denial, starvation and discipline is symptomatic of a grandiose ego, the logic of the ego being:

‘If I make myself as thin/successful/talented/PERFECT as possible then maybe they will love me? Maybe then they will accept me? ‘

This dangerous and far too common pattern tends to begin with parental relationships and then is extended to romantic relationships, friendships and relationships with figures of authority. Can you ever succeed in your search for unconditional love and acceptance from people who simply, through no fault of their own, do not know how to give it? –No- Hurt people hurt people.  If they, sadly, haven’t experienced unconditional love for themselves they simply do not know how to give it to others.

Oh dear. Poor dears.

This is a painful pattern that repeats and repeats generation after generation causing so much hurt and trauma for all involved, and we all have our different ways of numbing the pain. (For me, and for so many others, the booze, drugs and fags- once again were just like the eating- another way to escape from, or failing that, at least to dull the pain).

If I can some it up I would say that my underlying unconscious modus operandi was:

‘I hate myself so…’

‘I hate myself so…I’ll eat to block out the pain of feeling unlovable, unworthy and unaccepted’

‘I hate myself so… I’ll punish myself by starving myself into submission, or making myself sick if I’ve eaten too much’

‘I hate myself so… I’ll drown my sorrows in booze, swallow them down in pills, puff, puff puff my cares away.’

And it didn’t end there. All the booze and drugs and partying led to a couple of sizable nervous breakdowns. Around this time a very wise woman told me ‘you realise that what you put in your body affects your mind?’ Right then. I became a tee-total, yoga-doing, meditating, running, cycling, spinning, super-health-conscious, well-being nut with a qualification in Nutrition. I was at a loss as to what to do with my mind, it had proved itself to be an enemy, so I set about trying to spend as little time in it as possible and instead I threw myself into ‘taking care’ of my body. And in the months following seeing that life-changing performance with the wonderful naked dancing wild women I had grown confident in my body-I became brave enough to shower naked in the communal showers at the gym, and I was at home in myself enough to dance naked on top of a hill with a group of women on a sunny Spring day, as well as do my sun-salutations in my bedroom each morning completely starkers, that is, when the sun made an appearance (and these are all wonderful things of course).

So by my mid-twenties I had COMPLETELY turned it around.

I honestly thought I had totally cured my eating disorder. I had come on leaps and bounds, and yeah, so maybe I still had the ‘I feel fat’ thoughts (once in a blue moon, during a particularly bad bout of PMT), but I no longer starved myself or made myself sick. I no longer smoked instead of eating, or used my ecstasy habit as a cunning diet regime.

But… underneath all this -what was the unconscious modus operandi?

One day I remember I was in my kitchen, when I lived in the city, ok, so I think I was complaining to my flatmate that I had nothing that I wanted to wear out that night (and ok, so maybe the words ‘beached whale,’ or something of the sort, were dropped in there, as I said, etched in the psyche forever, oh dear) and she non-chalantly opened the fridge while sighing ‘you know, I don’t think I have ever met anyone with a more extreme case of body dysmorphia than you.’

I was completely taken aback.

Hey! I was in CONTROL. I was no longer someone with an eating disorder or body dysmorphia, I’d sorted that out years ago. I was just someone who was VERY interested in nutrition and exercise….

As far as I was concerned I was finished with all the self-destruction and self-abuse and I was instead fully committed to taking excellent care of myself and making myself as healthy as possible. I was, dare I say it, obsessed. (N.B. ‘making myself‘ as healthy as possible. It was an act of forcing). My self-acceptance only pertained to times when I looked and felt great, and thin. It didn’t include the episodes where I’d yo-yo ever so slightly the other way, become dependent on the booze, or comfort food again (to numb out the pain, usually work stresses or boy stresses), and gain a few pounds. Oh no, when that happened I was ripe fodder for a public dressing down, by myself. Or if I got sick and therefore needed to rest and feed myself comforting foods to recover then I would rant and rail against myself for getting sick in the first place, how dare I? how disgusting! I had absolutely no compassion for myself whatsoever. Oh dear, oh dear, oh DEAR! And it was at these times that I needed love more than any other.

Yep. Although I was ‘taking care of myself,’ without a doubt the unconscious modus operandi was still ‘I hate myself so…’

And although the self-reprimanding judgements about my weight and physical appearance in my journals were still there from time to time (in much subtler language) I honestly thought I had it sussed as they were quickly followed by motivational dietary plans I was going to execute with military precision, listing exactly what I was going to eat (or rather not eat) to rectify it, and the strict exercise regime I was going to impose upon myself to do so. My nightly diary entries would usually begin with whether or not I had made it out for a run that morning. If I had, I liked myself. If I hadn’t, I loathed myself. At my very worst levels of ‘control freakiness’ my entries included in the margin a scribbled little list of everything I’d eaten that day and equations (the only time I ever used my long-addition from high-school maths) totting up the number of calories I’d eaten that day, either with a smug gold star for praise-worthy, minimal calorie healthiness e.g (and I quote):

‘Celery, cucumber, apple, pear & spirulina juice; 2 slices buckwheat toast w/coconut oil; plum, apple; humous, carrot, celery & 2 ricecakes; quinoa w/broccoli, peas, spring onions, parsley, mint & afalfa sprouts; 5 brazil nuts, 2 litres water; nettle, green and dandelion tea.’

Oh dear. Or if the day’s eating was less than the purest-of-the-pure I would slam down an iron-fist that this utter over-indulgence and hedonistic gluttony would NEVER happen again. Oh DEAR! So maybe I wasn’t starving myself or vomiting up my dinner, maybe I was ‘taking care of myself’ and ‘eating healthily’ and ‘exercising’ and I was no longer abusing my body with drugs, alcohol and cigarettes any more. But did that mean I was no longer abusing my body? –No– But I wasn’t doing all this to be ‘thin,’ I was doing all this to be ‘healthy’, so I was on the right track, right?

WRONG.

‘I hate myself so… I’ll eat like a bird and exercise til I’m sore day in day out until I’m perfect… then I’ll love myself, then I’ll accept myself. Then they’ll love me, then they’ll accept me’

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, OH DEAR!

I had absolutely no idea what unconditional love was.

I had to learn.

 

Self-Acceptance

As it turned out I had to develop a chronic illness to learn self-acceptance.

I forced myself to be ‘perfect’ for so many years that it almost killed me.

Since coming down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome my body will literally not allow me to put it through one iota of the self-abuse I used to inflict upon myself and I have had to learn to embrace it in all its glorious imperfection. I can’t drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes to escape from it (not that I would want to), but equally I can’t kick it into shape by forcing myself out for those 7 a.m. runs or spin classes (sometimes I can’t so much as walk to the end of the road… for a week). Nope, it simply will not play ball. And if I was to try and get through the day on my former ‘purest-of-the-pure’ daily eating habits of vegetable crudites, fruit and rice cakes of my ‘healthy eating’ years, well I would collapse by 10 a.m.  Since I got sick my body has called the shots, and I listen, no more imposing from without, no more punishment. And as for my weight: when I first came down with my illness I gained quite a lot of weight, and as it progressed I got thin, really thin, perhaps the thinnest I’d been since the full-blown eating disorder days (as you can see, my ego really liked this), but I often had trouble even standing up for more than 5 minutes at a time…. These days I’m somewhere in the middle, but, I yo-yo back and forth, and I have had to learn to become a happy yo-yo.

             

These days I accept myself. I accept myself on the days I am too tired to get out of bed. I accept myself when I need to eat much more than usual to comfort my poor sensitive soul after it has been knocked about in the world for a few days (but I make sure to address the underlying issues so it doesn’t go too far). I do my best accept my body in every way– when it is in pain, when it is in bliss, when it feels fat, when it feels thin, when it feels sad, and when it feels happy, when it feels angry and when it feels calm. Because human bodies get fat and thin, they get happy and sad, they get healthy and ill, and without exception they get old, they die. That is just what they do! And we need to accept the whole she-bang, not just the good days.

I may have to have had my hand forced to get here, but my illness has led me to make the key shift to:

‘I love myself so…’

‘I love myself so… I’m going to eat a healthy, nourishing diet that best supports my body.’

‘I love myself so… I am going to do yoga and meditate and dance and go out for walks and move my body when I can because it makes me feel good.

BUT it also means:

‘I love myself so… I’m going to look after myself like I would a sick child today, because that’s what I need and so I am going to be so gentle, patient, kind and loving to myself.’

‘I love myself so… it’s totally ok that I’ve gained a few pounds because I’ve had a big energy crash and I need to eat lots in order to build myself back up so I can get out of bed.’

‘I love myself so… it’s absolutely fine that all I have the energy for today is to lie in bed and do nothing else but eat and go to the bathroom.’

I am doing my best to love and accept myself no matter what.

Self-love

But loving ourselves is hard right? Haven’t we spent SO many years thinking that to love ourselves is selfish? Goddamn that ‘don’t know how to give unconditional love because we’ve never received it ourselves’ pattern!

But it’s the ONLY way. We have to shift from ‘I hate myself so… to ‘I love myself so…’ We can be the most naturally thin person alive and as long as we come from a place of ‘I love myself so…’ it’s ok. The exact same goes for being extra-voluptuous. It’s all ok. As when we love ourselves we will do what is right for ourselves, we will do what is right for our souls. As long as the underlying belief is ‘I hate myself so…’ NOTHING we do will EVER be enough, NOTHING we do will allow us to feel loved or accepted. But the Truth is that we are ALL accepted. We are all lovable. EXACTLY as we are: on our good days/on our bad days/on our happy days/on our sad days.

More than that. We are actually all PERFECT. It’s just that it’s not our bodies that are… So I wasn’t totally off the ball thinking that I needed to be ‘perfect’ to be loved and accepted (I’m going to explain why in the next section). When our underlying belief is ‘I love myself so…’ EVERYTHING we do is enough, and EVERYTHING we do (or don’t do) doesn’t change the fact that we are always completely loved and accepted, no matter what.

And THIS is unconditional love. Learn it. Give it to yourself. Tell your friends. Above all, if you have kids, give, give, give it to them.

(P.S. Only when you fully love yourself unconditionally first can you then go on to love others, otherwise we’re just perpetuating the ‘hurt people hurt people’ pattern. Oh dear.)

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So how did I learn to love my body? This thing I’d hated and punished with a vengeance for so many years. How did I learn to love it even in it’s sickness, in all its glorious imperfection?

Well, I’ll tell you- I had to realise that I AM NOT IT.

*Warning, it’s about to get a bit ‘out-there’ but stick with me, yeah?*

Have you ever had a OBE? (No, I don’t mean a ceremony where the Queen bops you on the shoulders a couple of times with a blunt sword and thanks you for your outstanding contribution to society), I mean an ‘Out of Body Experience’? Perhaps not. Most people in fact tend to experience this for the first time right before death… walking towards that white light, so they don’t ever get the chance to tell people about it. Some people experience it through hard-core meditation, others through transcendental drug experiences and some during a NDE (Near Death Experience). Well, I am able to experience this regularly, perhaps a little bit too regularly, I do the meditation (and I did the drugs) and my close shave with death brought about by my illness has definitely speeded up the process. This is not easy to explain but when you become able to leave your body you realise:

‘OMFG! I am not this body! I can leave it and still be ‘me’! I am actually something else altogether!‘

And when you are able to leave your body and feel what you *really* are, it is just pure bliss, man. Yeah, I know, it sounds corny, but what can I say, it’s simply the Truth! What we really are is Spirit, a non-dual, non-separate, infinite, eternal, unchanging, formless, vibrating mass of energy, pure essence, pure consciousness, pure being, and there is absolutely no separation between us and anyone or anything. We are all ONE. To experience it physically feels like being enveloped in the warmest, most loving, most orgasmic hug you could ever imagine experiencing, and then some. And we can experience this all the time if we want to, even whilst still technically IN our bodies- How? get meditating! (I’d recommend that over the risky drug trips and the almost dying). Yep, we ARE just a part of the ‘Oneness.’ We never get sick, we never die. Yep, as crazy as it sounds, we ARE love, we’re just pure love. We are PERFECT.

Eating disorders, and escaping through self-destruction of any kind is, when we get to the root of it, a blatant denial of the physical body and a refusal to accept this incarnation. It is an awareness of ‘I know I am not this‘ -not this unwieldy, physical, heavy, fleshy piece of material. it is this deep knowing of: ‘I AM PERFECT‘, but we get it all skewed and we think that it applies to our bodies. And we struggle to ‘get there,’ when we ARE ‘there’ all along, it’s just not our bodies that are the perfect bit, it’s our eternal souls. The body is just a vehicle we are occupying for a lifetime, which is peanuts on the grand scale. And bodies are by their very definition imperfect and flawed and temporary. Oh, and we chose this incarnation (yep, parents and everything.)

But really, we are all love. *yeah, baffled me too at first, but when you experience it, you’ll never question it again*

So if I am love, and you’re love, and we’re all one, then by loving myself I’m not just loving me but I’m loving you and I’m loving everything.

And by that logic- if I continue to hate myself then I’m effectively hating you, and everything and everyone? (Come on now, don’t be THAT guy.)

Doesn’t that make it a bit easier to love yourself? Knowing that by loving yourself you are loving everything and everyone? And by continuing to hate yourself you are effectively hating everything and everyone?

It’s a no brainer, right?

So to boil it all down: We ARE Spirit incarnate. We ARE soul enfleshed. We ARE Spirit, and we HAVE Minds and we are IN Bodies. If we use the Mind and Body in service to the (eternal, indestructible, limitless) Soul then we will invariably operate from the modus operandi ‘I love myself so…’, BUT, if we choose to continue to operate from a place where the Mind and Body are in service to the (limiting, constructed, destructive) Ego, well then, that will ALWAYS result in ‘I hate myself so…’ Your choice.

*BUT, big butt- So yeah, yeah, maybe I’m Spirit incarnate, but I am still IN this body!*

Yep.

So after experiencing the OBE state we’ve got to get back into our bodies and be like, ‘Hey! I’m in this body! I may well BE an eternal, infinite mass of vibrating love and light energy but I’m IN this limited form, this body that is so incredibly dense, and it ages, and it gets sick, and dies, this vehicle.’

But you know what: HOW FUCKING AMAZING IS IT, BEING IN THIS BODY?! In bodies we can do all these things that we can’t do as a free-form, non-differentiated mass of energy -we can TOUCH things, we can TOUCH other bodies, we can have SEX (is there anything better?), we can eat FOOD (oh my God eating tasty food is such a wonderful experience), we can SING, we can DANCE, we can SEE all the beautiful things in the world- the mountains, the trees, the rivers (isn’t it wonderful?!)- and not to mention ALL the DIFFERENT PEOPLE, all of the billions of bodies in so many varying shapes and sizes, each one of them totally UNIQUE. Wow! This ‘being in a body’ thing is AWESOME as it allows us to experience the ‘oneness’ (of ourself essentially) in this gigantic plethora of separate and contrasting things, and bodies. And it is really much more exciting, interesting and colourful to be in a human body (with all its ups and downs) than it is to be a part of the vibrating mass of ‘oneness’ (as properly blissful as that is, and don’t get me wrong, it’ll be ACE to get back to it).

  Body Confidence

But for now I’m going to love this body with every ounce of my being as it allows me to experience this amazing thing: being a human being on planet Earth.

It is my ambition to learn to be fully confident in my body knowing that I am not it, but knowing that I am lucky enough to be residing in it for however long this human lifetime is going to take, and you know what? I’m devoted to giving myself the best experience I possibly can. I’ve been given a second chance, and I am going to love, love, love it. And I know that this body is going to take me to so many amazing places and sing, dance, eat, touch, have sex, maybe even give birth to another body/soul/part of the vibing mass of infinite oneness (Wow, now that will be an interesting experience in terms of accepting my body! And if I do they are getting unconditional love up to their eyeballs.)

I know that 20 years of self-inflicted abuse cannot be undone in mere months, but it’s ok, I commit to however long this is going to take, and all the ups and downs, the happies and sads, and the fats and thins of it.

I accept this incarnation. I love myself. I love my body. Do you? 

Say it with me:

‘I love myself so…’

Xxxxxxxxxxxx

Right, who’s going to join me dancing naked in celebration of the wondrous human form?!