How Do You Love and Honour your Body?

Loving our natural women’s bodies is a challenge in our culture, where women’s bodies are pornified, objectified, and commodified as a matter of course.

Throughout are lives we are challenged in our attempts to love and honour our physical selves. As we age, this challenge takes on new aspects.

We see what time and experience has done to our bodies, and we have a hard time loving what we see. Sadly, we often find ourselves bonding with other women over our body-hatred, comparing perceived flaws, complaining, and making self-denigrating comments about ourselves disguised as humour.

And then there are the things we don’t even talk about, like our relationship with our most intimate parts. This changes too as we age.

We probably already know that if we truly loved our bodies, all the flawed and aging parts, all the most intimate places, if we truly honoured our bodies, it would be a radical act, and it would transform our lives.

With our children, and if we are very lucky, with our mates, we get to experience what it is to see another’s body as perfect. The eyes of love bring perfection to the human form. What if you looked on your own body with these eyes of love?

I believe there are things we need to STOP doing TODAY in order to begin to cultivate a loving relationship with our bodies:

~ STOP trash-talking ourselves. Stop making our bodies the object of our mean jokes. Ask yourself: would I say this about my best friend, or my child?
~ STOP any rituals of pain we engage in in the name of beauty. Instead, honour ourselves with loving, painless, non-toxic beauty rituals.
~ STOP encouraging other women when they denigrate themselves. Don’t laugh at their self-denigrating jokes. Encourage them with words of love.

I believe that engaging in small daily acts of honouring can bring us closer to a sacred relationship with our bodies.

~ Take time for daily self-massage with beautifully scented oils. Rose and sandalwood are especially honouring and lovely.
~ Smile at yourself in the mirror.
~ Accept compliments with grace.
~ Notice self-critical thoughts and begin to practice replacing them with self-loving thoughts.
~ Pay special, loving attention to the parts of yourself – the parts of your body – that you have been most critical of. Practice looking on them with love.

What will you do today to lovingly honour your body?

Love,
Bronwyn