Tag — Body/Sex
Letter to My Body
Have you joined Suzanne’s national campaign over at BlogHer? There’s still time! Maybe it’s a valentine, or maybe it’s a memo from your inner drill sargent. Either way, don’t you think it’s about time you just sit right down and right yourself a letter? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours…
Dear Body,
It’s been nearly a year since I promised to be nicer to you. A year since I gave up saying mean things. A year since I stopped overriding your system with stress hormones. A year since I gave up dieting for good. A year since I decided to recognize that you are, in fact, me—that I am, in fact, my body.
I am so proud of you! In that year you’ve eaten mostly what you needed, and only a little of what you did not. I managed to not freak out on your ass every time you put something that actually tastes good in your mouth. You’ve enjoyed food more and felt guilty less. You’ve lost most of the bad language about how you function and how you feel. And you’ve regulated yourself down to your happy, healthy weight. (Bye bye to those 20 freeloading pounds.)
I hope you’ve like your treats of new jeans, shirts that cling a little, and a not unsmall amount of truly awesome lingerie. I’m so glad you’ve welcomed back your libido and embraced your newly recognized MILF status. Oh, and by the way, I really like your new motto: “Cleavage: It’s not just for weekends anymore.”
You’ve had some grand renewing adventures this year, and I’m planning on more in the future. Already you seem to be enjoying the Danish requirement for frisk luft (fresh air) every single day, and those boots you bought that were made for walkin’? Well I’m pretty damned proud that you’ve already worn out the heels.
In a few weeks your new bike will be here and you’ll be streaming along, your red hair standing out amongst the Danish blondes. And soon enough you’ll find yourself a new yoga class and be a dancing goddess once again.
I’m sorry it took me so long to finally appreciate you, but baby, look at you now! Thanks for hanging in there with me.
Yours (literally),
Rachelle
Are you going to sit right down and write yourself a letter? Let us know in the comments below (don’t forget to link!)
Wednesday Review: Books that Could Change Your Life, The Feel Better List
There’s nothing like New Year’s Eve to bring out a bunch of resolutions. Because I’ve been unwell since 2003 (migrianes), my resolutions over the past few years have centered around this idea: “Feel Better.”
Maybe one of these books will help you find a feel better place in 2008. Here’s to the hopeful!
-Rachelle
P.s. Remember, any purchase made by clicking on a title below helps support this blog. Find more great book, music, and misc. reccomendations over at Magpie Reviews. Thank you!
Intuitive Eating
Evelyn Trioble and Elyse Resch
How many diet books have you read in your life time? I think my list starts with my mother’s copy of More of Jesus, Less of Me –which I copped from my Mom when I was in 8th grade — and continues through The WeighDown Workshop, 8 Minutes in the Morning, You, on a Diet, The Maker’s Diet, and The Fat Flush Diet — some of which have only recently left the shelves of my personal library.
Last year after a failed attempt at Weight Watchers, I hit my 38th birthday and decided that I’d spent enough of my life obsessing about my weight/body/what I ate. At the ripe old age of 38, I gave up dieting for good and decided to start loving my body.(I’m a slow learner.) The catalyst? Intuitive Eating.
This is book that must be consumed slowly, so you can unlearn old habits and adopt intutivley helpful ways of thinking about food and nutrition. The assingnments take time, but are well worth the resulting mental and emotional reprogramming. For the first time I am eating when I’m hungry, stopping when I’m full, and balancing out at a size my body is comfortable with. Within weeks of begining Intuitive Eating, I stopped feeling guilty about food ,and now I can eat anything guilt free. For the first time this year, I didn’t even THINK of making a resolution that involved losing weight! It’s a small miracle.
P.s. If you are stocking your bookshelves on the topic, Women I Respect have also recommended Eating Mindfully and Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Eating and Living. Check ‘em out!
Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3 Program for Taking Charge of Your Pain
Dr. David Buchholz
When my husband handed me this book in our local shop, I pretty much rolled my eyes and sighed in defeat. After years of tyring everything under the sun to get rid of my migraines, I had pretty much resolved to live with pain for the rest of my life. I thought I knew everything there was to know about migraines and migraine meds — but after just a few pages of Heal Your Headache I’d discovered things none of my dozen-odd medical practioners had ever told me. Intially I was terrified of step one, getting off pain medications and most other meds. But within six weeks I was no longer dependent on pain meds or meds like immitrex, and I had discovered hidden trigger foods that no one had mentioned to me before. My migraines dropped from everyday, to 2-7 per month. After getting them down to this more manageable level, a good atlas chiropractor (we like to call him “Dr. Woo Woo”) got rid of the rest of my headache pain and desensitized me from most of my trigger foods. Now I only have the occasional break through headache — and this after five solid years of headache pain! Believe me, this book is worth taking a chance on!
What books help you Feel Better?
Next Week: books for the Budding Feminist.
Beaches & Bodies
Cate’s summer knees on brilliant display.
There is a part of me that misses preaching, and another slice of my persona that desprately wants to be this guy. So here’s a little bit of both captured in my very first podacst — it’s me reading my latest blog post. It mentions a couple of things you can link to like Tweet and this charming get away.
Listen to the podcast here:
Subscribe to Magpie Girl podcasts on Zune, or on iTunes, or via RSS.
More Thoughts on Church
I grew up in the church. I was nurtured by the anchoring habits of rhythm and the ritual; the security of absolute unquestionable truths; and the support of a like minded community. It was comforting to me – until it wasn’t. Then, like a switch flipped on the wall I saw the light, and the light exposed all these ugly and untrue accoutrements that came along with it all. Ironically this switch flipping phenomenon was roughly congruent with my ordination as a minister. Yep, I realized what I was standing in right when I was stepping hip-deep into it all.
It confuses me – as I’m sure it does you – how I can so deeply love Jesus and be so genuinely grateful for my Christian roots, and at the same time be so clearly scarred by the experience of religious indoctrination. I suppose this is because cult and faith cannot easily be balanced. Because Christianity is a social movement and all social movements eventually metastasize and bulge away from their original intent. Because, in my opinion, “Jesus got ‘jacked.”
When I think back over my religious upbringing there are a string of damaging thoughts that got grafted into my being which came purely from attending church, Sunday school, and youth group. Among the long list are these 7 most-damaging messages:
Any impulse you have towards physical intimacy is naughty. (Result: A lifetime of distrusting one’s body and seeing one’s physical self as the great betrayer.)
You should only date someone to get married. (The worst possible message you can give a fifteen year old)
You are not good enough, but God puts up with you anyway. (Result: A life-long feeling of inadequacy and a lack of self-love.)
Everything you love must be given as a “sacrifice” to God. (Thereby making you feel guilty for anything you feel passionately about that cannot be turned into “church work.”)
There is no wisdom/love/spiritual truth/devotion/generosity outside of Christianity. (Result: A really unattractive and utterly false sense of spiritual/moral/political superiority.)
The devil lurks around every corner waiting to attack. (Instilling a constant sense of anxiety and fear.)
God is only male, therefore women are bad because they are not like God and because they brought sin into the world. (Results: such a plethora of damaging crap I cannot even BEGIN to list it all here.)
These messages, these draining repetitive tapes that I still struggle to rid myself of, prevent me from taking my children to church. As much as I want them to have the beauty of growing up in church – community, religious ritual, music – there is too much ….crap…that comes with the package. I can’t allow my girls to be damaged by this as I was. As much as I’d like to think I can counter these messages with parental chats and at- home lessons, I don’t think I can. After all, my parents never taught me any of these deadly messages. I got those all on my own. From church.
Ideally, I could move out of the evangelical branch of Christianity and avoid these things. But really, it’s not true. No matter where I go—and I’ve gone to a LOT of churches—there are still things that keep me from resting easy: exclusively male pronouns for God; one person holding all of the wisdom in the pulpit; patriarchal models of hierarchy and decision making; and the ongoing staggeringly depressing truth that Sunday morning is still the most racially segregated hour of the week. Being a part of these things from a young age shapes you, moulds you, into a certain kind of be-ing. In spite of the changes many of my ministerial friends are chipping out in this old institution, I still have to take a time out. I still have to protect my children in all their malleable young glory. And I guess, above all, I still need time to be …sad.
May it not always be so. May those with the passion and drive to make changes have the strength to continue the work. May healing come, may truth return. Next year, Jerusalem!
Habitude for May
Much love to all you greenies out there who played along with April’s habitude. Sadly, I did not reduce my gas consumption one iota, even though I walked more places than ever, bunched together my car-required errands, and let a lot of stuff go undone rather than use the car to do it. How is that possible???
I did walk away from the reduce-your-gas habitude much more enamored with walking places than ever before. I took the “should I drive, or walk” option complete off my plate. If it’s walkable, it gets walked. And with Spring here, what’s not to love about that?
I live in a pretty walkable neighborhood, so none of my outings take more than 15mintues to walk each way. I’d like to up my exercise ante a bit, so my May habitude is to walk at least 30 minutes a day, in addition to my regular walk-to-work-and-the-grocer routine. Thankfully I have both a lovely three-mile urban lake loop nearby and a treadmill in the basement with a steady supply of favorite TV shows on netflix. (Current obsession: Grey’s Anatomy season two.) So I can easily get my 30 minutes in rain or shine.
Anyone else want to commit to a simple exercise goal for May?
P.s. Congratulation to Karla who got the cloth shopping bag for being the first person to sign on to Love Your Mother last month! I’d also like to send a bag to Aola for consistently chiming in with great greener ideas. Aola, shoot me an email with your snail mail. (moi at magpie-girl dot com.)Your package is waiting for you on my desk. Much love!
One last goodbye to March’s Habitude
Well, it’s the first week in April — time to say goodbye to our March habitude of body love.
Every habitude I play with inspires an artful little offering for the Buy Magpie page. This month’s love-my-curves experiement left me longing — as ever — for expressions of the feminine divine.
If you are a praying sort, you might want to check out the Blessed-Be-She rosetta stones. (Sparkly Things! So pretty!) I’m only making 3 or 4 of these, so if you’d like one, order soon.
Tommorrow, the April Habitude! (Here’s a hint…it’s inspiring me to make leg warmers!)
More Body Love
My migraine is back (hello darkness my old friend) and it’s hard to wax poetic about the miraculous wonder of being an embodied soul. But I did want to check in about our habitude for March.
I’ve taken Jen B.’s advice and adopted a mantra for the month. Every time I eat or drink I say to myself “I love my body as I love a child.” It came to me after I realized I would never treat my children’s bodies the way I treat my own. I don’t always remember to say it, but I often do, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how often I am making good choices without even thinking about it. Sometimes at the end of the day I go over my food and movement for the day and recite my mantra over each memory. I’m learning a lot…I have a lot to learn.
Inspired by the book Intuitive Eating, I’ve also thrown away all my dieting stuff and given up dieting for good. My Weight Watcher’s point counters are tossed and my scale is deprived of batteries and lying in the back of my closet. I’m eating what I want when I want it, as along as I’m hungry. The first two weeks I worried about gaining more, but so far all my clothes fit the same and my favorite pair of jeans fear maybe feels a little looser.The hardest part is determining whether I’m hungry physically, or just emotionally, but I don’t think I’m falling off the wagon too often.
I’m still writing my morning letters to my body about three days a week. It’s been surprising to me how sympathetic I feel towards my body when I treat her (me) as a person and not as a mysterious, manipulative entity to be battled.
Mostly pleasingly, I’ve noticed a distinct decrease in the amount of negative self talk I do about my body. I have this huge mirror in our bathroom which makes seeing my body (me) as a whole every morning unavoidable. Sometimes, I even smile.
What’s your mantra this month?
What Her Body Thought
Here we are again talking about how to break the stereotypical rotten-body-image thing that most American females are restricted by, and find a more shalom-like way to acknowledge, relate to, and treat our bodies.
None of us seem sure of how to get there, but that’s okay, I’m pretty good at stumbling around in the dark until we can light one candle.
Here’s my question for today, what are the absolute basic necessities for you as your body. I’m not talking about what you should be doing according to the latest Hollywood trainer or even according to your wholesome good-spirited naturopath. I’m talking about what you intuitively know to be bedrock-necessary for your body given who you are and how you are at this stage in your life.
Don’t know the answer? Do what Jen always tells me to do: get very quiet and be very brave and spend some time with your journal. Or if you are a kinetic learner, try taking a walk without your headphones. It will come to you. Your body – you – knows what you need.
I find I need to do this a couple of times a year, usually when I’ve let one of my bedrock needs fall out of my daily rhythm. Some of the things on my list remain the same, while others change with health, season, and age. I find that there are usually more than three and less than ten. If I get more than ten, I’ve drifted out of “bedrock” and into “preference” or “shoulds.” Here are mine for the present:
What I (as my Body) Need Right Now
Silence while working and driving.
Sleep from 10pm-7am.
Gentle exercise everyday.
To drink water after 3pm.
To honor my fullness and my hunger.
To knit and write every day – and consequently to ice my wrist every night.
What are yours?
March Habitude: Some Thoughts About Bodies
Take a look at this picture. Okay, ignored the permmed mullet for a minute and notice the size 5 body. This is me at about thirteen. I thought I was fat.
For as long as I can remember my body has been my enemy. It was what got me molested. (I can remember trying to wear shirts that buttoned to the neck to that the person who molested me wouldn’t be tempted by my developing breasts.) It was what made me attractive (or not) to boys. (I started dieting when I was 13 because I thought I should stay a size 3. Tiffany Frank figured out how many sit ups we’d have to do to burn off one of the chocolate caramel bars we were selling as a school fundraisers, and we’d eat them at break then all do sit ups in the empty classrooms.) It was what made me a hip, powerful woman — or not. (Hip, powerful girls played sports – girly old fashioned girls sucked at sports and were doomed to a life involving home ec.) I shoved it into pencil thin jeans, laying on the bed to zip them up; filled it with chocolate chip cookie dough binges when I was sad; and forced it to keep achieving and achieving by fueling it with diet coke through riduclous extracurricular activities and late night study sessions.
As I grew older, I became more sophisticated about how I talked about body image, and diet, and the insipid consumer culture that said happiness was a size 0 and plus size was a size 9. Still, my body was foreign to me – at best silent, and at worst a conspirator for my own unhappiness.
When my first child was stillborn, and my second delivery required an unplanned c-section and resulted in a child who lost weight and wouldn’t nurse, I became convinced – my body was out to get me. The separation between mind/spirit and body that had started as a necessity to survive the abuse had morphed into a permanent division that ruled a very large part of my world. The diagnosis of migraines as a chronic condition just confirmed my early assessment. The evidence was undeniable, my body was conspiring against me.
I am rarely happy with my body and I am appalled at how much time and creative mental energy I spend on this issue. Food is always on my mind. My weight is a near constant disappointment. I feel guilty all the time. I never go through a single day where I don’t feel bad about something I’ve eaten, some exercise I’ve not done or not done enough of, some item of clothing that I can’t wear. For instance, every day on my way to work I walk by this adorable boutique and think, “I can’t wear a single item in there.” They stop at size 9. It’s not a shop for petites or anything, it’s just a regular Seattle boutique. (I’m a size 12.) Or here’s another, today I lifted weights and walked on the treadmill, but I’m going about my day with this thought hovering over my head like a cartoon dialogue balloon: “Maybe I should have done yoga instead.” It’s mentally exhausting and embarrassingly ridiculous.
Last week, in yet another show about dieting, I heard Oprah say that she had wasted a large part of her 30’s worrying about food and weight. I’m thirty-seven. Only three years to go before I am undoubtedly, irrevocably ‘grown up.’ Will I still be carrying the neuroses of a thirteen year old? Will I still automatically convert calories into sit ups? Will I still waste precious minutes feeling guilty? Will my body remain my enemy?
I am so tired of being stuck in Jr. High.
A year or two after I was diagnosed with chronic daily migraines (status migranosis) a new friend, Christine Painter, recommended that I read Voice Lessons by Nancy Mairs and What Her Body Thought from Susan Griffith. Mairs taught me that I do not have a body. She writes, “I have a body. I am a body.” Griffith reminded me that “My story is immersed in my body.” (p. 7) This is not a gnostic exercise I cannot separate my “self” from my physical being. I am my body. If I hate my body, I hate myself. If I love my body, I love myself.
I am nearly 40 years old and I still do not understand this. “I am a body”. It’s is a thought that echoes with truth and memory. It shimmers like a mirage just out of reach. I’d like to get there. I’d like to understand. I’d like to bring my body back to myself. I’d like to be my body, and to love my bodyself as I love my motherself and my creativeself and my womanself.
That’s the habitude for the month, I think. Love your body. How shall we proceed?
Update: to find out how this experiement went, follow along by reading posts about body love in the Habitudes category!
Free Love to Me
Good Morning Body,
Welcome to the day! I love you very much and I think you are sultry and curvy and beautiful. I really want to treat you lovingly and with respect. I want to take good care of you today. So, there will be water and enjoyable exercise, fresh air and fresh food. I wont make you feel slugish with or lousy with too much sugar and caffeine. I will respect your words when you tell me you are hungry or full. I will be a good listener. and when you are tired I will let you rest.
I love you.
Rachelle
I’m not sure what all this is, but I think it might be a clue to next month’s habitude.
And so may this:
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works
I’ll let you know….
