Body Kindness: The Freedom and Power of Letting Go of Body Self-Criticism

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 149

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I know I keep banging on about body image to you in these podcasts, and there's a reason for that, and that's because the way that you feel about your body will change your whole life. Your body is the lens through which you experience absolutely everything. It's how you show up in the world. It's how you interact with other people. It's how you love and laugh and play. It's how you want to build relationships. It's how you concentrate and learn and grow. It's how you balance. It's what you delegate. Everything that you think about. Your body causes a different reflection of how you interact with your whole life.

Body safety and body kindness opens up access to joy and pleasure and creativity and connection, both with yourself and with people around you and with the things that are important to you in your life.

I'm not trying to show you ways to be able to navigate this stuff so that you can love your body all the time, but it's about softening that sense of perpetual disagreement that we might have with our bodies, whether it is like inherent criticism for them aging or aching, whether it is that they should be a different shape or shade or smoothness than what you happen to have glanced in the mirror, or notice as you look down upon yourself.

Feeling like your skin is your super suit with which you navigate your way around this universe, this time round is a way to be more present in your life. It's a way for you to be able to take up space in the existence that you're in. It's a way to be able to reclaim your time. Because I know for sure that the more time I spent criticising my body: when I was being my meanest to myself, I was absolutely obsessed with my body the whole time, it took up so much of my energy, took up so much of my existence, just worrying about how I look, how I was standing, what I was holding in, how other people were perceiving me, how I compared with other people in the room. All of these things just took up such a relentless amount of my headspace, energy, and life capacity.

And just allowing myself to exist in the body that I'm in has just given me so much more space for me to be able to live a life that is full of more things that can gravitate me towards more kindness and more joy. And so I think that sometimes we can think that working on body image is sort of like a little frivolous pastime that we could get around to if we have enough time and there's way more important stuff to be doing. And I agree with you; there is way more important stuff to be doing, but you'll actually have time for that if you speak to yourself with more kindness. This is just a gentle reminder that working on yourself is anything but selfish. I was at my most selfish when I was most self-obsessed with my own anatomy.

Freeing yourself up from some of the brutality that we can treat ourselves with enables you to live a life that's more in alignment with your own values.

I wish that for you. I wish you the freedom to move around and gravitate towards more things that bring you joy.

I think just as an extra PS to this, that one of the key ways that I was supported in being able to do this for myself was just to look at lots of different body types, lots of different bodies, being able to expand my range of what I consider to be beautiful. And if you want some extra ideas as you do that, my Instagram @HeardinLondon just has so many incredible, wonderful humans of so many different shapes and sizes and personalities and looks and vibes and backgrounds; do go and have a look over there at just how brilliant some of the humans are. It really does expand our range of how many different ways that we can see ourselves and our humanity as exquisite. I adore and appreciate all of the people that I get to work with and have such wonderful photo shoots with. And if you would like a photo shoot, of course, please do get in touch. I would love that. I'm always really excited by people who want to take their confidence to the next level and take that step of being able to explore what it could look like to be seen through a lens of love and care and respect. And that's what I try and do with all of my shoots. Expanding a range of what you see in your, in your eyes, in your daily feed of things is always a helpful tool to expand the range of more possibilities for more of us to feel welcome.

If you would like to see any more work on this, you know you have to find me over at www.selfcareschool.co.uk and I'll speak to you next week.

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