Four Powerful Questions to Transform How You Feel About Your Body

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 145

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Most of us have narratives about our bodies that we've been telling ourselves for our whole lives, or at least the part of our lives where we've been aware of our bodies.

And that often coincides with the time of our lives when we started to receive messages from the external world about our bodies. And most of us are also aware that we don't always talk that kindly to ourselves about our bodies, about our physicality. Or maybe there's just one particular area of your body that you really know that you should be kinder to yourself about, but somehow, actually transforming that never seems to stick.

And this week's podcast is just looking at some very fundamental questions that you can ask yourself to try and interrupt that pattern. And it's a series of questions

I want you to ask yourself:

Who taught you that?

Who taught you that message that you're repeating to yourself and saying that it's yours?

I want you to ask yourself, do you like it?

Do you like speaking to yourself like that? Do you like feeling the way that you feel when you say that thing to yourself?

And I wonder if you'd say it to somebody else?

Mostly this is the one that I think gets people, they know full well that they wouldn't speak to somebody else the way that they're talking to themselves.

And then it just leads to the final one, which is so gentle but so important, which is, do you want to keep this thought or not?

Is this something that you want to continue to say to yourself? It doesn't have to be. It can be. There's no right or wrong answers.

It just enables a little bit of looseness and a little bit of air around the idea that these voices that we talk to ourselves with do impact the way that we hold ourselves in the world and therefore do impact the world, do impact the way that we interact with other people. It impacts the way that we are able to make meaningful change in the world.

If we are absorbing and manifesting and holding and repeating fatphobia, ableism, ageism, heteronormative white supremacist beauty standards, they're taught to us, absolutely ingrained within us, if we are repeating these things, we are upholding these structures.

And taking responsibility for the fact that we are repeating this stuff isn't about self-blame. It's about acknowledging that we have the power to write news stories and we also have the power for it to be a roadblock, that you don't have to continue this on forever, that the next generation doesn't have to deal with this stuff, that we could halt it now. We could decide to be the dam that stops this stuff.

Quite often, agency can feel scary because it means letting go of waiting for our bodies to change in the way that we've been told that will make us acceptable and lovable and safe.

Waiting for external validation is never a kind, comfortable, easy place to be sitting. And actually, even though it feels like we're letting go of control, waiting for someone else to give us acceptability, lovability, and safeness in our own skin is nothing like agency. It's the complete opposite.

Deciding to interrupt some of these stories so that you can tell the story that you want to the kindness that you want to be, sort of compassion that you want to see out there in the world with your body within your body, with the way that you move within the skin that you're in, this can be your choice. And that choice is your responsibility.

You don't have to speak to yourself with any more kindness than you already do, but I can tell you from standing the other side, it's a hell of a lot nicer.

If you'd like help to do any of this stuff, you know where I am.

Come and find me at wwww.selfcareschool.co.uk

I'll speak to you next week.

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