Body. Love.

Body. Love.

In my underwear and a tank top while she made her way to comfort in her bed before I tucked her in and turned out her light. I picked up my right ass cheek, pulled my stretch marks to a stretch, and smiled. A genuine smile.

“What’re you doing?” “I’m just looking at my cellulite and thinking about how much I love my body, how much it does for me, how much life it lets me live.”

She’s twelve so the resounding response was, “Stop! You’re so weird.”

It’s weird to me that we live in a society where my daughter thinks its more normal to hide ourselves in shame, than to hold ourselves in love, even, and especially, our perceived flaws.

I was birthed by a woman who hated her body. Consider here that, even if only subconsciously, when we hate what we believe we are, we find it hard to genuinely love anything that comes from or to us. If you hate yourself, reread that last sentence until you own it, fully.

Everything, and I mean everything, the cancer diagnosis, the narcissistic relationship, the job loss, the money loss, the heartbreak, the shame, feels like opposition, but really, it all comes down to opportunity. Opportunity to heal.

My body, time and time again, experience after experience, has gifted me the opportunity to heal, and to find pleasure on the other side of the deprivation that comes when we hate her (she is by and large, not our enemy and in true perspective, the longest best friend we’ll have access to throughout this particular lifetime).

When I stopped holding her to some standard, when I nurtured her and listened to her the way I would my own children, she gifted me an opportunity to love her not for who I previously would’ve demanded she be, which was a standard, never could she live up to, but for who she came as.

They say nobody’s perfect but I ask whoever “they” are, what if every body, is perfect? Exactly as it is.

The body is a vessel to experience our inner world, in an outer way and she’s been with us from the moment of conception until the moment of death, to aid us in our experience, not to disempower us through it. To deny her the privilege of experiencing herself as beautiful, to deny her pleasure until she appears worthy of it, is literally insane.

I love my body not because she is beautiful, which I’ve come to consider to be true, but because she is the house of the beauty that is me, compacted into her, through essence, into form.

According to plastic surgeons (or my mother ;)) my tits are too small, my cellulite too rampant, my stretch marks and scars too obvious, the lines on my face which demonstrate decades of smiles too weathered. My body, like my home, isn’t just a place I sleep in at night, she’s a place I live in, I create from, I love from, I serve from. She’s even the office for my business. She’s a sanctuary of imperfectly perfect pieces and the pieces that appear haggard are only symbolic of life being lived. Ridicule won’t fix her unsavory parts, but nurturance will fill them, not to fix them, but to heal the part of ourselves that thinks our body needs “fixing.” That she’s too much, or not enough, exactly as she is.

If my experience has taught me anything it’s that when we change our vision about our body, our body will shape shift into a new vision. May you look at her in love today, because she herself, though you’ve felt like she’s been your enemy, is communicating with you, not to hold you down in anyway, but to give you an opportunity to see a part of you, as worthy of love, regardless of how we think love “should” look.