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This week’s Soften Saturday is a guest post from my friend Celeste who writes at The Lazy Radical. I went to a restorative yoga class earlier this week and heard the teacher several times say, “Notice how your body feels without judgment.” This concept seemed very foreign to me. Celeste’s post helped me understand. I love the way in which she is noticing her body without judgment.
From Celeste:
My Current State of Fatness
I am pretty fat right now. I haven’t always been, and I might not always be, but right now, my body is pretty big…bigger than I expect a lot of times. I don’t hate it, or myself, because of it. I also don’t have some inspiring story about loving my body this way, or at least loving it differently than if it carried less weight. Because this isn’t about acceptance or love or self-esteem. I’m just noticing what it feels like to be me these days.
I don’t think things magically change if my body changes. I’m not my body; I’m the soul residing within it. But I do live in it, and lots of people see it before they see anything else about me. Which is just how it works. We all do this – look at each other, and evaluate what we’re seeing based on our own preferences and values. I get it…I do the exact same thing. It takes some real work to be able to just see the light within and not get distracted by someone’s body. If people do or don’t like me because of my weight, it’s not so obvious to me, and I get attention from men on a pretty consistent basis, whatever that tells us.
To me, my body – this body, at this point in time – is the external manifestation of some internal state where I have created a lot of space around me. There’s extra physical space between me and other people with this extra weight I’m carrying. And at least in my mind, it’s also psychic space as well that keeps me from being so close to the surface, not quite so visible and vulnerable.
I haven’t psychoanalyzed all of this with any exactness. Mostly it’s an energetic and intuitive sense of wanting to add a layer or two to the incredible exposure I felt as a young woman with the advent of unexpected and intrusive sexual attention. I didn’t want this to suddenly be how my relationship with the world was defined, by people’s attraction to my body, and that’s true today as well. And maybe my body holds onto this truth even when my mind thinks that’s in the distant past.
I’m not trying to create an obstacle course of hurdles you have to get past to get to me, but I have always felt that people, with their needs and desires and demands and expectations, could be dangerous. And while I can face things when I need, I’ve always felt safer being just a little bit invisible, a little distant, in a certain way.
And I think that this weight will lessen when I don’t need to rely on it so much to create space around me. When I am comfortable being more visible, maybe more vulnerable, more connected and engaged and available. Because it would certainly be easier to clothes shop if I had a more average size, and my structurally unsound knees would be relieved to transport less weight with every step, and mostly I think I would look and feel much more like who I am energetically than I do right now.
But there’s some necessary organic process going on here, and I’m not entirely sure what it is. And I want to honor it, whatever it is, and understand it. Because when I have weighed less it wasn’t because of stringent diets or external discipline. It was about unleashing different energies into my life, and into my body, and maybe that’s what this is pointing to now.
Please read more of Celeste’s insightful musings on her blog, The Lazy Radical.
Hey there, I found you via the NaBloPoMo blogroll.
As part of NaBloPoMo I try to comment on as many participating blogs as I can, and I am also adding participating blogs to my feed reader. So I’m just dropping by to let you know I’ve added your blog to my feedreader, whenever you publish a post I will see it. 🙂
I have created three bundles on Inoreader so that bloggers can easily visit other participating NaBloPoMo bloggers which you can find here –
http://www.snoskred.org/2014/11/nablopomo-bundles-final-edition.html
Your blog is in the second bundle.. I also have a link up going at my place so my readers can find participating blogs which you are more than welcome to add your blog link to.
Looking forward to seeing your posts. You may see me drop by again during November, but it might be December before I finish my first drop by to blogs if I don’t get faster at leaving comments. 🙂
Happy NaBloPoMo to you!
Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org