Hello Lovely,
Welcome to your Saturday edition of SOVEREIGNTY!
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What is your relationship with your physical body? Do you love it or hate it? Does it give you energy and enable you to thrive, or are you constantly drained and sluggish?
Our body is our sacred temple, it is home to our soul and gives us the power to live and relate, and be all that we are.
But how conscious are we of our bodies?
Of the miracles it performs on a daily basis, of its ability to heal and endure, and the profound wisdom it holds as we journey through menarche, motherhood, and menopause, forever functioning and flowing in cycles within cycles.
How conscious are we of this beautiful and powerful ecosystem that helps us to regulate and detoxify, rejuvenate, and replenish, supporting us to navigate the trials and tribulations of birth, life and death, war and peace, chaos and stress, pleasure, and pain?
Our bodies are sacred and divine, loving and caring, and the body knows what to do at every given moment and yet, we still judge, blame, name, shame, and criticise the way our body looks and feels.
We avoid, deny and suppress what the body is communicating to us through symptoms, malaise, and disease.
And most of all we live in a state of disconnection with the body, constantly at war with our physical selves.
We all have parts of our bodies that we do not like, we’re too fat, too thin, too much orange peel, too white, too brown, too wrinkly, too saggy and the list goes on.
Then there are the physical scars we adorn, surgeries, accidents and injuries, stretch marks and pregnancy, self-harm, acne, and skin conditions and each and every single one has a story to tell, of the life we have lived.
The way in which we relate with the body, reveals the deeper conditioning we have been exposed to. The environment and culture we have grown up in, the media we have constantly consumed, and the views and opinions of others we adopt create a false narrative that we have believed, often to our own detriment.
We become obsessed and possessed by how we look to others, without thinking or even recognising the internal damage we are doing to ourselves, our confidence, and our self-esteem. And this impacts how we live and relate on every level.
I remember when I first went to Italy in my late twenties, I was extremely shy and self-conscious about my weight and the shape of my body, and certainly not used to spending so much time half-naked in the summer sun.
It felt like everyone around me was body beautiful and perfect in size and shape.
And here I was, this English, albeit very brown, fish out of water in a Mediterranean seascape where the emphasis on how you looked seemed to be at the centre of everything.
And while I could swim, I had also inherited a deep fear of the sea from my mum at a young age, and my clumsiness around the sea was evident in my flapping panic, which only compounded my discomfort.
I even had to wear jelly shoes to navigate the rocks, which made me feel stupid and out of place.
What I remember the most, is Michele, my Italian partner sitting with me on the beach as I was crippled with feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy, and he invited me to look around and take in every single person I saw.
Man or woman, masculine or feminine, child, teenager, or adult. Before me, there was every age group, from babies to grandparents and everything in between.
He showed me all the lumps, limps, and wrinkles, all the scars and the cellulite, all the different colours, the bones and the fat, all the wobbles, the bumps, and the sags.
It was like seeing the physical side of human nature for the first time completely naked, apart from the beach uniform of bikinis and costumes.
He showed me how everyone is different, and everybody has a different shape and size, but they don’t let it stop them from living life by the sea.
At that moment I saw a different culture, where being half-naked with every battle scar on show was the norm for 6 months of the year, and how it was necessary to get comfortable in my own skin.
That summer changed my life, and my relationship with my body as I began to accept my body for exactly how it is and fall in love with its beauty and intelligence even how it has aged through the years, sometimes with excess weight and the inevitable stretch marks that appear.
All of which I may never have experienced if it wasn’t for the love and patience of one man who saw my beauty and helped me to awaken my own confidence within it, by embracing my own shadows.
We all have a story about our relationship with our body, and it may be empowering or disempowering, but it is our body and it deserves our love, care, and attention.
To cultivate a deeper and more harmonious relationship with our physical body, we will need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable, taking the time to listen to all the physical parts of us we are rejecting and ask why?
Why do we feel ashamed, embarrassed, and distraught with these aspects of our bodies?
What is standing in our way of loving and embracing them?
This is deep and powerful work, but work that is needed if we are to liberate ourselves from the constricting and confining cages of unhealthy belief systems that keep us in a state of disharmony and disassociation with our true and divine nature.
And we always have a choice.
We can choose to unconsciously keep repeating the pattern of hatred towards our bodies and the disconnection we feel.
Or we can choose to nurture a more loving, accepting relationship with our bodies opening to the sweet ambrosial homecoming of joy and pleasure we experience on the other side.
What will you choose?
Thanks for reading,
With Love,
Nicola x
Turn 69 today and the greatest gift I have achieved is realizing how precious and sacred my sweet body is.
Will there be a replay on Thursday xx