If you do not know deeply, unshakably, that your body belongs to you, you will struggle.
If you are not FOR yourself. If you are not in alignment with what your body wants first and foremost.
Then you cannot have the life you really want.
You will be forever burdened with thoughts of “if only” and “what if.” You will be anxious and unsettled and unsure of yourself. You will be afraid of disappointing others or failing. You will not set essential boundaries. You will feel unclear about what your body is actually saying. You will hold yourself back from doing what you want. You will keep your gifts from the rest of the world. You will have sex that might feel ok on the surface but you will know deep down inside your body – if you listen – that something is still missing.
You will doubt that you deserve more.
I know this, because it was me.
My entire life shifted when I began to truly live the idea that my body was my own.
And here’s the sticky part: up until then, I hadn’t even known that I thought it wasn’t.
My behavior, though, told a different story.
I tried to make men like me. I felt guilty any time I set a boundary with bosses or family – if I even set them at all. I did not say “no” to the touch I didn’t like during sex. I caked my face in makeup. I clothed my body in the most societally appropriate ways, and I worried about the messages I was sending. I stayed with partners that didn’t fully meet me. I felt unsafe on the street. I did work in the world that made people see me as “good” – and that was what I cared about.
I tried to craft an image of myself that I thought was palatable to other people, and I hid the parts of me that didn’t fit.
(And today, well… let’s just say I put my naked body on the Internet, put menstrual blood on my face, live in another country with a man who challenges and inspires me, and have a reputation for being super magnetic. Ha!)
Our bodies are us. They rule our lives. They store our past experiences inside of us, and our unconscious stories dictate our responses throughout the day.
This is why you can logically understand “my body belongs to me” (or even “my life belongs to me”) but still not feel evidence of it in your life: your conscious mind believes it, but your primal brain (where your fight/flight/freeze response happens) does not.
If you truly knew you belonged only to yourself, you would live inside your body every day. You would feel from your womb, your gut, your pussy, your heart, your breasts. You would not need to go to yoga or meditation or exercise to feel your body – you would be your body already. You would listen to the tiny urges, the tiny whispers your body tells you as if they were the only thing that mattered. You would experience the type of wild synchronicities and magic that only happen when you’re being completely true to yourself.
You would enchant yourself and the entire world around you.
It wouldn’t matter what anybody else did or said, because you would deeply know that you are your own. That you exist for yourself. That your only purpose is to be your entire full self, and to free yourself from all the conditioning that got piled on top.
Since basically the entire world is set up to teach you that your body is not your own, it would actually be weirder if you already believed that it is.
Even “mindful” communities get this wrong – ever hear a meditation teacher say, “You are not your body”?
It might be true in a metaphysical sense, but when it comes to your time existing as a human on the planet (which, like it or not, is where you are right now), you actually are very much your body.
And your body is waiting for you to come home to it.
For you to say, I believe you. I will listen to you.
I am you.
If you liked this piece, you might also enjoy:
– You were never a virgin and nothing was ever taken from you
– I get angry that there are teenage girls who think their bodies are untouchable
– Once, he wrapped his hands around my neck
– They will tell you you are unclean
– 16 beliefs I have now that make my life way more fun