How I fell in love with my body.
Before I begin I first want to honour the people & lineages that have shaped me over the past decade. A moment of gratitude for the people who led me home. Much of this article is alive because of their work so please do check them out and support them where possible. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Satu Tuomela of Authentic Flow, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen of Body Mind Centring, Linda Hartley, Abigail Rose Clarke, Sonya Renee Taylor, Fanny Olsson and Sophie Strand plus many more. Also just a gentle content warning, I speak to a lot of the harm I have experienced, it’s ok if that feels too much for you today.
For most of my life I hated my body. It was too big, too small and not mine. A place of pain, confusion and disgust. Much of my life has been trying to control this body of bone, flesh and fluids. Autism was an extra layer… stimming, tension, relentless anxiety and this strange clumsiness that would come out of nowhere. Eating disorders, male gaze and being sexualised from a young age elevated my hatred. I used alcohol, drugs and sex to dissociate for a long time. Then when that was no longer serving me it shifted to a deeply unhealthy relationship with work. Punishment enmeshed with a desperate need for validation and unrelenting shame moved me for many years.
The story comes in many forms. I am too much, not enough, unloveable, not even likeable, I don’t belong here… These stories have rippled through the cells of my body for decades. Now I am aware that these stories aren’t all mine. Some are burdens of my ancestry, others given to me by modernity and quite a few came from the harms I experienced in my early and adult life (sometimes inflicted by others but also by me). In reflection, I never stood a chance.
And this story is not just mine. I have witnessed this hatred in my friends, family and clients. I see it manifest in the wider collective through our relentless pursuit of youth, beauty and thinness. A billion dollar industry. The system profits from our hatred. I don’t need to tell you this. Patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism etc are all driving forces of this hatred and wherever you fall on the ladder of privilege will likely determine how much you are conditioned to hate yourself.
Hate is such a powerful word. Writing it here feels like a spell, calling in my rage.
The word hate originates from the Proto-Germanic hatajan- and ultimately the Proto-Indo-European root keh₂d-, tied to “grief,” “pain,” and “sorrow.” It moved through Old English (hatian) and Middle English (haten) to become what we know now. At its core, it has always been a word shaped by ache.
Hate is a spell for our pain.
And for many of us, it’s the only tool we were given to make sense of the unbearable. Our trauma, our shame, our inherited wounds. We learn to turn it inward because the culture teaches us that self-dislike is discipline. We learn to turn it outward because systems benefit from our disconnection. Disconnected people are easier to manage, easier to sell to, easier to exhaust.
In the last few years, my body revolted against my hatred. It reached the limits of what it would take from my hatred and that came in the form of long covid, Fibromyalgia and burn out. To be clear, I do not want to glamourise or reduce chronic illness… it’s so hard and life threatening within the container of capitalism. I honour that struggle deeply but the body is not a product of capitalism. We are not machines so of course it was always going to have it’s own revolution and that for me at least has been through the portal of chronic pain & fatigue.
Firstly, I tried to push through. I tried to ignore my pain, ignore the tiredness but it persisted. And this is where I get grateful. Grateful for the people around me, grateful for podcasts & books, grateful for friends and family, grateful for the queer & disabled community and grateful for my relentless curiosity.
Sonya Renee Taylor’s The body is Not an Apology was the first doorway. A new spell.
Then affirmation through my Autism diagnosis.
Many things started to happen at once. I shed the mask of womanhood as I stopped suppressing my queerness and recognised that I was non-binary. This led to the beginning of letting go of the male gaze. I started to become myself and this eventually led me to somatics. Firstly, through yoga as I tried to ‘fix’ my pain. And then through therapy, still trying to be solution orientated so I could return to ‘normal’ but eventually I listened… I listened to the poetry of my pain; This can not go on, there is no normal to return to, can you be here instead?
This led me to compassion and curiosity as a foundation. Hatred was still alive but alchemising slowly to it’s roots… grief & sorrow.
And then came the real shift. As I pulled on the various threads that were coming alive in my unravelling, I found my way to a career change… training as a somatic therapist and then I found Satu & Authentic Flow who led me to anatomy through music, somatics and a little yoga. Another doorway, another portal. Each one taking me a little closer to love.
Anatomy… How the fuck did they manage to make this so boring in school?
It began with an image of the cells of our bones. I was looking at tree rings as art. And this is inside me? This art, that is alive on the surface of my bones. My bones that are made from stardust. My bones that are 20% water. My bones, shaped from the minerals of the ocean so I could walk on land and collaborate with gravity, the space between earth and sky. How did they make this so boring??? And how did they make me hate this?
Then I felt my breath for the first time fully. Inhale, life & nourishment, a gift from plants & trees. Exhale, release & give back. Robin Wall Kimmerer helped me fully realise photosynthesis in an embodied way in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. This awe-inspiring cycle that my body created itself to be a part of. My lungs look like upside down trees, they cradle my heart and know how to breathe without me having to do or be anything. Magic.
Fluids, fascia, muscle, skin, mitochondria… I felt my cells breathing. Dancing from the oceans inside me.
Then there was embryology. The journey of how I made myself. Where I began in the womb of my grandmother as a single cell in the womb of my mother before she was born. The first vibration of me. This form. The Notochord, the first yes, the beginning of my spine. The way our arms and hands spiral out from our hearts. How can I possibly hate this magic?
Yoga fell away. Pure expression moved in. Breathing into my pain, dancing with everything. Knowing that every breath, every intake of fresh oxygen that travels the rivers of my body to nourish every single cell is an opportunity to heal. I don’t say that as a simplistic solution to complex issues, I still have chronic illness and the healing is not the getting rid of this, its the act of alchemising hatred through grief to love.
Now discipline is rooted in devotion.
Devotion to life in all it’s forms. Devotion to our interconnectedness. Devotion rooted in love.
Devotion that reminds me… I belong here.
Everything has shifted in this slow dance of falling into love.
My capacity for complexity has widened. I view myself as plural, an ecosystem of trillions of cells and other creatures. I have a full embodied sense of my connection to everything while being rooted in the permeable boundaries of me. This comes with pain, joy, awe and responsibility.
Falling in love with my body began with trying to fix myself. Over the years it has shifted into a remembering and a constant active practice oriented around… can I be here?
Can I be present? Can I be curious? Can I be connected? Can I hold myself & others with care? Can I be accountable? Can I be fluid? Can I be love?
And the answer is always… yes.