What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
- Muriel Rukeyser
There is power in women’s voices.
When women rise up to tell the truth about their lives, the world as we know it starts to shift.
It shifts personally, in your own life. Nothing is ever the same after truth is told. Transformation and new possibilities are borne. Practiced. Lived.
And it shifts in our families, in our communities, in our world.
Telling the truth about our lives and bodies as women changes everything.
Let’s create the change we’re searching for by speaking the body honest truth about our lives as women in this world.
One of the big truths that I see, over and over again, is how much power, ability, appetite and electricity live in our bodies…
....and how systemically we’ve been taught to whittle it down, package it prettier, more palatable, less electric, more APPROPRIATE.
This conditioning builds shame.
But we don’t say anything about how difficult it is to contort ourselves in this way, we believe a good woman should be able to do it effortlessly. So we stay silent, maybe feeling shame about the struggle to keep ourselves appropriate….
And we suffer alone, in silence.
Let’s break the silence. Let’s lift our voices. Let’s tell our stories.
To each other.
Let’s tell the truth.
The truth is, you’re not alone.
The truth is, you didn’t create this body-shame, it was imposed on you.
The truth is, we can change it.
That’s the body-honest truth.
Let’s make a pact: we’re going to tell each other the truth about our bodies, our relationship to food, to sex, to appetite, to self expression and how we move through a culture and world that constantly and continuously tells us to tone down our appetites, control our bodies and keep ourselves in check.
As you likely know from your own life, this constant pressure is crazy making.
As Naomi Wolf so eloquently stated, Dieting is the most potent sedative because a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Maybe you don’t exactly consider yourself “mad”, but most of us can readily admit to feeling obsessed with the size of our body, worried about gaining weight or beating ourselves up for not losing weight and getting this food thing under control. Or for being too loud, too sexual, too opinionated, this list goes on and on.
And yet, as with so many struggles that women face, we have been conditioned to hide this battle with ourselves because, one of the many marks of “doing it right” as a woman is that we have our appetite and body under control.
Except that control is really the last thing that our bodies (and heart and soul) respond positively to. So we walk around in a silent sort of trap, trying all the diets, the newest fad “way of eating” or exercise phenomenon, all under the guise of wanting to be healthy when really, we just want to be accepted.
I believe, that when we tell the body-honest truth about our lives, something radical happens.
We see our stories in other women’s stories. We see our power in theirs. Our heartbreak in their heartbreak. Our exuberance in their joy. Our appetite for life reflected from their self expression.
We’ve seen it in action these past many months as more and more women pour forward to reveal their experience about sexual harassment. It’s become a movement that is reshaping our corporations and our culture. #metoo
Just like that, the personal experience suddenly becomes the collective and we experience *that much more* freedom because another woman was brave enough to stand for her story and say #metoo.
That experience is possible with our female bodies and the experience so many of us have had as a result of the shame, judgment and ridicule that we experience from not meeting someone else’s standard of beauty, thinness and appropriateness.
We’ve internalized this message so deeply, we think it is just us, there’s just something wrong with ME…
...but the truth is, binge dieting, body shame, appetite control, food obsession, “too muchness” and compulsivity that surround how we relate to our bodies is a virus that has infected most women.
It’s the norm, not the exception. That’s the body honest truth.
I want you to know it.
I want all of us to tell it.
So that we know we’re not alone and together we can change it.
And I think sharing our stories -- our body honest truths -- with each other will show us we’re not alone.
And we don’t have to quietly take it anymore.
We can get free of it.
We can tell the truth about it, to each other and ourselves, so we can get free of it.
That’s The Body Honest Truth
Let’s tell each other the truth.
Let’s create a new paradigm about the experience of living in your female body through our body honest truth.
Because if there one thing I know for sure, its women telling their stories of power, grace, grit, ecstasy and resilience can set the world on fire.
The Body Honest Truth Series is where we share our experiences of living in a female body in this world -- so we can get the fortification we need to keep surviving and thriving AND CHANGE OUR CULTURE with our stories and truth.
You can contribute your Body Honest Truth in a few ways:
Share on your own social media channel and use the hashtag #bodyhonesttruth and tag me @bodysoulwisdomschool
If you want anonymity or just aren't quite ready to share publicly, but know the power of telling your story, you can email me at hello@bodysoulwisdomschool.com. I will NEVER share your name, but may ask permission to share a part of your story. You can ALWAYS say no.
Or when I post each Tuesday, you can tell your story in the comments of that post.
Women’s voices, spoken in honesty and vulnerability, have the power to raise us all higher.
Join us in the #bodyhonesttruth movement and let’s start to strip the shame off our body.
Body Honest Truth Post Suggestions:
Tell your story of what happened
Tell us how it impacted you and
Tell us how you grew from it, overcame it or transformed that story for yourself
Tell us what you’re going to do differently (or that maybe you were fine all along!)