I Just Want To Body
Why we could all benefit from a paradigm shift that takes us from “loving our bodies” to “bodying” to live fuller, more exciting and adventurous lives full of love, laughter and joy.
“And I said to my body softly, ‘I want to be your friend’. It took a long breath and replied, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.’ — Nayyirah Waheed —
Igot home from my weekly boxing session a short while ago. I walk to and from boxing, an hour and a half each way, because I like challenging myself in all the ways. But I was lagging on the way home.
And then I thought how lucky am I to have this body? This body that just finished an intense boxing session and now gets to walk through a forest to get back home. Feeling grateful for this body of mine didn’t necessarily motivate me to speed up, but it re-framed my walk home.
Each week I get stronger and more skilled as a boxer. And while that has implications for how my body looks, the most important thing is how I feel in my body. What my body allows me to do.
But that said, while I am grateful for my body, I still think of it as something outside myself. It is very much an object. One I’ve tried to control for much of my life as I’ve written about previously.
I’ve had an uneasy relationship with my body for most of my life. Over the past few years, I’ve been working really hard on developing a better relationship with it. I’m learning to fall in love with my body. And while this all feels like I’m moving in a positive direction, there’s something missing. Because I’m still not really in my body. Even if I learn to love it, my body still feels like it’s outside of me.
As always Glennon Doyle and her profound insights helped me understand why I still feel disconnected from my body. In a recent episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast Doyle, who hosts the podcast with her wife Abby Wambach and her sister Amanda Doyle, is currently in recovery from an eating disorder.
She has been open and honest about her challenges because she believes that her experience can help others. It has certainly helped me and I’m grateful to her for chronicling her journey.
In the episode, Doyle recounted the biggest challenge she has with her recovery from a lifetime of disordered eating. And that is that we talk about eating disorders as if they are about body image. How we feel about our bodies. And with that framing of the problem, the solutions become about fostering a better relationship with our bodies. Loving our bodies.
But the problem with that? As Doyle explains that the
very framing of the solution is the problem. Because loving my body presupposes that my body is not me. It is other than me. It is the object. If I am loving my body, if am having a relationship with my body, I am already objectifying my body. I am the subject. My body is the object.
She argues that when we tell ourselves or advise another to just “love your body”, we are implying that we are separate from our bodies. She asks: if our bodies are the object of the loving who is the “I” loving our bodies.
She uses the analogy of couple’s therapy to paint a visual picture of what it might look like to love her body. If she in a session with a couple’s therapist to learn how to love her body and if her body is on the right side of the couch sitting opposite the therapist, who is on the left?
This prompted Doyle to ask: What if every single thing that we have learned about who we are is wrong? She explains:
What if I don’t have to learn to love my body? Because my body is not separate from me. It is is me. What if the only thing I have to learn how to love is having the experience of living out through this body?f I don’t want to love my body. I just want to body. I want to be. I want to look out from in here and experience it. I don’t want to have a body. I want to have an experience of being a body.
Her sister, Amanda Doyle, responded:
You want to be alive . . . You want to have the experience of being alive . . . If the experience of being alive is a truly unique experience then you want to fully inhabit that experience by being . . .
Doyle agreed, saying that she will not “self-objectify” anymore. She read from a beautiful piece of prose she wrote on the subject which goes like this:
Your body is not your masterpiece. Your life is. It is suggested to us a million times a day that our bodies are projects. They aren’t. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our love is. Our relationships are. Our work is. Stop spending all day obsessing, cursing, perfecting your body like it’s all you’ve got to offer the world. It’s not. Your body is not your art. It’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush . . . is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that you have a paintbrush which can be used to transfer your insides onto the canvas of your life where others can see it and be inspired and comforted by it. Your body is not your offering. It’s just a really amazing instrument which you can use to create your offering each day. Don’t curse your paintbrush. Don’t sit in a corner wishing you had a different paintbrush or wasting time. You’ve got the one you’ve got.
She followed this by declaring that she doesn’t want to spend anymore time learning to love her paintbrush. She just wants to paint. She just wants to be fully alive and to live through her body.
Doyle says that she’s learned that it is not just the media that influences how we view our bodies — objectified them and taught us to do the same — but Western philosophy and religion which underpins everything. And as such everything we’ve ever been taught objectifies our bodies. We have been taught to consider our minds our real selves and our bodies not our real selves is objectifying. She asks:
Why do I think that my mind — that honestly has done some incredible things but led me astray many, many times — has more wisdom in it than my hands? My hands are how I love and touch and how I’ve connected with every single thing I’ve ever loved or done or made art. Or my feet or my belly or my thighs . . .
And then she says the most uplifting thing that filled me with so much hope. She uses the analogy of an MRI with contrast and imagines that if she drank embodiment contrast with the aim of measuring how embodied she is a few months ago, just the top of her head would have been lit up. That’s the part of her body that she felt lived in. But now she declares that she would be lit up from the top of her head to the bottom of her toes. She said:
I don’t want to love my body. I just want to live with my body . . . I want to live out from in here. I don’t want to live out there looking at me.
That’s not to say that the body positivity, that loving the skin you’re in, is wrong in any way but as Amanda Doyle said:
Even if you are being body positive you are still separating yourself from your body and objectifying it.
This gave me a lot of food for thought.
And here’s what I’ve concluded so far, but as with everything it could change:
Who I am truly, my essential self is not my body. Nor is it my mind. My true nature cannot be defined in words. But as I wrote about recently, I believe that there are two versions of me. My essential self which is not just connected to all things, but is all things. And my human self, the one that lives in this human body.
While I know my essential self is always there to drop into, I also want to live a full, exciting, adventurous life in this human body.
Seeing this body as fully part of my human self — not more or less so than my mind — helps me do that better. It also re-frames how I see my body itself. It’s the paintbrush, not the canvas. Life is the canvas. I want my body to be strong and healthy and fit because I want to paint the heck out of that canvas. And now I’m going to go out and do just that.
