Your joyous bodyThere is nothing more, rare, nor more beautiful.

There is nothing more, rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself, comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.’ –  Steve Maraboli

For most of my own woman’s life, I have spent it, going against what was miraculously given to me at birth – my body! I have tried throughout my life to disown my shape, my curves, my lushness and beautiful bumps and lumps, wishing away for a different body, less of this and that and so on. Through years of healing, connectedness, reading, journaling, meditating and reflection – I step more into peace and more about self-love, than I knew as a younger amazing woman, however I know that this is a power-full thread that will continue in some form or another as my life unfolds. I share this powerful excerpt from a book, I was given almost 26 years ago, Women Who Run With The Wolves written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and the part I share is from Chapter 7 – Joyous Body: The Wild Flesh.

To all the incredible women that are reading these powerful words, these words are for you. May these words be a loving reminder for your life right now. May they plant a beautiful seed of change and to say to you no matter what your age, your shape, whether you have curves, a goddess’s body, or there are parts that you want different, that your journey is as fleeting as time itself and to gently remind you how stunningly beautiful you are.

A woman cannot make the culture more aware by saying ‘Change.’

But she can change her own attitude toward herself, thereby causing devaluing projections to glance off. She does this by taking back her body. By not forsaking the joy of her natural body, by not purchasing the popular illusion that happiness is only bestowed on those of a certain configuration or age, by not waiting or holding back to do anything, and by taking back her real life, and living it full bore, all stops out. This dynamic self-acceptance and self-esteem are what begins to change attitudes in the culture.

The Power of the Haunches

What constitutes a healthy body in the instinctual world? At the most basic level—the breast, the belly, anywhere there is skin, anywhere there are neurons to transmit feeling— the issue is not what shape, what size, what colour, what age, but does it feel, does it work as it is meant to, can we respond, do we feel a range, a spectrum of feeling? Is it afraid, paralysed by pain or fear, anesthetized by old trauma, or does it have its own music, is it listening, like Baubo, through the belly, is it looking with its many ways of seeing? I had two watershed experiences when I was in my early twenties, experiences that went against everything I had been taught about body up to then. While at a women’s weeklong gathering and at night at the fire near the hot springs, I saw a naked woman of about thirty-five; her breasts were emptied out by childbearing, her belly striated from birthing children. I was very young, and I remember feeling sorry for the assaults on her fair and thin skin. Someone was playing maracas and drums, and she began to dance, her hair, her breasts, her skin, her limbs all moving in different directions. How beautiful she was, how vital. Her grace was heartbreaking.

I had always smiled at that phrase, ‘fire in her loins.’ But that night I saw it. I saw the power in her haunches. I saw what I had been taught to ignore, the power of a woman’s body when it is animated from the inside. Almost three decades later, I can still see her dancing in the night, and I am still struck by the power of body. The second awakening involved a much older woman. Her hips were, according to common standard, too pear-shaped, her bosom very tiny in comparison, and she had thin purply little veins all over her thighs, a long scar from a serious surgery going around her body from rib cage to spine in the manner in which apples are peeled. Her waist was perhaps four hands wide. It was a mystery then why the men buzzed about her as though she were honeycomb. They wanted to take a bite out of her pear thighs, they wanted to lick that scar, hold that chest, lay their cheeks upon her spidery veins. Her smile was dazzling, her gait so beautiful, and when her eyes looked, they truly took in what they were looking at I saw again what I had been taught to ignore, the power in the body. The cultural power of the body is its beauty, but power in the body is rare, for most have chased it away with their torture of or embarrassment by the flesh. It is in this light that the wildish woman can inquire into the numinosity of her own body and understand it not as a dumbbell that we are sentenced to carry for life, not as a beast of burden, pampered or otherwise, who carries us around for life, but a series of doors and dreams and poems through which we can learn and know all manner of things. In the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to whom we are sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us.