Year of the body
This is going to get personal.
I was at a concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco in the spring of 2018 when I remembered I had a body.
It’s odd to become fully conscious of your body thirty something years after living in it — to recognize just how much information it is storing and sharing and experiencing, how much wisdom it can impart when you listen.
I was standing in a crowd of a hundred or so people, dark room, bright neon lights, experiencing music through my muscles instead of my mind. A kinetic voice whispering meaning from head to toe.
This song was playing:
I don’t recall exactly what my body was saying but it was something like:
“HELLOOOOOOOO-OH! I’m here! Maybe if you listen to me a bit more, you’ll stop making decisions that make you feel icky!”
Let’s be honest. It’s pretty absurd to ignore your body for thirty plus years. Frankly, it’s embarrassing to admit.
When I say ignore, I don’t mean to imply I was treating my body poorly. I was eating healthy foods, working out on the reg, and enjoying a good dance party whenever one came my way.
But, I rarely listened. Gut feelings came and went, ignored because they emanated from my center and not my crown. And, brace yourself — my sexuality, my pelvic floor, my vagina — I told all my feminine parts to stay quiet except during select moments when they were supposed to be on.
It’s not that surprising. As children, we spend the majority of our waking life in school, focused on cultivating wisdom from the neck up. Our brains, we’re told, are the source of our superpowers. Meritocracy rewards the smart and hardworking. Get a 1600 on your SATs, go to a good college, get a good job. Kabaam. Good life train here we come.
Bodies? Well bodies are here to serve you, to give you the energy to succeed.
The way to thrive in Corporate America, I intuited, was to be guilelessly un-self-conscious. As a young woman, it served me to be both a young woman, with all her shapes and curves, and also completely unaware that I was a young woman, seemingly ignorant to how those shapes and curves affected others.
Flash forward to the concert. I’m in a moment of life transition, about to get married, and a chasm ruptures. A deep remembering begins to plant the seeds that I am more than mind.
Over the last few years, I’ve worked through new ways to connect to the wisdom of my body, which ironically, has helped me fine tune my mind.
I still feel like a baby getting to know its hands. As I like to joke to my friend Krista, “What is a feeling??”
Why am I telling you this story?
First, it feels good.
Second, I was re-reading a letter I wrote to myself January 1, 2019 in which I told myself to to remember:
That you have a body (!) that has inherent wisdom, equal to the truth of the mind
That by letting emotions flow freely through you, you can become free. That containing them for fear of reaching higher peaks of negativity will only cause anxiety and more fear
That the mind and consciousness are distinct
Third, there’s something deeper going on.
I believe that women have been systemically and historically trained to ignore our bodies, especially our vaginas. As individuals, we’re trained to focus on the brain, with the ladder from high school to college to work. At work, you're supposed to both be a woman and not, lest you attract attention or under/over leverage your sexuality. And then, all of a sudden, you go through a major life shift like pregnancy or deal with a health issue and there's this huge awakening to suppressed pain and pleasure.
This extends beyond individuals. EXPERTS in the body, i.e. medical doctors, are rarely taught about female sexuality.
Here’s a snippet of a 2013 publication from UC Davis:
Although the importance of sexuality to patients is recognized, there is wide variation in both the quantity and quality of education on this topic in North American medical schools.
Many sexual health education programs in medical schools are focused on prevention of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection.
Educational material on sexual function and dysfunction, female sexuality, abortion, and sexual minority groups is generally scant or absent.
Source: PubMed
As many of you know, I now work in the body business. Over a year ago, I started a company (sneak peek) whose mission is to help women feel better in their bodies, through every phase of life.
There were many stars that aligned to get me here, a topic for another post. But the spark was this concert, the moment of reckoning that I have a body, and that she has a lot to say.
I like images that have a narrative. They offer you a starting point, not a closing point.
- Stefano Tonchi, former editor of W and T Magazine
Art by Alexandria Coe
Photo by Spathumpa
Get ready to move
Listen: My very own DJ Carlos Salim (aka Patrick Burns dropped this mix)
Read: The Eye by Nathan Williams
This is real
Go to this website and tell me that direct to consumer marketing has not crossed the chasm.