Dear body,

It’s that time of year again. You’ll see many people posting about their new year’s resolutions. You’ll see advertisements for diets and gyms. You’ll feel the pressure to purge from the way you engorged yourself over the holiday season.

Breathe.

These are expectations and demands that come from consumerism, from patriarchy and capitalism. These messages come from white supremacy and the normative categories of how your body “should” look. These are not created with the intention of what is best for you.

Inhale.

Exhale.

What is best for you is to be a body. You don’t have to be anything other. You don’t have to be taut. You can relax. Your breath is more full when you let your belly expand. It’s cold outside, and the extra food has given you energy to try to keep warm. You are doing great.

Dear body… Dear, Dear body…

I don’t want to set resolutions for you. A resolution is “a firm decision.” But you are soft. You are fluid. You don’t give way to rigidity or binary. You aren’t supposed to. No body is all or nothing. No body is completely symmetrical. No body is the same. That is part of the miracle of being a body. You just get to be. There is nothing else you can be but yourself, and I thank you for that. You remind me that I don’t have to be all things to all people all the time, in fact, I couldn’t be if I tried. All I can be is me.

My intention, rather than a resolution, is to find the freedom that comes from being me.

I am not imprisoned by your flesh. I am held by it. Enabled by it. Freed by it to be fully me. No one else in all of time has lived in this body but me, so no one else can tell me how this body should move or love or feel. As I grow in being able to listen to you, tend to you, nurture you…I grow in my capacity to allow others to do the same.

Oh body, thank you for all that you teach me.

You remind me that everyone else is a body too. Not a sinner, not a saint. Not good or bad or right or wrong, just… human. And that is just one form of body. You awaken me to the possibility of allowing myself to notice all bodies- both human and non-human. Your deep breath subtly reminds me and tunes me in to the deep breath of my beloved dog next to me.

Just breathe.

Look around.

Smell.

Feel.

Listen.

Right now all of your senses are beckoning me to be present, to be still. To just…be. You are reminding me that being present is necessary in this world that can feel overwhelming. When all I want to do is escape into business and false achievements you remind me that achievements mean nothing when you can’t breathe. So just breathe.

I can think about the past, and I can worry about the future…but I can only breathe in the present moment.

Dear body,

When I forget to be present and still… you keep breathing for me. You blink and swallow and digest and pump and pulse and contract and expand every second of every day. Everything you do is for me, to sustain me. In you I move and breathe and have my being.

Dear body… teach me to listen to your breathing. Teach me to indwell in all that you experience. Remind me again what it is to be a body, to be human. Let us go through this next year together, fully alive, from the inside out.

If you want to explore your connection to your body and your story join me in the Embodied Story Course!