This body is growing.

This body is growing.

With every day that I feed her when she is hungry, she grows.
With every day that I dance, as fully or gently as she needs, she softens.

The other day, I caught a glimpse of my back in the mirror, and saw how soft it was.

In my entire life, my back has never been soft.
Even when I was studying abroad in college and was quite fat - my back was not soft.

That’s because of some very literal things like, at the time I was doing gymnastics workouts, and then years later handstands were my world. So from a purely physical stand point, my back was hard because I was doing things that required it to be.

But it’s so much more than that.
My back was hard because I taught myself (was taught) how to stand in order to be perceived well by others.
How to have “good posture.”
How to look good.
Many of these things were conscious, like actively working on my posture. Or holding my body a certain way so much of the time because of dance or yoga technique, training it to become second nature. (It did).

And then so much of it was unconscious. Holding my stomach in and tilting my pelvis when I was around men.
Tightening my upper back to make myself smaller (energetically.. but physically too).
Eating only once or twice a day, triggering my stress hormones to carry me through, activating my nervous system into pretty constant hyper arousal.

I say this to my clients a lot - have you ever seen a dog get stressed, and their hair goes up on their backs? It’s basically same with humans. But so many of us are doing that 24/7. Imagine if that dogs hair never went down.

Waking up with back pain anyone?

(And I find it so fascinating that what our society thinks is sexy is actually just bodies in overdrive, but that’s a topic for another time.)

So,
Now,
My body is growing.
My back is softening.
My p*ssy is opening.
My rib cage is widening.
My breath is flowing more deeply.
My tension is releasing.
My body pains are diminishing.

And,
I’m not gonna lie…I’m scared.
A huge part of me wants to go “no no no nevermind! Let’s just go back to the gym, and no need for breakfast and let’s get cute and go meet some boys.” 😂

Because you know what?
Being skinny, and fit, and tight, and strong, and small… afforded me a lot.
It earned me respect as a yoga teacher.
It got me attention as a woman.
It had people listen to me, that wouldn’t have otherwise, in my business.

It allowed me to be PERCEIVED as successful or desirable in some way. But in a way that often mismatched what I was actually about.
Without meaning to, I was selling something I couldn’t deliver on. Because that was never what I was actually about. But here I was being the walking spokesperson of it, just because of how I held myself.

Letting my body grow is scary.
What will I lose?
Will I still be sexy?
Will anyone trust me anymore?

But it’s time to grow baby.
I love my body too much to force her into this lie anymore.
And I trust her more than ANYTHING else, so I trust that she will find the size and the posture and the movement that is deeply right for her.

Here we go.

Originally written January 23, 2022.