Love yourself by loving your body
You are a home…
And paying attention to your body is a healing journey.
Wounding often happens when we are forced to abandon our bodies - what they want, what is not ok, or what they need. Very often, having to abandon your body to deal with a stressor, a traumatic event, or a damaging relationship is part of what wounds us. And so coming back to our bodies, over and over again, can be part of our healing.
When we are meeting someone else’s needs while suppressing our own, or trying to survive an awful relationship, we might have had to tell our bodies to wait - that they are not important as we grapple to just make it through. And so our bodies can be a welcoming path to help us heal.
One of the most loving and healing things we can do is to start to listen to our bodies.
Do not believe that your body is not good.
Your body is made in the image of God.
Your body is needed, and holy, and it is where you live.
Your body is also where God lives, and the place you experience God.
You may have never felt the permission to take the time to really listen to what your body needed, to nurture and soothe your body.
Listen now. Are you hungry? Are you cold or warm? Does your body want to stretch or move? Or is your body aching for rest?
Lovingly tuning in and nurturing your body starts with simply paying attention. Wounding in our lives is often related to messages - implicitly or explicitly - that your body, your body’s needs, desires, or boundaries are not to be honoured. And so healing includes naming and honouring those needs, desires, and boundaries.
You get to choose now. You get to lean in gently to your body and let it whisper back to you that it is very thirsty right now, and loving God and loving yourself is taking care of the body that God gave you. And healing is not just in your mind, or in a prayer, or in a therapy session - it is in the bodily movements of gently loving and nurturing yourself.
You are worth too much to push your body past its points of need. Listening to what your body needs, and nurturing those needs, is one of the boldest acts of claiming your worth and the beauty with which you were created.
Love yourself by loving your body.
The healing journey is not far off in some distant place, on top of a mountain or across a mountain. The healing journey is where you sit now. In the way your arms fold across your lap, in the curve of your foot, in the hunger in your stomach.
The healing journey is in you, by honouring you, and there we meet God as well.
Written by Monica DiCristina
Guided Meditation - You Are A Home:
Mindful Prompt: You are worth too much to push your body past its points of need. Listening to what your body needs, and nurturing those needs, is one of the boldest acts of claiming your worth and the beauty with which you were created.
Continued in the upcoming series on mindfulness "With All Your Heart, Mind and Body", featuring Monica DiCristina and a guided mindfulness mediation each day, this week with a subscription in the App.
Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco
