This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | April 23, 2025 — How have you been taught to treat your body?
Happy good Wednesdayđź’ś
Let’s talk about rigidity, control, and domination.
I find these words jarring to write, and when I look at them, they read like war tactics.
And yet we’re taught to use these same approaches with our bodies.
Exploring the hows and whys is a separate lengthy convo, but really look at that truth for a moment: we are taught that our bodies are things to be dominated.
We’re told we need to whip our bodies into shape and deprive them of sleep and food. We’re simultaneously taught to be ashamed of our bodies’ natural processes and needs. And then we internalize these dialogues and transform them into deeply held beliefs that we pass from one generation to the next.
Let’s break that cycle.
Your body is not a commodity or machine. It is a part of you and your experience in this life. It’s how you get around and communicate. How you express and receive. How you reach out and commune. It’s how you live.
Building a strong relationship with your body is something that only you can do, and a good start is acknowledging what you’ve been taught about how you “should” treat it and separating those things from what you believe to be true for you. Take a good look at what you’ve learned from your family, media, pop culture, religion, and community. What might be in there that doesn’t ring true for you?
When we practice yoga, we’re not trying to dominate our physical form. We’re experimenting with and experiencing how movement and body position may shift our internal experience, and unify our minds and spirits with our bodies. To bring it all together. To make being a full experience.
Today I encourage you to start to get to know the lens through which you know your body, including the beliefs you hold that started somewhere else and might not really belong to you, and perhaps invite in a softer view: that you are a warm, beautiful body not meant to be confined to rigid constraints, that you are a whole being, meant for spaciousness and freedom and fluidity.
With wonder and curiosity,
