The war against my body.

Before I started down the journey of coaching, I never really thought about the relationship I had with my body, it was something that did what I wanted it to do. Then when I started to experience challenges with my health, I became very aware of it. I would focus on how my body lacked energy, how it caused me pain, how it couldn’t handle anxiety and stress, how I no longer moved in the way I used to, or looked the way I used to.

With this awareness around my body, I would find myself getting frustrated and blaming it for how I was feeling.

It was as though my body was acting separate from me, and I treated it as though it was me against my body. 

Believing that my body was the enemy that held me back from living a happy and healthy life, only caused me further dis-ease. I became less intuitive with how I was feeling and what I was needing because I dismissed and distrusted my body’s cues. I experienced more pain because I would try to suppress or push through physical symptoms telling myself it was something to beat. The more this separation grew between me and my body, the less confident I felt as a whole.

When this shift happened, I started to tune in to how other people were with their bodies and I saw that what I was experiencing was extremely common. 

This piqued my interest so I carried out further research and found the brilliant work of Hillary McBride whose work highlighted that 90% of people in Western cultures, including men, loathe their bodies. 

When I read this and reflected on where my relationship with my body was going, I knew I had to make a change. My body had been with me from the beginning and there was no physical way I was going to live a life that didn’t include my body in the conversation.

So....If my body was always going to be with me I couldn’t keep trying to treat it as something that worked in isolation to me. I was going to have to learn to reconnect and bring it back as a main character in the narrative of my life.

Because how can healing, how can joy, how can life take place inside of a body that I was at war with?

This was a pivotal moment in my personal life, and also shaped the work I do today as a Somatic Trauma Therapist and Coach.

And this is my invitation for you - 

• How can you develop a more loving (or at least a more mutually respectful) relationship with your body?
• How can you after experiencing changes in your body, where maybe your body has been a place where you’ve experienced difficulty, learn to partner with it so that you can experience more freedom, joy, health, and wholeness?

With love, 

Sarah x