Connie Sobczak's Blog, page 4
September 30, 2013
Is Accepting Ourselves Enough?
I recently found the book, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, and from the opening quote, “Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?” (quoting Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of my favorite TV shows of all time), I thought this is the next book that will reaffirm everything I do, everything that I am, and support me in how I love myself AND my body! Well I was wrong. I guess even the girls who take back the word fat and “accept” their bodies still don’t do enough to love them. What’s the difference between acceptance and love? Acceptance doesn’t prompt any action; it feels like, I’ve accepted that this is the way my life is. It isn’t engaged! Love is about connecting to, appreciating, doting upon, finding affection for, and sitting in awe of something, and more importantly someone. So I say, I’m proud that there are fellow fat girls out there, but if all we’re going to do is accept our bodies, I say I have better things to do. I’m here in this world LOVING every inch of me, and that, to me, is a more Body Positive thing to do.
Radical Self-Love: It Can Be Yours!
Radical Self-Love: It Can Be Yours!Hello Body Positive Community!!
I am coming off of an amazing weekend at our Be Body Positive workshop at the College of Marin. I am full of energy and have renewed commitment to the work of self-love. There is something amazing that happens during these weekend workshops. By the end of two days, the love in the room seems to burst at the seams! Women and men are reclaiming their beauty, proclaiming their truth, and sharing their wisdom about LOVE!
I wanted to share with you something that came up this weekend: the idea of radical self-love. Radical means, departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme, excellent, wonderful. You might wonder, “How do I get there? What would radical self-love look like in my life?”
You already possess the tools to unlock the love inside.
Start with what you know:
What do you know about yourself (your relationship with food, your body, relationship to others)?
What experiences have you had that have uplifted your spirit?
What obstacles have you overcome?
What we find is that when we start from what we already know about ourselves, we can follow a progression from what we know to what we like, and then to what we love. It is about giving yourself permission to discover what it is about yourself that you love. It is about opening yourself up to the possibility of loving your body, right now.
Ask yourself:
What would it feel like to love my body?
What would change for me in terms of my relationship to myself and others?
How would my life be different?
Something that I committed to this weekend was that I want the love for myself to swim in the world’s deepest oceans, to climb the highest peaks, to rest on the smiles of children and elders, to hold hands with my brothers and sisters around the globe, to warm my heart and feed my soul. I want my love for my body to rest upon my hips, to sit between my toes like sand on a beach, to cradle my belly and to crown my head. I want it to surround every inch and curve in a warm and enveloping embrace. There is an infinite amount of love in the world! There is enough for us all to have some. There is enough for us to cultivate it and share with others.
The idea that love for your body can transform your life is radical. This is The Body Positive work. We believe that love for your body changes your life because you learn that you are enough, you are beautiful and worthy of living your life now. Loving your body gives you the wisdom to love yourself in every moment. Start with what you know. Go towards what you desire, and hold a frame that says that in this moment you are beautiful, and you are worthy of love, just as you are right now.
Dancing Back to Myself
I have been through this before…periods in my life when I wasn’t dancing, at least not formally. I dance in my room, in my kitchen, in the shower (no singing but dancing!), in my car, but it is in a dance class is where I really appreciate my body. As you can tell, I dance everywhere, but the feeling of being in a class and working on something specific allows me to focus a tunnel vision, just me and my body. I look into my own gaze and flirt with my reflection, I dance in the very first row, I am not shy, I am strong, I am powerful, I am grace, I am me.
Again, I am in a period of life with less dancing. With graduate school and very limited income, I can’t fill my plate with all that I used to, and this has caused a grieving process for me. I have learned to do movement in other ways, by going on hikes to the beach, for walks by the marshlands by my house, yoga at the local community center, and then the dancing in the kitchen, the shower, my car…
Well, I was very lucky this week because my professor cancelled class and I got to go to a Samba class at the community center. As we women waited for the teacher to arrive, I became aware of my body in the mirror, in the front of the class, I was unsure of myself. I was unsure of the camaraderie of my peers because the women were using the minutes before class to do crunches and leg lifts, and chat about spin classes. What an unfamiliar setting, what a strange feeling to feel like an outsider in my own element.
The teacher said nothing to the class as she started the music. We stretched and moved and undulated our hips. Then we moved to floor and did an intense cycle of crunches and our bodies contorted in various positions. I was aware of my belly, how it sat touching my thighs as I drew my legs in close. I noticed how my breathing was more audible than the woman next to me. I started to feel embarrassment creep in as the teacher eyed me and encouraged me to straighten my legs, which were in a fury of shaking because they were working so hard. As fit as I am, crunches are not my strength.
After calisthenics, we stood up and the teacher changed the song to a loud, primal drumming beat. The sound of the ancestors, ancestors that I claim, that I make my own, that I give every cell of my body to as I dance. As we danced across the floor, I pushed at the air harder, I moved my hips wider, I stomped and jumped and swung my black curls to the rhythm of the dance. My teacher rushed over to me, put her hands out and held mine and said, “Where did you come from?” I told her that I dance Samba. She told me that I was a beautiful dancer and looked at me with eyes full of love and adoration. My next step threw me off–I was dizzy. There was something that shifted in me because I knew I was coming back into myself and that step, right after she noticed me was a step moving me in the direction of myself. She gushed over me at each transition, wanting to know more about me and the type of dance I did, asking if I would come to her other classes for advanced dancers. I let her words wash over me like a warm bath of crystals, adorning my body and giving it thanks.
This is what I know…I was the biggest woman in the dance class that day and the other women probably thought I was different and maybe that I was out of shape because I couldn’t contort as they did…but what I know is that I danced that day. I danced for every day that I haven’t since I started grad school, I danced for every cell in my body that feels love and gratitude and passion and for a body that people cast off as big or overweight or not good enough. It made me feel so good that my body had not forgotten to allow me the movement that it always had. This body, right now, is enough for me to express my joy. I cannot wait to have that feeling of freedom again.
Dancing: What a way to love your body!
When I am on stage and the lights are on me, I feel so full of love. I love putting on a show! The second the lights come up and the music starts, and I can feel the audience’s eyes on me, I feel at home. I enjoy every moment of being on stage and when I catch myself in the mirror I even gasp at how truly beautiful I am. This is the real me. The me that is full and happy and passionate. Who I am on stage is who I crave to be every single day. I crave that uninterrupted gaze of the audience, the gushing applause, the smiles, the wonderment, and the enthusiastic response when my dancing is done. Dancing these past two weekends in the show Earth Girls Are Easy was a turning point in my life. For all the nerves and anxiety and build up, I left all that behind when I stepped onto the stage each night. I danced like it was the absolute last time I ever would, and it is for that reason I think people were so drawn to me. Every stranger that came up to me after a show said they absolutely could not take their eyes off me. I was brought to tears with their kind words and smiled widely and said thank you. I will never argue with such gratitude for my dance. With each compliment, I took a breath in and said thank you, because each time I heard their words, a permanent imprint was made on my heart.
I could have focused negative attention on my body and for my perceived flaws. I could have picked myself apart, and I almost did…
But each time those lights went up nothing else mattered.
My body is my joy and without it I would not be myself. These arms, these thighs, these taped up ankles and knees will never be anyone’s but mine. I grow so much each time I am on stage that I feel 10 feet tall, strong like a warrior woman, so big that it is only me the audience sees. I take up space, I am large and grand, and they see Me.
How I am right now is how they saw me. Not a smaller version of me, not a work in progress, but the actual me. One woman said,
“No matter what you do in your life, please please follow your dreams.”
And knowing now how much this experience has changed my life, I know I can do just that.
I haven’t performed on stage in a dance performance like this in a long time. When I was in college I was so distracted by relationships and the loathing I felt for my changing body that I didn’t feel connected to what I was doing. I wasn’t empowered by rehearsals, and I definitely couldn’t take in compliments. After a performance I would feel like running away and hiding because I wasn’t proud of who I was and was unsure of what people thought of me. I sang for others, not myself. I danced to serve a group’s purpose and not my own.
Now I dance just for me. I dance because I am alive. I dance to honor this life and this soul inside of me.
If I can recreate the feeling I had on stage every day of my life, I will know real joy. Dance class and rehearsal, not just performance, is a great tool for me to find joy in my body on a daily basis. The element of an audience and lights and costumes is gone but the feeling of support and love is still there. I find support from my teachers, I feel the love in my own gaze in the mirror, and I feel love for my body as I work to make it move exactly how I want, and by doing exactly what feels good. I used to compare myself to other people in dance class growing up, but in my current dance company I have so much gratitude for my own body! 
Because I don’t feel competition with the other women, I am also able to feel appreciation for their bodies! The oldest women in my classes are in their 60′s and 70′s and they find great joy in movement, joy that perhaps they cultivated when they were my age. Backstage this weekend, I was talking to a woman who said that when teenagers started joining the studio she felt like she wanted to quit. She said she felt that they would judge her for being old and she wouldn’t have a place in the company anymore. But what changed her mind was that she became friends with the young women and bridged the age gap. She knew then that they could all be in the company together and make it even stronger.
I had to hold in giggles when people commented on how beautiful I looked this weekend. Don’t they know that I am always this beautiful? This kind of beautiful is always within me. But maybe I don’t always get feedback because I don’t always feel it in myself. When I do feel beautiful and worthy and full and happy, I giggle almost as if I should have known this all along!
In performing these past two weekends, I have learned that I absolutely can have these feelings about myself on a daily basis. Absolutely I can dance everyday. Absolutely I can take in what people say to me as gifts and give them back to myself when I am feeling down. Absolutely the world can be my stage, where the lights are the god and the music the goddess.
When I dance, I am Me. Absolutely.
‘Tis the Season to Be Squishy!
I woke up this morning thinking about the struggles people go through with their bodies as winter sets in. I’ve heard many comments over the past week from people about feelings of discomfort with their bodies-tight, achy, tired, sluggish, and physically low. They are noticing their desire for foods that are high in sugar and fat, and feel badly about getting away from their usual routine with food and exercise.
As my mind slowly came to consciousness this cold, dark morning, out popped the perfect title for an essay: ‘Tis the Season to be Squishy! From there my sluggish brain remembered years gone by when I really thought something was wrong with me each winter because my relationship with my body changed so drastically as the darkness set in. I felt out of touch with my physical self, and thought I’d never be happy again. I felt squishy!
squish ♥ y, adj.
1-soft
2-overly sentimental
3-weak
What I’ve learned in fifty-one years of cycling through the seasons is that human beings are physical creatures on this earth, and, as such, are meant to put on the pounds and be still in the winter. We are meant to go into hibernation mode, to slow down, stay indoors to keep the cold at bay (if we are so lucky), and to eat foods that give our bodies the fat they need to stay warm. No matter our beautifully natural body size-fat, thin, or somewhere in between winter we are meant to slow down, eat more, and honor the season.
This is hard to do in our modern human world. I often feel I am a bear in human clothing as I watch other people getting their work (including holiday shopping) done with what seems to be ease! As the days get darker, and the temperature drops (though I really can’t complain too much living in California, but I will anyway!), I find I’m not interested in much rigorous exercise, and I feel very happy eating foods with more fat and sugar. I bake my favorite cookies regularly, and dishes with cream, butter, oil, or cheese make me quite content. I still eat my veggies; I take pleasure in cooking delicious, nutritious meals, and most days I go out for a walk during the daylight hours, but generally only to do my shopping. I do my work, though less efficiently, and I keep my obligations to other people, but with great effort. My true desire is to curl up in my favorite chair with a good book, and to read-all day, every day-and not step out of my house until springtime!
I love watching the squirrels that spend their days on the fence outside my office window. In the fall, they scurry back and forth, jumping into the giant oak tree with their acorns, stashing them everywhere imaginable for the coming winter. They are very busy. Yesterday I noticed that the squirrels are beautifully fat with shiny coats, and they are spending much more of their time lying in the sun with their legs flopped over the sides of the fence, their sweet faces resting on their front paws!
Let’s be like the squirrels, my human friends! Since we still need to semi-function in the cold winter months and can’t go into full hibernation like the bears, let’s at least recognize that our bodies physiologically behave, as do our brains, like other creatures on this planet, and allow ourselves to winterize. Let’s be okay with the softening of body and mind, so we can focus our gaze internally and process the lessons of the year. Let’s be kind to ourselves and enjoy the delicious foods and beverages of the holidays. And remember, if you feel guilt for eating those cookies or shame for indulging in holiday spirits more than usual, you will end up consuming more of what you think you should limit in the first place!
Honor that winter asks for a different type of balance-one where time to move slowly may be requested more than rigorous movement, and our cravings for certain foods have merit. In their book, Healthy Pleasures, Dr. David Sobel and Dr. Robert Ornstein write about how our brilliant (my word) bodies crave certain foods to stimulate production of necessary neurotransmitters to combat stress or to ensure our intake of important nutrients. In their words, “It may be instinctive, then, when we eat certain foods to bolster production of these neurotransmitters to help us get through stressful situations or to satisfy a hunger for a specific nutrient. So, the next time you ‘feel like a steak’ or ‘need a cookie’ it could be your brain and not your stomach talking.” Out of the mouths of doctors!
As we all know, the holidays can be stressful for many reasons. Let’s not make life harder by talking smack about our bodies and beating ourselves up for indulging in the flavors and sensations of the season. Let’s remember that spring always does follow winter, and our desire to move more and eat a lighter fare will naturally return, especially if we don’t make a New Year’s resolution to go on a diet! Our moods will lift as the light returns to our portion of the planet, and we will function more effectively in our strange human world.
‘Tis the season to be squishy-enjoy!
Connie Sobczak is the Co-Founder and Executive/Creative Director of The Body Positive. She is currently completing The Body Positive’s book to teach women how to live with more joy, vitality, and beauty.
