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August 29 - October 3, 2020
There are times when our unflinching honesty, vulnerability, and empathy will create a transformative portal, an opening to a completely new way of living.
Natural intelligence imbues us with all we need at this exact moment to manifest the highest form of ourselves, and we don’t have to figure out how to get it.
Each of us has traversed a gauntlet of traumas, shames, and fears to be where we are today, wherever that is.
The work is to crumble the barriers of injustice and shame leveled against us so that we might access what we have always been, because we will, if unobstructed, inevitably grow into the purpose for which we were created: our own unique version of that oak tree.
It’s possible you don’t quite know either. That is perfect. At this very second, a trembling acorn is plummeting from a branch, clueless as to why. It doesn’t need to know why to fulfill its calling; it just needs us to get out of its way.
Radical self-love is not a destination you are trying to get to; it is who you already are, and it is already working tirelessly to guide your life. The question is how can you listen to it more distinctly, more often? Even over the blaring of constant body shame?
We practice self-acceptance when we have grown tired of self-hatred but can’t conceive of anything beyond a paltry tolerance of ourselves.
Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.
It is through our own transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies on our planet. As we awaken to our indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies.
Radical self-love is deeper, wider, and more expansive than anything we would call self-confidence or self-esteem. It is juicer than self-acceptance. Including the word radical offers us a self-love that is the root or origin of our relationship to ourselves. We did not start life in a negative partnership with our bodies.
Intersectionality has become a term often revered or repudiated depending on the source. Put plainly, none of us are mono-dimensional. We are not only men, fathers, people with living with lupus, Asian, or seniors. Some of us are aging Asian fathers who are living with lupus. Those varying identities impact each other in ways that are significantly different than if we were navigating them one at a time. Radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections and that we work to create space for those intersections.
Creating a world of justice for all bodies demands that we be radical and intersectional.
When we can see the obvious truth inherent in body activist Hanne Blank’s quote, “There is no wrong way to have a body,” we learn to love bodies even when we don’t like the humans inhabiting them.
Radical self-love is not light years away. It is not away at all. It lives in you. It is your very essence.
Grandma eventually started scolding me for saying sorry all the time. “Hush all that sorry. You ain’t sorry. If you were sorry you would stop doing it!” I wondered if there was any truth to my grandmother’s admonishment. If I were sorry, truly sorry, would I stop doing whatever it was? Could I?
We, at every turn, have decided that we are the culprits of our own victimization. However, not only are we constantly atoning; we have demanded our fair share of apologies from others as well. We, too, have snickered at the fat body at the beach, shamed the transgender body at the grocery store, pitied the disabled body while clothes shopping, maligned the aging body. We have demanded the apology from other bodies. We have ranked our bodies against the bodies of others, deciding they are greater or lesser than our own based on the prejudices and biases we inherited.
On some cellular level, we know our bodies are not something we should apologize for. After all, they are the only way we get to experience this ridiculous and radiant life.
convenient scapegoat for our bias and bigotries. Logic says, “If people are choosing to be different, they can just as simply choose to be the way I believe they should be.” What we must ask ourselves instead is, “Why do I need people to be the way I believe they should be?” The argument about choice is a projection.
When we decide that people’s bodies are wrong because we don’t understand them, we are trying to avoid the discomfort of divesting from an entire body-shame system.
1. Make peace with not understanding. 2. Make peace with difference. 3. Make peace with your body.
When we liberate ourselves from the expectation that we must have all things figured out, we enter a sanctuary of empathy. Being uncertain, lacking information or simply not knowing something ought not be an indictment against our intelligence or value.
Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.
The late poet and activist Audre Lorde said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”22
“I just want this complete stranger, whose life I know nothing about and who I have made no effort to get to know beyond this Twitter thread, to be healthy.” This is called health trolling or concern trolling, and it is just another sinister body shame tactic. Given that we can make no accurate assessment of any individual’s health based simply on their weight (or photo on social media), it is evident that such behavior is not really about the person’s health but more likely about the ways in which we expect other bodies to conform to our standards and beliefs about what a body should or
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When we propose that all bodies are the same, we also propose that there is a standard to measure sameness against.
our propensity to shrink human diversity into sameness creates exhausting barriers for the bodies that do not fit our default models.
Inequality and injustice rest firmly on our unwillingness to exalt the vast magnificence of the human body.
Hating your body is like finding a person you despise and then choosing to spend the rest of your life with them while loathing every moment of the partnership.
Remember that body shame is as contagious as radical self-love. Making peace with your body is your mighty act of revolution. It is your contribution to a changed planet where we might all live unapologetically in the bodies we have.
Ultimately we are wired to recognize difference and maybe even distrust it. However, we were also wired to eat bugs and to poop in a hole in the ground. The point being, we are capable of change. Seeing difference as synonymous with danger is an aspect of our social evolution that can and should be shifted. But we must grapple with difference. Our attempts to mute it reinforce the idea that difference is inherently bad.
when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world around us, we make judgments about that absence. Invisibility is a statement. It says something about the world and our place in it.
Cultural and familial messages that reduce masculinity to a bland soup of physical strength and stoic emotional response limit the full range of human expression needed for boys to develop a healthy sense of radical self-love.
Given how rarely we are in control of how products are sourced and made, it is easy to make purchases that pass muster in regard to our personal motives for buying them while subsequently being a source of harm because of exploitative or unethical practices at the hands of the product makers. These systems of oppression are intricately woven together and will be hard to fully divest from. When we are unable to do no harm, our work is to do as little harm as possible.
To varying degrees and without very much thought, many of us have accepted what we have been told about our bodies and the bodies of others based on what our government allows, sanctions, ignores, or criminalizes.
Systems of oppression stand or fall based on whether humans uphold or resist them. “We the people” have the power to uphold or resist body-based oppression.
At every corner, women’s political access hinges on society’s ability to see them in alignment with the default ideals of women first and then politicians.
We are saddled with body shame because it is an age-old system whose roots and pockets are deep. Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.
Our work must be radical if we are to combat the consistent inundation of toxic media messages, laws, and regulations seeping body shame and body-based oppression into every aspect of our society.
Making peace with your body is not about finding some obscure pathway to the peninsula of “liking my thighs.”
Body terrorism is a hideous tower whose primary support beam is the belief that there is a hierarchy of bodies.
Living a radical self-love life is a process of de-indoctrination. It demands that we look unflinchingly at our current set of beliefs about ourselves and the world and get willing to explore them.
To be fear-facing is to navigate cautiously and with alertness but to continue our journey.
Have you ever felt like you were living your life on autopilot? Somehow you just keep recycling old behaviors and ideas that you know do not serve you, but you can’t seem to interrupt them. Yeah (in my best Michael Jackson vocal impersonation), you are not alone! That sense of autopilot is the result of being disconnected from our thoughts. Without our awareness, thoughts run covert operations all through our lives, assassinating our sense of worth and blowing up our connections with other humans. When we avoid our thoughts, they go rogue.
All those media messages about “good” bodies and “normal” bodies: they’re in your thoughts. All the government-endorsed ideas of safe bodies and dangerous bodies: they’re in your thoughts. You have been given thoughts, and just like that shame sweater you do not have to keep them.
Say it again, for the folks in the bleachers: You are not your thoughts! That said, avoiding your thoughts will not help you train your brain to think new ones. You must look at them with gentle kindness and say, “Thank you for sharing.“ And with love, release them.
Our inherent sense of radical self-love doesn’t speak to us with cruelty or viciousness. Radical self-love does not malign our gender, sexuality, race, disability, weight, age, acne, scars, illnesses.
To live in a world of body terrorism is akin to forcibly imbibing three 7-Eleven Big Gulps of body shame daily.
Taking in toxic messages blocks our pathway to radical self-love without any real effort on our part. Just walking down the street or standing in the grocery store checkout line can be a stroll down body-shame lane thanks to billboards, bus advertisements, and tabloid covers. By engaging in the everyday activities of our society, we subconsciously absorb views about our bodies that are antithetical to radical self-love.
Toxic messages become our internal outside voice. After we’ve ingested enough body shame, these declarations become the narrative through which we speak about our own bodies, often without even noticing.
Depression, bipolar disorder, and other examples of neurodivergence7 are stigmatized because we are unwilling to extend the same care and treatment to our brains that we afford our bodies.
