Story Time: My (very-ex bf) called me fat; here’s what I learnt.

Firstly - I learnt that guy was a DICK! Though I had my sneaking suspicions even before this happened…but that’s a story for another day.

What I should have done is unleashed all my years of boxing and kickboxing training on him in that very moment, but in my shock, I did something even more harmful.

I accepted his words as ‘The Truth’ ‘cos it was the same thing I’d told myself many times before, and the same thing society had told me, as a woman, many times before that - why would I question it?

So I packed it up into my metaphorical backpack of ‘Things That Are True According To Someone Else’ and I carried it around with me.

From time to time I’d unpack it and re-examine it from a different angle, under a different light, and sometimes I’d even decide that it was definitely not my belief to carry around.

But no matter how many times I took it out of my backpack, it found its way back, ‘cos conditioned beliefs don’t just fall away overnight (boo you, conditioned beliefs).

And then quite recently I was mulling this all over when it occurred to me: my ENTIRE ADULT LIFE has involved some form of negative relationship with my body.

And I just thought - ¡QUE HUEVA!

This is an expression we use in Mexico that means:

How dull.

How tedious.

What a DRAG.

As in, what a DRAG to spend your entire life in conflict with the vessel that makes it all possible.

Beliefs given to us by someone else are hard to shake cos’ we’re often given them at a time when we don’t have the tools to say: ‘wait, I don’t actually think *I* believe this ‘belief,’ it can’t possibly be *mine*’?!

And then before you know it, you’ve carried it around with you for years and years and you’re not quite sure how to get rid of the prick.

I’m SoOoOoOo ready to lighten my backpack. I’m choosing to challenge and reject things that haven’t come from me, and don’t align with how I want the world to be.

And I sure as fuck don’t want the world to be a place where women wage wars against their bodies when they don’t adhere to an impossibly narrow, prescriptive ‘body ideal.’

So I’ll opt out of that one, thanks very much.

I developed a guided meditation specifically for these long-held, limiting and harmful ‘beliefs’ as a way for myself to make sense of the idea that ‘some beliefs are mine, and some are not mine.’

The idea is to disengage from the beliefs that have been given to us without our permission, to make space for those that we really believe to be true.

If that sounds helpful, give the button below a click and it’s yours, for free.

I hope it serves you, too!