Tag Archive for: bodypositive

What is Good Sense?

First of all, good sense lives in your body. Your mind is the messenger.

You know how it feels to be unhinged?

Your body twitches; your mind haunts. Fear is your emotional guide.

You “will” yourself to think positive. But, you “feel” possessed.
And, you are. From the inside out, unresolved, misaligned, uncertainty breaks you, with no strings attached to find your way back.

Anxiety’s fear overwhelms the whisper hope holds.

While I craft ornaments, shop virtually, and wrap holiday gifts, I feel inspired by love; yet, in the quiet spaces between tasks, I feel engulfed by the belief that I am unloved.

A familiar feeling that grazes the surface of my everyday life. But right now, under the shadow of the plague that killed my sister, it is rising into full force.

I have COVID again.

I’m isolated at Christmas time, for the second time. Canceling holiday gatherings that had crafted a sense of belonging into my first sister-less Christmas.

After a week, I eagerly test again, only to find that I’m still COVID positive.

A pendulum inside me swings between extremes—my greatest fears and greatest hopes. I’m unhinged.

It feels like everyone is moving ahead. I can’t keep up. I’m afraid of losing everything that matters to me.

Alone, and uncharacteristically lonely, my mind desperately spins. I try to figure out how to fix this recurring sense of unlovability. But the only thing I come up with is, who to blame and why I have the right to feel if. Neither, of which, help me feel better!

I need to silence the haunting voices! Separate from my story!!

Balance asks us to relax into the emotional body, with the same degree of attention, as we express the emotional mindset. Extreme outward emotion opens a deeper path for inward resolution.
Tao Principle

Exhausted, I prepare an epsom salt bubble bath. I slip into the elixir. My world slows down. My aching head slides under the water. Instant silence.

The water feels soft on my skin. The warmth cocoons me, except for the parts that break the surface into the cool sharp air. I hear a bass beat from music, without a melody, as if it were a heart beating. My thoughts stop. My body’s soothed.

I keep my ears submerged in the silence until time disappears. (This was a long bath!)

When I rise out of my wet cocoon I feel like myself again. My joy de vive is back. What had been “unhinged” is now “aligned.” I feel a peaceful vulnerability. Like Bambi standing up for the first time.

I wonder if the unloved voice will resurface?
I stay in my body’s senses and listen. I return to my Christmas preparations, witnessing and reining-in mindset relapses. And, in the doing, that peaceful alliance grew stronger.

Your body’s an energetic antenna that can steer the mind’s attention. You hold the reins for change.
Tao Translation

Delighting in sensations, lift us out of our shadow worlds. They usher us into an expanded world. A world where belonging, hope and love live in the space between tasks.

Thinking emotions—understanding your triggers and causes—manage them. Changing emotions asks you to deliberately feel something else—sense the life you want through your whole being—so mind and body unite.
This is Good Sense!

Mind body alignment is self-love that aligns your world.

May the quiet magic of the season cocoon you in the soothing heart beat of Love.

Comment with an aligning anecdote or response.

Own Your Beauty

Photographer: Charlie Chessler

Most people I know question their beauty and judge their body.

So they hide it with baggy clothes, beat it with fitness, or starve it with diets. But, even if you change your body’s appearance to what you deem preferable, the only thing that can change your relationship with it is trust.

Trusting that your body is an expression of beautiful.
Trusting that your beauty is an expression of love.

Trust goes beyond looking beautiful, to being beauty.

Your body is a bridge. It brings face-to-face what the mind deems important and where Spirit wants to take you.

I was recently asked to participate in a Body Positive photo expose’. It was explained that all the women involved would pose nude, and write an essay to accompany the photo about their relationship with their body and the project.

I accepted.

Women from different cultures, ages and sizes were asked to sit in the same position for the photo. Nineteen women had gone before me, so I was able to see the ensemble of photos chosen before taking my clothes off.

They were all so different. Beautiful in unique ways. They adorned themselves with tattoos, hair-styles, make-up, hats, jewellery and nothingness. I enjoyed the creativity and sensuality we all shared.

Most of all, the grace in our willingness to be wholly seen took my breath away.

I was about to join these women in a trust.

A trust that physical beauty is something we each have.
A trust that beauty has the wisdom of diversity.

And, what I learned was, beauty needs our permission to be experienced and shared.

Without giving beauty permission to exist, it stays trapped inside the body unable to shine. And our expectations and uncertainties overcast the body’s wisdom causing us to fear ourselves.

But when you trust you are beautiful, an inherent wisdom outshines your fear of being you.

Before this photo shoot I was terrified of a camera lens. Would it see me as ugly, afraid or lacking? I was afraid to really see me.

But something about the willingness to be seen wholly, mixed with the integrity of the shoot, I felt relaxed in my imperfections. I felt free!

Suddenly I was more curious than judgmental. The lens was a place I could learn about myself and everything I could-be.

Everything I thought I should-be, by comparison, seemed unimportant.

Is your relationship with your body based in judgments or love?

This photo shoot was an extension of my work. A place where mind body alignment dissolves the judgments that shadow love.

To be curious about what judgments cause you to not trust yourself, keep talking to your body’s pain and discomfort, adjust your stance, and breath a new alignment into being, until all that remains is a recognition of the beauty that is you.

Please comment with how you experience beauty or this story.