When I was 9 years old I went to try out for after school gymnastics club. I loved all the extra-curricular activities that were available and wanted to try out everything. Mum was a single parent and we had no car, so school was the centre of my young existence. I loved what was available there for me to experience – in the early days it was my safe place to be, home away from home.
In the gymnasium, the school teacher told me that I had “the wrong body for gymnastics”. That was one of my first encounters with deep, no-holds-barred rejection. The music teacher gave me a similar painful gift as she listened to me sing and ousted me from the choir!
The primary one was being told my dad didn’t want a daughter.
Then the signs of puberty started and my natural vivacious, early-life confidence started to flicker with self doubt as full womanhood beckoned. All of a sudden there was a division between ‘me’ and this vehicle-body I found myself in. I felt wrong, because as an impressionable young child, careless comments became part of my inner broadcasting programme. Within a few years, as cooking (which got me compliments) and eating became a primary source of comfort, my self-hatred grew. Everywhere I went, I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, ashamed and my natural happiness waned until it became a mask I wore when social situations expected it.
Then I discovered alcohol. An escape, a numbing agent and a wonderful false spirit that gave me a taste of that early-life genuine vivaciousness, lost to memory.
Years caught in cycles left me feeling there was no way out and one day I symbolically found myself standing in a hole deep in the earth barely glimpsing the light of the sun. In the darkness of the hole, there is nothing to do but feel and listen. It was the whispers that saved me. They showed me how to build a ladder, and each rung of my own acknowledged despair became an essential part of that ladder that helped me climb out of my own hole.
The climb over the last 15 years specifically, is a journey I am now beginning to honour and respect in myself. Yesterday, I read an article about climbers on Mount Everest – well yes, what a wonderful, visible outer physical achievement that is. Yet I know that I’ve made as long a trek and climbed a vast emotional mountain within me that affected my physical body on the outside – and that, is just as remarkable.
I hope you know that climbing inner mountains is worth it. The air is clearer, the view expansive and the journey and life experience exists within us always.
And you come to know there are no mistakes, your own body is never ‘wrong’. In fact it is innocent and deserves the most powerful unconditional love for the miracle it is. The longest journey and the most profound we will ever make, is to fall in love with the miracle of the body-temple each of us has been given to nurture and care for, for the duration of this one precious life. Enjoy your body. It is true and honest and ever "in the present". Learning to trust its unique form of wisdom and listen to what needs healing and care is the most essential of work - not an inconvenience that stops us from getting on with real life.
The body has the ability to set us free in unimaginable ways.
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