The following is an excerpt from the first section of my book, Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead
I wrote this book not as an icon in the body positivity movement or as a fat activist with thousands of followers on Instagram and a flair for fashion.
I wrote this book as an ordinary woman who has, like so many other women just like me, spent the vast majority of my life hating and subsequently trying to change my body.
Well, I’m almost an ordinary woman who has always struggled with accepting, respecting, and loving my body. Almost.
I am also a teacher and life coach, and, in my work, I’m fiercely committed to supporting women to unearth themselves from beneath the expectations, roles, responsibilities and models of success – those externally-defined constructs of What Women Do – and reclaim who they are and what matters most to them – whether that’s in their careers, their relationships, their parenting, their spirituality or yes, in their bodies. After doing this work for a few years, I created a woman-centred model of change and a coaching methodology based on what I’ve learned about the complexity of disengaging from the personal and cultural narratives that challenge women’s authenticity, sovereignty, and potential.
This book is an account of what happens when I used my methodology on myself in an attempt to disentangle from the impacts of society’s expectations for my body, which I have spent a lifetime attempting and failing to live up to.
This book is, as all of my work is, both personal and political.
And I believe it’s more imperative than ever: women are not just wasting their precious time, energy and money as they struggle to keep up to impossible body ideals. In both my life coaching work and my work as a doula (yeah, I do that too!), I have seen firsthand that, in so many ways, women’s bodies are the seat of their personal power. They are the home of women’s intuition and wisdom, the literal and metaphoric home within which the next generation will be nurtured, and, as posited by ecofeminists everywhere, a pathway to our society’s renewed connection with the earth.
To me, the healing of women’s relationship with their bodies is not just about the reconciliation of hundreds of years of commodification, hyper-sexualization, pathologization, shame and trauma. It is about reclaiming power and possibility, about restoring our culture’s connection with the archetypal feminine, a deeply embodied power source that I believe can change the world.
But we start here. With this. With the thoughtful and compassionate dismantling of everything we’ve been told about our bodies, so that we can make way for what’s possible.
We start here. With us.
Project Body Love launches TODAY!!!
This book been a labour of great love over the past three years, and it is finally here for you to read.
To order your ebook or paperback copy, click the image below!
