Your Body Is Your Home.

Illustration by Rachel Woodend.

Your body is your home. Yet, we women often tend think of them like show houses: as if their purpose is to be aesthetically pleasing, perfectly put together, not a hair or a freckle out of place. We advertise them with the latest clothes, beauty products, hairstyles, as if we are merely objects to be admired. We strive for this “perfect” ideal, thinking that when we get there, this is when we will start living our lives. This is when everything will fall into place. This is when I will be loved and accepted.

We are told to treat our bodies as temples. Let me ask you something: when you visualise a temple, do you think of love? Of warmth? For me personally, I think of magnificent beauty, but also of coldness and loneliness and big, empty spaces. We were not put on this earth to worship our bodies, or for others to worship them for us. This sends out the impression that they are the most important thing about us. They’re not. The most important things about us should have more to do with our hearts, our souls, the connections we make. How many times we’ve laughed, loved, given ourselves to others. Our creativity, our courage, our resilience, our gifts. The difference we’ve made in this world.

No, your body should not be a show house, or a temple. Your body is your home. It is warm and safe and familiar. It is filled with love and laughter and memories. As much as we try to keep them clean and tidy, the messiness of life continues to show up again. And again. And again. The walls that surround it are important, as is the ground on which it is built – they are our foundations, our protectors. But the inside is where the life really is, where our souls, our minds, our hearts reside. They are an extension of ourselves, our safety, the place we return to day after day to rest our bones. We were not built to be perfect. We were built to have wobbly bits and uneven boobs, blemishes and birth marks, cellulite and hip dips (seriously, this is a thing), hair growing from places we wish it wouldn’t. We were built to be messy and flawed and imperfectly human.

So how can we start to feel more at home in our bodies? Listen, listen, listen. What does it want to eat? How does it want to move? Does it want to stretch or run or lie in bed all day watching Netflix? Does it want to draw or sing or write or dance? The more we start to tune into our bodies and listen to our intuition, the more we will start to feel safe and at home in ourselves again.

Your body is your home. Let’s love it unconditionally.

Love, love, love,

Kirsty

xxxxxxx

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Email: baines.kirsty@hotmail.co.uk