Sunday Sermon…loving ourselves up… you can’t give what you don’t have…celebrating our bodies!
Dear body of mine…
Thank you… because I know I not have treated you well. You have been here from the start, you gave my soul and my spirit a place to live and have a human experience and for that I am grateful. Although I know that I am so much more than you (my ‘body’ will weigh the same right after death as just before), I also know that without you I don’t get to be here in this way.
People looked at you with such awe and wonder when I was born, it is the natural thing to do. People delighted in my chubby thighs, my button nose and big eyes… as I find myself delighting on other new born babies too. Because in a baby we see body and spirit so beautifully entwined in the perfection they are.
When I was two, I used to look at you in the mirror with absolute delight! I bloody well loved you so much, clothes or not… I was never embarrassed to show you, and I never thought about whether you were good enough for the world to see… I just knew you were. And my spirit and soul just delighted in that, because that was also when I was courageous, loving, kind, spirited, happy, joyful, fearless and totally, unconditionally, delightfully ME!
And then, well then something happened between you and I… well actually the truth is, I let something come between us. You see, I started buying into all the negative messages about ‘body image’ and what you should look like and how you should be serving me. I started getting angry at you for not matching up to the airbrushed and photo shopped models in magazines… I even started comparing you to my friends and noticed that there were things about their bodies that I felt were better than you! And I got mad at you… yes I did! And when I got mad, I tried to punish you by starving you sometimes, so that I could just make you fit into a different mould. And then I over fed you and gave you all the wrong foods and then I got bloody angry at you when you didn’t fit into my jeans anymore… and still you stayed, still you get up with me every day to give it another go. You give me arms to hug my kids, legs to keep walking me through life and all of its journey – no matter how much abuse I have given them.
I abused you for the stretch marks, when all you were doing was giving me two beautiful healthy boys. I got angry at cellulite and forgot that they were the ‘dimples’ that used to be considered so cute as a baby.
But, I wasn’t finished… Oh no… then I even drank what was not good for you or me. Oh yes I did… I filled you with wine and you told me the next day you didn’t like it and it wasn’t good for us, oh yes, you sure told me… and what did I do?… Well I waited a couple of days and then I showed you didn’t I, oh yes I did… I gave you another dose!
And now in menopause I have been unkind to you again, and you really are just doing what you need to do, taking me into the next stage of my life an I need to love you through it…
So I am so sorry, and that is enough.
You always reward me when I do good things for you, and my spirit does too. The moment I treat you with love and respect and feed you with healthy food and take you for exercise, you reward me with a euphoric feeling that makes me feel more like who I am here to be. It then gives me space to give more of myself to the world and for that I get rewarded. I shall now go forth and treat you like I love you. And as I do more of that, I find more of me and I rediscover that childhood behaviour … courageous, loving, kind, spirited, happy, joyful, fearless and totally, unconditionally, delightfully ME!
Yes, I shall be kinder in the way that I talk to you, after all you and I are going to be together for a lot longer yet…Well that is what I want, and you keep telling me that is what you want too, because you keep bouncing back through all the abuse… so I shall treat you with the respect that I would treat somebody that I love.
So, I am sorry I have not always treated you well, please forgive me… you really are so amazing and I truly do love you!