I look at my belly, its flatness a distant memory, wrinkled with stretch marks from my pregnancy with B.
I see my face, lines at the corner of my eyes. There are streaks of grey hair surrounding it despite my attempts to cull their number.
And then there’s my formerly-smooth butt, now dotted with cellulite.
I look at my breasts which have lost their perkiness, drooped from nurturing a baby nine years ago.
But then I still whisper “thank you” to my body. As they say at the end of yoga class, be grateful for your body, for its persistence and diligence in moving you through your practice and your life.
I’m grateful for my feet which has marched confidently into conference rooms in high heels. It has also brought me around different cities during my years of solo travel.
Thank you for the arms that have carried suitcases and magazines, cradled a sleeping baby, comforted an anxious husband, embraced a friend.
I’m grateful for the repository of creative ideas, solutions and memories: my brain.
And to my hands, that has typed this post, that has made cookies and paintings, that has knit through kilometers of yarn, thank you.
What would be different if you could love all your parts, not just the ones that you’ve covered up and filtered, but even those that you find hard to like?
“I had spent so many years—by this point, it was decades—tugging on my body, covering up my body, and despising my body that the thought of thanking it caught me totally off guard. I’d always been a pusher—pushing myself toward an idealized version of myself that always seemed close enough to aim for but just far enough out of reach—but there on the mat, my sweat-soaked hair plastered to my face, I realized for the first time that there might be another way. Maybe I didn’t have to push quite so hard. Maybe I could pull instead. I could pull myself into an embrace.”—Jessica Honneger, Imperfect Courage
