Strengthen Your Relationship with Your Body With These Six Blogs
What does it mean to have a strong relationship to your body?
Does it mean you need to be body positive? What about body neutrality? Or body trust? What do all these different terms mean? Do you have to embody all of them to have a strong relationship between yourself and your body? Where can you even start?
Having a strong relationship to your body helps your health holistically. It helps you tune into your physical and your emotional needs, and tend to them consciously and intentionally. But getting there isn’t an easy journey and it can be hard to know where to start.
These six blogs are our starting point for you if you’re looking to strengthen your relationship to your body.
They’re all about reflecting on your relationship to your body, learning to adjust your perspective and expectations, and practices you can take with you as you learn to engage with your body's needs and cues moving forward. Check them out below:
What Does it Mean to Engage in Self Care When You’re Chronically Ill
Your practice doesn’t have to be perfect all of the time. No one is keeping score at how well you’re taking care of yourself or what you’re falling behind on.
Determine for yourself what you can maintain, and try your best to maintain it–and trust yourself to know when you need to just relax.
3 Ways to Build Trust with Your Body
You might not even realize the messages that you’ve taken in about bodies throughout your life. There may be cultural messages that you disagree with on an intellectual level but have a hard time disconnecting from for yourself. You’re not alone. It’s hard to disengage from the constant messaging that your body is not good enough and that you can’t trust what it’s telling you.
When you don’t trust your body, you might have a harder time picking up on body cues like hunger or thirst. You might ignore your body’s needs, like needing to take a break, because you feel you should push through.
Separating Healing from Healthism
Your health is not insignificant–when you are sick or injured or unwell in any way you deserve care and medicine and support. The rejection of healthism isn’t a rejection of taking care of yourself, but shifting the motivations behind it.
Instead of caring for yourself because you want to be healthy so you can deserve love and care and support, can you care for yourself because you are alive and deserve it? Can you shift your habits of caring for yourself so they come from a place of love and joy, rather than guilt and shame?
Learning How to Connect Emotions & Body Sensations
Do you know how emotions feel in your body?
Emotions aren’t only felt in the mind. Our bodies react to our environments just like our brains do, and it can be helpful to connect emotions with body sensations so we can better understand what’s going on within us.
Can I have a Healthy Relationship with my Body Without Loving it?
While it would be wonderful to get to a point where your relationship with your body is a loving one, it’s possible to have an emotionally healthy relationship, even a caring relationship, without love. Think of human social relationships–you might not love your coworker or your neighbor or your barista, but you’re likely able to at least provide them the respect and dignity they deserve, and possibly even have a positive, friendly relationship with them. You care about not being rude to them, you don’t think they are unreasonable for having boundaries, and you probably don’t think they’re shameful for asking for what they need!
Gentle Movement tips for a Healthier Relationship with Exercise
Gentle movement or moving our bodies in some way that feels good is important for our health–not for the reasons we often hear about in intense fitness environments, where fitness is more of a sport focused on pushing your body to extremes–but because our body and our brain feel better when we find ways to incorporate movement into our routines. Keep the purpose of feeling good at the center of your search for a gentle movement routine: if it starts to feel like drudergy or punishment, it’s time to find something new.
If you’re looking for support as you heal your relationship to your body, therapy can be a great place to start. Contact us today and our expert clinicians can help.
Parenting can already feel like driving somewhere new without a map–when you add in managing chronic pain on top of that, it can be hard to find resources that speak to your experience. There are a lot of limitations that come with experiencing chronic pain that just aren’t factored in with typical parenting advice. This can make parenting–where your whole world is about your child, and you already feel a little removed from your “adult” social circles–feel even more isolating.