EMBRACING MY AGING BODY

I fully believe aging is a gift; I am grateful for the wisdom and resilience I feel I gain with each year of my life, and yet, I cannot seem to embrace my aging body. I feel at odds with my quickly multiplying grey hairs, my deepening laugh lines, and my increasing flabby bits. I want to be a woman who doesn't view the changes in my body with despair, but with pride, but I do not know how to reconcile my deeply ingrained belief that beauty lies in youth, with my desire to appreciate (and maybe even love!) my aging body. Where do I begin?

Dear friend,

We live in a society that tells us lots of things about who we are + what we should look like + how we’re not enough + what beauty is + which bodies are worthy of love -- a society driven by capitalism + inundated with advertising -- a society where corporations make money by trying to convince us that our deepest magic (our delight, our joy, our aliveness) exists outside of us and that we have to spend money to have any hope of getting it back + buy products to attain the wholeness that already belongs to us.

I say this because I don’t think we can truly address your (very relatable + understandable) question without looking at the forces in the world that are deeply invested in convincing us that we’re not enough in some way.

We breathe this poison everyday, so it makes sense that we sometimes (or often) think thoughts like “beauty lies in youth” and that those thoughts become deeply ingrained beliefs.  

So perhaps the first step is to simply acknowledge that this belief isn’t yours.  As in, it didn’t come from inside of you -- from your heart, truth, and knowing.  That belief was someone’s else’s idea, and it got in you.  

This awareness doesn’t necessarily solve the problem or make it easier to release these beliefs.  It’s hard to live in the poison, and there’s no shame in struggling with it.  (And it’s certainly not your fault that these beliefs persist within + around you).

So what, then, can we do to feel more at home in our bodies, more grounded in our real selves, and more appreciative of who we are, exactly as we are?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Look at the big picture (+ get political): 

When I don’t feel pretty enough, thin enough, young enough, or whatever enough, it often helps me to ask: 

Who benefits from my feelings of not-enoughness?  Who’s getting rich off my self-doubt?  What advertising executives are working really hard to engineer these negative feelings to make me a more pliable consumer?  In what ways does spending my energy worrying about my wrinkles (or my thighs or my hair) make me smaller and shrink my life?  How does it reroute my energy + suck up my life-force?  How does it distract or derail me?  How does it suck up power that I might bring to the world in other ways? 

I ask these questions not to blame or shame myself but to ground myself -- to remember that the feelings of judgement, the unkind words, and the general discomfort I sometimes feel in my own skin come from somewhere else -- and that the life-force energy I lose in the process benefits people I don’t like who are doing things I believe are bad for the world.  There are people + systems who benefit from my smallness, and I don’t like those people or those systems. 

This angers me (bringing my own power + energy back online) and motivates me to continue the deep work of inhabiting my body and claiming my full humanity + aliveness in and through my body, even as I live in systems that work against my efforts.  It also reminds me that I do this work not only for myself but for the world I want for others + future generations.

2. Divest

When it comes to actually doing this deep + ongoing work, I frame it as divestment -- the process of taking my energy, time, resources, attention, and money out of one space to invest them in another gradually over time.

Here’s an example of how I’ve divested in another area of life:

My sweetheart + I care deeply about climate justice, but we both live in a world powered largely by fossil fuels.  We want to change that, but rather than taking a grandiose all-or-nothing approach, we’ve opted to slowly divest over time, taking strategic steps away from fossils to invest in the future we want.  Over a period of years we’ve put solar panels on our roof, bought an electric car, transitioned to a more plant-based diet, insulated our home, and invested retirement savings in fossil-free funds.  None of this happened overnight, and we still live in a world that burns lots of fossil fuels, but our own carbon footprint is lower than it used to be.  It’s not everything.  It didn’t magically fix the system causing harm.  But it matters + feels good.

I see this work of inhabiting my body in a sane, grounded, and life-affirming way similarly -- taking small steps in the direction I want to go, gradually divesting my energy + attention + money out of body-negative systems to invest them in another possibility.

This could look like all sorts of things: setting boundaries around media + advertising, stepping away from spaces where body-negative talk happens, or limiting the amount of time or money you spend tending to your body’s appearance -- all to invest in something else that grounds you in embodied delight and supports your goal of appreciating your body as it is.

I like divestment as a strategy because it’s a cumulative, exponential process.  It’s not about forcing or expecting ourselves to be perfect.  It’s not about never having a bad day or negative thought.  It’s not about fighting the whole system at once.  

It’s simply about tending to where we spend + invest our most precious resources: our time, attention, and energy, understanding that these small moves add up to something significant + exponential over time.  

3. Remember:

You say you want to view the changes in your body with pride -- to appreciate + even love your body.  Why do you want that?

Remembering those reasons matters.

Because this is deep + not-always-easy work.  And we need those deep + beautiful + life-affirming reasons to keep going.

For me, it’s about claiming my aliveness + fully inhabiting my experience of life.

Because the things I most want from life (presence, power, connection, truth) happen in + through my body.

And when I’m judging my body -- when I’m looking at it as a judgmental observer -- I’ve stepped outside of myself in a way that fragments my experience of living + disconnects me from my life-force.

I do this work so that I’m not living disconnected from my own aliveness.  Because I know I’m here not to be evaluated as beautiful (or youthful or thin or whatever) -- but to live a good life.  And I do that by stepping into the fullness of my life-force + creatively channeling that energy in ways that are truest + deepest for me.  

This is the task of my life.

What’s yours?  And how might you anchor into that intention?  

What are the stakes?  What are your reasons?  And what is the beautiful vision that makes it all worth it?

Much love,

Rae

You can connect with Rae + learn more about her work in the world here: raeserafinabarker.com