The body as a battlefield

For women, the body can be kind of a battlefield– societally, and culturally, the fluctuations of hormones, the pressures to conceive and birth… it all lends itself to pitfalls of being in a body. 

Then there are the traumas of our grandmothers and mothers of whom many grew up in times of war or conflict which has an imprint on the ancestral lines we belong to and that continue to live on in our bodies (epigenetics, generational traumas). 

The women before us were in struggles that still impact us today. 

All of these struggles get synthesized where we create behaviour patterns because of it.

Having maladaptive eating patterns, ways of dealing with the way we look, the way we dress, the way we deal with our sexuality are all examples that come from our conditioning, from societal messaging about our bodies, and the overculture that wants us to be, looks and behave certain ways. 

It is important to acknowledge that the shame, mistrust and rejection of our bodies is something we all carry as women, in varying degrees, but nonetheless all to an extend.

It is important to realize this to take the stigma away from it, and come home to our bodies.

A woman who cuts, or doesn’t eat, or continues to spend too much money on handbags (oe new lips these days)… these are all examples of maladaptive coping mechanisms with the pressures of society upon our bodies and looks– these are all the same expression of coping mechanisms in response to the strong cultural conditioning that in the long run do not benefit us at a deep level.. 

It is important to take the shame out of it. It is not fucked-up, or uniquely bad to have these coping mechanisms or behaviours. There may even be a choice to some of these (like choosing from a free unconditioned choice). 

But the journey is about uncovering the root causes, the personal responsibility we can take for societal imprinting we are not necessarily solely responsible for receiving.

These coping mechanisms are part of human conditioning. It is a matter of learning better coping mechanisms, ones that work for us, not against us, amidst the societal pressures that remain.

Acknowledging that we all have these coping mechanisms in response to how society tells us to be, look and behave like, gives an opportunity to healing. Because you cannot fully heal and integrate and become free from something that is not being acknowledged. If your coping stays in the dark, the shadows, it will keep lurking. So let’s take off the stigma and embrace that we all feel a similar way around our body.