Body Love

This journal supports an intentional practice of changing your relationship to your body for the better. It includes quotes, questions, checklists for self-care, and pages for a six-week-long daily inquiry and writing practice. It can be used as a stand-alone journal, or in conjunction with The Invitation: Daily Care for Your Intimate Self. The journal pages contain a checklist of suggestions on how to show your body love on a daily basis. There are also blank boxes for you to write in your answers. You might add other boxes for other actions and rituals—like “doing my physical therapy exercises,” or even highly targeted interventions like “massaging the scar tissue on my knee.”  It’s our perspective that humans are incarnate spirits, woven of consciousness and energy. While we have a permanent consciousness (or “soul”) that isn’t anchored to the body, we are living in a body. Our bodies’ health responds to our thoughts, as well as to the thoughts of the collective culture. When those thoughts are negative, they can limit our freedom and happiness. Those beliefs can be unwound. Body Love Journaling, and the suggested self-care practices in the checklists, are designed to support a reintegration: a restitching together of the body, mind, and spirit. In addition to these exercises, questions are sprinkled throughout the book. They were created to help you evoke and examine the cultural beliefs that you’ve inherited about your body. They are questions about sex, shape, size, function, illness, and aging. About who your body belongs to, and who can make decisions about it. About what it can eat or drink or ingest. About what medical procedures are allowed and disallowed—even about how your body should be dressed. We ask things like: “Is your body here to please others?” “How is a person’s body related to a person’s worth?” Our hope is that, upon examination, there are some beliefs you might like to leave behind forever!