Revolutionise Your Relationship with Your Body: The Power of The Body Love Method
On the 8th January 2017, while I was hooked up to a morphine drip after having a hysterectomy the day before, the first inklings of The Body Love Method were born. It was on that day that I received what I call a divine message that said, “You’ve punished your body for too long, now it’s time to love it instead.”
For the past 10 years, I’d been battling Stage 4 endometriosis and a disordered relationship with my body. To say I hated my body was a bit of an understatement. I was counting calories, weighing myself every day, denying myself sugar and gluten, and exercising as a form of punishment. And no matter what I did, I still had 5 kilos to lose. The weight I was at was never low enough.
Besides the weight loss goals, I was also regularly in pain from the endometriosis. Plus, I was trying to get my personal training business off the ground, and I was hustling hard. I felt guilty for resting because I wasn’t earning a lot of money and always needed more, and rest meant I wasn’t earning anything.
So, it’s not surprising I got the message to stop punishing my body, because on top of everything I had a major surgery to recover from.
I didn’t know what to do with the message straight away. My focus was recovery. Then in March, I headed to Bali for a holiday (I won the trip!!). Ed Sheeran’s song “Shape of You” was playing everywhere and the lyrics “I’m in love with your body” were being blasted into my ears. I got a love heart tattoo to remind myself to take this self-love stuff seriously.
After the Bali trip, I was working with a business coach, and she was giving me some feedback on a webpage I had made with photos from my travels. She didn’t like the photos. She said they looked like “Before” photos. Meaning I looked overweight, old, unattractive… I’m not sure. I never asked her. I cried on and off for a week. I realised that I wasn’t upset with what she’d said, I was crying because I realised that what she’d said didn’t affect me as much as it would have in the past. I was crying because maybe, just maybe, I was starting to love my body.
Then I got a little bit obsessed. I started to document what I’d done to get to this point. What were the practices and lessons I’d learned to get me here? Once I got that onto paper, I shared it with some of my clients and coached them through the same practices and lessons and they got similar results. They weren’t so hard on their bodies mentally or physically. They started to value rest and recovery time. Their confidence grew. Their eating habits changed. They started to have more fun. I was onto something.
I called that something The Body Love Method. It’s a series of tools, lessons, and practices to help people look after their bodies with love and kindness, to value their body no matter how it looks, and to learn to love and accept the person they are.
Read on to learn exactly what The Body Love Method is so you can start practicing it yourself.
There are 12 parts to the Method. Ideally, you’d go through each one in order, but you can also start where you want to start. It’s completely up to you. You’ll also notice another word in brackets after some of the words. This is Sanskrit for a yoga practice that is similar or the same as what I came up with. In this article I am giving you a quick description. Over time I’ll write longer posts about each practice and link them here.
The Body Love Method
1. Intention (Sankulpa). Decide that you want to make a change to your relationship with your body. Write it down. Revisit it often. Click here to ready my step-by-step guide for setting a Body Love intention.
2. Declutter (Aparigraha). Stop following people online who make you feel bad. Ditch the old diet books. Throw out the clothes that you “might just get back into one day.” Delegate something on your to-do list. Make space for a new mindset and a new way of living. Click here to read a whole article about decluttering.
3. Forgiveness (Ahimsa). Forgive yourself for hating on your body, or those people that made horrible remarks, or the systems that make us feel “not enough”. Forgiveness isn’t necessarily condoning behaviour, but instead letting go of the idea that the past can be any different.
4. Anchor (Mantra). Find an affirmation or a trinket (or in my case a love-heart tattoo) that reminds you of your body love journey. Download my free body love affirmations audio here.
5. Chakras. Learn that your body is more than flesh and bones. Take care of your body, mind & spirit.
6. Meditation (Dhyana). Practicing self-compassion meditation has been proven to reduce body image issues. Click here to get a copy of mine.
7. Journaling (Svadhyaya). We spend so much time with our thoughts. Writing them down can be a great way of decluttering them and seeing that they aren’t true!
8. Toolkit. Create a list of things that make you feel good – your fave meal, person, TV show, walking spot, essential oil… whatever makes you feel good and have that list handy so when things go to shit (and they will) you have a handy resource that you can use to help you feel better.
9. Movement (Asana). Notice I don’t say exercise! Find ways to move your body that feel doable and wonderful.
10. Fuel (Intuitive Eating, not a yoga practice per se but does require mindfulness). There is a lot to say about IE and it’s hard to sum it up in one sentence. I recommend reading this blog post to learn more.
11. Daily Rituals (Sadhana). Creating a little pocket of time just for you each day is essential for body love.
12. Body Love (Samadhi). This is where you find your own version of body love. It might be accepting your body enough to put on some bathers and swim in the ocean. It might be learning to say no to someone so you can rest. Everyone’s version of Body Love is different, but a small change can have a profound impact on your life.
Do you want more Body Love?
I hope you’ve started to revolutionise your relationship with your body just by reading this post, but if you’d like to delve deeper, I host a 90-day Body Love Yoga challenge twice a year. This challenge combines the physical yoga practice with yoga philosophy and The Body Love Method to help you feel more at peace with yourself so that you can start to live the life you want. Click here for details.
More posts about Body Love that you’ll love
10 lessons from 10 years in the fitness industry
How I got a body like Jennifer Aniston: A Fable
3 ways your body image was ruined by diet culture in the 1990s and 2000s
Reflections on a year of self-care
An apology to my past clients for promoting diet culture