Heal your Body by Healing your Heart

It’s time for a Body Love Revolution.

From the time I was 11 years old, chestier than my peers, and the tallest girl in my 5th grade class, my body and I have been at odds. I felt a lot of pressure to look a certain way, to be attractive, to be something more.

Adding to my critical self-judgment and confusion was shame around sexuality, ideas around women being the "weaker" sex whose main task was to have babies. and a bucket-load of warped conditioning around people-pleasing and being "nice."

When I was 16, my mom signed us up for Weight Watchers. I never really asked if she did for herself or for me, but she made it easy. I lost weight. I didn't achieve "goal," (it felt like an impossible standard) but I felt good—more comfortable with myself.

Oh, but that made life more complicated.

As a fat girl, I has been invisible to boys. Other than when one of them tried to be funny in front of his friends and made some mean comment about my size or my level of desirability.

Weight Watchers changed all that. Now, they liked me. They wanted to touch me.

It made me mad (and triggered deep levels of fear). I was the same person on the inside, but now that I looked different, I had value.

But I had been well trained. Nice girls didn't get mad...I stuffed the anger with food, the pounds crept back on, and I went back into hiding. I heard once that anger is an expression of the soul's sadness. I know I felt sad and alone for a very long time.

I spent a lot of years hiding. Holding back in relationships, in life. Not willing to let others in. Not trusting that I was someone worth loving. Not willing to be vulnerable and open. Hiding behind my own protective bubble wrap.

There are a lot of reasons that we hold a skewed vision of ourselves, and all of those reasons show up in the body. It is our body that is the carrier of this human experience. It holds it all. It wears it all.

Over the years, I went on lots of diets, read a shelf-load of information on nutrition, and consulted with health experts. I lost a few pounds here and there but they always came back. External measures brought short-term results. I struggled to achieve what I really wanted: to feel comfortable in my own skin.

What I have come to realize is that lasting change isn’t an outside job. Healing comes from the inside. As we tend to our inner wounds, conditioned thinking, and self-limiting beliefs, and embrace a fuller expression of our core self, we glow. Our light changes. We show up differently—in our body—and in all aspects of our being.

I've learned to recognize and release the unconscious limitations that tell me who I am, and who I can or can't be. I've become an ally with my body, listening as best I can when it has something to tell me about hunger or fear or anger, and choosing a self-valuing response. I've found activities and ideas that nourish me in satisfying and enriching ways.

We are multi-faceted beings: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. When one aspect is wounded, the others feel it too. It is when we bring all of ourself into a place of working together that we make lasting change.

Join me for a Body Love Revolution: www.kaileanwelsh.com/bodyloverevolution2022

It is time to come home to ourselves.

"It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels."