Woman on Fire (18 page)

If you are insecure in the relationship, there may be a need to do some work to feel better in the relationship. You can make reasonable requests of the other person to compliment or validate you, to connect with you in a particular way, to show love, or to remind you of the importance of the relationship. Often just having a reconnect with the person is all that's required to let jealousy go. However, if there is a real reason for you to be jealous because the relationship is, in fact, insecure, then thank your jealousy for alerting you to address something deeper that's getting in the way of your intimacy and tackle it in a healthy way.

If you are insecure in yourself, that's another story. When you feel insecure, you might need to reconnect to yourself, your own innate greatness, and your ability to create powerful intimacy. You could also ask for support or validation from your partner, friends, or family if you are having an insecure day or week, or focus on reminding yourself how much you do have in your relationships. I've witnessed people own their vulnerability in this arena on social media or by e-mail and ask for what they need. Sometimes you need to call your BFF so she can remind you of your total awesomeness.

If you are jealous of someone else, remind yourself that their existence and good qualities do not take anything away from yours. Be inspired rather than threatened by the beauty in others. No one's light needs to dim yours. It is there to uphold goodness and elevate
you, not take you down. There is room and a need for all of our lights. When it comes to your own insecurities, you have choices: you can make up stories about yourself and all you are incapable of, you can decide to work on what you want to improve, or you can accept that some things are just not your strengths. But everyone has strengths and positive qualities that add value to our world. Focus on your value and strengths to get out of an insecure spiral. Feeling insecure just makes you feel bad. It does nothing to improve a situation. Recognize the stories you tell yourself based on your insecurities and ask who you would be without the story.

There is a simple three
R
process to help you to emotionally evolve when you are in an unhealthy emotional state. 1)
Remind
yourself to choose a different response. I say remind because, with any experience, you know what's better for you, even when you are in the thicket of emotion having a hard time seeing out. 2)
Replace
the old behavior/reaction with a new one. 3) As you try something different, you
release
the old way of being in action, thought, and feeling state.

Choosing an empowered and intentional emotional response will guide you toward a much more joyful and fulfilling emotional life. It's worth retraining yourself so you can show up as the emotionally powerful woman you are meant to be.

When you are fully present in yourself, you can be present with others. When you are in your pleasure, you tap into your deep joy. A woman who is on fire is in her joy and full expression—she emanates her light in the world and showers it on those around her. People are drawn to her because she is magnetic, warm, and alight. Fuel the right emotional states. Cease to give energy to the emotions that make you feel bad. Each day ask yourself, “What will bring me the most joy today?” and act on that question. Energy reproduces itself, so your joy and love can multiply. Depending where you are in your emotional development, this may feel like an enormous shift, but even little steps make a big difference. You are fully capable of taking total responsibility for your emotions. Transform your destructive patterns and become the most powerful emotional being you can be.

Element 4:
BODY

KNOW AND RADICALLY ACCEPT YOUR BODY

In my Women's Sexually Empowered Life Program, we spend an entire weekend on the body. I ask the women questions about how they feel about and experience their bodies, and they line up in the room along a spectrum in the place that identifies what they think and feel. Ask yourself where you currently place yourself on this spectrum:

AGREE > > > DISAGREE:

1. I like my own body.
   
2. I often give my body negative energy.
   
3. I intentionally hide parts of my body in the clothes I wear.
   
4. I spend a lot of time on organizing, primping, and fixing my appearance.
   
5. I have made decisions about relationships because of my body or my feelings about my body.
   
6. I have made decisions about sex because of my body or my feelings about my body.
   
7. My feelings about my body have restricted my choices.
   
8. My treatment of my body has put me in risky sexual situations.
   
9. It's hard to let go of how I feel about my body when I am having sex or being physically intimate with someone.
   
10. If I felt differently about my body, my sex life would be different.
    
11. If I felt differently about my body, my relationship(s) would be different.
    
12. A partner has said things about my body that have made me feel bad about it or have hurt my feelings.
    
13. Family members have said things about my body that have made me feel bad about it or have hurt my feelings.
    
14. If I could, I would trade in my body for a different one.
    
15. I am working on loving my body more.
    
16. I accept my body just as it is.
    

I remember in 2013 asking a group of women whether they agreed with those statements. As the women discussed their feelings about them, I was struck by the vast amount of energy they spent disliking, critiquing, trying to improve, or beating up on their bodies. I listened intently and took in the mass negative energy they had toward the temples in which they lived, how betrayed they felt, how dissatisfied and distraught some of them were about their magical bodies. In that moment, I realized that this is perhaps the single most effective and pervasive reason women are denied their full personal power. As I witnessed how these women—women who actually want to work on themselves—waste so much time and energy in negativity and even turmoil over their bodies, I could only imagine
how much precious wasted energy women spend on this body self-hate worldwide.

Pilar found me online and called me because she was about to turn forty and felt she really wanted to break through with her sexuality. She was a well-educated producer from the Caribbean who had grown up with different norms about sexuality, and she had been fortunate to work with many teachers and healers and had done a lot of personal growth work. Yet she didn't understand the full nature of her sexuality or of her body's capacity for pleasure. She had not had a lot of experience being partnered—instead she had focused on her career, being a businesswoman, and building her life in other ways. It was time to address her sexuality, and she was ready. A core part of our work was on her owning her own body, pleasure, and sexual confidence. Here's how she described it.

What made it hard to accept my body is that it's not the body I think I would like to have. I struggled with self-abusive thoughts about my body, thinking I was too fat, cellulite, big thighs. I had convinced myself that no one would want to be with me because I didn't have the “perfect” body. I felt a lot of shame around the fact that I didn't have the type of shape that I admired on other women. It never stopped me from having sex or being able to orgasm, but I was so abusive in my self-talk that it was destructive and punitive.

I am normal sized, toned enough, healthy, fit, active, sexy, and attractive—but it's “not good enough” because I hate my thighs. Most of my challenges came from comparing myself to other people and wishing for something other than what I had. Logically I knew that was rubbish because I knew that I possessed my own unique
gifts that, to be perfectly honest, I value far more than the mere physical. But emotionally it was always a different story. It was like I was blocked—maybe because it was something that I felt I could not control or change—but it was a constant recurring mental block that made me feel much shame. In fact, it is still something I battle with every day. It's hard to let go of self-loathing because it can bring a perverse kind of pleasure.

Indeed, one of the biggest blocks holding people back from having the sexual empowerment they really desire is that they do not love or accept their body. We walk around with these critical tapes running in our minds about our bodies, putting energy into hiding our bodies, feeling desperate to improve what we cannot accept, and we hold ourselves back from living. Many women spend their lives hiding, avoiding being too close, fearing their sexuality, because they are so deeply uncomfortable and unhappy with their bodies. It is a jolting realization to think of how much of our potential we waste on things we cannot change or simply do not fully understand and how much this holds women back from our true wholeness and having the fulfilling sexual experiences we so desperately want.

What would it mean for you to break your patterns of body abuse and learn to radically accept the body you've been given with grace and gratitude so you can begin to enjoy your body in ways you didn't know (or forgot) you could? Part of radical and whole acceptance of your body, no matter your body type, age, ability, or hang-ups, is learning about how it functions so you can enjoy it and take more pleasure in it. As you take greater pleasure in your body, you build your confidence and sexual self-esteem as you discover, accept, and love the body you've been given.

It's ludicrous that body types go in and out of style like fashion.
Our bodies are our bodies. How you dress yourself up might change, but the body you have is the only one you get. You don't get to trade it in for a different one like a new car. The process of learning to love your body wholeheartedly will empower you as a sexual being. This doesn't mean it isn't fun to change and adorn our bodies. We do so in many ways. We pierce our ears and other parts, get tattoos, wear makeup, color our hair, change its style, paint nails, and build muscles because it's part of our self-expression and how we want to look. Yet it's important to make distinctions about why we do things to our bodies. Are you coloring your hair because you love the color or because you are terrified of gray hair and what it means? Do you wear makeup because you enjoy dress-up and glitter or do you refuse to leave the house bare because you are afraid of being seen without it? Are you losing weight because it makes you feel better and more healthy or because you feel ashamed? Are you obsessed with having an unattainable ideal body weight or type, or are you finding the weight and fitness level that's right for you? Ask yourself questions about why you do what you do and whether your reasons support you loving and accepting your body and your aging, or whether they contribute to more self-hatred. It's impossible not to feel pressures around our looks, but you can change your relationship to those pressures and how you respond to them.

The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.

—A
DRIENNE
R
ICH

Why spend your life fighting what is? You were given a beautiful body in which to live, and spending your hours, days, weeks, years
directing negativity at it does not improve anything and, in fact, it can make you sick. Literally. People make themselves anorexic, develop chronic illnesses, or have recurring issues with their sexual and reproductive organs because of their body shame and hate. Direct enough negative, angry energy at your body and you will affect its cellular structure—it will respond. Not all bodies have the same capacity or ability, yet we can all learn to accept what we do have and are able to do with our bodies.

Tara Brach, author of
Radical Acceptance
, says: “Radical acceptance has two elements: It is an honest acknowledgment of what is going on inside you and a courageous willingness to be with life in the present moment, just as it is. I sometimes simplify it to ‘recognizing' and ‘allowing.'” To apply radical acceptance to your body means to acknowledge your feelings about your body and to be with and in your body as it is, ceasing to need it to be something else.

There are so many aspects about your body you cannot control and there are many that you can. What are the things you can actually change and what are the things you cannot change? People spend so much of their lives being angry and upset about what they cannot change. This fixation robs you of your joy.

One day, Amy Jo said to me that if I knew what I was doing, could see myself doing it, and knew that it wasn't true, then why was I doing it? “That's a choice,” she said, “so just stop doing it—no explanations or stories—just don't do it!” That was one hell of an
aha
moment for me, because I realized I was addicted to the self-abuse in some way, so I did what she said—I decided to just stop negative or abusive self-talk about my body or legs. And I also removed myself from any and all environments that encouraged or stimulated
comparison in me. So I stopped exercising with certain friends who were very competitive, things like that. It was a liberation.

I still struggle with it, but I accept and love and embrace my body. It's curvy and sexy, and as one male friend said to me, “We need something to hold on to.” So I just decided to let that old negative story go. But I also realized that in order to feel good I had to stay well with myself by being active and eating a certain way—once I'm doing that (skinny or not), then my body image is balanced and positive. So I committed a hundred percent to only doing things that I felt nurtured my body instead of punishing it and trying to force it into submission as I had done in the past—for me that means exercise and food that feels good and right to me. And it works.

Learning about my body and pleasure has impacted my sexuality as a whole. I experience much more sexual pleasure—better orgasms, more confidence, a feeling of liberation and freedom from something that had me bound in the past. I am much more open and willing to explore with partners. I am much more confident in my sexiness and am aware of how I am perceived by men—I am more willing to show my body as well.

Dissatisfaction leads to so much pain. Let's refute a few of the lies that keep us striving for an unattainable ideal and hurling negativity at our bodies, and then let's fill in some of the blanks most women have about their bodies with new knowledge.

Many people and corporations are conspiring to make you hate your body so that you will buy their skin-care products, get yourself a tummy tuck or the latest fad surgery, and spend lots of money trying to attain the unrealistic ideal they have conjured for you. The
mainstream media tells a very specific story about the bodies and sexuality of women. We should be thin. We should not have cellulite or wrinkles. We should have vaginal orgasms. We should have small, symmetrical labia. We should have shapely, round, symmetrical breasts. We should gasp and look beautiful when we orgasm (and simultaneously with our partners). We should be pretty and sexy all the time, at any cost. We should be young forever.

Let's briefly look at the story we consume and break out some real bona fide truth with these five facts.

FACT #1: NO ONE LOOKS LIKE
THE WOMEN IN THE MAGAZINES, NOT EVEN THE MODELS THEMSELVES.
Every woman is primped before photography to an unnatural degree, and after the photos are taken, every image is airbrushed to “flawless” perfection. No blemishes, no dimples, no cellulite, no tan lines, no wrinkles, no pores. Photos are made to look like china dolls. Women are continuously made into flat, two-dimensional beings devoid of variation. When there is variation—like a woman who is more round or curvy, more masculine, or when a photo runs in a tabloid of a real woman in a bikini with no airbrushing—she is critiqued online and by the media in cruel, disgusting ways. Her entire credibility is questioned because she is not a “perfect,” flawless image of a twenty-first-century manufactured, thinly bodied, skin-perfect, feminine woman.

FACT
#2: WE ARE ALL IMPACTED BY PERVASIVE MEDIA IMAGES. MEDIA
LITERACY IS A REQUIREMENT.
If a woman watches television programs and takes in print and online advertisements every day, how could she
not
begin to believe something is wrong with her? None of us are impervious to the influence of these redundant media images. I keep myself on a pretty strict media diet, and I think this is helpful to avoid internalizing harmful, damaging media messages. For the most part, I do not watch mainstream television, read mainstream magazines, or listen to mainstream radio. I'm sure I'd have many more hang-ups if I consumed more mainstream media. Cutting these sources of harmful messaging
about
real
women out of my life assists me in keeping a more realistic view of women's bodies, aging, sexuality, possibility, diversity, and beauty. It helps me to feel good and have love for my body in all of its imperfections, not to mention the bodies of my female lovers.