Here is what I have...

Clarissa Pinkola Estes is a truth speaker and a total inspiration. Anytime I need a slap upside the head, I open her book "Women Who Run with Wolves". Like most women, I STRUGGLE with my body image. Especially since I have broken my year long strict candida cleanse, I have put on a few lb's. I am nice and soft and round and...soft and round. Ha! All of the women on this retreat are true goddesses, and we all share a similar fight, that against the mind and ego telling us that we are less than, not enough, or too much. I read this passage from WWRWW and it really hit home for us all...

"The body is like an earth. It is a land into itself. It is as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, over mined, and shorn of its power as any landscape. The wilder woman will not be easily developed by redevelopment schemes. For her, the questions are not how to perform, but how to feel.

The hips, they are wide for a reason, inside them is a satiny ivory cradle for new life. A woman's hips are outriggers for the body above and below; they are portals, they are a lush cushion, the handholds for love, a place for children to hide behind. The legs, they are meant to take us, sometimes to propel us; they are the pulleys that help lift us, they are the 'anillo', the ring for encircling a lover. They cannot be too this or too that. They are what they are.

There is no "supposed to be" in bodies. The question is not size or shape or years of age, or even having two of everything. But the wild issue is, DOES THIS BODY FEEL, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in it's own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters."

Can my body move, dance, jiggle, sway and thrust? NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.

After class we did a journaling exercise and wrote a poem based on one by Ntozake Shange. Shanges' goes...


HERE IS WHAT I HAVE...
POEMS
BIG THIGHS
LIL TITS
&

SO MUCH LOVE.


To write your own....

Line 1: "Here is what I have..."
Line 2: Insert noun (yoga, dances, knowledge, etc)
Line 3: one body part (that frustrates you)
Line 4: one body part (that you love)
Line 5: &
Line 6: blank
Line 7: "and so much <insert word>"


My poem was...

Here is what I have...
Yoga
Big ass
Huge smile
&

So much fucking joy.


Namaste beautiful people !!