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The other day at my boxing class my coach River was correcting my boxing stance.
“I was looking at your stance and thinking it was okay but then I noticed that your legs are long and I think you need to widen your stance” she said.
I think I must have given her the most quizzical look as I said:
“Me? Long legs? I have never ever ever thought or been told my legs are long”.
Of course I widened my stance (cause you gotta listen to the coach) but for the rest of the class there were body stories swirling around in my head.
My legs? Could they possibly not be the tiny short little legs I always perceive them as.
You see, both my siblings are much taller than me. My body story has been that I am the short, squat, rolly polly one, definitely with short thick legs. I’ve been working through many of those body stories, especially the part of loving being curvy and seeing my body with kindness but I hadn’t realized until that moment that there were so many other layers, other stories that I still had in place (of course there always are and they appear when we are ready for them).
I might have changed my body story in some ways as I can see my legs as strong and muscular now but never long, never tall.
Now, not every story we have about our body will be one that our inner critic likes to speak to us, but this was one of those for me. Maybe not as intensely as other body stories, but it was a negative way I had looked at my body for a long time.
Not just that, but it was a story that kept me small energetically (as I thought I was less than my siblings because I’m the shorty in the family, seeing their height as the norm and mine as negative).
I’ve been thinking about this all week, these long legs that I didn’t know I had and that haven’t grown at all, except in my own perception of them.
Of how changeable so many of our body stories are and how easily we can write one into proof.
Of how I had been making myself small in that boxing stance and was invited to take up more space (and how much that resonates in life as a whole).
Of how sometimes all it takes is one person seeing you differently to crack open one of these stories.
Or seeing yourself differently through the camera…of course, self-portraiture being my favourite tool for changing body stories.
Do you have some stories like these, that might be able to be re-written if we really listen to the compliments (or boxing feedback in my case) that people might be giving us and let them unlock the tales we have previously written in as proof of what our body is or is not?
What stories about our body are waiting to be re-written and some day we’ll be invited to take that step and rewrite it?
I’d love to hear your stories of body-awareness awakenings too. Or if you’re looking for support in changing these stories come join me for the next session of the Be Your Own Beloved E-Course!