Reclaiming the Body
Definition
At some point you left. Not entirely, not on purpose. But you stopped living in the body and started managing it from the outside. You stopped feeling what it felt and started watching what it looked like, what it was producing, whether it was performing adequately by whatever standard had been installed. The body became an object of management rather than the place where you live. Reclaiming the body is not a fitness practice or a beauty practice. It is the process of moving back inside, of learning to feel rather than watch, of trusting the body's signals again after years of overriding them in service of the expectation of others.
Origins & Context
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves describes the reclamation of the wild woman as necessarily somatic: it happens in the body, through the body, as the body. The instinctual woman is an embodied woman. The woman who has lost access to her body has lost access to her instinct.
Marion Woodman in The Pregnant Virgin writes about the difference between the body as object and the body as self: the woman who can inhabit her body rather than observe it from outside has access to wisdom and vitality that the disembodied woman cannot reach. Woodman's work on embodiment is foundational in Jungian feminist psychology.
Sonya Renee Taylor in The Body Is Not an Apology argues that radical self-love is necessarily embodied, and that the political and the personal intersect precisely at the site of the female body: the body that has been shamed, judged, and managed by cultural systems is the same body that, when reclaimed, becomes the site of personal liberation.
Reclaiming the body is not a beauty practice or a fitness commitment. It is the process of moving back inside the place where you actually live.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
Reclaiming the body shows up as slowing down enough to feel. The pause before moving that allows sensation to register. The moment of noticing: I am hungry, I am cold, I am tired, I am satisfied. The body's signals, which were suppressed or ignored for so long, begin to be heard again.
It shows up as the change in relationship to exercise. From punishment or performance to pleasure or expression. The body that moves because it wants to move rather than because it is being disciplined.
It shows up as the ability to receive touch without checking whether the touch is warranted. The ability to enjoy physical sensation without guilt. The body being allowed to have a relationship to pleasure that does not require justification.
It shows up as the grief. The grief of how long you were not there, of what was managed and suppressed, of what the body experienced without your presence. That grief is part of the reclamation.
Generational Transmission
Through the maternal line: The mother's relationship to her own body is the first map. The mother at war with her body modeled that the female body is something to be managed, defeated, improved. The daughter's body absorbed that relationship before she had any independent experience to draw from. The grandmother who survived by erasing her body's needs modeled a different but equally distant relationship. The daughter who reclaims her body is often also completing the reclamation her mother and grandmother could not finish.
Through the paternal line: The father's gaze is among the earliest external relationships to the female body. The father who treated his daughter's body with warmth and respect modeled that the female body is worthy of that warmth. The father who criticized, sexualized, or ignored his daughter's body modeled the opposite. The daughter's adult relationship to her own body often carries the specific quality of the father's attention or its absence.
Nikita's Note
Reclaiming the body is one of the most important pieces of the work. Not because the body is more important than the mind. Because you cannot do the rest of the healing from outside the place where the healing is supposed to happen.
The body is not an obstacle. It is the home. The work is not to fix it or improve it into acceptability. The work is to move back in. To live there. To trust it again.
That is not a small thing. For many women it is the most radical thing they will ever do.
From the work
Reclaiming the body is not a beauty practice or a fitness commitment. It is the process of moving back inside the place where you actually live.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Daughter's Lexicon
See all in The Daughter's Lexicon →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.