As I finished up my Substack message last week, I turned to some household tasks, listening to a recent We Can Do Hard Things podcast episode while moving about. And, as is often the case, a teacher arrived when the student was able to listen and hear. This is a teacher I know already, Sonya Renee Taylor, but I hadn’t listened to her message for a while and it felt like a deeper dive into what I’d already been writing about that morning.
Taylor is the author of several books of prose and poetry, including The Body Is Not An Apology, and is the founder of the international movement by the same name. I first learned of her work and mission in 2020—a mission to remind people of the political, social, economical, and emotional importance of what she calls Radical Self-Love. And this is not about thinking grandiose thoughts of ourself or about reinforcing self-improvement plans or the notion that one kind of body is more valuable than another. This is about the kind of rooting into ourselves that I wrote of last week, a kind of rooting that could allow humans to grow into exactly the divine creation they were made to be and to allow others the room and dignity to do the same. As Taylor says, “We do not have to figure out how to Radically Love ourselves. We have to figure out what conditions have paved over the fertile ground that allows this thing that is naturally in us to sprout, to grow. To continue to grow.”
Taylor speaks a lot of wisdom, all of it, I know, deserving some time to really root. In 2020 I sensed that rooting into this wisdom was something I needed to do for myself and for the people who came to me as students and for my children. One of the images that Taylor uses to describe what she believes is our innate ability to trust in our body’s value is the ways this innate ability gets “paved over” much like a beautiful field might get turned into a Target parking lot:
“What if we remember there is no beautiful, vibrant, verdant place in the world that if we thought about it we’d say should be a parking lot in Target? The only person who would say that you are deficient and not enough and need to change and not inherently valuable enough in the beingness you embody today is someone who profits from you not believing it…someone who profits from you being a parking lot in Target.”
Someone who profits from me believing I should be paved over. And you should be paved over. Someone who profits. Sort of makes me think of all those beginning of the year messages I mentioned last week. Who profits from me believing my body isn’t valuable as it is on January 1? And I don’t mean to say doing the things that reinforce the vibrancy and verdancy of ourself isn’t a good idea. I believe it is. I’m trying not to equate that with a set of standards that actually makes me, or you, feel like there’s a divinely appointed weight, age, race, gender or gender identification, physical ability or measure of strength that is the vibrant and verdant one of value.
How did this show up for me this week? As the image of becoming a more peaceable entity. For me that word, peaceable, evokes the idea of being at ease and creating ease. A more easeful ecosystem that can promote a network of ease from within. This doesn’t mean it’s something easy. In fact, I think it takes a lot of practiced, conscious effort to learn to be at ease. Yet, when I cultivate a soft, still, yielding nature, it does start to feel a little easier to root into myself and to feel at ease there. I might call it an inner yielding into myself. Yielding. Isn’t that quite an image? One for me that conjures a picture of slowing down, not forcing myself in, a kind of patience to the arriving.
I think there’s a lot to explore in this notion and perhaps it’s something best done for you by listening to the wisdom of another or by working somatically. If you want to listen to the full podcast I mentioned, click here and if you’re a book lover, consider purchasing Sonya Renee Taylor’s small but mighty book The Body Is Not An Apology.
For paid subscribers, scroll past the poem to find a full hour long yoga practice for ease I recorded this week during my weekly Friday noontime class, offering both live in Shepherdstown and live via Zoom (reach out to me if you’d like more info on how to attend).
And for those fellow poetry lovers, who perhaps need a bit of a myth to see your innate strength and aliveness, I’ll end with a favorite poem by Ada Limon. I personally think it goes for all you fellas out there too.
Wonder Woman
Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirling
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.