Adopting Your Body as a Rescue Animal
Rescue animals are popular. So many of us sigh cooingly at a dog that needs wheels as support for their legs. We have compassion for animals who lived on the street. We patiently invite rescue animals into our homes, think about what would make them comfortable, spend time training them, acclimating them to parks and children and loud noises. We make lots of allowances for their challenges, their trembling, their trauma. What if you did the same for your body? What if you treated your body like the rescue animal that it is?
Think of all that your body has gone through. At it’s birth. When it was learning and stretching and growing. Think of how it was talked to and touched. What streets did it roam and what kind of food did it find there? I’m not just talking about what to eat.
This is a challenging time of year, but it is especially a challenging time for our bodies. We have already or soon will present them to be seen, maybe judged by our loved ones. They will be offered treats. Will they take them? What will people think if they don’t? Or do? We may visit places where not such nice things happened to our bodies. Our bodies may tremble.
My body is definitely a rescue animal but loving her this way is such a challenge. I was raised to treat her a certain way and so it’s easy to look at her with less loving eyes - to judge and pick at, to get frustrated and exasperated with her. She has been through so much, but I don’t often feel tender towards her about it. Loving all of her - her rolls and marks and skin creations, her feelings, her fears, the way she barks when scared has been a long journey and there is much road ahead.
The other day, though, I decided to do something for my rescue animal while I was getting her dressed. I wasn’t feeling great with my body and I just decided to play Christina Aguilera’s song “Beautiful” while I put my clothes on. It was so simple and also so hard to do. I felt embarrassed but no one was in the room. I tried to take in the sentiment of a beautiful body experience when I didn’t feel that way about myself. My private shame about my body mingled in the room with Christina’s sentiments “You are beautiful, no matter what they say…words can’t bring you down.” There was a softening and tenderness evoked in me that wasn’t there before. I had invited in someone with the energy and words I wanted to say to myself, to my rescue animal body, that I can’t yet. A stand-in mother singing me a lullaby about my beauty.
As a therapist, I think of myself as a stand-in mother for the moments when mothering didn’t go well for clients. But when it comes to love and body image, there are challenges to me being able to do that well while adhering the norms therapists operate under. What do you most want your Mom to say to you? “I love you.” “You are so special.” “You are beautiful.” These are things a therapist will be scared out of saying a lot of the time (me included), as they get close to a kind of romantic intimacy that we are explicitly trained to avoid. As a therapist who has worked with other healers and with a spiritual mentor, I have received this kind of mothering and found it profound. I have been rocked like a baby, I have been told I am loved and I am beautiful many times, I have been treated very special and precious. This is an experience I want to offer clients, but when I do it does feel “out of bounds.”
I feel comfortable saying “I love you” to clients. And I’ve more recently been able to say, “You are looking especially beautiful today” to a client. I will say that I can notice when a client IS feeling good about themselves because they actually DO look more beautiful on those days. And for some reason with some clients, they look more beautiful when they are sad.
But you dear reader are not my client, and so I can say. You ARE beautiful. You are even more beautiful when you are sad and letting yourself feel your feelings. You are special to me. Your animal body is sweet and I want to adopt it and put up pictures of it on Instagram. What you think is ugly about it, are its most endearing features. Your tender vulnerable lumpy pimply sagging fleshy greying hairy body. The world’s sweetest animal. The best animal you could possibly rescue. I love you.