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Zusammenfassung von The Body Is Not an Apology

Name: The Body Is Not an Apology
Rating: 4.1 (118 reviews)
Author: Sonya Renee Taylor

Sonya Renee Taylor

The Power of Radical Self-Love

4.1 (118 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

Themen

Simplify Podcast Weight Loss The Body

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The Body Is Not an Apology
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What’s in it for me? Learn how to release body shame and adopt radical self-love.

Imagine waking up one day in a world in which everyone loved their own body. Why is that so difficult to envision? Human beings are complicated and varied, and we tend to agree on very little – but we do have one thing in common. Everyone has a body. And yet, most of us harbor some level of negativity toward our bodies that we can’t seem to shake.

This is all by grand design. Since we were young, powerful systems have flooded our awareness with body-shaming messaging and indoctrinations about which bodies are “right” and which are “wrong.” But if we’re willing to do internal and external work, we can fight these systems. When we access radical self-love, we discover how to unlearn body shame, we celebrate the splendor of human diversity, and we push to collectively transform the world.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why body terrorism is our native language;
how we can work to demolish the Body Shame Profit Complex; and
what the four pillars of radical self-love are.

Embracing radical self-love helps to pave the way for individual and collective transformation.

In 2010, Sonya Renee Taylor was in a hotel room in Knoxville, Tennessee for a poetry slam competition when her teammate Natasha confided that she feared she was pregnant. Natasha didn’t want the pregnancy – she wasn’t prepared to be a mother, and the would-be father was just a fling.

Sonya, who had once been a sexual-health and public-health service provider, instinctively asked Natasha why she hadn’t used protection. Natasha was honest. She admitted that her cerebral palsy made sex difficult already, so she felt it wasn’t okay for her to insist on using condoms. Sonya empathized with Natasha and her mind reeled with all of the episodes from her own life in which she’d sacrificed her own bodily needs out of shame. She told Natasha, “Your body is not an apology. It is not something you give to someone to say, ‘Sorry for my disability.’”

The key message here is: Embracing radical self-love helps to pave the way for individual and collective transformation.

These words weren’t just for Natasha’s benefit; in speaking them aloud, the author also galvanized herself to start living unapologetically in her own human body. She realized that we are all born with inherent radical self-love, but as we grow up, the feeling of awe we have for our bodies is replaced with shame.

So what exactly is radical self-love, beyond childhood innocence? We can break it down by first discussing what it isn’t. It’s not self-confidence – radical self-love is more expansive than merely thinking highly of yourself. Radical self-love isn’t self-acceptance, either. Self-acceptance lacks imagination; it’s settling for good enough. As activist and professor Angela Davis said, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” We begin our radical self-love journey here: wondering why loving our bodies no longer comes naturally to us.

You might be wondering why radical self-love is focused on the body. Consider this: when we talk about injustice, we’re talking about the violence and oppression inflicted upon bodies. Racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, weight stigma – these forms of discrimination all stem from conflicts with the body.

Finally, why must self-love be radical? The term radical emphasizes the need for a political, economic, and social transformation in how we view and deal with bodies in all their variations. Our identities are complex and intersect with one another; therefore, a radical self-love world is a world that works for all bodies.

Before we begin to practice radical self-love, we must make the three peaces.

Try to recall your first memory of body shame. Was it a reaction to sudden body change? Were you a teenager or a child? Did you just become aware of the difference between people? If you answered yes to any of these, you’re not alone: The author found that most of the attendees of her radical self-love workshops learned body shame during at least one of these points in their lives.

Take Daemon. When he was eight, he scraped his knee badly at the playground. When he approached his older cousins, crying, they laughed at him and said, “Man up. Only sissies cry.” There and then, Daemon internalized the idea that being a man meant ignoring pain. As an adult, he neglected his body and self-soothed with drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t until he had a stroke at 37 that he finally began to question his toxic beliefs about masculinity. He realized that when we distinguish our true values from echoes of the familial, social, or political messaging we heard growing up, we can begin to heal and find peace.

Our world is made up of systems that thrive on invalidating “different” bodies.

At this point, you may be tempted to blame your negative feelings about your body on your mother, your cousins, or that boy who taunted you in middle school. You may even be experiencing what one of the author’s workshop participants called meta-shame – shame for having shame. But the truth is that our relationships with our bodies have been shaped by greater forces.

Consider that only five percent of American women have the body type that advertising depicts as the ideal. Meanwhile, a People magazine survey reported that 80 percent of women respondents felt insecure when they viewed images of women in film and TV. Why do advertisers want us to feel defective in comparison with the default body? Because it compels us to buy products that will remedy our supposed flaws – which they invented – enabling them to generate more wealth and power. The author calls this capitalist structure the Body Shame Profit Complex, or BSPC.

The four pillars of practice guide our radical self-love journey.

During a visit to the Bahamas, the author stumbled upon a small beach marked with a sign for Dean’s Hole: the deepest hole in the world, which dropped to 663 feet just steps from the shore. There, she struck up a conversation with a free-diving champion from Italy named Davide Carrera, who told her: “In the water, I must learn the difference between fear and danger.”

Unknowingly, Davide was also describing the journey of learning radical self-love. Like a deep-sea diver wading into unknown depths, we must be fear-facing when we first encounter the four pillars of radical self-love practice. The first two pillars reorient our thinking, the third reckons with doing, and the fourth introduces a new state of being.

Expanding to an ethos of radical human love puts us on the path to liberation from body terror.

Body terrorism has not only robbed us of our compassion for ourselves, it has also led us to sabotage other people’s self-love. Just as we receive toxic messages, we send them. And by doing nothing to stop it, we are complicit in maintaining the uninterrupted feedback loop of body shame.

Realizing the structural nature of body oppression, we may even find ourselves on that wheel of meta-shame, judging ourselves for judging others. But rather than becoming paralyzed into inaction, we can work towards implementing the final pillar of practice: collective compassion. This happens when we open ourselves to trusting others and engage in community care.

When we engage in difficult conversations and actively fight oppression, we usher in radical change.

During the US presidential primaries in 2015, former candidate Hillary Clinton had a tense conversation with Black Lives Matter activists about how to address racist police violence. At the time, Clinton believed their approach was unrealistic. She was quoted as saying, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. You change laws; you change allocation of resources; you change the way systems operate.”

Meanwhile, history is full of proof that changing laws isn’t enough to wipe out body terrorism. Take the racial bias that’s led to horrendous and disproportionate mass incarceration of Black people in the United States. Because it’s now legal to discriminate against anyone with a criminal record, redesigning the system has ushered in a new era of segregation.

Quote from the book

“Bodies are not the only designators of oppression, but all oppression is enacted on the body.”

Quote from the book

“Radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections and that we work to create space for those intersections.”

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Worum geht es in The Body Is Not an Apology?

The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition (2021) shows how restoring our relationships with our bodies on an individual level can lead to transformative change in the world. It’s a guide to developing a radical self-love practice while also disrupting the systems of power that depend on our body shame to survive.

Bestes Zitat aus The Body Is Not an Apology

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

—Sonya Renee Taylor

Wer The Body Is Not an Apology lesen sollte

People struggling with body shame
Social justice advocates
Anyone with a body

Über den Autor

Sonya Renee Taylor is a poet, activist, and educator, and the founder of The Body Is Not An Apology movement.

Kategorien mit The Body Is Not an Apology

Motivation & Inspiration Mindfulness & Happiness Society & Culture

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