Hold-Your-Breath Skinny

I have an aunt that I think of as "hold-your-breath skinny." Her whole life is about how little she eats. I only eat a banana for lunch she would say, or I live on buttered noodles, or I never eat breakfast. Cigarettes and diet soda completed the menu. For me that's no way to live. She was slender but didn't look like she was fulfilled or happily occupying her body. I would rather climb trees and swing from the vines like Tarzan and enjoy all of the earthly delights; edible, musical, sensory, and sensual. The belly-dancer we see every week dancing at the jams says proudly, "I'm a woman who eats!" Hurrah for the women who eat, dance, run, jump, skip, and scream!

My mother took diet pills that were speed (amphetamines) to "keep her figure." She would gorge herself on weekends, gobbling up cheesecakes and ravioli and meat pies while entertaining my father and his clients, and then not eat anything but chicken broth from little foil packets during the week. Not a fun way to live.

I went to school with a girl who was orange because all she ate was carrots.

We live in a culture that says women should be stick figures with grapefruit-sized breasts. Luckily that image is changing!

Body wisdom is available to you when you use your body.

There are many folks who loathe being a body, a creature, and who wish they were just a brain. I see these folks as separated at the neck. Their heads float about two feet over their torsos when they walk around. They try to have complete control over their bodies. Have you ever seen this?

I often struggle to pull myself down from the sky and back into my body, or up from the mud and back into my body. The only reliable way to do this is to blam on my horn!

For years I swam with a sad woman who was tall, skeletal, and worn out. She swam every day for hours. She had no meat on her at all and big anxiety creases on her forehead. One day we were changing back into our street clothes in the locker room, and she told me when she was little she was a fat kid and her mother "didn't want to have a fat child." So, unloved, she now was spending her whole life making sure she didn't have an ounce of flesh on her. She was obsessed with swimming herself thin.