Your Body's Been Waiting

This month in Wholly Woman, we're sitting with a proposal from Clarissa Pinkola Estés that I keep returning to.

The body is not your other half. She is a sovereign being, with her own intelligence, her own wisdom, who decided to partner with you, so that you could have this human experience.

Estés calls her the Body Consort.

She is how you move through the world, how you experience pleasure, pain, beauty, time. She is also vulnerable — a being who requires your care, your attention, your willingness to listen.

This month I shared a story with our Wholly Woman circle. A demon, furious that humans had been given the gift of true sight, created a cursed mirror that showed distortion instead of truth. When the mirror shattered, the dust blew into everyone's eyes. And people began to see themselves, and each other, through a fractured lens.

Estés names what the mirror does to us: it makes us see our bodies through a lens of flaw and insufficiency, rather than intelligence, relationship, and loyalty.

But here's the truth that stayed with me.

The body never stops sending her transmissions. The restlessness, the longing, the ache you can't quite name — those aren't signs that something is wrong with you. They are your Body Consort, refusing to let you forget yourself. It is nature itself advocating for your particular bloom.

The shard in our eye is our inability to come into true attuned intimacy with the body. It's the label we put on ourselves that creates distance because we now think we know what we need. It's the narrow concept of beauty that we have subscribed to. It's the speed at which we think we need to move, that leaves no room for listening to the body.

One thing that struck me is that the body is always calling us to the present. Through pleasure, pain, discomfort, joy, it is always inviting us into relationship. As in our other relationships, my attunement to you today won't mean I know how you are tomorrow, or what you may need. I can try to anticipate, but the true moment of connection can only be lived in the here and now.

That's our homework for this month. To notice and celebrate the ways we already attune to our Body Consort, and to notice where there's an opportunity to shed the speck in our eye. To release the lie that creates distance from this most loyal companion and come back into connection with the truth of our body.

If this is stirring something in you, I'd love for you to join us. Wholly Woman meets monthly, and there is still time to step in.

With love,

Raisa