I remember I was going to write a whole essay in my new body of work about why it’s possible to go through profoundly hard times, what I call "initiations," without gaining weight. I see so many women say, “That thing happened in 2016 and that’s why I gained 60 pounds.” Just recently, I listened to India.Arie speak about what she endured and how her body changed. And I want to be clear from the outset that there is NOTHING wrong with weight gain. Nothing at all.
And what's also true is that what I’m saying isn’t really about weight gain, inasmuch as it’s about living in the practice of what true embodiment looks like. Overtime, I learned that no matter what I am moving through, I do not abandon my body or bodily awareness. I stay in contact with what is happening in my breasts, my scalp, my muscles, my breath, etc. Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes grief pulls me under the water and I drift away for a brief moment. But eventually, I come back home to the interior landscape of my body and its deep tissue sensations moving through me. And that return has been my anchoring. My grounding.
My devotional practice through trauma, grief, pressure, and initiation has been to stay in relationship with my body, not controlling it, overriding it, or dissociating from it, but remaining present and awake to its full root to crown sensation. From breath to muscle to tissue to sensual dance, I allow life to move through me rather than shutting my body out or down. I believe this is also why I never felt drawn to coffee, alcohol, or cigarettes. When something inside me was breaking or shifting, I eventually reached for my body instead of reaching for something outside of myself. This wasn't something someone taught to me. It's where my nervous system learned to go and where I learn to feel the greatest love story of all.
If you are gaining a lot of weight right now, it's not necessarily because you are weak, unconscious, lazy, or failing. Many of the most esteemed, brilliant women gain weight during hard times because dissociation has been a great strategy for survival. The body gets drowned out and the signals go quiet. A woman may feel think she feels “fine,” but she can’t feel the tenderness in her breasts from her heartbreak until there is a diagnosis, you see. She can’t feel tension building in her pelvic tissues bracing all the time until something physical goes array in a bigger way. Sensations and messages like hunger, thirst, fullness, rest, or even the need to pee get overridden, sometimes until she’s almost about to urinate on herself. Weight change is often just a downstream effect of a rupture in making loving contact with the self.
That said, I don’t pedestalize my practice. As mentioned, there is nothing wrong with weight gain. It’s my oracular practice of coming home to my body that helps me to ‘see’ and receive next step internal guidance and I love this. I do name the truth of my own experience and how my body has remained a heartfelt companion to me, my Beloved, through some hard-ass life, fucked up life initiations over the years, all of them part of the greater love story.
-India Ame’ye
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