You wouldn’t believe it but I’ve been good with the #90daysofmindfulness challenge. I miss a day or two sometimes on Insta, but I catch up and post double the next day or a few days later.
I’ve been a good girl, I have.
Not quite so good about the blog though, I know. In my (rather poor) defence, I’ve started a new job and so I spend a lot of the day staring at a computer and am sick of screens by the time I get home. So there we go. If you’re really missing me so terribly (all five of you including my imaginary friends!), follow the daily updates on Insta instead. Please and thank you.
BUT, I’ll still attempt to drag my sorry self over here to write. Perhaps a weekly / fortnightly #90daysofmindfulness check-in?
I’m stopping by tonight because I’ve had one of those smashing, amped-to-the-roof evenings and feeling high as the moon on bodyjam adrenaline shots. This isn’t just another boring rave about aerobics though. It’s about the whole big whoosh of gratitude I felt for my body about a hundred times throughout the class.
See, I’ve spent a lot of time hating it—wishing it were more of this, or less of that; willing in to be firmer, slimmer, stronger, sleeker, smoother, curvier; comparing it to Gisele Bundchen and Jennifer Lawrence and Lena Dunham, and never feeling like it’s a good enough fit.
But today! Today, as I jumped and jiggled and shimmied and stomped, I felt nothing but an appreciation for every single part of my body for coming together to let me do all the things I do:
my eyes for seeing my way through the day, which includes everything from writing, to walking down a street, to seeing where my feet go in the next four, eight, 64 dance steps.
my ears and mouth, for hearing great tunes (and singing along to them while I dance), for having amazing soul-saving conversations with people I love, for telling and receiving stories.
my hands for creating—typing out stories, clicking a photo, shimmying it up on the dancefloor.
my legs for holding me up—for getting me from here to there to there, keeping me balanced so I don’t topple over, doing all the fun mad things I love to do, BodyJam included.
my tummy (and all digestive bits) for holding everything I eat and digesting it to fuel the rest of me (so I have enough energy to do things like, you guessed it, BodyJam).
my lungs for breathing in goodness and expelling horridness; for reminding me of the importance of pausing, resting, slowing down to appreciate the small things, like I was doing today right in the middle of an insane too-fast-and-furious dance sequence.
my loving steady heart for beating away so that I can feel and do everything I’m lucky enough to take notice of.
So this photo is only of my body, angled so my head / face are cut out of the picture—and this is deliberate. There’s plenty of objectification of bodies going on everywhere in the media, on billboards and TVs and iPads. But maybe, just maybe, if we remember what our bodies really do for us — beyond just looking a certain way — this wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It would be an appreciation, a remembrance and an honouring of its magnificent limits.
As I jammed my way through that sweaty jam session today, I couldn’t help but see myself reflected in the giant mirrors spread across the front wall of the studios. And because it’s Halloween, they’ve put decorations halfway up the mirror so that all I could see was my body from the neck down. For an hour, I saw only the movement of my body and the crazy-fun-amazing range of my limbs as they took me through one fantastic song after another. This is what inspired this post.
So there it was — my splendid, happy body bopping along and having a good old time. She was loving it—all the movement, the energy, the thumping-thumping of a dancing heart. And so was I.
