{"id":1188,"date":"2019-03-13T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/?p=1188"},"modified":"2023-02-20T17:14:12","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T22:14:12","slug":"why-its-not-just-up-to-you-to-heal-your-own-body-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/omstars.com\/blog\/culture\/why-its-not-just-up-to-you-to-heal-your-own-body-image\/","title":{"rendered":"Why it’s Not Just Up to You to Heal Your Own Body Image"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s easy for me to rhapsodize about the way yoga has held me in my relationship with my body. Like so many of us from so many backgrounds, my early life taught me to experience my body as a source of shame, vulnerability, and discomfort. When I began practicing yoga in my early adulthood as part of eating disorder recovery, it gave me a new sense of my body as a source of vitality, joy, and strength. I especially loved that it bypassed my struggle to fix my \u201cbody image issues.\u201d When I move and breathe, I feel viscerally that, in fact, my body isn\u2019t an image\u2014it\u2019s me, an ever-changing reality to be experienced, not gazed at.<\/p>\n

Y<\/span>oga led me to spend the last twenty years trying to understand how we heal our relationships with our bodies. I became a psychotherapist. I sit with people day in and day out, supporting healing, self-discovery, and self-compassion. As a white, thin, Jewish woman and mother, my understanding is informed by my own privilege, perspective, and experiences of how I felt and feel I was supposed to look to fit in to belong and feel safe in today\u2019s American culture. I invite my clients, too, to investigate how their own cultural experiences and experiences of oppression influence them. We talk a lot about how society influences body image, and inevitably I ask, how can *you* resist negative cultural messages?<\/p>\n

But here is what I have learned over time\u2014it is a rare person indeed who can resist all the cultural messages about bodies and all that lies within our beauty\/health standards\u2014sexism, racism, ableism, classism, concepts of privilege and power. Even some of the bravest, most resilient, most culture-resisting people I know share in private that their body image issues have not disappeared. I am one of those people. To be quite vulnerable, despite the fact that I have been immersed in the recovery, yoga, and body positivity worlds for all these years, I often notice societal messages zooming through my mind.<\/p>\n

Because of this, I have come to believe that expecting perfect body image from ourselves is a setup, and one built on a major cultural trap: the idea that healing is an individual endeavor and an individual responsibility.<\/p>\n

We are taught: If you are poor, it\u2019s because *you* haven\u2019t worked hard enough. If you have health problems, the cause is *your* lifestyle. If you have an eating disorder or body issues, well, that\u2019s because *you* haven\u2019t resisted the cultural messages enough. Which is just what you need\u2014something else wrong with you that you should spend some money to fix.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where I come back to yoga: the ultimate aim of yoga is for liberation\u2014individual and collective. Yet, in contemporary US culture, yoga can become zeroed in on individual healing. I am certainly guilty of using it this way\u2014I wrote a whole book about yoga for healing. This approach has powerful gifts to offer, but I worry that when it is the\u00a0only\u00a0approach taken, it lets the culture off the hook. Most health problems owe far more to societal factors than individual.<\/p>\n

How are we to heal as individuals in a culture that continues to cause harm? How are we to heal if we are taught that, on basis of size, race, gender, age, or ability, our bodies are only meant to be sources of shame, vulnerability and discomfort? How do we learn to trust ourselves when our thoughts\u2014based on very real messages we have absorbed in an undistorted manner\u2014are labeled as distorted?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to stop supporting people in their individual healing because I know that work is crucial, too. The individual counts\u2014our stories and voices matter. Eating disorders are not simply reactions to a toxic culture. People with eating disorders haven\u2019t just failed worse than everyone else at resisting cultural messages. Eating disorders are illnesses with clear roots in genetics and life histories. Recovery must involve understanding and finding compassion for your unique temperament and biology in order to learn how to be a steadfast self-caretaker.<\/p>\n

But for that inner work to flourish, we need to collectively change systems, not just people. Changing society will not cure eating disorders\u2014but it sure would remove many of the obstacles that make recovery and healing so very hard.<\/p>\n

Here are some tiny starting points for change:<\/p>\n