Last year around this time
I was on a call with my male coach.
It was 97 degrees and I was wearing an enormous sweater with a tight work out top underneath.
Sweat was trickling down my back.
I felt like I was suffocating.
But I didn't want to take the sweater off and reveal my body wrapped in a tiny top. I knew his GF.
I didn't want her to get the wrong idea.
But almost an hour into it and I couldn't care it any longer.
Instead of taking the sweater off, I told my coach what was happening for me.
Fast forward a few days later and I post my first semi-nude picture on the internet.
On my business platform.
I didn’t do it because I thought I looked good enough to, or felt confident and radiant (in ways I do now .
I did it because I felt like my covered human body was somehow IMPLYING something to a professional, even if it was covered in a shirt.
When you get surprised by ridiculous logic living inside of you, it's called conditioning.
You have 2 choices, in my opinion, continue to let it dictate your actions /perceptions of life by catering to it, OR…
Lean into it and lean into it hard.
For me I became actively aware of all the times I was hiding my body in order not to give the wrong impression to men, not to make other women mistrust me, not to get inappropriately treated, and so much more.
I still to this day have to deal with this mechanism.
I got out of a car in the middle of nowhere California 2 days ago. It’s 112 degrees out and I’m wearing a sundress for a 5-hour drive.
I need to buy water at a gas station.
I grab the only cover I have (a thick cashmere sweater and slip it on.
I walk to steps and cannot bear the heat before I realize what I’m doing. Just hiding. In case I’m in danger by just walking into a gas station wearing a dress.
I have compassion for this part of me and I’m so excited to not live with it anymore.
With every evolution of the mechanism, I see more of it that I have to lean into. Even though each time it's terrifying it liberates me to be more relaxed in my body, in my life, in my work, to be more open, freer.
This morning I offer up another thing I would neeeever give in public a year ago…a slow and sensual morning stretch.
I do this so I can live in a world where me stretching sensually in public because it feels really really good is reason enough.
That, and because I want to unlearn stupid philosophies that live inside of me that claim that my body is not mine.
That my body and how other people interpret it is somehow MY responsibility?
I want to burn victim shaming and people who say “well she shouldn’t have dressed that way” when a woman gets violated.
I want to burn conditioning that says that little girls have to measure their skirts in school because of how excitable OTHER people will get.
When will we learn that when we forbid something it immediately becomes arousing, irresistible, dangerous, exotic?
I went to an all-girls catholic school with measured uniforms for 2 years and I still find those uniforms raunchy/ sexy AF.
I hope to serve here by embodying that - showing/moving your body, being in your most natural naked state, wearing whatever brings you happiness, doing whatever liberates you of your conditioning- is NOT bad, not negatively meaningful, not inviting of violence, not taboo.
It’s you in your freedom. In your body. Doing whatever the hell you want with it.
For me this is my edge right now, the edge holding me back but it’s all connected.
My work on money, my work on bodies, my work on relationships.
Sexy dance vid:
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