How to love your body without shame

so you can be free to be who you want to be

While I’m drinking a coffee at the beach in a small Greek harbour village I am watching the sea, the sun and the waves and think about the turns my life has taken in the last months. I don’t think that I could have imagined my life would be like this. In my search for and creating of the life that suits me best I have been reading a lot about how you could manifest things in your life. It never really happened for me. I was happy, but I always felt something was missing. A deeper feeling of connection and trust. But since I set foot on Corfu I made some major changes in my behaviour and my thinking. Now I see it was there all the time, but I had to open a door to free it.

Finding freedom within

I always thought freedom was something you had to gain; you needed money or had to be single or whatever outside thing you can desire that would make you feel free. But like a lot of things freedom is an inside job. It is about your view on life. The people I’ve met in the last months really helped me to open up being more free than ever. I can see it in the way I move, in the way I speak and in the way I don’t care so much about other people’s opinions anymore.

Your relationship with your body

A good example is the relationship with my body. I have always been ashamed to show my body and have been very careful about what I would show to whom. I have never seen myself as a beautiful woman. In my teenage years I always thought my sisters and friends looked better than me. I don’t know whether this is true, I just saw them having different ways of making contact with people and I always thought it had something to do with the way they looked. In my twenties men started to show interest in me. I loved the attention, it felt really good to be seen and loved. But I wasn’t able to set boundaries in the way they treated me, so after some bad episodes with men, I closed myself again. In my thirties and early forties I started wrapping myself in scarfs and thick sweaters, so people wouldn’t see the features of my body. It was a time that I needed to go inside as well, so it was probably for the best.

The difference between being naked and being sexy

But now there is this new life and most of the new people I meet who are not afraid to show body parts that I always kept hidden. Because I made the connection between nakedness and sexual desires. But being naked and bodily desires are completely different. When I was sitting on the beach the other day a woman wearing a very ‘sexy’ bikini passed me by. I was amazed seeing her walking like that, judging her on trying to gain attention. A couple of minutes later when I saw a naked woman walking into the sea to go swimming. I immediately saw the difference between the two. The woman wearing the bikini looked like an object of desire, the naked woman was just being her natural self. The first one was hoping to be seen, the last one didn’t care if people were looking at here, she just enjoyed the fact of being naked in nature.

In the past I was always trying to hide behind towels to change on a beach, wanting to hide my female parts. Now I am trying to be more relaxed with naked bodies. My own and other people’s bodies. I can see the magnificence of our bodies. The way they move us through life. I am even more aware of the fact that we can love or hate our bodies and the effect this has on our life.

Making love to your body

In one of my previous blogs I wrote about my hesitance to be playful when people could see me. I was afraid to show the way I moved my body when I do my dance or yoga routine. Movements that completely suit my body. I was afraid people were looking at me and have their opinions. Weeks ago I decided I don’t want to be afraid anymore. The other day when I was dancing on the quay in a little Greek village a friend of mine saw me dancing. When I returned to the boat, he told me he had been looking at me and said it looked like I was making love to myself. I had been unaware of the fact he had been watching me dance and I wasn’t sure whether I would call it love making, but this dancing routine started as a way to be more in touch with my feminine side. And maybe at that time it was necessary to make love to myself. To completely embrace myself in all its beauty and difficulties.

When you start to love your body completely, with all its beauty and strength, the more challenging parts can heal. When you love yourself completely, every little atom inside of you, you will start to feed it with the right foods and drinks, you will start to take care of it in a way that makes you healthy and you will start to shine this love to the world around you.

I wish you a lovely day, with lots of body love and excitement. Enjoy its greatness, feed it with the best foods and love yourself completely.

With love, Irene