I’ve been thinking about my body a lot recently. Which usually isn’t a good sign for me. Generally I can gauge my mental health by the amount of time in the day I spend thinking about my body. And I’ll admit that there have been quite a few times this week where my old negative mental cycle reared it’s ugly head, but for the most part this week I’ve started to think about my body differently.

I am currently reading Women Who Run With The Wolves : Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. It’s not a book I’d recommend for *everyone* – I just don’t think all people will connect with they mythos of the book. But if you’re a woman (especially a highly creative one) there is the chance that this book will change your life. It’s currently changing mine.

I just read the chapter titled “Joyous Body : The Wild Flesh” and it sent me on a tailspin of thinking about bodies and ancestry and women and the ways in which our society tries to rob us of pride in our lineage. I am going to do a poor job of expressing to you just how powerful this text is, and how it has shifted my thoughts. So I thought I’d just share with you two of my favorite passages from this chapter of the book.

“We tend to think of body as this ‘other’ that does its thing somewhat without us, and that if we ‘treat’ it right, it will make us ‘feel good.’ Many people treat their bodies as if the body is a slave, or perhaps they even treat it well but demand it follow their wishes and whims as though it were a slave nonetheless.”

This quote spoke to me because I think it’s highly diagnostic of the problems within our health and wellness world. We (generalizing here) feed our body good, organic produce – maybe even a splash of been pollen here or there – and we expect it to conform. Conform to a size, a weight, a build, a lifestyle. We demand that our bodies produce and mold for us. But our body has a history of it’s own, long before we were born. My hips are my grandmothers hips who were probably her grandmothers hips. My jiggly arms are the same arms my mother hugs me tightly with. And I’d never ask either of those women to squeeze into a shape that wasn’t made for them. So why do I ask that of myself?

Pinkola Estés combats this societal misshaping with what she believes the body is meant for:

“There is no ‘supposed to be’ in bodies. The question is not size or shape or years of age, or even having two of everything, for some do not. But the wild issue is, does this body feel, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in its own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters.”

To me this is health. That is the imagery of a healthy body. A healthy body isn’t made in the gym. It’s made in our soul. A healthy body isn’t one that shrinks in compliance with our wishes. A healthy body jiggles and dances and connects us to our hearts. A healthy body reminds us of who we are and where we have been.

In some silly way I started to compare the way society asks us to mold into certain shapes with the “jar salad” trend. You take a wild, unkempt salad – topped with anything and everything your heart wishes – and you force it to fit into a (probably too small) jar in perfect layers. I’m not saying that the Vegetarian Blueberry Cobb salad in a jar isn’t beautiful (it is.) And I’m not saying that it doesn’t make it easier to handle (it does.) But I am saying that it loses some of it’s wild beauty when you force it into compliance.

Our bodies are like that. They can be beautiful and easy for society to handle when we force them into (probably too small) jars. But there is a wildness hiding inside that is ready to spill out. There is a messy, unruly, and beautiful self that is just waiting for someone to see. So dump your jars out – spill your salads onto bowls or plates or right into your mouth. Notice the wild beauty. Eat it up. xoxo.