355: Beyond the Surface: Deepening the relationship you have with your body.

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always, I’m delighted that you’re here.

Courtney Townley 0:35
Now to say that most women that I’ve coached over the years have a complicated relationship with their bodies would be a massive understatement. In fact, it’s a rarity that I work with a woman who has a really healthy relationship with her body. What is a healthy relationship with the body?

Courtney Townley 0:51
Well, that’s precisely what I’d like to explore on today’s episode, and why I’ve titled this episode beyond the surface. Because someone can look amazing physically, and have a whole lot of internal friction, and less than stellar health going on internally. So in this episode, specifically, I’d love to talk about body beliefs and how they impact every dimension of our life, how to edit the story that you’re telling yourself about your body, so it works for you rather than against you. And I’d even like to explore some strategies for improving the relationship that you have with your body, and so much more.

Courtney Townley 1:31
But I’d like to start here with a quote from Glennon Doyle’s amazing little essay called your body is not your masterpiece. If you don’t know this essay, you can find it on her website monastery.com. I first came across this essay, probably I don’t know, eight years ago. And I reference it often when I’m talking about body image or body struggles of any kind. And I just want to read you a couple paragraphs from that essay. She says your body is not your masterpiece. Your life is It is suggested to us a million times a day that our bodies our projects, they aren’t our lives, our our spirituality is our relationships, our our work is stop spending all day obsessing, cursing perfecting your body, like it’s all you’ve got to offer the world. Your body is not your art. It’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush, or a thin paintbrush, or a stocky paintbrush, or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that you have a paintbrush, which can be used to transfer your insides on to the canvas of your life where others can see it and be inspired and comforted by it.

Courtney Townley 3:11
So once again, you can read the whole essay over at monastery.com. But in essence, what I want you to hear there is that your body allows you to do life. It allows you to love on the people that you love. It allows you to create the things you create, contribute to the world inspire other people. And yes, of course, we should be taking excellent care of it. Because we don’t get another one, we don’t get another paintbrush. But the energy at which we come at taking care of our body. I think for a lot of people is not healthy.

Courtney Townley 3:54
So often people are trying to mold their body into something different, to be more lovable, to be more respected, to be more whatever. But to show up fully to do the real work of our lives is the purpose of having a body. And this is what I mean by beyond the surface. And most women that I have worked with really struggle to build a relationship with their body that is beyond surface level. So they’re very concerned with how it looks, how it’s perceived. But not actually all that concerned with how they’re utilizing it, how it feels, what it’s allowing them to do in their life.

Courtney Townley 4:54
I think a large majority of women focus on all the ways in which their body can would be better if they focus on the parts of their body that don’t line up with the impossible ideal that is sold to us. And look, I have shared this many times on the show, but I’ve worked with and around athletic women my entire life, many of which who have the very physiques that others aspire to attain, and I can tell you this, the shape of your paintbrush has nothing to do with the depth of your health and well being.

Courtney Townley 5:42
And so I’d like to challenge you from the start of this Podcast today to really pause and consider. When was the last time you asked yourself, what you believe about your body. When was the last time you checked in with the narrative that you have about your body? Maybe it’s time, because what you believe about your body has everything to do with how you will show up to take care of it. So if you want to improve your self care, I am going to propose that you don’t need to start with diet and exercise. In fact, I would strongly suggest that if you really want to improve your self care in a sustainable way, start by getting radically honest with the way that you talk to and about your body. Because it will have every everything to do with how you show up around food and exercise. So I want to get into a few reasons why your thoughts about your body matters so much.

Courtney Townley 7:07
First and foremost, the narrative that you have about your body, I said this before can influence every aspect of your life. So how you talk about your body will influence how you show up in relationships. It will influence how you show up in your career. Of course, it will influence how you show up in your own health journey. Your own thoughts about your body are also really powerful. Because when we choose to think really horrific things about ourselves, how do we feel we feel like hell. And when we don’t feel great. mentally, emotionally, physically, you will likely spend a lot of time doing things that make you feel even worse, because we’re so desperate to feel better. And when we do things that make us feel worse, all we’re doing is reinforcing the thoughts that we have about our body. It’s like we’re providing more evidence for why our bodies suck. I’ll give you a really concrete example of this.

Courtney Townley 8:29
If you weigh yourself, you may be someone who gets on the scale, regardless of how you have treated your body in the past day or two. So even if you’ve treated your body with the utmost respect, and you are feeling amazing in your body, and you decide to get on the scale, and you do not get validation that the scale has moved. In fact, you see that maybe it’s bumped up a NIC or two. It can literally rob you of all the goodness that you were just experiencing a few moments before. So you may see think something along the lines of this shouldn’t be happening. And when we argue with reality, this shouldn’t be happening. We feel stressed. And when we feel stressed, how do we show up in our lives?

Courtney Townley 9:26
Well, a lot of us look for ways to de stress in ways that are not promoting well being. So we eat foods that don’t necessarily make us feel amazing but tastes amazing. We drink alcohol, we don’t get great sleep because we’re stressed. And then guess what that does to the scale. It just reinforces the very thing that we were so irritated by in the first place. Which brings me to my next point. It is so important to check your thoughts thoughts and your self narrative about your body. Because your brain will always find evidence for what you believe. It’s so powerful.

Courtney Townley 10:10
The brain is like a self fulfilling prophecy. You believe you’re lazy and worthless, you’re going to look for all the evidence in your life for why that’s true. I am not saying that’s true. I’m saying you will seek out evidence to prove yourself, right. So if you choose to think things like, I’m at war with my body, guess what you’re going to see a lot of evidence for why you’re always at war with your body. If you choose to think thoughts, like my body hates me, yep, you’re gonna find a lot of evidence that supports that.

Courtney Townley 10:47
Other thoughts that I often hear that probably are not very useful, are things like it’s all downhill from here. This is just what happens when you age, my weight will always be a problem, my metabolism sucks. You think those thoughts on repeat, you will behave in ways that create that evidence for you. Nobody wants that. The fourth reason I want to just introduce here for why it’s so important to check our narrative about our bodies, is because the same energy and beliefs that you use to pursue any goal or are the same energy and beliefs that you will need to use to sustain any results that you achieve. I’m gonna say that one more time, because there’s a lot packed into that the same energy and beliefs that you use to pursue any goal. Or the same energy and beliefs you are going to have to use to sustain whatever results you achieve.

Courtney Townley 11:58
Meaning if you try to hate your way, into a smaller body size, and let’s not, let’s just drop the word try, let’s say that you do hate your way into a smaller body size, because women do this all the time, you will have to continue to hate your body to stay there. That’s not health. That is what I call surface level health. You can appear healthy, and be radically unhealthy simultaneously. If you tell yourself that you are broken. And that’s what motivates you to do the work of changing your physiology in some way. You aren’t going to stop believing that you’re broken. Just because you create an outcome. Whatever belief you practice on the way there is the same belief you’re going to have when you get there. Which is why again, I think it is so important that as you deepen your self care practices, whatever you commit to, I think it makes a whole lot of sense, to first check in with narrative, and make sure that you are creating change from a healthy place.

Courtney Townley 13:26
So I have said multiple times so far in this episode that you should check in with the narrative you have about your body. How do you do that? Well, it’s not hard, we just have to ask ourselves some good questions. And of course, I have lots of good questions for you that you can actually pose to yourself. Here are just a few. What do you think your body is supposed to look like? And why? What are the expectations you have for how your body is supposed to behave? So what is your body supposed to be doing for you that it’s not doing right now? How do you feel when your body responds in ways that are outside of those expectations? Do you get really curious and really check in with your body like how can I help you what’s going on today? Or are you like a lot of women I work with?

Courtney Townley 14:25
When your body doesn’t deliver the expectations you have you berate it, you get pissed at it. You say terrible things to it. When your body responds in ways that you don’t understand, what do you make that mean? That something’s wrong with your body that something’s wrong with you? How does it feel to think the thought that my body is working for me and never against me? It lists 10 things your body is doing awesomely well right now in this moment. If you could change your body in some way, or be happy, which would you choose? And why? Obvious obviously, this is not an either or scenario, we can change our physiology and be happy. But I want you to answer the question, if you could only choose one, change your body, or be happy, which would it be? Why do you what do you currently believe about your body? What do you want to believe about your body?

Courtney Townley 15:43
Again, this is not an exhaustive list of questions you could ask, but I definitely think they are questions worth asking. And, of course, I have all of this written out on a PDF for you, if you’d like a copy, just head on over to graceandgrit.com/bodyimage. And we will send you this PDF that is titled body image journal prompts. So you can kind of get to the root of these answers for yourself. And I want to tell you this, that we often do exercises like this, and the whole purpose of them, is to bring awareness to what’s truly going on, because we can’t change anything if we don’t see it, if we don’t acknowledge it. And awareness is not a feel good exercise. Because we will often answer these questions. And what we do is we expose a horrific script that we have about our body. And that is often painful to look at.

Courtney Townley 16:46
So I want you to commit here and now that if you decide to do this work, I hope you do. That you will enter the exercise of answering these questions with curiosity as a companion and not judgment. We’re not doing this exercise to promote more judgment. We’re doing this exercise to get you out of a space of judgment. But because possibly you have been judgmental about your body for so long. It’s a habit. So you have to consciously decide not to bring judgment into the room with you. So judgment would sound like when you look at your answers, you start to think things like what’s wrong with me? I can’t believe I think like that. How did I get to this age and not see this? And on and on? It goes right?

Courtney Townley 17:42
There’s no limit to the judgmental thoughts you could bring in. But curiosity sounds like isn’t that interesting? I wonder why I choose to think that way. I hope you hear the difference, because there’s a big difference. And you cannot apply both curiosity and judgment at the same time. Which is an awesome thing. If I’m being curious, that means I cannot be judgmental, if I am being judgmental, that means I cannot be curious. Once you expose your current narrative, I am willing to bet you are going to find some thoughts, if not a ton of thoughts that are not useful to forging a healthy relationship with your body. Because nobody wants to live with someone who’s parading them all day. Nobody wants to live with someone who only likes them when they behave a certain way or look a certain way. And yet for some of you listening to this that is absolutely describing the relationship that you have with your body. So how do we start to pivot?

Courtney Townley 19:02
When we expose these unusable thoughts that are really harming the relationship that we have with our body? How do we start to pivot? Well, we can’t just lie to ourselves. We can’t just choose a thought like, I love my body. I think it’s perfect. Now if you believe that truly more power to you. But people who have been thinking the opposite for for decades, will absolutely not feel that that is true. It feels like a lie. So one of the things I encourage my clients to do when they’re really rumbling with body image, is we start talking a lot about body neutrality. And what I mean at the most fundamental level, is that we just focus on the fact that you have a body and we drop all the rest of this storyline. So the new thought becomes, instead of I hate my body, my body sucks. I wish my body was fill in the blank. We pivot to I have a body. That’s a fact that is true. There is no denying that.

Courtney Townley 20:21
I have a body. Now you might hear that be like, okay, that doesn’t make me feel amazing. Which is probably true. It doesn’t make you feel amazing, but I bet it makes you feel better. Then my body sucks. I don’t like my body, my body should whatever the thoughts are that you you exposed in your journaling. So I have a body that is true, your body is a fact. And facts are neutral. They’re not emotionally charged, until we start writing a storyline about the fact. So I have a body, what am I making that mean? There’s your story. Right?

Courtney Townley 21:07
Well, it should look different, it should act different. It should. Whatever I have a body is a fact. Or you have a body as a fact. And facts are neutral. Body neutrality is choosing to focus on facts rather than story. You don’t have to make the facts mean anything. So right now I’m in my office, I can look out the window. And I can see my husband’s shop in our backyard. The fact is, I have a shop in my backyard. If I’m not careful, I can look at that shop and think that shop needs to be painted, the roof needs to be repaired. I hate looking at that shop. I wish there wasn’t a shop in my backyard because I always have guys coming in going out of my yard, right?

Courtney Townley 22:03
Like I have this whole story about that shop. But what is neutral what is a fact is that there is a shop in my backyard period. And when I choose not to dive into the story, and just focus on the fact that there is a shop in my backyard, I feel better. I am taking responsibility for not creating a lot of unnecessary suffering. The truth is your body is not what is causing you emotional pain. Notice I said emotional pain which is different from physical pain. Your body is not what is creating emotional pain for you. Your thoughts about your body are creating emotional pain. judgement about your body is creating emotional pain. This is a problem, I have a weight problem. There’s something wrong with me. I’m not lovable like this, I wish I looked like her. I’m too big, I’m too fat, I’m in the wrong body, my body’s betraying me. That’s what’s causing emotional pain. This is the cause this dialogue that I just read off is the cause of immense suffering and pain.

Courtney Townley 23:19
And when you feel immense suffering and pain, you’re not going to feel inspired to take amazing care of yourself. So neutrality, I want you to hear this loud and clear is often the easiest place to start with changing the relationship that you have with your body. When you find yourself in the next few days, and you will spinning out about something that is something you don’t like about your body or something you perceive as being wrong about your body. That is your opportunity to practice. I have a body full stop. I do not need to have more thoughts than that. I have a body because only then can you pivot. Right when I’m willing to acknowledge what is true. And what is true, is I have a body.

Courtney Townley 24:22
The second thing I would recommend is and this is so powerful. When you find yourself really deep in a space of judging your body or rating your body. I would challenge you to really drop in to your body shift from thinking about your body to being in your body. So just think about this for a second like right now. If I was sitting across the table from you and ask the question, how do you feel feel about your body? What would you say? Again, listen to the question, how do you feel about your body? Maybe you would respond with something like I don’t like it. It’s complicated. It’s frustrating. It’s what? How do you feel about your body? But now I want you to consider this question. How do you feel in your body? These are two very different questions.

Courtney Townley 25:37
When I stopped thinking about my body, and really shift into the experience of being in my body, those are two totally different things. So your body is not causing your emotional pain ever, your thoughts about your body are. So when you find yourself caught in a moment of body shame, or judgment, or in the space of wanting to improve the relationship that you have with it, it is a really powerful practice, to stop thinking about it, and start experiencing it. So the practice of experiencing your body is literally intentionally shifting from thinking about it, to just being in it. And this is a big challenge for people who’ve been thinking about their body most of their life, and not practicing being in it. You can’t do both at the same time, kind of like judgment and curiosity. You can’t think about your body and be in your body at the same time. Because think about it.

Courtney Townley 26:52
If I am having the experience of really being in my body, I’m feeling my, my feet on the ground, I’m feeling the length of my spine. I’m feeling my shoulders pull back a little bit. The second I start thinking about any of it, I’m robbing myself of the experience of being in it. So right now, like if you are someone who experiences pain, rather than telling me about your pain, rather than even telling me that you have pain, what is the experience of pain? Notice what it feels like? How does it move through your body? If you had to describe it as a temperature or texture, or a color? Like what is the experience of the pain rather than thinking about the pain, and as I’m saying that to you, I realized kind of the conflict and what I just said, right? Because if I’m starting to think about a texture and a color and all the things, I’m starting to think about the pain, so let’s just remove that piece for a second.

Courtney Townley 28:12
And again, I’m either thinking about the pain, or I’m being with the pain, I’m observing the pain, I’m watching the pain, I’m experiencing the pain. Again, two very different things. So rather than judging yourself by saying you have thick thighs, or a fat belly or big hips, or broad shoulders, shift your focus to the area that you often judge and just be with it. Be with your thighs. Drop into your belly, experience your hips, experienced your shoulders. It’s kind of like you know, a lot of people don’t listen to what other people have to say in a conversation. They’re just waiting to talk. They’re just thinking about what they’re going to say. In response to the person, they’re not really listening. And the same is true with our bodies. We’re not listening. It’s like we’re talking over them all the time. People aren’t in their bodies, they’re in their heads. And the head of course, can be a source of a whole lot of unnecessary suffering.

Courtney Townley 29:33
So being in your body is not positive or negative. It’s just an experience. That’s it. Be with the experience. There’s the thought and then there’s the experience. I hate my thighs. Neutrality goes to I have thighs and being in your thigh. Eyes is something else. There’s no judgement when you have an experience, because judgment is a thought. What does it feel like in this moment right now to be in your body rather than thinking about it.

Courtney Townley 30:27
The third thing I would recommend to start improving your relationship with your body is to extend gratitude to it. And this is actually one of the journal prompts on that sheet. Again, if you want this list of journal prompts, just go to graceandgrit.com/bodyimage, and we’ll send it to you. But seriously, just every day, taking a moment to extend gratitude for what your body is doing well. How often do you acknowledge what your body’s doing? Well, and look, we were all conditioned at a very young age to feel less than and look for brokenness when it comes to our physiology. Why?

Courtney Townley 31:06
Because a whole lot of people profit off of your insecurities around your own body. And some of the stats that just kind of emphasize this fact of how early we learned to start judging our bodies. 42% of girls in grades one through three want to be thinner 80% of 10 year old girls are afraid of being fat. By middle school, 60% of girls are dissatisfied with two or more parts of their body. So you have been mentally conditioned by culture, by marketing, by parents, by school, all the things, to have thoughts about your body, you have borrowed beliefs about your body from other people. And the great thing about being an adult I say this all the time is that you get to change what you believe moving forward. So rather than focus on everything that’s going wrong, everything that you wish your body was what about starting to daily acknowledge or acknowledge daily? Everything that’s going right?

Courtney Townley 32:15
All the ways that your body is showing up to help you do life? Is your hearing working? Are your eyes blinking? Can you see? Can you swallow? Are your arms moving? Can you understand my words? As I’m talking through this Podcast? Are you able to communicate with the people that you love with ideas that you want to share with the world? Are you able to create with your brain with your hands with your art? I’m willing to bet your breathing right now that’s a pretty awesome thing. Can you stretch? Can you go to the bathroom? Can you run, walk or run? Can you move in any way? Has your body ever healed you in some way? Have you given birth, maybe not even to babies but to ideas or to inspiration or to a million other things? The invitation here is to build a practice of unlearning conditioning that isn’t serving you. But the only way we can unlearn is that we start practicing shifting our focus. what’s truly going on? How do I feel in my body? What is my body doing? Well, how am I talking to it? How am I talking about it? All of this matters.

Courtney Townley 33:44
Okay, last thing I want to share to help forge a better relationship with the body. And this is not a great place to start. I do want to give that disclaimer. But eventually what we want to work towards is this attitude of unconditional love. And I want you to think for a second about something in your life that you love unconditionally. That might be a pet, it might be a partner, it might be a child. What do you love unconditionally. Meaning regardless of how that person or that animal, or that thing shows up, you still love it. And I know this is a really hard concept for us to wrap our minds around when we have spent a lifetime putting conditions on our body. But I just want to offer you that unconditional love for your body for having a body is available to you. Because the only person putting conditions on it is you. One of my favorite Coaching Questions has all was then what would love do?

Courtney Townley 35:02
So when a client is really rumbling, especially in that realm of relationships, how they want to show up how they want to respond to something, I will often ask them, What would love to hear? And the answers come really quickly. And it’s like they’re so clear on what love would do. So when it comes to your body, how would love think? How would love act? How would love respond to what’s going on right now? What would love say? How would love extend care? When you look through the lens of what love would do, you will get a lot of great intel about what would promote a state of deep health. So some of you listening to this will be very far from being able to do that yet. And I emphasize yet.

Courtney Townley 36:12
I would encourage you right now just to consider, what if I could learn to love the body that I have? What if that were true? How would you show up differently to care for your body? If you deeply cared about it, and deeply loved it. Now a lot of women when I ask that question, they will say to me, well, Courtney, if I got to a place where I loved my body now, I would never show up to take care of it. And that is absolutely not true. Love does not ignore. Love does not neglect, love does not abuse. Love attends to love pays attention. Love shows up to do work, even on the days that it doesn’t want to. So it’s easy to go down that pathway that if I if I like myself, now if I love and appreciate my body, now, I’ll have no motivation to do the work.

Courtney Townley 37:29
Because let’s be honest, for a lot of people that of course, is work in terms of amplifying their self care, I’m not denying that. What I am saying is the energy that you come at it with matters a lot. And I just am so reminded every day of how thick this mentality is in our culture, that if you want to start improving self care, you should eat better, you should exercise you should, you know, get X number of hours of sleep per night, right, whatever the regulation or the suggestion is. And again, I want to offer you that I strongly feel the best place to start is with narrative. Improve the relationship that you currently have with your body and I guarantee you will start taking care of it on a higher level. Because we take excellent care of the things we truly care about.

Courtney Townley 38:37
Okay, so just to recap, it’s really important that you reveal your current narrative that you have about your body in order to improve the relationship that you have with it. Once you start exposing those thoughts, some of them are going to be pretty nasty and pretty terrible to look at. And this is where we remind ourselves of neutrality. I have a body. That’s all I need to think I don’t even need to think you don’t have to think anything about your body. But you could just simply replace any of those horrific sentences with I have a body full stop. Then we can upgrade our practice to start dropping into our body practice being in it rather than thinking about it so much all the time. Right so maybe I put on a summer dress that I just feel amazing in like I love the material on my skin. I just feel free in it. Like I just really love it and I turn around and look in the mirror. And I have so many thoughts about how I look in that dress that I go and I take it off. And I robbed myself of what was just a few moments ago a beautiful experience. So practice being in your body shift from what isn’t going well to what is how is your body helping you to do life right now. That usually helps us to pivot pretty fast, the fact that I’m able to even able to put a summer dress on, obviously I’m looking forward to summer, it’s nowhere near summer yet here. But the fact that I’m able to put a dress on, that’s a gift.

Courtney Townley 40:29
Right, the fact that I can actually I have a brain that can choose a dress that I like that I have, like all of these sensations physically of what it’s like to have a dress on. There’s lots of good things happening, you just have to start looking for them. And then we work our way to getting to this place, hopefully some day of really choosing to practice loving ourselves on purpose. Loving yourself doesn’t just happen. Loving your body, loving your physiology doesn’t just happen. It’s a practice. And any practice has to be intentional. Right, at least I should say any practice that is going to change our life in positive ways, needs to be intentional. It can’t just be by default, your default has likely been that you’ve been talking not so nice about your body for decades, maybe a lifetime. Your practice has been thinking thoughts about your body, maybe for a lifetime, that really make you feel terrible. So that’s the default practice. What is now the intentional practice.

Courtney Townley 41:52
What are you willing to start doing repetitively, to override those old pathways in your brain that are not serving you. That’s how habits change, lots and lots of repetition. All right, my friends one more time. The reminder, if you do want a list a printed list of those journal prompts that I mentioned earlier in the episode, simply head on over to graceandgrit.com/bodyimage. I hope this was helpful. I really feel that this is a topic that I coach on a lot, it always comes up in some way shape, or form with pretty much every client I’ve ever worked with. And, again, I think alluding to what I said at the start of the Podcast, which is how you think about your body impacts every dimension of your life. Because how you think about your body has everything to do with how you will treat your body and how you treat your body has huge implications across your life. So I hope this gives you some tools I hope it gives you a chance to reconsider maybe some of the relationship gaps that you have in your own life right now with your with your own body. And I will see you again very soon. Thank you so much for being here and I will be back eventually take care.

Courtney Townley 43:21
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.