#self-healing

# A Deep Dive: A Meditation Into Your Own Body

My father taught me this practice so I could relax and fall asleep. Over the years, I've taken it much further. I believe its roots are in autogenic training, but I've come to think of it as a meditation with myself. The purpose is simple: to reach complete relaxation by visualizing every cell of your body.

To begin, find a comfortable position. I still prefer lying down — it makes it easier to relax every fiber of your being. Sitting works too, though it asks some muscles to stay active, and it takes practice to find that balance where the body holds itself upright without effort. The ideal setting would be an open field, with grass beneath you and trees nearby. But places with some background noise can be helpful too, training you to check in and out of yourself.

* * *

Take a deep breath. Close your eyes. Lie back, and turn your attention inward. Focus on your body. Starting with your head ... your neck, your shoulders, your chest and your back, your stomach, your legs, all the way down to the toes on your feet. Become aware of your whole body. You want to forget everything around you. As you do this, you may be distracted by sounds. That's fine. Follow them. Try to picture where each one is coming from. If you're lying in a field, perhaps you hear a train somewhere in the distance, people nearby, the rustling of branches and leaves in the forest behind you. Now estimate the distance. How far away is it? Picture the place. Move your mind to the source of the sounds, like a drone's camera, toward the treetops, or to the train as it passes, or to the laughing people. Maybe you can listen in. Focus on the sounds. But THEN turn back around and see yourself lying there in the field. Come back to yourself. Return focus to your body.

* * *

Find your feet. They are already relaxing, every muscle released, until they grow heavy. Visualize the inside of your foot: the bones, the tendons, the muscles, the vessels, the blood flowing through them.

Follow that blood. Up your legs to your calves. They, too, are completely relaxed now. You almost take pleasure in finding a muscle that still wants to be released. If you feel a twitch or a tickle, go to it. Find its source. A tickle might be a loose thread from your clothing, or a strand of hair, or a crumb carried by the wind. Visualize it touching your skin. Recognize that your nerves are sending a signal to your brain — a careful instinct of warning. But know that it's only a hair, only a breeze. Let it pass. Let the dust or the fabric rest against your skin without disturbing you. The blood beneath your skin keeps flowing. There is nothing to attend to here. The nerve endings are relaxing too. Tell your brain it can let go, and return to the muscles that are still tense.

Follow the bloodstream up to your knees, to your thighs, and to your groin.

Notice that bones connect to muscles too — your hips, your lower back. Feel them settle, freed from stress. You may sense a small adjustment in your posture as the blood begins to flow freely. The muscles open. The vessels widen. The blood rises up your spine, into your shoulder blades, across your shoulders, down your arms. Your elbows grow heavy. So do your forearms, your wrists. Every bone and digit in your fingers, the tiniest muscles — relaxed.

Move slowly. Take your time. Every fiber of your body deserves attention. Even the fingernails — they are not dead. They are a part of you. They belong.

Travel back up, through your neck, into your head. Feel your eyelids, your eyebrows, the muscles of your cheeks, your lips. Let your mouth fall open. Let your tongue rest — even if your breath becomes louder. Your chin drops.

Your breath slows. And as it does, you'll notice your heartbeat slowing too. The muscles have opened. The blood streams freely. Your heart no longer has to work so hard.

And the blood, remember, carries oxygen.

Take another deep breath. Imagine those oxygen molecules — tiny elements, too small to be seen drifting through the air — but not too small to be visualized — drawn into your lungs, picked up by the blood, carried throughout your body. Every atom of every oxygen molecule reaches every part of you, every cell. Here and there, you may still find a small twitch, a muscle holding on. Breathe out and let it go.

Dive deeper. Go further in. Reach the level where the cells themselves are twitching, moving, bouncing against each other. That is life. It is happening in every cell of your body, all the time. But now, you allow them to slow down — resting in the knowledge that there is nothing for them to worry about. Oxygen still flows — more freely than before.

* * *

If your heartbeat seems too fast, or if you cannot quite reach that cellular depth, do not worry. Step back. Return to the outside. Let your thoughts bounce off the voices, the car, the wind. Then come back. Try again. Go deeper. Search for any muscle that may still be holding on. Take another deep breath. Slow down. Breathe out — and feel the oxygen reaching every part of you. Focus on just one spot in your body — your stomach, for example, or your gut, or your heart. Visualize your blood as it nourishes every cell.

On the other hand, when you haven't done anything wrong, it's easy to start spiraling. First you feel guilty for the thing you supposedly did. Then you realize that it wasn't actually wrong, and you don't need to do anything about it. But sometimes your guilt can't accept that - it thinks you've done wrong and that you need to atone in some way. So rather than dispersing, it simply keeps harping on the thing you allegedly did wrong, and/or latches onto itself as a target - making you feel guilty for having felt guilty.

This is the kind of situation that makes avoidance tempting. Simply stop doing the thing that makes you feel guilty, and then everything will be fine, right? Well, no, because that still empowers your brain to beat you up for harmless shit. Avoidance is like a Molotov cocktail: it doesn't solve the problem, just creates a different one.

This is where emotional management skills come into play. These are going to be different for each person, but the things that I find personally helpful include breathing regulation, exposure therapy, and journaling.

(In fact, that's what this post is about. I'm working my way through a spiral.)

Breathing control and journaling are pretty much self-explanatory, so I'm going to focus on exposure therapy. This can be hard to self-manage, but it's a helpful solution when your feelings are too overwhelming to handle all at once. What you do is let yourself repress for a while, and then, when you're feeling better, go back to that feeling and let yourself dip back into it. Don't dive all the way back in - that's just going to keep you feeling awful about it - but allow yourself to feel and work through a little bit of the pain. Think of it like cleaning up a massive pile of garbage: you can't pick up the entire thing at once, but you can chip away at it one bagful at a time, and every time you do, the main heap is that much easier to face.

Hey,

Don’t do it

When I said my character was plus-sized, I hope to goodness you just missed that statement, and not that you actually think this slightly curvy, very trim “AU” of my character that you created really counts as ‘plus-sized.’

Honestly, when I search “how to draw plus-sized characters” on YouTube the search results are kind of concerning.

They're extremely limited and/or you get drawings of women who are average weights. They’re not Barbie-thin drawings, but they’re certainly not XL or larger (then again, is there actually a consistent sizing metric for that?)

What exactly are we calling plus-sized nowadays?

As a curvy girl, I still get size-shamed for ‘stretching out’ the pairs of jeans I wear, but they aren’t structured to accommodate my body type. 

The world we live in is ludicrous, but fortunately, I’m fairly used to that by now.

The truth is, though I search for plus-sized drawing tutorials occasionally, plus-sized women aren’t one of my main art struggles. I’ve been drawing them for years now and I’ve even been told I’m the “queen of drawing plus-sized characters.”

While I know that’s a stretch, learning to draw beautiful plus-sized girls has been a form of self-healing for me. 

While I’m far (far) from a Barbie girl even now, when I was in my early teens I was definitely plus-sized. I hated my body, and when I drew self-portraits, I either skinny-washed myself or made myself look ridiculous and monstrous. 

The saddest part is that artists are still doing things like this and posting this hurtful art online.

If this counts as “representation,” it’s some ‘dark empath’ variation that continues to scar plus-sized men and women around the world.

Drawing fat people takes just as much skill as drawing skinny people. It takes effort to be able to draw them “believably” and yet, many many people still choose to use their skills to mock plus-sized people, instead of encouraging and empowering them.

The decisions we make are so much more important than many of us are willing to acknowledge. 

We can help others or we can harm them.

I choose to make my art a form of empowerment. 

When I learned to draw beautiful fat people, I learned to separate my beauty from my weight. Being fat didn’t make me ugly. ‘Fat’ is just a state of being, not an insult.

While I did lose weight for health reasons (being overweight was doing a number on my hormones) I learned that beauty doesn’t have a size-restriction. 

This is the message I want to share through my art, and I hope more people will continue to help me share it. I know some people take this mission every bit as seriously as I do, but often it feels like we’re drowned out by a sea of voices promoting the exact opposite. Often it feels like we’re the minority. Often it feels like people don’t even care whose feelings they batter and bruise.

A few months ago, someone drew the female lead of my WIP novel “Rigamarole” as a gift. I specified in my description of the character that she was plus-sized, but the artist made her skinny. Very skinny. 

I don’t know if he simply misread that part of the description (I’m guilty of “skimming” paragraphs, too.) But I can’t help but feel like it was an intentional decision.

Maybe he didn’t feel like putting in the effort. Maybe he didn’t even know how to draw plus-sized women. Out of all his plot-central female characters, only one has even an ounce of body fat, and that might be a bad sign in and of itself.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being trim or muscular - I love working out. The thing is, even fit or “jacked” women usually still have a notable amount of body fat when they’re healthy. 

The female body is DESIGNED to carry more fat than the male body. Just like it’s unsafe to have an extremely high body fat percentage, it is also often dangerous for women to have extremely low body fat. It convinces our bodies we’re in danger of starvation. We start building up stress hormones and everything becomes a mess.

Life is about balance, not extremes.

There is an overbearing emphasis in this world on thinness. We stick the words “pretty and skinny” together like they’re synonymous. We use photo editing and plastic dolls to create dysmorphic standards for how thin a woman's body “should be.”

It’s horrifying that after all this time, this still needs to be said:

Female bodies store fat for a reason. 

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