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Real Beauty: A Healing Story About Body Size

posted by Cait Johnson Mar 8, 2002 8:45 am
filed under: True Beauty, Body Image
Real Beauty: A Healing Story About Body Size
2 comments

By Cait Johnson, author of Witch in the Kitchen (Inner Traditions, 2001).

To take pleasure in a world filled with many kinds of beauty is a joy in life to which all women are entitled. To support only one kind of beauty is to be somehow unobservant of nature.
–Clarissa Pinkola Estes

After a lifetime of being shamed for the lush abundance of her body, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, made a pilgrimage to her ancestral village in Mexico, where she made an amazing discovery.

If you sometimes struggle with issues around weight and body size, this healing story will give you hope and comfort.

On the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Ms. Estes found a race of large, strong women who patted her, fussed over her, and told her she was not quite fat enough. Had she been ill? Did she eat enough? They told her she must try harder, “for women are La Tierra, made round like the earth herself, for the earth holds so much.“

If your weight puts you at risk for serious health problems, that is one thing. But if you, like so many of us, are shamed by media advertising so you will be motivated to spend money trying to change your shape to attain an impossible ideal–thereby making somebody a fortune–take heart. All over the world, at this very moment, women of abundant size are loved and respected. Can you walk like one of the large-bodied goddesses whose statues have been unearthed throughout the world? Can you love your healthy flesh? What an act of pure, subversive self-love that would be!

More on Body Image (14 articles available)
More from Cait Johnson (396 articles available)

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Christine Eret

At my age, I am at peace with my size 18W body. I do have issues with my back though. It hurts all the time. My doctor is reccommending that I have a breast reduction surgery. I am ready for that. I had to give up on a job that I loved, because of my back. I need this so much. My life now is going from heatpad to hot bath to heatpad, with a genous doseage of painkillers. Makes it hard to be employed....

Maresa Tedrick

I am far more content in my abundant body than I ever was as a culturally slim size 5 woman. My life is no longer obsessed with food, what I can or can not eat, or the need for others approval of my body.

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