What is your soul aching to express?
Honouring Cancer Survivors in a 24 Relay Walk
Congratulations to my friend Jon, Chair of Relay for Life in Australia. Over 50 teams and 1025 participants raised $117k for cancer research.
Relay For Life is an overnight event that gives your community the chance to celebrate, and remember those who have been touched by cancer while raising funds to support vital research into all cancers.
Thank you for publishing my survivor story in the Relay programme.
In my book it’s never ok to diss other women, however bad their choice of clothing … and what it reveals:
Nigella Lawson wearing a burkini, courtesy of Matrix Pictures in The Daily Mail
“It’s disgusting” said one of my WeightWatchers. “I’m never buying another of her cookbooks”.
I’d asked my members to bring in a picture of their future self which was designed to then motivate them in their weight loss journey.
“Is this your future self?” I asked the disgusted member (and owner of the picture).
“No” she said.
Afterwards I couldn’t help but wonder: why didn’t she bring an image of her future self? Was owning her own image so scary? Then I realized. She was brandishing her own image, and it was an image she was disgusted with.
Self-loathing in women lies underneath weight issues. In fact, it is often the grumbling, restless ghost in the room. While I ‘get’ it, dissing women is not the solution.
The Aborigines gave us Dreamtime, and in modern times we have our bodies – this has become our new landscape. We are more primed, prepped, plumped and pumped with pills than ever. Our bodies are reshaped, redesigned, stretched, pumeled, torn, cut and ripped apart, scarred, wrinkled, old and new. The new canvas of expression is the skin and bone, the ligament and sinew upon which and through which we find our expression – anxiety and depression, cancer and obesity, heart attack and breakdown, it all comes through the body. Industries have been built to soothe and swathe the body out of its coma. We feed it and starve it, depress it and suppress it with potions and lotions. Drugs, and herbs and vitamins are multi-billion dollar industries where the message is ‘fix me’.
In judging other women we are hurting all women including ourselves.
Own it don’t moan it.
