The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

Author:Sonya Renee Taylor [Taylor, Sonya Renee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2018-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Four Pillars of Practice

We know that adopting a radical self-love lifestyle is a process of thinking, doing, and being. But changing the way we think, act, and are in our daily lives can feel like an assignment of planetary proportions. Implementing practices to structure this endeavor is the equivalent of turning on the high beams amid the fog. Rather than collapsing under an avalanche of new ideas and behaviors, we can install signposts and guardrails that help us know if we are still on the road to radical self-love. The four pillars of practice can help us corral our wily thinking, fortify love-laden action, and give us access to a new way of being in the world. The pillars are:

• Taking out the Toxic

• Mind Matters

• Unapologetic Action

• Collective Compassion

Dismantling body shame and body terrorism is a process of deindoctrination requiring that we excavate the thoughts we have internalized about bodies and evict the voices of judgment, hierarchy, and shame. Remember when I recounted how my fear of sharing a selfie was an early prompt in my radical self-love journey? The voice I heard in my head telling me I was too fat, ugly, and black to post the photo was not my voice. It was the propaganda of body shame, the “outside voice.” Our inherent sense of radical self-love doesn’t speak to us with cruelty or viciousness. Radical self-love does not malign our gender, sexuality, race, disability, weight, age, acne, scars, illnesses. A world of body terrorism that impugns us because of our identities is the only thing that would dare speak to us with such malice. Just as the Three Peaces offer us a framework for divesting from a lifetime of shame and judgment, the four pillars teach us to make peace with our bodies by distinguishing and diminishing the outside voice and cultivating a practice of listening more deeply to our authentic selves, our radical self-love voice, our “inside voice”

Radical Reflection

I have always had a very loud voice. My mother would constantly admonish me for talking too loudly. “Use your inside voice!” she would say. Next time you hear someone speaking body shame over themselves, politely suggest that they use their “inside voice,” and share what the phrase means.

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