What does it mean to be embodied? I’ve thought about this for years now, maybe ever since I was seventeen and decided, while looking at myself in the mirror, that I was not going to spend this life hating what I saw. I made a promise to treat my body kindly, even when other people didn’t, or couldn’t. Wild, I know. Though in many ways, the promise has been an easy one to honor: My body has been mostly healthy and dependable. Why wouldn’t I be kind to it?

But the older I get, the more I realize I have not even scratched the surface of inhabiting myself, of being present with what my body is telling me. And, of course, I also realized that some of what I thought was me loving myself was just me piggybacking on my many physical privileges: Fair-skinned, young, medium-sized, with no visible disabilities. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve missed something. Which is maybe another way of saying: I am aging.

I’ve been stuck on the phrase ‘The Body is Not An Apology’. This is the title of both a deeply influential poem, a book and a movement by writer and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, who is one of my favorite teachers. Her poem, and everything that grew out of it, is a call to bring light to all the places in our bodies where we feel shame and to celebrate these places instead. Here is a part of her poem:

The body is not a wrong answer.
The body is not a failed class. 
You are not failing.
The body is not a cavity, is not hole to be filled, to be yanked out.
It is not a broken thing to be mended, be tossed.
The body is not prison, is not sentence to be served.
It is not pavement, is not prayer.
The body is not an apology.
Do not give the body as gift. Only receive it as such.

These are not easy instructions. Receiving our body as a gift, however we define this, can confront us with so much pain and grief. Sonya, who has a big, brown, queer body, understands better than most people how difficult and yet necessary that is. And she is very clear on how body-shame is used as a political weapon to silence and disempower ‘the other’.

Her poem reminds us that there is freedom in no longer apologizing for our being here. Freedom in no longer feeling as though we have failed just because we have a body. Her poetry and her writing allow me to grasp that freedom when I lose it (and I lose it often these days).

I have read ‘The Body is Not an Apology’ many times, and watched the clip where Sonya performs the poem live. I suggest you go see it too, because Sonya is a priestess of the spoken word and it will give you goosebumps of the good kind.

You would think I understand by now what the title means, since I have read the poem. But the more I thought about it, the more mysterious it seemed: How is my body an apology?

Yesterday, while doing the dishes, it came to me. I thought of all the ways in which I - secretly - have made my body into a kind of strange friend that I drag around going ‘here she is, I’m sorry, she’s a lot’. And of course I have done it secretly. Shame does not like to be seen. Instead, I do my best to come across as confident, and sometimes it works. Still, I can’t get rid of my strange friend. So, as an experiment, I decided to write out some of those secret thoughts and see what happens. I call this my ‘all apologies’- poem. These are the things I don’t want to know.

please forgive my big soft belly

please forgive my aching arms

I am sorry for growing older and closer

to death; forgive the grey hairs, the lines on my skin

can I offer you my undivided attention and uncritical adoration as proof

of how sorry I am?

I can make amends

and I know I should, because one day soon

I’ll be sick and need you even more

it seems no matter what I do

my body changes and is never less

than tired, hungry

and tender.

I have not yet decided whether this poem is serious or ridiculous. Perhaps it’s both. A bit of a trickster, like my body. I wonder what we’ll get up to in the decades to come. I think Sonya’s work continues to teach me that radical self-love is not a switch I can flick, it’s a process, a practice. A walking companion toward the final edge we all eventually reach.

Perhaps it was the New Moon in Taurus last night which made me want to write about embodiment. Taurus, more than any other sign, is associated with the body and its most fundamental needs: food, sleep, touch. People with strong Taurean placements often don’t think they ‘have’ a body. They believe they ‘are’ their body, which is a beautiful and very different way of being in the world.

Taurus, as a fixed Earth sign, teaches us the beauty of slowness and the power of staying with the process. All good things to bring into the new week, when Mercury moves into Gemini and immediately makes its first conjunction with Uranus (on May 18). A few days later, on May 22, the Sun does the same. Both these conjunctions up the ante with regards to technological advancements, communication and learning. But since Gemini is also famous for its witty jokes and hot gossip, I think we may see some of that, too. Either way, expect to be a little distracted, a little disoriented by all the influx of info over the next seven days. And when in doubt, go slow.

Resources

You can read the entire story of Sonya’s poem and movement here, and you can find the whole poem on this page if you scroll down a little.

The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor was published by Berrett-Koehler in 2021 (2nd Edition).

If you are interested in learning more about shame and its gendered nature, I think there’s no better teacher than researcher Brené Brown (apart from Sonya, of course!). My favourite book by Brené is one of her earliest: The Gifts of Imperfection, published by Hazelden in 2010, though you can really start anywhere.