Belly Love

The Belly Project
A Celebration of Women, Mothers, and Reproductive Choice

Growing up, this poster hung (or, okay, most of the time was propped on the floor) in my parents' bathroom.

I would sit sometimes and just study it -- study the bellies, the bios, the birth histories captured in so few words. I would peer at the bodies pictured, and match the bellies I saw to the bellies of my mother, my aunts, my friends.

I'd study waistlines and pantlines and imagine the bellies hidden underneath: Would she look like top right? No no, maybe bottom right.

I'd sit and wonder, Which would mine become?

I sat and I stared and I found beauty in them all -- and in my mother, my aunts, my friends, my future self. I fell in love with bellies because of this poster.

It hangs now in my office bathroom. It's not an ideal thing -- not enough visible bodies of color, lacking an acknowledgement that not only women birth, that there are so many routes to motherhood -- but like the bellies pictured, like my belly, like yours, it is a beautiful, beloved thing.

Massage for Women Who Aren't Yet Comfortable in Their Bodies

CC Image by susivinh from Flickr

I'm taking a business class right now, through the amazing not-for-profit MercyCorpsNW, because I want to be better able to serve my clients. I already give a great massage ("Best massage I've ever had." - Emily M.), but in order to be able to do the massage I love, I need to have the scaffolding of good business practices in place. And, frankly, I love being a small business owner, and have been having so much fun learning and connecting with other local people who are or want to be self-employed.

It's a great class, and I'm incredibly lucky to be taking it with Rebecca and Wade, owners of Santeria, Portland's best Mexican restaurant. This week we practiced a fifteen word "unique value proposition", which is a very business-y phrase to mean "what you do". During the break this week they each, separately, came up to me afterward to compliment me on mine. Here's it is:

"I help women who aren't yet comfortable in their bodies, through massage and radical acceptance."

(Count it!)

I'm not entirely sure this is correct, though it is definitely a large portion of what I do. I'm still working on it.

But I wanted to talk about the word "yet", which is my favorite part of this sentence. I love "yet". "Yet" is such a full word, both acknowledging the reality of now and creating space for the future. "Yet" is hope, is opportunity, is potential. "Yet" is mindful, is accepting, is compassionate. "Yet" is the space between pessimism, which closes itself off to any good in the future, and optimism, which dishonors the darkness of now.

I haven't finished putting my website together yet.

I haven't figured out how to communicate the wholeness of what I do in fifteen words yet.

I haven't yet made my entry way as beautiful as I know it can be.

But I will.

What are you holding the space for in your life right now? What are some of your "yets"?

Fat (n.): "best or most rewarding part"

Fat and beautiful are not opposites

Allow me to sing the praises of fat massage.

I work a lot with fat clients*. I've been fat all my life, and I've been fat and pregnant twice, so I know just how frustrating it can be to worry about whether I will be safe and feel secure when I see a new massage therapist on a new table. Before even starting school, I resolved that in my practice bodies of all size would be welcome and would feel celebrated.

Massaging fat bodies both is and isn't different than massaging thinner bodies. I've had massage where it felt like the therapist didn't want to touch my fat -- which is to say, they didn't want to touch me -- as though it were contagious, or didn't need touch, or that I'd be upset if reminded of the abundance of my flesh. To which I say, both as a fat person and as a massage professional: hooey.

With thinner clients, an LMT can get away with a very superficial touch, gliding over the skin yet still, slightly, massaging the muscular layer. Working with a fat client calls me to slow down, to sink deep, to differentiate between the layers of the body, to feel what I'm doing.

On the other side, I've heard some LMTs complain they don't like working with fat clients because they can't "access" the deeper layers of the body, but this only shows they either have no experience, no idea what they're doing, or no willingness to learn. We absolutely can access all the same parts (and sometimes more easily!) as on a thinner body; fat clients can and should get the same quality massage as any other client.

I have never had a body on my table I didn't think was beautiful; I've never had a body on my table I didn't enjoy massaging. And yet, sometimes, fat is the "best or most rewarding part".

*Why do I use the word "fat"? Well, why not? The word "overweight" implies that there is some weight that I, a fat woman, am "over", "obesity" is a clinical term defined by the ratio of height to weight and says nothing about the corpulence of the body in question, and "fluffy" is a great descriptor... for a kitten. Because I do not believe fat is a bad thing to be, I do not think of "fat" as a bad word, any more than other relative descriptive words like "tall" and "young".

CC image credit: Mattias H on Flickr

Definition of fat via Etymonline.

This post is part of NaBloPoMo, where I blog every day for 30 days. If you'd like to make sure you don't miss a day (unless I do), you can follow the RSS feed or get emailed every post by signing up to the right; if you'd like to be emailed only the weekly highlights, as well as updates about the practice and tips on improving your relationship with your body, subscribe to the Holding Space Massage Newsletter.