Nearly every mother I know struggles mightily with her relationship to her body, especially after baby comes. Our society is so fixated on thinness that mothers often feel like a failure when we can’t get our pre-pregnancy bodies “back.” Maybe you’ve called yourself gross, disgusting, ruined, or out of shape. It’s hard to honour the change in your body as a sign that your body did the amazing task of creating a human being.
The body image struggle, for me, is a vulnerable and personal topic. I suffered from an eating disorder for many years in my youth. As I healed in my early twenties, I discovered yoga, which helped me learn to listen to and enjoy my body. My body came to feel like a friend. I treasured it, trusted it, and accepted it.
Then I got pregnant, and months after my daughter was born, I found myself inhabiting a different body—softer, bigger, and rounder. I had a pool of soft, wrinkly skin around my belly button. The skin is papery-thin and a bit glittery from where it mixes with stretch marks. The old thoughts I believed I’d left behind—the self-criticism, the disgust, the longing for a “better” body, and the concern about losing control—all came back.
My yoga practice showed up to help me again. It gave me space to create an inner softness and curiosity about all these painful thoughts and feelings. I was able to understand them as my mind grasping for safety, stable identity, and self-esteem at a time when so much was in flux. Just as parts of my body changed, how was my identity changing? How would I hold parts of my old self as I became a mother? Of course it would make sense for my mind to divert these big unanswerable questions to my old obsessions about my size and appearance.
I realized that I could offer myself compassion. “Of course this is scary,” I said to myself. “It takes time to accept that things change. I am leaving the part of life where I am a young maiden, and I am moving into being the strong matriarch, a phase in which my hips are wider, my wrinkles (and opinions!) more pronounced.”
For many of us, the only way we have been taught to feel better about our bodies is to take on the project of learning to find ourselves beautiful. “Love your body!” we are told. “Embrace your curves!” And I did this myself; I reminded myself that I had expanded to make another person, that my body had done something beautiful and the changes were beautiful. I worked to appreciate the new lines of my curves and stretch marks.
While these are lovely sentiments, they still imply that liberation comes from beauty. This idea distracts us from discovering our true, unchanging nature, the self that has nothing to do with how we look. So I also took care to remind myself, I am not this body. Nor are these thoughts me. This culture has messages about women’s bodies that I do not have to buy into, nor do I have to make them go away. The human mind is a sponge, soaking up messages and values from its surroundings. Yet just as the water soaked up by a sponge is not the truth of what the sponge is, these thoughts were not truly me.
Yoga offers us a deeper form of liberation. It frees us to notice our oldest attachments—to things like our bodies not changing, to living forever, to avoiding pain. We open our eyes and face the truth that we cannot hold fast to any of those things. Everything will change. None of us gets our old body back, even if we don’t have kids. This is the one and only body we get—how do we live knowing this is it? What really matters? What do you want it to say on your tombstone: Here lies someone who lost all her baby weight?!
MORE INSPIRATION
READ Awake at 3am: Yoga Therapy for Anxiety and Depression in Pregnancy and Early Motherhood
FIND A wealth of resources for psychotherapy and yoga therapy at suzannahneufeld.com/resources
“Yoga offers us a deeper form of liberation. It frees us to notice our oldest attachments—to things like our bodies not changing, to living forever, to avoiding pain”
THE PRACTICES
Practice Meditation on Your Changing Body
Gaze at a spot on your body with wrinkles or stretch marks or new fat, welcoming any thoughts or feelings that arise. Just notice any judgments or stories that may arrive, then gently redirect your attention back to the spot on your body. Notice how what you see, feel, and think may change and change as you look.
Practice Soft-Belly Meditation
Allowing and encouraging the belly to be soft can be scary for some mothers but also so sweet. So many pregnant women say the thing they love about being pregnant is that they can just let their bellies be soft. It can feel transgressive, given everything we’ve been taught as women, and also such a relief. Imagine inviting and encouraging your postpartum self to have a soft belly!
Sit (or lie) and notice the breath rising and falling, with the belly as the point of focus. With each inhale, soften the abdominal muscles. You may tune into the sensations of softening as a point of focus, or maybe repeat the words in your head with each exhale—soft belly, soft belly, soft belly. Allow the breath to come and go of its own accord. Receive the breath, don’t reach for it. Allow the belly to fill and empty without controlling its shape, size, or length.
Over time in the meditation, you may notice deeper and deeper layers of tension held in the belly. Our bodies often hold this tension as an armor against emotional vulnerability or societal standards of beauty. Exhale and allow the softening, again and again.
For some women, it can feel very scary to feel the belly press against the waistline of their pants. You might try practicing soft-belly meditation wearing stretchy clothes or no clothes at all. You may even start to question our society’s choices of clothing—why would we wear clothes that don’t allow us to fully inhale? Why do we strive to make ourselves fit our clothes, rather than our clothes fit us?
For those who have experienced trauma, letting the belly be soft may bring up painful thoughts and feelings. You may be flooded with fear, vulnerability, and sorrow. If this comes up, decide what action would be kindest toward yourself. For some, stopping the soft-belly meditation might be the wisest choice. Perhaps doing something active with the body—like a walking meditation or the physical chores of your day might feel more grounding. For others, it may feel healing to stay with the challenging feelings, allowing them to rise and fall, committing to softening the belly as all sensations are welcomed.
