Hello Every Body,
Body Loyalty came out of the sum total of my life experiences. My years as a community organizer and activist, my hardscrabble youth, the years of infertility and loss, medical health crisis, mental health crisis, living with an undiagnosed disability for decades and having to learn to manage my health with no guidelines or treatment plans, and most of all: Being Atticus' mother. I learned everything the hard way.
So when I thought about sharing all these hard won lessons, it was a struggle for me to figure out how to talk about it without just sharing my entire life story. I didn't know how to share WHAT I learned without sharing HOW I learned it. These choices we make are extremely contextual and the solutions we implement have to reflect the resources we have to solve these problems. One person's life story may help if you have a lot in common with them, but it's not necessarily going to answer all of your questions. We each have to learn how to evaluate our options and find the solutions that are available to us. That brought me to one of the biggest lessons I've learned as Atti's mom: Disability Accommodations.
Disability accommodations are any adjustment you make to the way things are normally done in order to make them possible for a person with a disability. Atticus can't walk, but his wheelchair allows him to move independently. We use subtitles on everything at my house to help the people with auditory processing issues understand the TV we watch. When your entire family life is oriented around creating accommodations for each other, you learn to pay attention to the goal instead of the method. It doesn't matter how you get there, what matters is that you get there.
Living with disability makes a lot of things about managing a human body pretty clear. But every one of us has a human body to manage, and if you're not disabled in some way yet, you will be before you're done here, so the lessons of disability are actually the lessons you need to learn to live in harmony with your body.
It doesn't matter if meditation doesn't work for you or if the thought of journaling makes you want to barf. Those are just the methods. What is the goal those methods are trying to accomplish? Reflection. Thinking about what you're doing and if you want to keep doing it. Paying attention to your thoughts and learning what old programming you are unconsciously running, and then choosing your way forward with that knowledge. There are many many ways to accomplish that goal and you can find one that fits in your life using the resources you have in a sustainable way.
This all went in to a tool called
The Body Loyalty Scaffold. Instead of recommending the same strategies that worked for me, I created a screening tool to help you accommodate your body needs in the same way we accommodate disabilities: by setting an intention for what we are trying to accomplish, finding new ways to think about things, and then building practices that help you get there.
