Body Image: Be Kind To Your Body - Elena Sonnino

Elena explains that she is a guide who nudges you to find your own liftoff. She asks questions to get people to the nudge, but it’s about you finding your own joy, value, and truth.

Our judgment of our bodies starts when we are so young. All of her experiences growing up caused her to be her own worst enemy with her body, but it took all of that to give her the opportunity to love her body, too.

When she got into her yoga practice, she discovered that the body changes daily and she started to fall in love with her own body. She explains that your body is your “home base.” It knows so, so much, even before the brain does. The body knows stuff! There are energy systems inside our bodies. So, to understand when we naturally find “home” in our body and the places where we haven’t been kind to ourselves we get to know sensations and find answers within ourselves.

So, how do we start the journey to release the shame we have about our bodies? The first step is to decide that you want to be in relationship with your body in a new way. It’s a light switch that you have to keep turning on. Next, get rooted, get curious, and be alive.

Yin Yoga is about allowing the body to speak to you through sensations. The beauty of it is when we sit with our breath and get curious. She likes to call the sensations that come to us “benevolent messengers.” These are the body saying, “knock knock, I want you to pay attention to me.” "Release what it is that no longer serves you" is a great sentiment, but it’s really hard to release anything if you don’t know what it is that no longer serves you. Once we can learn to listen to our bodies, we can get to a place where we feel more alive within our bodies and we can then tend to that “aliveness.”

We take in energy, we absorb it, and we allow the leftover energy to be released. Moving with the intention to give something permission to move through us is something we should aim for. How are we treating our bodies? Are we nourishing them? Are we offering our bodies what they need rather than what we think they should have? Poet June Jordan is quoted: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

The body has everything we need and crave already inside of us.