Body Image, Bitter Tea, and Radical Self-Love

Culture & Body Image: We’re Drinking the Tea

In last week’s Monday Musing email, I shared this line in reflecting on a recent yoga retreat.

“We explored how culture shapes our relationship with ourselves and our bodies—and how, through awareness and curiosity, we can begin to rewrite that story.”

When your work centers on women, movement, strength, and embodiment, body image often lurks just beneath the surface. It appears as hesitation, internal critique, avoidance, or overcompensation.

At the retreat, I drew an image to make visible what I sense so often but have struggled to name: a teacup steeping with cultural messages I’ve absorbed my whole life.

Inside that cup are phrases I—and many women—have internalized:

“your body isn’t important” “you lose worth as you age” “you have less value if you are not thin, white, and young” “don’t take up space” “your body is ours to control”

That bitter brew has seeped into self-image, self-worth, and even how we move—or choose not to move.

Remembering What Was Once Free

While journaling and sharing in retreat, I revisited passages from Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology. Her words offer a powerful counterpoint to the internal chatter:

“We did not start life in a negative partnership with our bodies. I have never seen a toddler lament the size of their thighs, the squishiness of their bellies.” “Body shame is a fantastically crappy inheritance. We didn’t give it to ourselves, and we are not obligated to keep it.” “Body shame has severed our love of activity … many of us cannot recall a time when moving our bodies was something other than a way to punish them … But we were also babies who loved moving them. There was magic there.” (paraphrased here; see full original text in The Body Is Not An Apology)

These passages take me back to a time before shame, when movement was joy, discovery, play—not punishment or measurement.

Weaving the Threads: Past Musings, Present Truths

This metaphor of tea dovetails with ideas I’ve laid out in emails I've shared with my mailing list:

• “Wear the Damn Bathing Suit” — A call to dismantle the commentary and shame with which women are steeped about their appearance.

• “What Women’s Fitness Has Gotten Wrong” — An exploration of how we’ve been coached to value how we look instead of how we feel, how we move, and what we’re capable of.

Those musings and this post form a larger narrative: culture conditions us to distrust our bodies; our work is to notice the conditioning, unlearn what harms us, and reclaim what was always ours.

Un-Steeping: A Practice of Radical Self-Love

We may not be able to toss out all the tea instantaneously, but we can begin to notice the teabag, the flavor, the aftertaste. And from that noticing, choose differently.

Here are some gentle invitations:

• Move not to fix, but to feel. Let curiosity guide your body, not critique.

• Watch your language. When self-talk veers into “should,” “need to,” or “fix,” pause and ask: What if I spoke to myself as a friend?

• Ground yourself in reminders: you weren’t born with shame — you inherited it. And what can be inherited can be disinherited.

• Seek community. Stories, witnesses, shared struggle—these remind us we’re not alone in the cup.

• Practice small acts of kindness with your body: a stretch, a breath, a pause, a rest, even silence.

Closing: A New Cup, A New Story

Maybe next time you glance in the mirror, you’ll pause—not to judge, but to remember the baby who once marveled at her own feet. That wonder is still there.

There was magic before the tea. Let’s begin to distill it again.