How do you feel? And how do you want to feel?
These are the most important questions for me when guiding someone. These questions led me to how a person experiences herself or her body and has created an image of herself. And for many women, that self-image is anything but positive, with all the misery that entails.
Our self-image is like a filter of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings through which we see ourselves, our bodies, our actions, and our environment. It has a huge impact on how we move through our lives, and what decisions we make for ourselves. It creates our signature as well as our habits.
Our self-image manifests itself in the body through the way we hold ourselves and the way we move. The more negative our self-image, the more postures we adopt that can really hurt us physically. Our self-image also reflects in the health of our body and in our outer appearance. Do you sparkle? Do you open your heart to the world or close yourself off? Do you feel heavy, rigid, or light, expansive? Our self-image guides us through life, for better and for worse.
I experienced first-hand how my self-image steered my life.
My self-image told me early on that it was not safe to be me, that I was not loved, not good enough and not worth being seen. That I should be ashamed of who I was and that I would never belong. And my way of coping with this image was by trying to be perfect in all sorts of ways and by doing that, I was actually creating more of a harmful self-image and its associated harmful habits. Do you recognise that your self-image makes you feel smaller and more scared than you actually are?
Our nervous system is very vulnerable in the early years of our lives. It absorbs energy from our caregivers and our environment. However, the brain is not yet sufficiently developed by then to understand and give words to all these stimuli. Until our 5th year of life, all life experiences, positive and negative, are experienced with the same intensity. Our nervous system at this stage explains all signals into pain or pleasure. As little ones, we are completely dependent on the love and attention of our caregivers to survive, so we will do anything to get it.
During this period, we often create the painful pieces of our self-image and all the emotional habits that stem from it. This limits us in our later life to step into our light. Our self-image has the power to hinder our nervous system from creating opportunities that put us in our power with regard to our health, our feelings, our thoughts and the way we move and act.
I know you need to change your self-image to get your sparkle back. And that this requires small actions. One step at a time. How wonderful that you can easily achieve this by starting through your body and at the level of action: namely, moving.
Movement is the language of the central nervous system.
That part of our nervous system that organises and coordinates our thoughts, feelings, actions, and movement. It receives all input through movements that take place inside and outside the body and that we experience through sensations, for example. Think of the movement of breathing, cell activity, the organs, the skin, the blood flowing through the veins, the beating of our heart, the life energy that flows through us and expresses itself through emotions, among other things, and so on.
With this information, our nervous system organises all the activities in our body. Not only our physical movement, but also our thinking, feeling, and acting. It has the ability to create endless new connections and opportunities to dance with life. And this is why, through the body and with movement, I can create lasting change for the women I coach.
May I dance you home?
