Honoring the belly.

Honoring the what?

For most of us, the belly is cause for shame and embarrassment. Contemporary Western culture bids us to trim our tummies, manage our midriffs, battle belly bulge, and attack our abs. Accordingly, we try to flatten our stomachs and banish our bellies from sight with diet pills, weight loss regimens, exercise gadgets, girdles and corsets, liposuction, and surgical tummy tucks. We have bankrolled multi-million dollar industries with the notion that there's something wrong with woman's belly as it is. We have spent our money and we have compromised our health. We have made ourselves miserable attempting to comply with our culture's conventions, attempting to make our bellies invisible.

Here is one example of the shame attached to women's bellies. One woman told me:

Women and men in other times and cultures have recognized the belly as sacred, not shameful. Cultures native to every continent have developed patterns of movement and breath-traditions of dance, rites of healing, spiritual practice-which honor and energize the belly as our connection to source energy, the Power of Being.

Honoring Your Belly draws upon this world-wide wisdom to create an opportunity for you to experience your belly as your body's sacred center. This practice enabled me to move beyond a twenty-year eating disorder—twenty years during which, in alternate rounds of starving and stuffing my belly, I gained and lost at least 2,000 pounds.

I began to diet when I was seventeen, having made the flat-bellied, stick-figured fashion model Twiggy my idol of Thin. I would consume nothing but cottage cheese and water for weeks at a time, then binge with abandon for weeks, only to repeat the cycle again. Whether I was finally squeezing myself into size seven jeans or wildly devouring another bag of cookies, I was always obsessed with my weight and shape, with filling my belly or keeping it empty.

This mixed sense of control and compliance came with a pricetag. In order to restrict my intake of food I had to deny my hunger and all the other sensations emanating from my bell—anger, fear, joy, grief, desire, and satisfaction. As long as I was dieting, I had to set aside my ability to know what I was feeling and give myself what I wanted.

After weeks of rigid self-denial, my physical and emotional hungers could no longer be denied. They emerged in my belly as an irritation, a grumbling, a restless stirring, a craving to feel full. These sensations were terrifying, intolerable; I tried to extinguish them by cramming my belly with food. My weeks of compulsive dieting would dissolve into weeks of compulsive eating, a guilt-ridden attempt to compensate for the deprivation I had previously imposed upon myself.

One Sunday during my teen years I witnessed a demonstration of yoga during a worship service at the Unitarian church I attended with my family. Years later, desperate to escape the cycle of stuffing and starving myself, I remembered that demonstration. Not knowing how else to help myself, I began taking classes in Kripalu Yoga (kripalu means "compassion"). I learned to practice breathing and stretching exercises with the intention to promote self-awareness and self-acceptance. In the practice of yoga I found a meaningful way to begin nurturing my body and soul with something other than food.

Devoting myself to the practice, I trained as a Kripalu Yoga instructor and yoga therapist. As part of my training I learned a sampling of movement and breathing exercises derived from Masahiro Oki's Zen style of yoga. This approach to yoga focused on developing hara—the Japanese word for the belly as the body's physical and spiritual center, the source of our spiritual power.

I read about the benefits of developing hara in Karlfried Graf von Durckheim's Hara: The Vital Centre of Man. One who develops hara, I learned, unites with the nourishing, creative, regenerative flow of the universal life force. One who develops hara experiences, in Durckheim's words, "not a power one has but a power in which one stands." One who develops hara enjoys the list of qualities I coveted for myself: security, confidence, courage, creativity, serenity, identity, authenticity, autonomy, sense of purpose, sense of connection.

I craved these qualities, which I recognized to be attributes of the soul, expressions of soul-full living. I resolved to practice the hara-strengthening exercises. I would do them consistently for a couple of weeks, reveling in the new levels of energy and confidence I would experience. But then a nameless dread would arise and I would stop. After a few weeks I would long to experience that hara-powered vitality again and I would start the practice once more.

During one morning practice, I began to giggle. I giggled and laughed for half an hour or more, for no reason at all. I began to suspect that the feelings hidden deep down in my body's center might not all be dreadful—they might also include joy.

Joy? Intrigued, and determined to do these hara-energizing exercises on a regular basis, I prepared myself to confront the barriers that were periodically blocking my way. Accordingly, I defined my start-and-stop pattern of practice not as a personal failing but rather as something important to investigate.

That question led me to the beginnings of human experience. I learned that our ancestors revered the ultimate, universal Power of Being as First Woman, the Great Goddess; they understood the world as the body of the Sacred Feminine. The images and icons crafted by these ancient matrifocal-woman-centered-cultures honored the pro-creative power of woman's belly as kin to the power creating, sustaining, and regenerating the world.

My research suggested that, through history, women's social standing within a culture has correlated with the degree of that culture's respect for woman's belly and regard for the Sacred Feminine. The last five thousand years of patriarchal culture, for example, has degraded woman's belly, women, and the Sacred Feminine-as well as native peoples, nature, and the feminine sensibility in both women and men-in a single process of devaluation.

Patriarchal culture, I learned, subjects woman's belly to both overt and covert violence. The modern methods of disempowerment include sexual assault, unnecessary hysterectomies and Caesarean sections, restrictions on women's authority in pregnancy and childbirth, and reproductive technology that depreciates women's wombs. They include belly-belittling diet schemes, Barbie dolls, pinch-an-inch apparel with built-in corsetry, and instant-slimming undergarments. I realized that the girdle my well-meaning mother expected me to wear to slenderize my shape when I was fourteen was an item of serious social control.

Now I understood why bringing awareness to and energizing my belly stirred up feelings of "nameless dread." Patriarchal culture, by definition, literally hates women's guts. For thousands of years Western culture has made war on women's bellies; such brutality has made the belly an uncomfortable place in which to be. I understood why so many women, myself included, have suffered through compulsive dieting, compulsive eating, anorexia, and bulimia, enacting the ambivalence we feel about our bellies. In a culture which subordinates women and shames women's bellies, those of us who have internalized the culture's animosity can all too easily make the belly the focus of our self-contempt.

However gut-wrenching, my study of cultural violence against women and woman's belly was also liberating. I recognized that, whatever dread I might feel as I energized my belly, these difficult feelings were only culturally imposed, layered over the deeper treasure awaiting my discovery. I knew that I needed to contact the vitality and power of hara more than I needed to avoid whatever anxiety might arise in the process.

For my own healing, I developed the sequence of belly-energizing exercises which has become "Honoring Your Belly." I began by selecting and adapting a set of hara-strengthening exercises from the many I had learned, arranging them in a way that made sense to the body as a well-rounded "workout." I designed the sequence to start with "warm-up" stretches, continue with more vigorous movements, and conclude with "cool-down" poses. To link the movements organically I ordered them according to the way they placed the body in relation to the vertical axis and the horizontal plane, in relation to the earth and sky, and to the earth's gravity.

When I began this belly-energizing practice, the most that I hoped for was relief from the cycle of bingeing and dieting that had engulfed my life. In fact, the practice has given me much more. The program has evolved into new dimensions, adding myth and image to the patterns of movement and breath. The sequence of exercises has become a woman-affirming ritual, a "Rite for Reconsecrating Our Womanhood." Each of the exercises has become a gesture embodying an ancient symbol of the Sacred Feminine. As I continue to honor and activate my belly, the core energy residing at body's center finds expression in image and voice, making the Sacred Feminine an immediate, intimate presence in my life and continually generating new elements of the practice.

To make this book manageable, I've limited its scope to reconceiving the belly as the site of our soul-power, presenting Honoring Your Belly as a pleasurable and empowering movement program. See Part V, Additional Resources, to obtain information on practicing Honoring Your Belly as a rite for reconsecrating our womanhood and as a ritual for invoking the Sacred Feminine.

Developing and practicing Honoring Your Belly essentially saved my life. Over the years, as I've shared this practice with women in weekly classes, day-long workshops, and weekend retreats, I've witnessed the profound and wide-ranging benefits the practice can bring to many.

I've written this book in response to the many women who are asking for a practical way to feel good about their bellies. My intention is to offer you an opportunity to experience your belly as the source of wisdom, guidance, and vitality which is your greatest treasure. My intention is to offer you specific skills to enliven the soul-power centered in your belly and to bring that vitality into your everyday life.

The soul-power centered in your belly is pro-creative power, kin to the power promoting creation which infuses the universe. This pro-creative power generates new human life; it also brings forth new ideas, images, systems, institutions, organizations. Activating this power, you can direct it into any expression you choose: personal healing, intuition, creativity, family relationships, your work, your community, your world.

The power abiding within our bellies can bring us greater health, freedom from addiction, enhanced sexual pleasure, more satisfying relationships, a sense of prosperity, a sense of the sacred in our daily lives, an ecological consciousness of kinship with all creation. I suspect that the pro-creative power abiding within our bellies can help generate the evolution of consciousness that humanity needs for our own and the earth's survival.