Making Your Abdominal Shield

Traditionally, shields serve several functions. They protect the belly's vital organs from assault, fending off swords and spears, barring injury. Ornamented with signs and symbols invoking fierce protective powers, shields also frighten off approaching attackers, undermining their will to fight. Shields declare identity as well, indicating warriors' status or rank and their affiliation with a family, clan, or tribe.

Even without the clash of hand-to-hand combat, an abdominal shield may be a necessary accessory for life in contemporary culture. Creating an abdominal shield is one way to begin claiming our right to set boundaries, enjoy safety and privacy, affirm our presence, announce our sense of belonging.

If we neglect to protect our core vulnerability and affirm our existence in a conscious way, our bellies may internalize the process in the unconscious, somatic dimension. Our bellies may shape themselves to serve as shields: muscles tensing to make the abdomen board-hard, for example, or fat accumulating to create a thick buffer around the visceral organs.

When we attend to protecting our core vulnerability directly, our bellies no longer have to cast themselves as armor. Creating an abdominal shield, we externalize the process of protection and self-affirmation.

Steps for Making Your Abdominal Shield

Gather your art supplies, including:

glue, scissors, circular paper plates (one option is to use a paper plate as the base for your shield), colored paper, markers, glitters, stars, stickers, pictures from magazines, ribbons, string, feathers, fabric, beads, gemstones...

• Consider the functions of a shield-providing privacy, setting boundaries, barring injury, repelling attack, and declaring identity, community, ancestry. What are some other services that a shield provides?

  Which of these functions are important to you now? In what situations and circumstances would a shield be useful to you?
  

• Consider the following questions as you evoke your shield's design:
  • What protects you from injury?
  • What wards off attack?
  • What safeguards your secrets?
  • What gives your wounds a safe space in which to heal?
  • What gives your pro-creative power a safe place in which to develop?
  • What completes you?
  • What feeds you?
  • What satisfies your hunger?
  • What warms your soul?
  • What declares the community and lineage to which you belong?
  • What tells the world who you are?
  • What tells the world about your courage, anger, capacity to love?
  • What tells the world you have a right to exist?
    
    
• Create your shield, including a way to hold or wear it in front of your belly. Consider adding a handhold on the back of the shield with a loop of ribbon or string, or make holes in the shield's side edges and lace ribbon or string through the holes so you can wear the shield like a belt over your belly.
  
  
• Wearing your shield, look in the mirror—or if you're with a circle of friends, stand in the center-and tell the world who you are. Ask a friend to take a photo of you wearing your shield in full glory so you can have this image of yourself readily available.