In Bloom: our new year seedlings
We commit to a year of ambition, goals, and loving our bodies exactly as they are.
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Hello to our wonderful community,
Welcome to the first Bloom newsletter of 2022! This is Zoë writing to you from frosty London, full of new year reflection and optimism. Two weeks ago, Chayn came back from our ‘winter wind-down’ of decreased workload ready to plan our ambitions for 2022.
But as we’ll explore in today’s deepdive, not all the new year goal-setting is positive. We’ll be grounding ourselves with a gentle exercise, rooting ourselves into the Chayn community, before branching out into January’s annual reckoning of body shame and fatphobia. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Bloom newsletter.
Ground: Settling into our bodies and the present
During our planning week at Chayn, we did a number of vocal grounding exercises. Warming up our voice can be a playful way of allowing ourselves to let out energy while exploring different kinds of vocalisations (as long as you’re not in a public place, that is). Whether you use your voice to communicate or not, this exercise can be great for grounding in the sensations and vibrations our voice makes. Or if you cannot use your voice, you can modify this exercise by replacing the sound vocalisation with breathing instead.
For this exercise, place one hand on your lower abdomen. Now, start repeating a ‘v’ noise with your voice, like you were revving a car engine. (A ‘v’ noise is made by placing the lower lip on the back of the upper teeth. Alternatively, humming also works for this exercise). Notice the little ‘kick’ in your lower abdomen – can you feel it contracting? That’s your diaphragm kicking into action to support your breath. Make a few more noises like this as you feel the movement in your lower abdomen.
Now, place your other hand on your upper chest, over your heart. Make the repeated ‘v’ noise again – or your humming or breathing – and this time notice the vibrations in your chest as you vocalise the sound.
Finally, while keeping your hands where they are, make a continuous ‘v’ noise, like you were humming. Feel the sensations both in your chest and in your lower abdomen.
If you enjoyed this exercise, you can repeat it with a voiced ‘sh’ sound, or even just humming by blowing through your cheeks with your lips pursed (like you were blowing up a balloon).
Root: Connecting with the Chayn community
We are hard at work at editing, revising, and recording our courses again for the new year. We plan to launch our new courses in March or April. To be notified when this year’s courses launch, please head to our website, and/or sign up with your email address here.
Chayn Strategy: We’ve just shared the draft slides of our 2022-2025 organisational strategy! Read more about our process here, and you can read and make comments on our slides here.
Bumble: We’ve been running research sessions with Bumble users who experienced sexual assault or abuse from someone they met on the app. It’s been a great opportunity for us to speak with survivors who are not yet familiar with Chayn or Bloom, and understand what they felt they needed on their healing journey. We’re looking forward to sharing some of our learnings with you in the coming months.
Branch: Exploring together
New year, same body: in the season of pledging to hate our appearance, what gives?
A content warning for body image, relationship with food, and body prejudice. We know this can be a triggering discussion for many, so please do take care with this section, and go back to our grounding exercise if you feel overwhelmed.
It’s that time of the year, everyone. No, not the time of year when we congratulate ourselves for having made it through another 12 months around the sun – a period spanning the minor hiccup of, oh I don’t know, a devastating, ongoing global pandemic – or delight in the rest and rejuvenation that the end of year brings for many.
No, I mean the time of year when we commit to losing weight and hating our bodies. It’s time to shed our snake skins! The perfect body exists, and you don’t have it. But you could, if you just worked hard enough! January is the Annual Festival of Body Hatred™, during which we pledge unrealistic fitness goals (increase weekly gym attendance from 0 to 7 days) and downright impossible physical appearance goals (lose 15 pounds around my stomach SPECIFICALLY, no matter what my whiny metabolism tells you is possible. Or my adrenal glands. Or my insulin. Or – you know what, forget it).
This yearly reckoning comes on the back of another particularly harsh season for body feelings: the end-of-year festivities. It’s a time many people see family and loved ones, to mark holidays or otherwise gather together in celebration and relaxation. Along with the delicious food that you may be criticised for eating too much or not enough of, openly talking about other people’s weight is absolutely on the table during many of these communal gatherings. In some families or cultures, these types of conversations are especially common. Rarely in this setting, as far as I’ve experienced, do comments about our weight come as openly aggressive criticisms. They’re feathery, elusive comments – the purpose of these statements is to code judgments subtly enough that the speaker can deny them if they're called out on what they’ve said. My personal favourite is ‘oh you’re looking healthy!’, which can somehow be used to signal both weight gain or weight loss. Indeed, these judgments are often embedded in so-called ‘concern’ for our health. (Much more has been said elsewhere about the inaccuracy of mainstream narratives about the relationship between health and weight; if you’re interested in learning more, look at the Health at Every Size movement.) Or, these comments may be straightforward observations – ‘you’ve gained weight’ – that once again the speaker can laugh off as a straightforward, unloaded statement.
Not every fatphobic comment is said with cruel intentions, either; often, these comments are directed at ourselves. While ‘oh no I shouldn’t have one more chocolate, I’m so bad’ might feel like a bit of light-hearted self-deprecation, it reinforces the narrative that eating, and its potential effect on our weight, is something that needs to be publicly excused or apologised for. Others in our presence are hearing and internalising that sentiment.
All of this is to say: it’s exhausting! So much is demanded of us throughout all these interactions; we have to be outwardly confident while at the same time apologising for our food intake, either promising to ‘work it off’ during future exercise, or otherwise excuse why this intake is justified (‘oh well, it’s a special occasion I suppose!’). Our weight and eating patterns demand public justification. So far I’ve mostly addressed fatphobic judgments we might face, but this can also be an incredibly triggering time of year for those with eating disorders that decrease their weight as well. No one is free from judgment, and it can feel like we come to the end of year and have to excavate our internal lives for other people’s judgment, offering up apology and explanation to their satisfaction.
So even if you can steel yourself against the ‘all that food is for you?’s or ‘that’s all you’re having?’ of your aunties, the inescapable January headlines that your body is wrong, and that you’re ‘lazy’ if you don’t commit to changing it, is a harsh experience. I’ve been sarcastic throughout this deep dive, but I am fully serious about how stressful, damaging, and exhausting this annual occurrence is.
So what are we to do? I wish I had a simple answer to that question. In truth, I wish I was writing to you about a completed journey of body love, or body acceptance at the very least. For all the places my body has taken me, the illnesses it has seen me through, its quiet resilience to see me through to another day, it feels like all I have to give it most of the time is criticism. Why?
But something I do know is that there’s nothing bad about your body or my body. You don’t need to change your body, and you don’t need to begin every new year with a display of public arithmetic for how you need to balance out your body’s sins by committing to a sufficiently punitive exercise regime.
It’s also true that body positivity is complicated. As well as commenting on how the movement has shifted from its radical roots, many activists and educators have noted that body neutrality and ‘fat acceptance’ are for many a more meaningful pathway to finding peace and compassion for our bodies, by de-focussing our hyper attention away from them. I, and many others across the world, have found The Body is Not An Apology book and movement by Sonya Renee Taylor an incredibly useful resource. Taylor digs deep into the political roots of body oppression, from fatphobia to ableism to transphobia and beyond, while simultaneously presenting practical exercises for practising what she labels ‘radical self-love’. It’s a persuasive and educational read, especially with the accompanying workbook, full of empathy and insight in equal measure.
Otherwise, although easier said than done, be kind to your body. Resist the publicity of others’ January commitments to less food and more exercise. Instead, make a quiet commitment to your body – ‘we’re in this together. I’m with you. Even if we don’t always agree, I love you’. In the words of Nayyirah Waheed, and one of our favourite quotes here at Bloom, “and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.’”
Have a peaceful rest of your January, everyone, full of quiet resistance and tender promises.
For anything urgent, you can always reach us at team@chayn.co. We’ll see you very soon.
With love,
Zoë and the Bloom team