We know and love the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for being a civil rights icon who helped African-Americans. However, his works also helped women's rights, rights for immigrants, and many other movements for human dignity. So, maybe his words can inspire body acceptance among women. Why? Studies show that most women have a negative relationship with their body and 94 percent of females have experienced body shame by their teen years.
More than four decades after the women's movement, women have learned to get degrees, good jobs, and many freedoms. However, women have not yet learned how to claim our bodies as our own. Historically, women's bodies existed for male consumption which resulted in feeling imprisoned and disconnected from our bodies. This resulted in body dislike. While we now have rights to our bodies we have not learned how to love our bodies. What if the words of Dr. King informed the thinking and growth of women learning to love the body they have.
MLK quote 1: "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
The false belief in our society is that you have to get healthy before you can love yourself. Studies have proven that many women who are healthy feel that they need to lose weight in order to like their body. Since some women are healthy, but still not accepting of their body, then that proves that placing conditions on body acceptance, such as health, isn't the answer to self -acceptance. You choose to love your body, unconditionally, or you don't. The truth is that everyone will die, most often from a health related complication. So, should you hate yourself if your health starts to fail? Me, I side with Dr. King when he said: "I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." (MLK quote 2)
MLK quote 3: "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."
Many women feel disconnected from our bodies after trying and failing on a daily basis to feel the elusive "beautiful enough." Anger, even hatred, is a natural defense against feeling burdened by a body we must carry around but never enjoy. Many females get to the point of hatred, self -hatred. This makes it easy to hate others. However, before anger and self-hatred sets in is the time to set boundaries. Boundaries serve to carve out space for love that hatred is unwelcomed to infringe upon. Honorable men and women will respect your boundaries and, over time, only respectful and honorable people will be a part of your world. With proper boundaries in place, that low feeling of your body not being good enough will start to subside.
MLK quote 4: We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
As women, we must learn to live together as sisters. Therefore, we cannot base our identity on competing against our sisters for cheap meaningless validation. We can't pit fat against thin, light against dark, young against mature, or any other opposites against each other. When we do that, we adopt a false belief that one woman has to be ugly in order for us to be beautiful. The result -- the feminine essence gets trapped underneath the negativity and society is robbed of much needed evolved feminine energy - Queen energy. You will find that men love, support and value the feminine essence. Competition is masculine energy so you can't compete to be feminine. It is something you just are when you allow yourself to be natural.
MLK quote 5: "We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
If most women dislike their body in some way we are in the same boat. That means that women who meet the beauty standard feel the same body dislike as women who do not fit the beauty standard. What if we would be better served by embracing each other's beauty, and our own, to feel beautiful and more alive? That alive feeling is our sensual energy and it has no look. Because we are designed to be nurturers, all women have enough beauty to be sensual. Positive nurturing occurs when we are alive in our sensual energy, different from being a sex object. Embracing our sensuality is the place where loving our body starts. As King said, "hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." (MLK quote 6)
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