honoring your belly: meeting place of body and soul
by lisa sarasohn

A familiar conversation: Jane is meeting Francie for lunch. After they order, Jane leans in toward Francie and confesses: “I shouldn’t be eating. I feel so fat, my belly’s so big.”

A familiar complaint? As you read these words, one out of every two American women is dieting. The reason? To “trim the tummy.”

Most of us experience our bellies as shameful. Our culture bids us to battle belly bulge with diet pills, weight loss regimens, exercise gadgets, girdles, liposuction, and tummy tucks. We've bankrolled multi-million dollar industries with the notion there's something wrong with our bellies as they are. We've injured ourselves with eating and body image disorders. We¹ve made ourselves miserable attempting to make our bellies invisible.

I can speak for myself: When I was seventeen I started dieting strictly (between periods of out-of-control overeating) in the effort to look like stick-thin fashion model Twiggy. In twenty years of alternate starving and stuffing, I gained and lost more than 2,000 pounds.

Just what is so shameful about a woman’s nicely rounded belly?
You may have noticed that advertising for girdles reads like an FBI directive for suppressing foreign insurgents. Using phrases like “achieve firm control” and “obtain total control,” the hangtags on these stomach-shrinking devices announce that they are in fact instruments of social restraint.

During some periods of American culture an ample belly was actually the fashion standard. But, since women gained the right to vote in the 1920’s, the most fashionable belly for a woman has become the one that you cannot see. Apparently, if women are allowed to wield some measure of political and economic power, they must deny the power inherent in their body’s center.

As I’ve moved beyond what was an all-consuming eating disorder, I’ve learned: The belly is woman's power center, both as symbol and in physical fact. I suspect our culture labels woman’s belly as shameful because it can’t stomach the full expression of women’s body-centered power.

What is the power that’s centered in woman’s belly?
Looking beyond the borders of contemporary society, we can see that cultures native to every continent have recognized the belly as the site of our soul-power. They have developed patterns of movement and breath, traditions of dance, rites of healing, spiritual practices that honor and energize the belly as sacred, not shameful.

In Japan, for example, the word for belly as sourcepoint for both our physical and spiritual vitality is hara. In the process of my own healing, I trained as a Kripalu Yoga teacher and studied a Japanese style of yoga focused on developing hara through movement and breath. And I read Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim’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 Dürckheim's words, “not a power one has but a power in which one stands.” One who develops hara expresses the qualities of soulful living: confidence, courage, creativity, a sense of purpose.

For my own healing, I drew upon my yoga training and developed the hara-strengthening practice “Honoring Your Belly.” As I moved through this belly-energizing practice daily, I no longer felt the need to stuff or starve myself. The eating disorder diminished and then disappeared.

In its place, I began to experience the very characteristics of hara: new levels of creativity, confidence, and sense of purpose in my life. Now, instead of hollow emptiness and gnawing hunger in my belly, I feel radiating warmth. I feel a sense of satisfaction in my belly, the sensation of being full and whole. And I feel a resonance with the center of the earth, as if an invisible cord extends from the center of my body to the planet’s center. I feel that I’m welcome in this world.

Developing and practicing “Honoring Your Belly” essentially saved my life. Over the last fourteen years, as I’ve shared this program with thousands of women in classes and retreats, I’ve witnessed the profound benefits the practice brings to myself and others.What I see time and time again is this: the power centered in woman’s belly is pro-creative power, kin to the Power of Being that promotes creation throughout the universe. This pro-creative power generates new human life; it also brings forth new ideas, images, systems, institutions, organizations. Activating this power, we can direct it into any dimension we choose: personal healing, intuition, creative expression, family relationships, our work, our communities, our world.

Observing my own and other women’s experience, I see that the power abiding within our bellies also brings us greater health, freedom from addiction, sexual pleasure, more satisfying relationships, a sense of abundance, a sense of the sacred in our daily lives, a consciousness of our kinship with all creation.

A new conversation
Our culture bombards us with instructions to belittle our bellies and cut ourselves off from our bellies’ pro-creative power. Choosing to honor our bellies instead takes courage (yes, guts).

Many of us have internalized the culture’s devaluation of women, unwittingly working its violence upon ourselves. We’ve made our bellies the focus of our culturally imposed self-hate. But unless we grew up without the influence of family, school, friends, advertising, television, movies, books, newspapers, magazines, and toys (let's not forget Barbie) how could we have done otherwise?

The good news is: We don't have to torture ourselves any longer. We can choose to support ourselves and each other in honoring our bellies as the site of our soul-power, the home of our soul-knowing. Instead of complaining to each other about the size of our stomachs, we can encourage each other to use our belly-centered power in ways that create a life-affirming world.

When we do so, we restore sanity and self-respect to our lives: At lunch, Francie listened respectfully as Jane confessed, “I shouldn’t be eating. I feel so fat-my belly’s so big.” And she replied: “Yes, your belly is soft and round. If you found a precious jewel-something so precious it had the power to create life-wouldn’t you place it in a container that’s soft and round, to protect and nurture it?"

Lisa Sarasohn teaches weekly “Honoring Your Belly” classes in West Asheville and at Namasté Yoga Center in downtown Asheville. For more information on classes and the instructional “Honoring Your Belly” video, visit www.honoringyourbelly.com, email bellyqueen@earthlink.net or call 828-251-5786.