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July/August 2006 Living Now
Honoring Your Belly: Meeting Place of Body and Soul

by Lisa Sarasohn

Jane and Francie meet for lunch. After ordering, Jane leans in toward Francie and confesses, “I shouldn’t be eating. I feel so fat. My belly’s so big.”

How often do you hear a statement like that? 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. We’ve made ourselves miserable attempting to make our bellies invisible.

I can speak for myself: When I was seventeen I started to diet 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.

Exactly what is so shameful about a woman’s nicely rounded belly? Advertising for girdles — a.k.a. “shapewear” — 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 1920s, 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 a woman’s power center, both as a symbol and in physical fact. I suspect our culture labels a woman’s belly as shameful because it can’t stomach the full expression of women’s body-centered power.

Looking beyond contemporary Western culture, 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 the process of my own healing, I trained as a yoga teacher and later as a yoga therapist. As part of my continuing training, I learned movement and breathing exercises derived from a Japanese style of yoga developed by Masahiro Oki. 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.

Intrigued, I developed a hara-strengthening practice of movement and breathing exercises. As I moved through this belly-energizing practice daily, I began to experience the benefits of developing hara that I craved—more confidence, creativity and sense of connection. I no longer felt the need to stuff or starve myself. The eating disorder diminished and then disappeared.

Learning to revalue my belly essentially saved my life. Over the past 15 years, as I’ve shared this practice with thousands of women, I’ve witnessed the profound benefits it can bring. The power centered in a woman’s belly is indeed 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.

Choosing to honor our bellies takes courage—yes, guts. Our culture bombards us with instructions to belittle our bellies and cut ourselves off from our bellies’ pro-creative power. 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 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. We can enter into a new conversation.

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?”

Based on Lisa Sarasohn’s The Woman’s Belly Book: Finding Your True Center for More Energy, Confidence, and Pleasure (New World Library, 2006). Visit www.loveyourbelly.com or email lisa@loveyourbelly.com. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, www.newworldlibrary.com.