From Forceful to Loving, Here’s How I Became Friends With My Body

The last 18 years feel like a winding, evolving, beautiful love story.

Photo Credit: Anas Qtiesh, my loving partner captured this image during our Bernal Heights adventure.

Since discovering my highly sensitive nature last year, I’ve peeled back more numbing layers and dove even deeper into body awareness. Through a series of many lifestyle shifts and inner work, I’m growing more grounded, tuned in, and holistically healthy.

Next week I’ll be 30 years old, and looking back on all the victories in my inner love story feels like one sweet way to celebrate.

At 12 years old, I went to the gym with my mom for the first time, and that experience felt like the first step in sorting through all these stories we have about our bodies.

I’ve spent many years optimizing my wellness with diet, exercise, and all sorts of psychology and productivity advice. In the last three years, I created even more space for inner connection with things like Jungian psychology, creative recovery work, and somatic processing.

Reading Marion Woodman’s “Addiction to Perfection” book, based on her Jungian psychotherapy work and research, significantly shifted my perspective about “addictive” behaviors. She describes compulsive, destructive patterns as “choosing death” rather than life. It’s like we develop this deeply…