A Prayer For The Girl In The Mirror

If you are like seven out of 10 women on this earth,

The first word that comes to your mind when you look at your body in the mirror is disgusting.

You might stare at your thighs or your breasts or your hair or your nose and you think they're too much this or not enough that.

You pull and tug at your outfits to make sure your shirt covers your muffin top belly or maybe you roll your shoulders forward unconsciously because you stand a good head and shoulders taller than just about everyone you know.

If you feel like you're in a forever war with your body,

You are not alone.

Whether you're short and stout,

Tall and lanky,

Blonde or brunette,

White or brown,

Or even if you have a so-called perfect body,

Whatever that even means,

If you live in this culture,

You've probably absorbed and internalized painful messages about your body.

You need to be smaller or softer or quieter or just something other than what you actually are.

But somewhere beneath all that noise,

Something within you remembers that your body has never been the problem or the enemy.

There's a part of you that holds the quiet truth that your body is a portal to wisdom,

Intuition,

And a beauty that is as vast as Mother Earth herself.

And that's what we are here to reclaim today.

Welcome to the Marcella Principle Podcast,

A place for women like you to know your truth,

Love your truth,

And live your truth.

I'm your host,

Marcella Friel.

In this special series on the Marcella Principle,

I'll be walking you through a path of healing body shame through four archetypes of feminine power,

Maiden,

Mother,

Queen,

And crone.

Each one offers a sacred key to help you return to your body with reverence.

This series is a sneak preview of what we'll be exploring at my upcoming in-person retreat,

A Pilgrimage to Self-Love,

August 13th to 17th in the sacred Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Southern Colorado.

This four-night retreat will guide you through an archetypal odyssey to release shame,

Awaken self-compassion,

And reconnect with the miracle that is your body.

Today,

Let's begin with the maiden.

But before we frolic in the maiden's meadow,

Let me answer a question you're probably wondering.

Why look at something as personal as body shame through an archetypal lens?

The term archetypes was coined by Carl Jung as a way to identify universal patterns of human experience that live in our collective unconscious.

So when I mentioned these four archetypes of the maiden,

The mother,

The queen,

Or the crone,

You probably get an immediate sense of their qualities and energy because each is an energy that already lives in you.

In a world where the funhouse distortions of reality parade across the blue-gray screens we call our phones,

Archetypes help us step out of that freakish isolation and plug our experiences into a universal bank of wisdom,

Healing,

And transformation.

They help us see our own lives as a heroine's journey.

So no matter your chronological age,

The maiden archetype is the ever-youthful part of you who is wild,

Curious,

And full of wonder.

The maiden daydreams without limits.

She dances barefoot in the field.

She sings at the top of her lungs in the shower.

She follows what lights her up.

But the maiden also lives in paradox.

On the one hand,

She seeks authentic self-expression,

But on the other,

She absorbs every message handed down to her from mothers,

From magazines,

From mirrors,

And from the media.

Ever since the first women's fashion magazine,

Harper's Bazaar,

Appeared in the mid-19th century,

We gals in our maiden years and beyond have been seriously scrutinizing our bodies against the it-girl images we've been fed and wondering,

How do others see me?

Am I okay?

Am I lovable?

Am I too much?

This trend has intensified as media sophistication accelerated over the past century and has now reached fever pitch in the age of social media.

From the time a young maiden scrolls her first Instagram feed,

She begins to drink in the message hundreds of times a day that her body is her currency,

Her beauty is her value,

And her youth is her worth.

By the time that girl turns 17,

She's likely seen nearly half a million such images,

Each one whispering,

Be smaller,

Be smoother,

Be prettier,

Be perfect,

Or make yourself so thin that you just disappear.

The maiden's developing human brain is no match for the supercomputer behind her screen that predicts and directs her online behavior toward obsession,

Dissociation,

And body self-objectification.

Is it any wonder then that so many of us learn to turn on our bodies as the enemy,

To fear the mirror,

To dread the birthdays,

Or to measure our worth in wrinkles and waistlines?

While I'm one of those rare women who never felt body shamed as a girl,

I did internalize not good enough messages through my hair.

Growing up in 1960s TV land,

My beauty idols were wholesome teeny bopper Barbie dolls and blue-eyed Brady Bunch girls with corn silk and locks.

Seeing these images,

I continually felt a smoldering humiliation over the contrast of my own appearance,

My olive skin,

My weird ethnic name,

And especially the tightly curled shock of chestnut brown hair that sprouted wildly from my crown chakra,

Making me look more like Eraserhead than the cutesy TV girls I wanted to emulate.

At age 12,

I decided to take matters into my own hands and tame my wild Mediterranean mane once and for all.

Locking myself into the bathroom one Sunday afternoon with sun in spray-on bleach and chemical hair straightener,

The result was a fried orange triangle of frizz sitting on the top of my head that made me look like Roseanne Rosanna Dana from the old SNL days.

I went to school the following Monday under a crimson pall of humiliation.

The boys called me names I cannot repeat to this day,

Implying that I was wearing a bush of pubic hair on my head.

Decades later,

I came upon a magazine article where a Puerto Rican woman who looked just like me chronicled similar experiences with her hair and vowed never again to alter it for the sake of some arbitrary beauty standard.

Emboldened by her brave example,

I followed suit and to this day,

At age 63,

Refuse to hide the gray or straighten the waves.

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything here that you don't already know or haven't experienced in your own legacy of body shame.

And yet,

While it's one thing to understand the roots of that shame intellectually,

It's another thing altogether to rescue our inner damsel in distress from the tower of shame where she's been kept locked away for so long.

So how do we flush out the relentless body shame that we've been carrying since our maiden years?

Here are a few tips based on my own experience and on working with thousands of women like you.

First,

Even though we can feel shame so personally,

The reality is the shame is not ours.

Shame is something we inherit like a sticky toxic goo made up of others' expectations of how we should look or how we should be.

So when you feel yourself sliding down a shame spiral,

Stop.

In fact,

Let's try this together right now.

So if you're in a place where it's safe and comfortable to do so,

I want to invite you to place one or both hands on your heart,

Close your eyes or soften your gaze,

And take three slow,

Nourishing breaths.

Let's do that together.

And as you breathe,

Imagine your body as a place rather than a problem.

Feel the rise and fall of your chest,

The warmth of your hands entering your ribcage and softening your heart.

And just allow yourself to witness yourself as you are in this moment.

And now I invite you to recollect as vividly as you can a recent episode of body shame that you experienced.

And keep breathing with your hands on your heart as you summon this memory.

And then ask yourself,

Whose shame is this really?

And just allow that question to be your meditation.

Sit in the open space of the question without trying to answer it and just see what bubbles up.

You might find memories from your history or images you've internalized from some media or other,

A snarky remark someone said,

Or you might find nothing at all.

Either way,

The act of simply stopping and turning toward the shame rather than habitually shrinking away from it can sometimes be enough to disrupt the momentum of the feeling.

Now,

Here's another question you might sit with as you're here with your hands on your heart.

How might this shame be a gateway to compassion for myself or others?

So,

If you take the view that the shame is not yours,

Consider also that you are not alone in your shame.

Imagine for just a moment how many other girls and women feel this very same shame and send them the healing light that you desire for yourself.

You might even say a prayer,

May we all get out of the shadows together.

May we all get out of the shadows together.

May we all get out of the shadows together.

And just let your breath carry that prayer outward to every woman who needs it.

So,

You can continue this contemplation until it comes to a natural completion and then just dissolve it,

Let it go and allow yourself to rest in that space of peace and resolution.

And feel free to repeat this as many times as you need it.

Next,

After you've done a meditation,

Like this,

Try focusing more on how your body feels rather than how it looks.

So,

If the mirror image really is too much to bear,

Drape a cloth over that mirror when you don't need it.

Treat yourself to some gentle movement,

A tasty meal,

A luxurious bath and in those activities begin shifting your attention to how your body feels rather than how it looks.

You could even start a practice of journaling at the end of the day about what felt good to your body that day.

Remember that whatever we focus on expands and so the more you divert your attention away from the trash talk and toward the feel good,

The more dividends of body love you will eventually harvest.

Then consider this,

Because shame can be a gateway to compassion,

Consider that anything you feel ashamed of can eventually become something you appreciate.

So,

Here's my question to you,

What seeds of gratitude and appreciation might you find inside that swampy morass of the shame?

So,

For me,

Now that I'm in my early 60s,

I'm actually grateful for my thick Mediterranean hair,

My fleshy thighs,

You know,

Just the flesh of my body as the telltale traits of a midlife woman in robust health.

Lastly,

Remember,

Deeper than the incessant media noise lies the truth that your body,

Yes,

Your body,

Your body is a miraculous reflection of mother nature's generosity and glory.

You know,

You'd probably never dump motor oil into your backyard creek or litter the highway,

Right?

You don't do that kind of thing.

So,

It's time then to stop trashing your body ecosystem with toxic judgments of disgusting and begin restoring your inner landscape to its primordial innocence and integrity.

With all the problems that we face today,

Transforming your body shame into body love is one simple thing that you can do right now to lift up your life,

The lives of everyone you love and the wellbeing of your world.

This is Marcella Friel,

Thank you so much for visiting with me today.

If you'd like to walk the sacred path of transforming your body from enemy into ally,

Join me August 13th to 17th for my in-person retreat,

A Pilgrimage to Self-Love here in the sacred Sangre de Cristo mountains of Southern Colorado.

Let the sun,

Wind,

Primordial mountains and healing waters bear witness to and support your intention to love your body for the miracle it is.

And I'll see you in the next episode.