You cannot punish, criticize, or judge your body into healing. Especially after trauma, the body simply cannot heal in a hostile environment where we are angry at our body for doing whatever it needed to do to survive.

This might include putting on weight, anxiety, injury, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammation, depression, and any number of other wise and adaptive responses to the stress and trauma we experienced (and continue to experience).

Stephen Porges, creator of polyvagal theory – the foundation of trauma work these days – asks, “How do we coax the nervous system into feeling safe?”

Because we MUST feel relatively safe in order to experience joy, pleasure, connection, and healing. We must feel relatively safe in order for our brains to read a friendly smile as a friendly smile rather than a threatening snarl. We must feel relatively safe in order for our body to begin to relax and open to new stories and possibilities.

If we are talking about pleasure, if we are talking about movement, if we are talking about joy, we must first always talk about safety. Not only in our physical environment and in our relationships, but also safety in how we speak to ourselves, in how we think about our body.

Our body and nervous system will not feel safe if we are criticizing our body, feeling like it’s a problem to be fixed, monitoring and denying our hungers and needs.

If you’d like to have a more pleasurable relationship with your body, with food, with sex, with life, what would help you to feel a little more safe? What kinds of mindfulness practices might help support more self-compassion? What small shifts in environment or relationship would help create small pockets of safety and openness? What music, what words, what colors help your body to unclench and spread out?

As safety becomes more familiar and available, play, pleasure, satisfaction, and joy become more accessible and available to us. Because your power is tied to your pleasure and satisfaction.