Loving Your Body
Is it possible to find yourself loving your body exactly as it is? In this episode of Your Superpowered Minds, host Kristin Maxwell and guest Erica Mather sit together for a talk on self-love, beauty, and perception. Mindset shifts allow you to create a loving relationship with your body. You need to understand that you are not at war with your body, and your body is not to blame. To do this, you need to discover your true power in the face of unrealistic beauty standards. Listen in to know how significant loving your body is every single day!
Kristin Maxwell:
Hello everyone, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I am your host, Kristin Maxwell, and in this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life.
Today, I am excited to be talking to Erica Mather about a radical idea, and that is loving your body. Erica Mather is a writer, speaker, educator, and yoga teacher. Using her own experiences and the embodiment principles from a type of yoga called Forrest Yoga, Erica encourages her students to build a relationship with their bodies, in service to their health and to discover their life’s work. She is the author of Your Body, Your Best Friend: End the Confidence-Crushing Pursuit of Unrealistic Beauty Standards and Embrace Your True Power. And who among us could not use a little bit of this conversation, honestly? Anyway, Erica, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Erica Mather:
Thank you so much for having me, Kristin. It’s wonderful to be here.
Kristin Maxwell:
Yes, it’s very exciting. I love the work that you’re doing and where you’ve gone with it. And I want to go into that a little bit, but I always want to start with my first question, which is, what superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
Erica Mather:
Trusting myself. That is the superpower, trusting myself. And I think this is something I long for other people to have, as a superpower, too. It is knowing that you can trust yourself in day-to-day scenarios with other people and that you can trust yourself when you think about the trajectory of your life. Even if it seems murky, or it seems foggy, you have a little intuition and you know that even though there’s no concrete evidence anywhere to tell you that this intuition is correct, you can trust yourself to know that it’s correct. And that you can stay the course and follow that intuition through to an inevitable end, where I hope that you find out that you were right. I’ve been exploring this myself. And it relates specifically to trusting the body because I think that trusting the body is intrinsic to trusting yourself. Because you can’t trust yourself but sidestep your body because you are contained within your body. The self that you call self is housed within the body, so that’s my superpower.
Kristin Maxwell:
That’s a pretty great superpower.
Erica Mather:
Thank you. I’m excited about it.
Kristin Maxwell:
Yeah. It’s a pretty good one. And what I wonder is, was there a challenge in getting to that point, or was it something you’ve always had?
Erica Mather:
That’s a great question. I think, in certain regards, it’s something I’ve always had. I used to play the piano professionally. I was a musician. I wrote music. And I think, in terms of creativity, I learned to trust my creativity. But I think that having that trust leap domains, from trusting your creativity to trusting your instincts in a relationship with a person or trusting your instincts. For me, one of the big trust things around my business, actually, was just trusting that I would land on my feet. No matter what, even if I’m not sure how I have a feeling that I am going in the right direction and I will land on my feet. And it may take a year, it may take two years, and it may take five years to really play out. But just holding on to this sense of, I can trust myself. I think that trusting in my business or trusting in my relationships with other people is a little bit more current.
Creativity doesn’t necessarily require that you be in conversation with other people or dialogue with other people. It can be just a thing that you have yourself with the world. And I think that’s a lot easier to trust than when you have lots of other people in the play. And as you know, people create complications.
Kristin Maxwell:
Yeah, they certainly do. That’s the whole thing about people, they’re complicated. Yes. Well, that’s really interesting. And you’ve got an interesting story, it sounds like. We are going to take a super quick break before we go into your work around the body. Can you let people know where they can find you and your book?
Erica Mather:
Yeah, the best place to find me is on my website, which is ericamather.com and there are some options, some click-through buttons there to get the book. But I urge you if you have a local bookseller to go in and ask them for it and be in support of your local bookseller.
Kristin Maxwell:
Great. Good. Thank you for that. We’re going to come back in a minute and talk some more about the process of learning to love your body. Hang on.
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