Sonya Renee Taylor

It was not until I was in my thirties that it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting myself. Perhaps the victory that lay at the end of the long road of self-denial and repression was not a reward that I actually wanted. Perhaps all the love and acceptance that had been promised me if I could just hate myself into a new me didn’t exist. Perhaps I was going to spend my entire life fighting my own existence and then just . . . die.
I would like to say that this revelation led me to immediately toss a lifetime of self-loathing aside and fully embrace proud ownership of my self, but there are no epiphanies that outweigh a lifetime of conditioning. Slowly, and often painfully, I started to risk moments of authenticity. I started to share my opinion without apology. I started laughing loudly without embarrassment. I started creating and growing into myself. And slowly I started to believe that perhaps I did have the right to take up space. Perhaps I had not only the right but the obligation to love myself as I was.

I was transported to all the times I had given away my own body in penance. A reel of memories scrolled through my mind of all the ways I told the world I was sorry for having this wrong, bad body. It was from this deep cave of mutual vulnerability that the words spilled from me: “Natasha, your body is not an apology. It is not something you give to someone to say, ‘Sorry for my disability.’” She began to weep, and for a few minutes I just held my maybe-pregnant friend as she contemplated the fullness of what those words meant for her life and her body.

Marianne Williamson offers us a perspective of natural intelligence as a source of innate perfect design, and yet her own bias and learned body shame contradict its efficacy.

I have my own name for natural intelligence. I call it radical self-love, and this second edition is our opportunity to expand and unleash the full power of radical self-love as a tool for social change. In a time of unrest, uprisings, and a longing for what is possible beyond disconnection, radical self-love is a pathway toward personal and collective transformation. It is time we use it to change the world. Radical self-love was the force that cannoned the words “your body is not an apology” out of my mouth, directed toward a friend but ultimately barreling into my own chest and then into the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Evangelizing radical self-love as the transformative foundation of how we make peace with our bodies, make peace with the bodies of others, and ultimately change the world is my highest calling

Radical self-love is not a destination you are trying to get to; it is who you already are, and it is already working tirelessly to guide your life. The question is: How can you listen to it more distinctly, more often, even over the blaring of constant body shame? How can you allow it to change your relationship with your body and your world? And how can that change ripple throughout the entire planet?