Hello, long time no newsletter in your inbox. Truthfully, I’ve been equal parts busy and chilling like a villain. Anyway, I just hope you enjoy this latest issue and are not holding a grudge at me for casually falling off the grid yet again (and thank you for reading!).
A little housekeeping before I start blabbing about the topic du jour. I’ve been rethinking the newsletter. My vision for it was to be a community effort, an archive of things that bring us all joy, that could inspire others to pause. Alas, it turned into a monologue, one I enjoy creating though, so I’m going to be making a few changes going forward. It’s still a work in progress, but if you enjoy reading the newsletter (or even if you hate it) please leave a comment on this post, or email me and let me know what you think. I’d really appreciate it!
A recent highlight has been this conversation between Brené Brown and Sonya Renee Taylor on the Unlocking Us podcast. I have been following Sonya Renee Taylor on Instagram for a while. She is an award-winning poet, activist, writer, educator, transformational leader and one of the most inspiring speakers I’ve had the pleasure to listen to. I have watched her Instagram videos in awe of her clarity and intellect, her words have the capacity to lift you into some otherworldly dimension. She speaks big, necessary truths in a way that makes them irrefutable. Her ideas brought about an inner revolution, I’m still reeling.
At a time when beautiful radical concepts like self-love or self-care have been co-opted by the advertising industry (ahem, capitalism!) to sell us skincare products and wellness treatments, Taylor challenges us to move from a place of shame, of unworthiness into radical self-love, where we can love ourselves, then love others and ultimately change the world. While I was familiar with Taylor’s definition of radical self-love, by listening to her interview with Brené Brown I was able to appreciate these larger-than-life ideas in all their joyous plenitude. If you do one thing this week, this month, even this year, set aside two hours and give yourself the gift of this incredible, enlightening conversation.
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“We have built a world that is a reflection of our belief that we are not enough”
—Sonya Renee Taylor
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As I listened to the interview, one of the first things I scribbled on my notebook is the need for a radical self-love mantra for our bodies. I only picked up on that late last year, once I fully grasped the magnitude of what had happened to my own body. That’s when I first developed a sense of deep love for it and started referring to it as “my perfect machine”. For no explicable reason other than my brain is a weirdo and stores the most random things it comes across, I recalled a phrase from the Netflix film Sierra Burgess is a Loser (which is semi-bad and fully problematic) and began chanting it mantra-like to my body every day. “You are a magnificent beast,” I would declaim shuffling from my bedroom to the kitchen on cold winter mornings. If you think a radical self-love mantra sounds mumbo-jumbo, I can positively attest to the benefits of having one. It’s hard to talk sh*t about your body once you start loving it.
What is radical self-love then? Does it give us permission to indulge in an extra glass of wine or splurge on a day at the spa? Does it allow us to hold on to the few extra kilos we’ve tried to shed for years or treat ourselves to an incredibly expensive new leather bag? Taylor explains that “the work of radical self-love is to keep moving the things that are in the way outside of [us], and to keep working in concert with other human beings to move the things that are in the way in the world, then we’ll make a different world.” She further expands on Marianne Williamson’s idea of natural intelligence — the belief that we are naturally equipped with the key to become the highest form of ourselves — by asserting that each of us already possesses an inherent divinity, an inner enough-ness. According to Taylor, once we free ourselves from the expectations and the obstructions the system imposes on us “we will just become.”
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radical self-love — a deliberate unlearning of the internalized shame and discomfort we accumulate with respect to our physical bodies — is a non-negotiable step in the fight for a more equitable society
—Sonya Renee Taylor
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Throughout the 80-minute-long conversation, Taylor discusses the concept of ‘ladder’, which she devised to describe “all the systems [of oppression].” It is a very powerful image that aptly conveys the individualistic nature of our society. A ladder is to be climbed one person at a time, usually upward. What radical self-love does is to help us acknowledge that we already possess everything we need to become and that the ladder is only real because we want it to be. “To divest from the ladder” is radical self-love’s ultimate goal, which allows us to reclaim a fuller understanding of our bodies, beyond the hierarchy of bodies that regards the white landowning man as the default body, the top rank.
To disrupt the current system is to oppose the rampant proliferation of individualism brought about by the ladder and self-love seems to be the answer. Radical self-love, as intended by Taylor, is love — which is active, as opposed to acceptance which is mere compromising— for difference within oneself and others. In fact, love goes beyond acceptance and it is love that leads us back to our communities, which in return show us the truth about who we are and are the primary space where the system’s falsehoods are shattered at last. Interestingly, while reading about abolition and revolution, I often notice that community and care are placed as the mainstay of these re-imagined futures. Taylor argues that social justice is rooted in a yearning for collectiveness, thus to aspire to a different future is to reclaim our essence as inter-dependent beings.
In 2018 Sonya Renee Taylor published a book by the same name of her trailblazing organisation, The Body is Not An Apology. In the book she shares her insights into the path to radical self-love. I am currently reading (and loving) it, but I’m pacing myself as I’ve realised that to face uncomfortable truths and unlearn my understanding of myself and the world demands a lot more time and emotional energy than I had anticipated. Do you think love is really all it takes to change the world?
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