My 52 Year Old Body Carries My Life

How do you feel about your body?

When asked to write about the body - my body - my first thought was how at home I feel within it. Or, more precisely, how at home I feel within it in the presence of another. I am a sensual and sexual woman.

My body speaks where words fail me, where fear still holds me back. My body is a place I express myself not through clunky language but through movement, touch, the way I inhabit a space.

My initial thoughts about my body are in relation to another. Well, to my one love. I am strong and my body is slim. I feel graceful, deliberate, and elegant within this form that I have. The way I make my way from the bed, the way I walk the house in just knickers, shirt or just shoes. I have a lightness within me as a sensual woman that often otherwise escapes me in other ways. Standing naked in the kitchen with a mocha pot. Wearing just a jumper falling slightly from my shoulder. This is how I seduce my love – in these small, fleeting, unspoken moments. Here, in this space, we meet as equals.

When I think of my body, I think of how I love. I need a certain lover, my lover, to move into my body in the way I need. I need someone that understands love outside of ordinary life. Although as I reflect on this statement, I realise that the gold is within me. I am the one that brings this love. I am possessed by the elements through my body when I make love. I can almost feel the rhythm of the sea as I navigate the landscape of another. Of him. Maybe you feel this too? It is as though physical form evaporates to waves of love. I cherish this about myself. I know that not everyone finds such ease in their body.

I send my lover photos of myself. It is a currency of love. A way of navigating distance. I trust him with my body explicitly and so those images are a form of art. By that I mean they are my love in form, they are poetic, they are a calling to him in our tiny ocean of life. They are our shared love.

But there are other things in life that are not so natural for me. Hmm. What do I mean by that? Well, life can be so tricky eh. Life has been. My face is scarred by this lifetime. It holds a story deeply engrained, and only my light and smiles disguise the oldness of the lines I carry. When I let the dark in my face is full of age and hollowed by the terror of it.

This has become more of a stream of consciousness than an ocean as I write now. But in many ways that is also the place I am navigating with my body as I concentrate on waves rather than matter. I am learning of the body and how it keeps me to ransom through my past. I am creating a new body. I mean I am starting anew. I am making my body respond to life as it may have been without the terror.

Because this body—this 52-year-old body—carries all the life I have lived. We call it baggage, don’t we?

But if it were just baggage, I could leave it somewhere unknown and never return. My body holds my past.

I can descend into its depths so that it can take days to surface. You may never know what I mean. Or perhaps you know exactly. But recently, almost too recently to dare to speak of it. I have left my baggage to my past. I am moving in the future now.

I have cultivated a practice—most days, at least—of re-imagining my life. Not as it was, but as I wish it to be. I envision it unfolding now. I let my body feel the joy of it. They say the body does not know the difference between memory and imagination. Each day I spend an hour feeling into what I no longer want to be and then what I do. I feel into how this feels and how my life would be different. For one hour a day I am a published writer, I no longer need someone to validate me, I no longer look to another to fulfil me.

I have a wooden cabin in the woods, I feel loved and surrounded by what I need, with windows looking out to trees and sometimes the sea. In that hour it is real. And do you know. By becoming this my body is slowly catching up. I am breaking old patterns, old addictions to sabotage myself. I follow this process, taught by Dr Joe Dispenza and I am changing. I am changing. At 52 I am finally finding my way. I am lighter, gentler, less self-absorbed (believe it or not) and my career is changing along with my relationship with the man I love and more importantly myself. Because I am learning to be in love with my life.

I think—I think—it is changing me.

My external body hasn’t changed all that much as I have so far aged. I am still strong. I remember being a teenager in the bath, stretching my legs above me, tracing their pale length. They are pretty much the same. There are external scars from a playful childhood. A childhood spent outdoors falling from trees and off skateboards. I am still in play with my body. If I walk into an open space, I want to dance or move. I often feel the urge to cartwheel which I generally subdue. I like to move around in my body as if life is a dance and this shows me how I am also very capable of joy.

I often talk of the hills and walking. Of the woman there that no one knows. But you know. They are beginning to. I’m introducing her to the world. She is slowly be coaxed down into this life and walking beside me in the cafes and tables with my friends, at work and in my day to day. She has even finally decided to pretend not to be fearful of riding my motorbike and for the first time this week I took to the hills on it.

So, back to my body. The love of my life in the story I created in this lifetime, which is another story all together sent me these words when I spoke of writing of my body. ‘Oh Honey, your body’ then ‘How do you give something to someone without giving it away’.

Freely, with love. That is how I do it.