Let’s Get Physical Transcript

Rhea: Before we start talking about the body, I think it’s really good to take a tiny step back. There are four bodies, right?

Liz: Yes, there are. The mental, spiritual, emotional and physical. There are many bodies. To be fair, we have a lot more than that but there are four main bodies – physical, spiritual, emotional and mental

Rhea: Okay, so mental – what we think; spiritual – our relationship with Spirit; emotional – our emotions; and physical – our physical body.  

Liz: Exactly

Rhea: And that’s what we are going to be talking about today is our physical body.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: Okay, cool. I think that’s just important to start with because I think sometimes I get a bit confused when we are talking because you will say our body and our bodies, and I’m like whoa! What? So glossary terms here is when we say plural “bodies”, we are talking about the four and when we say ‘body”, we are talking about our physical body.

Liz: Correct. Part of the Soul Memory practice is understanding what our bodies are trying to tell us, because often people might have some mystery physical issue, you name it. It could be something as innocuous as eczema, which for some is not innocuous, it’s massive, for others, it’s mild, to disease, and as we understand our physical bodies are an expression of our spiritual, emotional and our mental states, and that’s why understanding the physical body is so important. Things that are manifesting physically, it’s there to tell us something, and often people don’t want to get to that point. They just want to know diagnose me and give me whatever it will take to make it go away, and while that can be fine, in order to come to understand what it means to own who we are and come into our truth, it means acknowledging what we look like, what we feel and what our bodies are communicating to us.

Rhea: Just as I guess a relationship with your emotions and understanding what your emotions are trying to tell you, the relationship with your body and understanding what your body is trying to tell you as well . . .

Liz: Is key

Rhea: Is super key

Liz: Yes, and we have spent lifetimes abusing our bodies that it’s time that we make our peace with our bodies if we are to live longer, healthier, happier lives.

Rhea: When you say “abusing our body”, are you saying using our bodies to numb our emotions?

Liz: Yes, but also abusing our bodies because we take them for granted. 

Rhea: Yes, that would be my experience.

Liz: Very much so.

Rhea: I focused on what was wrong with my body, not what was right.

Liz: The reason why I struggle with my body as a temple is it’s kind of pushes that idea and that image out of ourselves again. It sort of forces us to see our bodies in a rather three-dimensional way.

Rhea: It’s allowing someone else to define what temple is.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: My temple could be really into dairy.

Liz: It’s not a structure. It’s a reflection of everything we are.

Rhea: Yes

Liz: And that’s massive, and we have not taken very good care of them

Rhea: In a lot of ways that stuff comes from fear. If I eat X, Y or Z, I will get sick. I will be hurt and again, that fear is the antithesis of love. It’s the antithesis of power.

Liz: Right

Rhea: Your self-power

Liz: It’s subscribing to somebody else’s belief system as well, because it means denying your own because then if I do this, then that. The consequential way of doing things which doesn’t necessarily work.

Rhea: So it’s more like the difference between the person who says I choose to eat a salad because I am craving it and it will nourish me and it’s an act of love, and someone who goes I am forcing myself to eat a salad because I am afraid of what happens to me if I don’t

Liz: Yes, or if I don’t eat one, then it’s bad, also labelling how we treat our bodies.

Rhea: And I guess that’s having the confidence to choose yourself.

Liz: Absolutely. The courage for sure, because the root of how we treat our bodies is certainly self-esteem, but self-esteem is not to be linked to confidence, because that is an entirely subjective thing. Confidence is the sense that when it comes to our bodies I know that I have this particular look, feature, et cetera that I know is acceptable or admired. Self-esteem is love. I know that I exude love. Love pours out of every pore of my body, and that is my light and that is what people see.

Rhea: So self-esteem is I love myself, and other people can see that I love myself?

Liz: Very much, and that makes me flawless and the greater the self-love, the greater the self-esteem.

Rhea: Not to be confused with other people love me so I must be okay

Liz: Or other people tell me I’m pretty, so that’s what I am going to put out to the world.

Rhea: We’re moving the idea of self-esteem from one that is external to internal, so the more you love yourself, the more self-esteem you have, the more respect you have for yourself, because love and respect are so intertwined.

Liz: Yes. So I just say that self-confidence is necessarily misplaced. It is important to have a sense of belief in one’s abilities, often when it comes to our bodies, and how we express ourselves to the world, so much of that is based on acceptance by others. 

Rhea: And the problem is that because everyone has different criteria for accepting you, we try and be flawless so that everyone accepts us.

Liz: We try to be perfect. I think flawless is a beautiful thing. No-one is ever perfect because you are not 100% at everything at every given moment, whereas flawless to me means however we are being at any given moment, it’s us being at our best.

Rhea: When we are doing the best we can

Liz: When we saying that we are flawless, it means we are accepting our light and we are allowing our light to shine as much as possible.

Rhea: We all want to be loved unconditionally.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: So if we see someone loving themselves unconditionally, we want to be close to them and spend some more time with them because we also want to be in the same state. So that makes us more beautiful and more engaging because we are at peace with ourselves.

Liz: Very much so. So self-acceptance is the critical step in self-esteem. It’s step 1. Can you accept that this is who you are? And the moment you have the courage to do that, it’s when you can take the subsequent steps, to building up love, self-love. 

Rhea: But if you accept who you are, do you then lose the agency to change it? If I say I accept that I have got a big ass but I’d like to make it smaller, is that allowed in self-love?

Liz: Of course, because is it a product of a certain behaviour? Is the goal of a smaller ass, is it a vain one, because you just want to be an impossibly tiny size, or is it because you know that by working out, it’s an act of self-love because it’s healthier and if the by-product is a smaller ass, then all the better?

Rhea: Yes, because we only talk about the physical body. It’s really defined by your outward appearance.

Liz: Oh yes. Our society is so vain. 

Rhea: Yes

Liz: It has been for lifetimes and lifetimes

Rhea: Physical appearance is currency

Liz: Very much so, which has damaged the integrity of our bodies, which is why we are in such a crisis right now, and that’s what I meant when I said we have abused our bodies is because we have not treated them with integrity, because we are constantly trying to shape and mold them to be accepted as we are. We are all so different and unique on the surface, aren’t we? Skin color, eye color, height, size—no two people are exactly the same and that’s a lovely thing. 

Just under 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, so I’m auto-immune. I had this sort of atypical symptoms. I didn’t have the weight gain. I had the fatigue but having two young children, it’s easy to dismiss one’s fatigue for I-have-two-small-children. I had just taken a lot on myself. I tend to do that and it got to the point where my body said, “Enough!”

When it comes to hyperthyroidism, it’s about putting yourself last and I had been in this kind of caretaker-mode, not just with children but also because of my husband’s career and the constant moving around we were doing which I didn’t enjoy the moving bit. It’s a lot of work; it’s quite stressful. But I also just have such a wanderlust. I was at war with myself. I was at war with how I was living my life versus how my needs were being met and my body paid for it. So fast forward, everything I’m managing, I’m managing. 

Just last year I was diagnosed with early-onset menopause and that was also kind of crushing. Again, I had to stop and think about what were the triggers and it was because I had taken on too much. So I feel like here I am, I’m forty-two. My body tells me that I’m about 50, and I needed to kind of go back and I needed to say what can I do to make sure that my physical body is in line with everything else? Also, where are my emotions and my thoughts and my spirit?

Rhea: Do you find that now that’s happened you are always going to be a victim to that?

Liz: No, I don’t consider myself a victim at all. It just means that I have to always be in integrity with my body. My body can only handle so much. I just really need to slow down and listen to that.

Rhea: So basically, it became a barometer to how far you can push your physical body

Liz: And also myself emotionally. If I was in the thick of something emotionally, then I really needed to pay attention to it so that I wouldn’t hurt my other bodies

Rhea: Because they are all linked to each other

Liz: Very much

Rhea: I think what you said about the war was really interesting, and it definitely opened something up in my eyes as well, because I had an eating disorder for quite a long time, and I realize now that the issue was that I was definitely at war with myself because there was a part of me that wanted so desperately to love myself for who I was, but there was another part of me that was so desperate for people to love me, so all those times of the bingeing and the restricting was me indulging both sides at the same time. 

When I started trying to bring them together, I was just going to look at this from love so I’m going to try to do loving acts towards myself, whether that is eating what I want or whether that is saying “enough” and putting the knife and fork down. As long as it comes from a place of love, that’s the right way to start, because I was so tired from all that, my body started giving up as well, so that actually the diets that would normally work would no longer worked. I was doing everything and I was not seeing a change in my physical appearance because the problem was not actually physical. It was a reflection of what was actually going on emotionally, which was my inability to understand I had maybe different views to what I was being told I should want. And I think that’s the big problem with a lot of the consumerism that we are facing in the world today and that whole perfection thing. We are being told this is what you need to look like to deserve love.

Liz: Or this is what you drink or eat if you want to be happy.

Rhea: Because I wasn’t entirely convinced by that, but my fear was so high and my self-esteem was so low, I was looking for that Hack 101, Physical 101. I don’t really want to deal with the emotional side of why I don’t think I deserve love. I’m just going to go down the physical route and drink this drink and work out in the gym and not have dinner, because that will solve the problem for me. But deep down inside, I knew that wasn’t the case.

Liz: I think many do but they don’t necessarily want to consider the alternatives because that would be too difficult. That would force them to give up these coping mechanisms that they wanted to believe would work, and if they had to learn that they really don’t work, then it means that they are wrong and it starts that cycle again. Then if I’m wrong then I’m not worthy of these things, then how can I ever love myself? I’m not perfect, I’m flawed, et cetera.

Rhea: So almost our physical body is a reflection of our shadow in a way. How close we are to integrating that shadow to our self. Even if it’s not a conscious choice, it’s a subconscious one?

Liz: Our bodies are not our puppets. They are not dolls. They fluctuate along the spectrum and our stories reflect this

Rhea: So in your story and in mine, our bodies were mirroring to us the old stories that we maybe thought we had gotten rid of that still needed to be looked at

Liz: Precisely.

Rhea: In my case, I hadn’t gotten rid of anything at that point.

Liz: Yes

Rhea: But in yours, maybe

Liz: Well, there’s always layers. Once we have divested ourselves of one layer, there is often another underneath and so often our job is really and hence Karma is my bitch is just own it. Layer after layer, just keep going, keep going. Don’t assume that you are finished. It’s an endless process as long as we live, that we get to a place of peace and wholeness that we look at and we go, ‘okay, I get it. I get the message.’

Rhea: The more I decided to love myself and do loving acts as a by-product, the better I started to looking, so was it almost that because my body is always my mirror, it’s reflecting how I feel towards myself in some ways, because I think what’s interesting about both our stories is that yours is one very much from a medical perspective, and mine is very much from an appearance perspective, and those are the two ways we talk about how our bodies communicates to us, because in one way if we look at it, it’s really showing us what’s going on and in another way, it’s reacting to show us what’s going on.

Liz: Oh yes.

Rhea: So it can be either kind of disease or weight, or whatever else it is.

Liz: Oh, very much

Rhea: Or sometimes both.

Liz: One of the steps to getting into love though is forgiving and having compassion for how we treated our bodies when we were in states of lower consciousness. We’ve treated our physical bodies as disposable. In general for thousands of years, human beings have pretty much treated the other as disposable, and that includes the body, so we have been very comfortable torturing ourselves, haven’t we and torturing others. The idea of death and slaughter and torture and abuse has existed. It’s part of our mind frame, isn’t it? We see these in movies and people laugh. They think nothing of it.

Rhea: Well, slapstick comedy is people getting hurt.

Liz: Yes, so our physical bodies have been the brunt of many jokes, but also historically in many stories have suffered so much, and yet now, we are at a point where perhaps we have less of that in the world. We still have it obviously, but we have less of it but we are inflicting that torture on ourselves.

Rhea: Well, I have definitely found it in my present where the biggest part of starting to do those loving acts is forgiving myself for not having started before. For me, it was this cycle of if I start now, then that means that the fact that I didn’t start before, I failed myself somehow. I should already be at the finish line. I should be in the greatest expression of who I am, and I think that goes back to what we were saying at the start about us being flawless, is that part of it is accepting that at that time, I was doing the best that I could because other shit was going on, and now I had the strength from my emotional body to give to my physical body and to start that process and to forgive what had happened before, because it was what it was for loads of other reasons and maybe it just wasn’t the time then, or maybe I had to learn a bigger lesson which was sometimes I am not going to be in alignment with what everyone else thinks, and what’s really important is that I am in alignment with what I think, and that’s quite a big lesson. 

So if it a war with my weight and my eating disorder to figure that out, then that’s what it took. And better to move forward and own all of myself, and owning all of yourself, one of it is knowing who you are and choosing to stand by yourself, not alone but next to yourself, but part of it is also understanding with the four physical bodies that we were discussing, at any one point, one of them could be stronger than the others. They are here to prop each other up. My physical body may not be in the best place it could be, but that’s because my other bodies needed the support at that time, maybe more.

Liz: Precisely, and they really have lately as we have been trying to divest ourselves of our issues, karma, trauma, abuse, anything that we have been going through, our physical bodies have been sort of suffering in order to support. Can we come back around and sort of see that our physical bodies need some support? Right now, what many of them have been doing is relying on coping mechanisms that are not working any more. All of these bodies really do need to be functioning, perhaps not fully at 100% all the time, but a lot more so than they have been. For me, that means I don’t get as many cocktails as I enjoy.

Rhea: For me, it means maybe sometimes after a couple of days of eating whatever I want, the minute I start feeling less in love with myself as a result, I do a loving act because I think the other thing with me, a big part of that war we were discussing in order to resolve things, we need to need them. In our society, big businesses need to convince us there is something wrong.

Liz: They have to sell us our unhappiness to sell us happiness.

Rhea: They have to sell us on happiness to sell the fix. It makes our focus as a society more superficial. 

Liz: Very much

Rhea: Because we are judging other peoples’ happiness and success by what they look like or by how they are feeling. The healthier you are, the better looking you are, the more you conform to societal standards of beauty, the better person you are, which often is not the case. You might know the most beautiful person in the world. If you find out that they have the worst personality, they stop being beautiful in your eyes and the other way round. Someone who really first impressions could not be anything special could end up being the most beautiful person in your eyes.

Liz: Right

Rhea: So we have evidence that actually beauty is not about what you necessarily look like, but it’s all of who you are. We have to own all of ourselves to be the greatest expression of who we are, and that does include the physical but not maybe in the way you think.