The Octopus has the power to change
some things but not others, and that's the hard part
I'm back from five days on Mackinac Island between Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas. I go twice a year, teaching Qoya at a garment sewing retreat. This was my third time attending and teaching, and it was, as it was in the past, phenomenal. It is, as more than one participant said, so much more than a sewing retreat. In addition to the actual sewing, and the intuitive dance component that I teach, there's also the morning women's circle and an overarching theme of body positivity. There just isn't anything else like it, anywhere, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it in my own very small way.
We were working on creating patterns from store-bought garments that we already own in order to be able to make our own copies, often with changes for fit or style. It's that question of fit that makes garment sewing so rewarding as well as challenging. A quilt just needs to exist in two dimension, pretty much. A garment has to harmonize with the three dimensional body within it.
Tina, the extraordinary maker who runs the retreat, is particularly talented at both figuring out how to make changes, but how to discuss them without triggering body issues. That last one can be a particular challenge since many of the areas of the body that cause fit issues are also those areas that we don't like or are ashamed of. Tina is always relentlessly loving and positive about those body parts that need special help with fitting.
I agree with her, completely and wholeheartedly. Our bodies are beautiful exactly as they are, without needing to change anything.
And yet...
There are consequences to some of the idiosyncrasies to my body. My shoulders, for example, slope down and curve forward, after years of bad posture and hunching over a computer and slouching in easy chairs (reality check: I'm hunched over a computer with horrible posture as I'm writing this). In and of itself that's not really a problem, except that it's causing me back and neck pain.
I don't particularly like how my shoulders look, similarly to how I don't like the hollows at my hips. But there's a difference, structurally, between sloping, curved shoulders and hip dips. Hip dips are an anatomical quirk, coming from the way the bones at the top of the leg and the crest of the hip fit together. That's very much just how my skeleton (and muscles) developed, and that's not something that I can change. It's absolutely something to accept and learn to love as it is.
But my shoulders. The structural change to my shoulders came about over years of "training" for bad posture. My body has compensated by shortening my chest muscles and lengthening the muscles in my upper back in order to allow me to maintain my chosen position more easily. It's not how I was born, it's something that I've created through the way I move--or don't move--my body.
As a result, I can undo those adaptations by mobilizing and stretching my chest muscles, and activating and strengthening my upper back muscles. Plus, I can change how I'm moving and working so that I'm not training for bad posture anymore. Eventually--by which I means over the course of several months but certainly less than a year--I can help my shoulders and back return to a state that is pain-free and better balanced.
(A very important note: as a nutritionist who's fascinated by the question of body weight: our weight is a lot more like hip dips and less like curved shoulders. I suppose that I should write a full newsletter about that, because it's something that I feel very strongly about and it's complicated. But for now, just know that your body controls your weight, not you. Our weight falls into the category of things that we learn to accept and love, not a problem to be solved.)