"You've gained a lot of weight."
This was recently said to me by someone in a professional setting and it did not feel good to me. Mainly I felt caught off-guard because the comment did not fit what I expected for a professional setting. I did not know how to respond, and it didn't help that the rational part of my brain was thinking, "I actually weigh less than when I last saw this person, but my breasts have gotten bigger. Maybe bigger breasts makes me look bigger overall? I hope she doesn't think I got a breast augmentation surgery."
So here I was, logically stepping through the rationale behind this comment, the way that I would approach a scientific problem, realizing that I had no emotional response to being told I was bigger and feeling happy about that, while the other person was clearly waiting for a response. I was unable to understand why I looked bigger if I am in fact not, and I was also unable to recover from my surprise in order to respond gracefully. I am not even going to pretend like I said something profound. I babbled and then abruptly began talking about business.
I don't spend time thinking about my weight. The only reason I even knew that I had lost weight was because I had gotten weighed at my annual physical and then again when I went to get my PPD placement. Looking back, I can see that I was just surprised that someone else felt like it was appropriate to comment on my weight when I pay so little mind to it. Also, it felt like way too personal a comment to make to me at work!
I want to make it clear that I am not writing this to call anyone out. Many people feel free to make personal comments about my body and certainly weight is one of the most common, so for anyone who thinks that this is a reference to them, it's probably not. The other thing most frequently commented upon is my hair, which is undeniably Afro and uncontrollable even in the least humid weather. For people who are not close to me, it is probably hard to understand why I can't bring myself to worry about my weight. I never weigh myself. It seems like our culture believes the biggest complement that can be given is to tell someone they have lost a lot of weight. I don't have any interest in measuring my self-worth by what numbers are on a scale, and the people closest to me understand why. Shortly after giving birth to my son, I went through five years of illness, weighing less than most 12-year-olds, being unable to eat a full meal without excruciating pain. You can read my healing story here:
http://michelleshealthrevolutionblog.weebly.com/the-daily-ayurveda/myhealing-story.
When I was healed through my personal Ayurvedic practice, I was so grateful to be healthy that I promised myself I would go through the rest of my life loving my body. I promised that for the rest of my life,my only goal for my body would only be health, and that whatever shape that would take, I would love - not accept or tolerate, but love. I felt like I had wasted too much of my youth worrying about whether or not I was "fat". Too many of us waste time worrying about what size we are and how to stay that size, and we miss out on all of the joy our bodies can bring us. My approach to loving my body is to eat seasonal and whole foods, exercise and meditate daily, and live my life. I am thrilled, by the way, to have a primary care physician who respects me as an Ayurvedic practitioner, and who works with me as a partner. I am healthy by all medical measures, happy in my body, I feel powerful, and I help others heal every day. I have a joyful life that I am grateful for.
Getting back to the topic of surprising conversations, it has been brought to my attention as I have discussed these types of incidents with fellow healers that I have "soft boundaries". What they mean by this is that we all are subconsciously attuned to each other. We get impressions of one another based on an energetic conversation that is happening underneath every social interaction. Some people project a "dominating" vibe that everyone picks up on. These "dominating" types don't get any sass. Their presence is intimidating even when they are at their happiest, and people usually respond by giving these types respect and authority. By contrast, I project a "calm and yielding" energy, which people likewise pick up on without consciously realizing it. I have noticed that this energy has the dual effect of making people more open with me and also making me a target for dominating energy types. I have had many colleagues recommend that I present a colder energy, not joking around with patients, not allowing text and email communication between appointments. I get their point about my openness making it easier for people to think of me as a friend than a healthcare provider, but I also know that one of the reasons so many people come to see me is that I put them at ease. I do personally care about each person who comes into my office and I want them to know that. My goal is to maintain high standards of professional ethics while also providing a personal touch that I believe is missing from the healthcare system in our country.
As a healer, it is a great asset to have people be so effortlessly open with me about their struggles, their emotions, and their life experiences. As a human being who enjoys feeling respected, my having soft boundaries can present challenges at the personal and professional levels. I have had to put a lot of work into understanding when it is important for me to have stronger boundaries. One example of creating stronger boundaries for me has been to clearly delineate work time from family time, and to carve out time for self-care into my daily schedule. Before I learned the importance of having these boundaries, I let my work life bleed into my home life, answering text messages, emails, and voicemails at all hours because I genuinely do care so much for the people with whom I work. However, letting work bleed into family life gives one's family the impression that they are less important than one's job. My creation of stronger boundaries has enabled me to have a healthy professional life, a richer family life, and time for the self-nurturing that I recommend to all my patients. Having strong boundaries is also important in personal interactions, because having soft boundaries and yielding energy can easily lead to being dominated in personal relationships. It is important to understand and learn to recognize the moments when soft boundaries and compassion for others come into conflict with compassion for self and self-care. Although in the moment these things may seem like they're in conflict, in fact by taking care of ourselves we are able to be better examples of love and compassion in the world.
People tend to say things to me that are intensely personal and usually quite surprising. I can be in line at the grocery store and the complete stranger in line next to me will turn to me out of the blue and tell me intimate details of her life. Or, I might be at a party and after being introduced to a new person, this individual begins to tell me a traumatic story of how their marriage is falling apart. I believe that this openness that people sense in me is a gift. It may not seem like it to others, and many people have told me so. Imagine a life where you cannot make eye contact or smile and greet a stranger in a coffee shop without them engaging you in a deep conversation.
This is my life. I am a healer. Each time a stranger tells me something deeply personal, I have a chance to give them the gift of being heard. Not all of my healing work has to take place in my office. To be a healer is my nature, and I can't turn that off just because I am not "at work". Sometimes people just need to be heard, and that is enough for healing to begin. I believe that one of my purposes in the world is to give people this gift of being seen and heard, to know that someone cares, even if that person is a complete stranger.
I do need alone time to recharge, and I have to truly isolate myself if I want quiet time. Those are the days when I take to the woods for a long walk, or schedule time for myself to do Yoga Nidra in my office. I choose to keep myself open because it allows me to help others. I will spend my life learning about what it means to walk the line between having soft boundaries and gently but firmly standing in my power. That's okay with me. What a dull life it would be if I thought I already knew everything.
This was recently said to me by someone in a professional setting and it did not feel good to me. Mainly I felt caught off-guard because the comment did not fit what I expected for a professional setting. I did not know how to respond, and it didn't help that the rational part of my brain was thinking, "I actually weigh less than when I last saw this person, but my breasts have gotten bigger. Maybe bigger breasts makes me look bigger overall? I hope she doesn't think I got a breast augmentation surgery."
So here I was, logically stepping through the rationale behind this comment, the way that I would approach a scientific problem, realizing that I had no emotional response to being told I was bigger and feeling happy about that, while the other person was clearly waiting for a response. I was unable to understand why I looked bigger if I am in fact not, and I was also unable to recover from my surprise in order to respond gracefully. I am not even going to pretend like I said something profound. I babbled and then abruptly began talking about business.
I don't spend time thinking about my weight. The only reason I even knew that I had lost weight was because I had gotten weighed at my annual physical and then again when I went to get my PPD placement. Looking back, I can see that I was just surprised that someone else felt like it was appropriate to comment on my weight when I pay so little mind to it. Also, it felt like way too personal a comment to make to me at work!
I want to make it clear that I am not writing this to call anyone out. Many people feel free to make personal comments about my body and certainly weight is one of the most common, so for anyone who thinks that this is a reference to them, it's probably not. The other thing most frequently commented upon is my hair, which is undeniably Afro and uncontrollable even in the least humid weather. For people who are not close to me, it is probably hard to understand why I can't bring myself to worry about my weight. I never weigh myself. It seems like our culture believes the biggest complement that can be given is to tell someone they have lost a lot of weight. I don't have any interest in measuring my self-worth by what numbers are on a scale, and the people closest to me understand why. Shortly after giving birth to my son, I went through five years of illness, weighing less than most 12-year-olds, being unable to eat a full meal without excruciating pain. You can read my healing story here:
http://michelleshealthrevolutionblog.weebly.com/the-daily-ayurveda/myhealing-story.
When I was healed through my personal Ayurvedic practice, I was so grateful to be healthy that I promised myself I would go through the rest of my life loving my body. I promised that for the rest of my life,my only goal for my body would only be health, and that whatever shape that would take, I would love - not accept or tolerate, but love. I felt like I had wasted too much of my youth worrying about whether or not I was "fat". Too many of us waste time worrying about what size we are and how to stay that size, and we miss out on all of the joy our bodies can bring us. My approach to loving my body is to eat seasonal and whole foods, exercise and meditate daily, and live my life. I am thrilled, by the way, to have a primary care physician who respects me as an Ayurvedic practitioner, and who works with me as a partner. I am healthy by all medical measures, happy in my body, I feel powerful, and I help others heal every day. I have a joyful life that I am grateful for.
Getting back to the topic of surprising conversations, it has been brought to my attention as I have discussed these types of incidents with fellow healers that I have "soft boundaries". What they mean by this is that we all are subconsciously attuned to each other. We get impressions of one another based on an energetic conversation that is happening underneath every social interaction. Some people project a "dominating" vibe that everyone picks up on. These "dominating" types don't get any sass. Their presence is intimidating even when they are at their happiest, and people usually respond by giving these types respect and authority. By contrast, I project a "calm and yielding" energy, which people likewise pick up on without consciously realizing it. I have noticed that this energy has the dual effect of making people more open with me and also making me a target for dominating energy types. I have had many colleagues recommend that I present a colder energy, not joking around with patients, not allowing text and email communication between appointments. I get their point about my openness making it easier for people to think of me as a friend than a healthcare provider, but I also know that one of the reasons so many people come to see me is that I put them at ease. I do personally care about each person who comes into my office and I want them to know that. My goal is to maintain high standards of professional ethics while also providing a personal touch that I believe is missing from the healthcare system in our country.
As a healer, it is a great asset to have people be so effortlessly open with me about their struggles, their emotions, and their life experiences. As a human being who enjoys feeling respected, my having soft boundaries can present challenges at the personal and professional levels. I have had to put a lot of work into understanding when it is important for me to have stronger boundaries. One example of creating stronger boundaries for me has been to clearly delineate work time from family time, and to carve out time for self-care into my daily schedule. Before I learned the importance of having these boundaries, I let my work life bleed into my home life, answering text messages, emails, and voicemails at all hours because I genuinely do care so much for the people with whom I work. However, letting work bleed into family life gives one's family the impression that they are less important than one's job. My creation of stronger boundaries has enabled me to have a healthy professional life, a richer family life, and time for the self-nurturing that I recommend to all my patients. Having strong boundaries is also important in personal interactions, because having soft boundaries and yielding energy can easily lead to being dominated in personal relationships. It is important to understand and learn to recognize the moments when soft boundaries and compassion for others come into conflict with compassion for self and self-care. Although in the moment these things may seem like they're in conflict, in fact by taking care of ourselves we are able to be better examples of love and compassion in the world.
People tend to say things to me that are intensely personal and usually quite surprising. I can be in line at the grocery store and the complete stranger in line next to me will turn to me out of the blue and tell me intimate details of her life. Or, I might be at a party and after being introduced to a new person, this individual begins to tell me a traumatic story of how their marriage is falling apart. I believe that this openness that people sense in me is a gift. It may not seem like it to others, and many people have told me so. Imagine a life where you cannot make eye contact or smile and greet a stranger in a coffee shop without them engaging you in a deep conversation.
This is my life. I am a healer. Each time a stranger tells me something deeply personal, I have a chance to give them the gift of being heard. Not all of my healing work has to take place in my office. To be a healer is my nature, and I can't turn that off just because I am not "at work". Sometimes people just need to be heard, and that is enough for healing to begin. I believe that one of my purposes in the world is to give people this gift of being seen and heard, to know that someone cares, even if that person is a complete stranger.
I do need alone time to recharge, and I have to truly isolate myself if I want quiet time. Those are the days when I take to the woods for a long walk, or schedule time for myself to do Yoga Nidra in my office. I choose to keep myself open because it allows me to help others. I will spend my life learning about what it means to walk the line between having soft boundaries and gently but firmly standing in my power. That's okay with me. What a dull life it would be if I thought I already knew everything.