Welcome to the Postpartum Matters Village
Celebrating the equinox, getting naked and examining body image
Hello my loves,
I hope you’re doing okay and finding your feet with the changing seasons.
This post will be the first of a series which will go out once a month. It is a re-envisioned newsletter, carried over from the pre-Substack days where I ran The Postpartum Village.
The Postpartum Village was an online membership. I would check in with members once a fortnight, sharing a topic or a prompt along with my personal reflections and an invitation to share and connect over on WhatsApp. It was an awful lot of work and something I struggled to keep on top of after opening The Women’s Health Hub but it was also really beautiful and I’d love to build something similar - albeit more sustainable - over here.
So, at the end of every month, I plan to share with you a prompt or a topic that generally relates to my own experience of womanhood/ living in the world as it is today. And I will open up a thread - you can find todays here - for us to share our light bulb moments and key takeaways with each other. I’d love to use this to build community and to support each other from this online space.
So you can get a flavour of what I am going on about, I’m opening this first post up to everyone, however this series will usually be for paid subscribers only - so please consider updating your subscription1.
I like to start each online circle by pulling a couple of oracle cards, to hold us together and ground us into the space. Please use these as you see fit - as stand alone things, as something to keep in mind as you reflect on today’s theme or just as pretty cards which you promptly ignore! There is no way you can do any of this wrong, it’s all just gentle invitations and ways into inspiration and intuition.
Our two cards today were pulled from the Work Your Light Oracle by Rebecca Campbell and The Sacred Cycles oracle by Jill Pyle & Em Dewey. I love both of these decks and use them all of the time - highly recommend!
The words that jumped out at me most from the guidebook for Pleiades were…
You are a soul who has a double mission: To grow at soul level and to raise the vibration of the planet. If you have been called to write, speak, or channel, this is your sign to keep doing it… Your presence and unique light is needed.”
To me, this feels like the invitation we all need to speak our truth here together. I know it can feel scary to share, particularly in a new and familiar way, but I hope you do know how needed and valued your voice is in this world.
I wonder how this card, and the accompanying words landed for you? You are so welcome to share in this weeks thread or in the comments below.
The words for the lunar eclipse card also felt perfect for today’s theme, and I hope they will hold you well through this process…
“I embrace my shadows…
You are being called to get familiar with your shadows. The time has come to root out any lingering or ‘stuck’ energy, limiting beliefs, or old stories that may keep you stagnant or playing small… Your Sacred Body is asking you to release these…
Let them go and allow yourself to be free.”
Today’s theme is all around body image.
The internal image we hold of our own body - and the things we make that mean about us - but also the images we have of other bodies, our kids maybe, or our neighbours. As well as asking - where has this image of the ideal body came from? And who’s voice is it telling me how I should or shouldn’t look?
My own personal body image is something I have been really struggling with on some level for my whole life, but it has became a much bigger issue over the last couple years. As my body has shifted through a second pregnancy, a difficult postpartum recovery and the development of chronic pelvic pain, so too, my body has shifted further and further away from being ‘straight sized’ and my clothes have gotten bigger and bigger. With that comes a slow, sliding loss of thin privilege, a subsequent increase in anxiety and a personal increase of volume and persistence of the ‘diet culture’ voice in my head.
I’ve wanted to write about this here for a while because I think it’s a battle we all face, as women+, as we have been conditioned and brought up as girls into adulthood. But I have also been mindful that, whilst in a slightly larger body, I am certainly not what anyone would consider obese (if we all accept that BMI is dog shit) and I don’t want to try and insert my voice in any kind of fat liberation space2.
So I think opening it up as a topic of shared reflection and discussion feels more helpful.
Because, what I have realised - in my logical, thinking mind, which I have to keep reminding the other parts of me - is that the way I feel actually has nothing to do with the size of my body.
I know this for certain because these are thoughts that I have had at varying body shapes and sizes.
These thoughts have nothing to do with what my body actually looks like.
They also mean nothing about me as a person.
They mean nothing about my overall health.
The size of my body also has nothing to do with my overall health.
So, why does it feel like such a personal failing when the size of the dress or the number on the scale doesn’t match up with what you think it should be in your head?
This theme is at least partially inspired by attending The North East Skinny Dip this weekend. Running into the North sea, completely naked, alongside 1000+ other naked bodies of all ages, shapes and sizes makes you see how completely bollocks and made up the whole thing is.
So, prompts for us all to consider
Pick one, pick several - journal them out privately or chat about them with a friend, whatever works best for you.
And I would so love it so much if you wanted to bring these to the thread I have set up for this session
How do you feel about your body? What words do you most often use to describe it/ yourself and are these representative of what others would use to describe you?
What beliefs do you hold around your body and do you extend these beliefs to others? (for example, I struggle massively in my larger body whilst knowingly admiring women of a similar size)
If you do hold onto more negative ideals around your body, how do you feel about that? Do you want to let go of it? How do we go about that?
How has your body image/ opinion shifted through time, with age and knowledge and experience? Has this correlated with shifts in body size or is it separate? (for example, I can remember having quite a negative body image even when my body was much smaller)
Where did all of this come from for you - where were you, how old were you, who told you your body shape and size was something you needed to even consider?
Does any of it matter and, if not, how can we all learn to let go of this pressure to match the thin ideal?
How can we better show up and support those in the fat liberation movement and tackle anti-fat bias as a society?
Maybe the theme of body image takes your mind elsewhere - feel free to follow that thread instead and share it with the rest of us.
See you over in the thread,
Zoe xx
A complementary subscription is available to anyone who cannot financially afford to become a paid subscriber - no questions asked. Please do let me know and I can sort that out for you.
There are some AMAZING people writing about anti-fat bias, diet culture and all the rest of it here on Substack.
& are two of my favourites currently but there are definitely loads more to explore too.
I’m 100% with you on this one Zoe. I’ve recently uploaded 95% of my wardrobe on Vinted because I cannot fit in to any of my clothes anymore. In a way this feels really therapeutic - like a fresh start, a new identity. I’m not the woman I was pre-babies. But there’s also the sadness that my body isn’t in that smaller size anymore - and it’s ok to grieve that, but important to realise that the sadness comes from equating thinness with worth and success, which obviously comes from a BS diet culture!
There’s still too much pressure on women to “bounce back” after having babies, and society makes you feel like a failure if you never fit back in to those jeans again!!! I had to do a lot of re-learning and healing my relationship with food and body image after I became a mum (and once I realised that diets don’t actually work!)
I’d highly recommend the book “the f**k it diet” by Caroline Dooner.
Sending love and solidarity xxx