Sonya Renee Taylor - Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook

Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook

Copyright 2021 by Sonya Renee Taylor

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First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-9116-4

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9117-1

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-9118-8

2021-1

Book producer: PeopleSpeak; Interior designer: Beverly Butterfield, Girl of the West Productions; Cover designer: Irene Morris; Illustrator: Natalie Banaszczyk

This workbook is dedicated to

Anastasia Duchess

10.07.0704.04.20
One of my most
important teachers about the
unapologetic embodiment
of radical self-love

CONTENTS

Hi. I am so glad you are here. I am not sure how you got here; perhaps you read my book The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. Maybe you follow me on social media or saw a video of me blabbering on about this radical self-love thing. Either way, welcome. I am excited to be part of this particular journey with you. I believe with the entirety of my being that radical self-love is a pathway to a richer, more miraculous, fecund, joyful life. It is a power-wielding practice that can uproot oppression and grow equity, justice, and compassion on a global scale. Yup. I believe radical self-love does all that. Its the coconut oil of social change! Unfortunately, accessing the earth-shifting influence of radical self-love is about as easy as accessing the core of a coconut with a baby spoon. Quarrying the magic of this force will take both personal and collective effort. It will take some work.

I once read somewhere that faith without works is dead (or is it the other way around?). While I may not agree with the dead part, I think we can all concur that anything done without consistent practice will be hard to master. Living by a radical self-love ethos will require more of us than posting Instagram memes and personal platitudes. Radical self-love is an action practice. When you dedicate yourself to this work, you will have to invest in a radical self-love routine, examining how you currently operate and creating new patterns of behavior to replace old body-shame operations, which will ultimately give way to a radically new way of being. This endeavor is what will be needed to take our will and power back from those who help cultivate and then profit off our discontentment and disconnection with our own divine beings. This is the work we must do if we wish to beat back the bounty hunters of the Body-Shame Profit Complex and the institutional structures of body terrorism.

Unlike the grueling labor under a system of capitalism, radical self-love invites you to keep the profit of your labor and to willingly watch its overflow rush over all the areas of your life, filling others with a comparable sense of possibility and love. Now that is the kind of work that pays off. Your radical self-love journey restores your relationship with the most influential person in your life: you.

Rediscovering intimacy and connection with a body you may have been on the outs with for decades may feel awkward at first. You may even find that the bullhorn of body shame gets louder initially. Do not fret, friend. Every living thing fights to stay alive, and the Body-Shame Profit Complex and systems of body terrorism are very much alive in each of us. Those systems of self-loathing and internalized oppression may get downright nasty as you move to compost their waste into the nutrient-rich soil of your new life. That response is natural and common.

What I would like you to let seep into the whole of your heart is that your inherent sense of radical self-love has fought to stay alive as well. It is why you are here, pulling up the weeds of body shame and reclaiming the right to live unapologetically in your body today. Go forth with great faith and courage, my dear. Your journey home to you is more than deserved. I also want to let you in on a little secret. I know how this story ends. Psst: radical self-love wins.

I hate rules! Consequently, I will not offer many, but I would like to propose some guidance as you journey through this workbook. Each tool and activity is meant to build on the tools that came before it, so there is value in starting at the beginning and working your way to the end. However, I also trust that if you are being led to start in the middle, there is a reason that is specific to you, and I encourage you to trust your inner guidance. There is no prize for completing all the activities in the shortest amount of time. In fact, speeding through the activities will likely make them less impactful and limit the space needed to truly integrate the ideas into your being. Be patient and gentle with yourself. When you notice resistance to any of the ideas or exercises, practice lovingly sitting with the resistance. Ask it what it wants you to know. Allow it to become a child whispering a precious secret in your ear. Receive it as important information for your radical self-love journey. Be with the resistance until it releases into willingness.