Maria Mar’s intimate confessions

Dialogue in front of the Mirror 

In the shamanic lore, an actress or performer is a shapeshifter. She wears the mask, becoming the mask. She enacts different realities, becoming those realities. She takes the shapes of the community’s disease or problem and then shifts that disease back into harmony. As an actress, I am a shapeshifter.

But for many years, I was a Shadow Shapeshifter. I changed my shape to fit an ideal, other-defined image of what my body was supposed to be. In our society, this condition is also known as the yo-yo syndrome or the binge-diet polarity. As an actress, I suffered a brutal pressure to constantly diet and lose weight. I not only had to be thin. I had to be super-thin. During my training as a Woman of Power, I healed from my Shadow Shapeshifting. I became a huntress and tracked down the Shadows ―or fear-based defensive Inner Selves― that kept me running from one extreme to the other of the Yo-yo syndrome.

Now my body is changing again, and I am once again having a dialogue in front of the mirror. Though, judging from the multitude of voices participating, this could be seen more like a town meeting than a dialogue.

Confronting our body-image and our body in the mirror is a delicate balancing act. There are voices that result from a Domestication process that shames women’s bodies. Our body is who we are. It is an expression of our Essence, our nature and our way of life. When our society makes women’s bodies into a mask, it erases the woman and creates a war between the woman inside and the body that reflects that woman. When this happens, we try to control our body to express what others want us to be, and resent what our body REALLY is, what it truly expresses. Our Essence is invisible behind that Body Mask. This unnatural state of affairs creates inhuman stress and self-alienation in a woman.

Nevertheless, sometimes our body is trying to tell us something, and we need to listen. So here I am, facing once again my image in the mirror. There are however, essential differences this time.

1. I love and like myself.
2. I know those voices and the histories and fears behind them.
3. I am not attached to any of those voices. I know they are just beliefs that I inherited and aspects of my totality. They are part of me, but they are not me.
4. I see myself with my own eyes.

I want to share this dialogue with you. At the end, I offer two Tasks of Power that have helped me and others to address similar situation.

MARIA: My body is changing and I don’t like what I see.

SACRED WITNESS: You body is always changing. Your body changes because you change. Therefore, what you are seeing in this mirror is the change that is happening in your life now. 

LA FLACA* (ANOREXIC SELF): You are fat! You’ve always been fat! And now you are FATTER!

MARIA: Fat is a label. You see me with borrowed eyes. I have seen you looking at exuberant women and judging them, like you judge me. You are a victim of other’s opinions. If you have nothing else but labels to tell me, I will not listen to you. I will, however listen to Grace. 

LA GORDA* (FATSO): Don’t listen to her! She is a compulsive mad woman. All she cares about is how men see her. How thin she is so that she can wear whatever is fashionable. How sexy she looks. She is hollow!

MARIA: You are another polarity. Don’t think that you fool me for a second. You are not me, either. You are a hermit who wants to hide behind layers of fat and isolation because you don’t want to face the world.

LA GORDA: You bet I don’t! I write beautiful stories and plays. I put together powerful performances. I do art. I am multi-talented. But what do all that people care about? How much my waist measures! It’s disgusting!

LA FLACA: YOU don’t do performances. If I left it to you, you wouldn’t move, you couch potato, you fat ass!

My SACRED WITNESS begins deep, slow breathing. My whole body is breathing. I feel sadness that these aspects of my Sacred Self are trapped in this polarity. I feel compassion for myself. I also feel free from either polarity.

MARIA: Anyone insulting anyone is a Shadow, and I will not do as you bid because you talk from fear and talk in extremes. If you have something to tell me that I need to hear, you better speak with honest feelings and say your truth without putting anyone else’s down.

LA FLACA: Okay, sorry. What I was trying to say is that I am the performer. I want to be thin so that you can perform well.

MARIA: That is a false belief. I don’t have to be thin to perform well. I am an excellent performer, with great expressivity and flexibility. I don’t have to be THIN to do anything. Actually, I am NOT thin and I am not interested in being THIN.

LA GORDA: See what I tell you? She’s obsessed.

SACRED WITNESS: Call Grace.

I begin breathing again. I call Grace. Grace is the healthy aspect of La Flaca. She is my performer.

GRACE: I am sad.

MARIA: Why?

GRACE: You have not rehearsed for a long time. I want to dance. I need to move. You keep me locked in this house, and I need to dance into the world.

SACRED WITNESS: Look at your body now. What do you see, with Grace’s eyes?

I see that my solar plexus is congested. It has pent-up energy. I am a shelf. I am putting my dance and my grace in a shelf, and it’s not going out into the world.

GRACE: Yes! That’s what’s happening.

MARIA: I know. But right now, I am concentrating on getting all of this business tasks done, for our prosperity, and in writing the book. It’s so hard to take out twelve hours a week to rehearse!

VIVIAN (MY SOUL-VOICE): That is an excuse. There are no excuses. Only choices. I am losing form.

MARIA: What do you mean? Are you saying that I’m out of shape? Coming from you, that’s surprising!

VIVIAN and FIFI (My Sexual Self): No. What we want is to keep our form. We have a form. Our form is who we are. You are not listening. You are losing the form of who we are. It’s not about weight or being thin. We are not happy in your body!

SACRED WITNESS: Listen to your body in breath.

As I do, I begin to feel that I am a closed book. My solar plexus and the upper stomach area are cluttered, like a thick book whose knowledge is locked. I feel very sad and begin to cry.

SACRED WITNESS: You cannot place yourself on hold. For many months now, you have placed yourself on hold. By doing this, you have created disease and imbalance in this body. You ARE the book you are writing. You write it with your life. You cannot forget yourself in order to write for others.

This impacts me deeply. I feel the truth of this in my soul and my bones.

MARIA: What can I do? I can’t do 12 hours of rehearsal a week, like I usually do. It’s not possible for now. It’s too cold to do speed-walking in the park.

SACRED WITNESS: You don’t have a lot of time, but you can take out 30 minutes a day. You like weight-lifting. It is very good for your menopausal health. It builds muscles, which brings you back into your natural form. It helps your heart be strong and lowers high blood pressure. You can do weight-lifting three times a week, for half an hour each day, instead of the usual long rehearsals.

LA GORDA: Ah, no! There you go into compulsion. Aerobics. What kind of Sacred Witness are you? You are an accomplice to LA FLACA! I protest!

MARIA: Weight-lifting is not aerobics. Aerobics are not necessarily a compulsion. I am not doing this to be THIN. You need to let go of your fear of being visible in your power and beauty. You create stagnation in my body because of lack of movement. You stop the circulation of life in my being. Haven’t you realized that your obsession with avoiding exercise is another form of compulsion?

SACRED WITNESS: Everyone has spoken now. More words are just Shadow Games. What does your body need? What can you do that will return you to balance? It is time for choice and action.

MARIA: Yes, I can do weight lifting more consistently, instead of the rehearsals. But I can keep the stretches by doing only half of the Dancing the Bones routine Tuesday and Thursdays.

SACRED WITNESS: That sounds good. If you stop working by 6PM, then you can do this from 6PM to 7PM, before you eat. This helps you not to overwork and to return to your body at the end of the day. This sounds good. How does it feel?

I breath again deep into my body. I am feeling at peace. My body is feeling light, energetic and joyful.

MARIA: It’s a deal!

TWO ACTS OF POWER

Holy Communion

EATING EMPOWERMENT 

Our relationship with food needs to be healed. I share with you a powerful spiritual revelation I had in my Healing Journey.

Jesus Christ in the Last Supper raised the bread towards the sky and said: “This is my body.” Then he raised the wine and said, “This is my blood.” He said to do this in his name. Each time we did this, we would be receiving his body and blood.”

In the Catholic Church, this has given birth to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. But I saw in my soul that Holy Communion is not limited to that sacred moment. Each time we eat, we are performing a sacred communion with the energy of Life Mother and Earth Mother.

To eat with this awareness, to bless the food and give thanks to the food, is a powerful shift in your relationship to the act of eating. I created a prayer for the moment of eating. I further developed the prayer by telling the food what I want it to become in my body. This is how my eating prayer looks like:

“I bless this food with love, gratitude and joy. Thank You!”

I welcome you into my body.

Inside me, you become health, strength, stamina, harmony, grace, joy and dance!”

Try it. Mean it. Know that your words send a clear intent to your mind and to each atom in each organ.

Body Metaphors

BODY-IMAGE EMPOWERMENT

We talk about body image. But it is fascinating to see that the body itself is an image. It is the metaphoric expression of your life. You can have a dialogue with that metaphor.

1. Look at your body in front of a mirror. Find a part or aspect of your body that you like, that you feel beautiful. It could be the shape of your face, your breasts or your legs. Contemplate this part of your body as a work of art, a metaphor, a poem. What does it say about you and your life? Write it as an Ode.

Example:

Oh, my generous breasts!

My voluptuous breasts!

You are large and bountiful.

You have to be.

Only in such abundance

could my generous heart fill at home.

2. Look again at your body in the mirror. Find something that you don’t like, that seems out of balance or out of place with the rest of your body. Contemplate this part of your body again as an art, a metaphor. What is it saying about the way you are living? Work the metaphor until a poem comes out.

Example:

The sensuality of my hips

is a mirror to the exuberance of my breasts.

Venus dances in the waters below

and is reflected in the sky above.

Who dams the flow?

Who closes the waters?

Who breaks the mirror?

What joy is locked away?

What bridge is closed?

I can no longer put myself in hold.

I am the book, and it must now be opened.

――――――――

* NOTE: La flaca means The Thin one in Spanish. That’s the name for my Anorexic Self. La Gorda means the Fat One. That is the name for my Overeating Self. These two Inner Selves are polarities from my Yo-Yo syndrome, a condition that took over most of my young adult life. You get an idea about how different personalities they are if you realized that during these years I had two wardrobes, and I swung between wearing small sizes and wearing large sizes, so that I wore one or the other wardrobe. There was no middle ground. It was a battle inside me!