Discover The Wisdom of Your Eating Patterns Through Drawing Your Body's Story

Lying down on a human sized piece of paper and having your body shape be outlined with a marker is an interesting experience.

It was my first year of Graduate School for my Masters in Body Psychotherapy. One day in class, our teacher took out a human sized roll of paper. We each had to lie down on the paper and a piece was cut to our height. We then had to pair off and lie down on the paper and have the other person outline our body with a marker.

When I got up, I thought, "Yup. There I am. I've seen that shadow a million times."

Next, markers, colored pencils, and pens were brought out to choose what we wanted to draw on our body with. The activity was to draw our body's story visually. Draw on your scars physically and emotionally. If we wore something every day, draw it on there. At the time, I had been wearing a necklace I made myself out of black string that was tied tight around my neck. As I drew a black dark line across my neck I started to tear up.

I knew I had been holding my voice back for a long time. This was expressed through my relationship with food. The more I didn't speak up, the more complicated my relationship with food became. To see it drawn onto my body as literal and figurative brought new awareness I didn't have before. Why did I choose to wear such a tight necklace around my neck? How was it another external tactic to try to keep everything I needed and wanted to express inside? How did it make taking in and receiving my physical and emotional nourishment more difficult? It was time to take the necklace off.

At that point, I had been wearing this necklace for years. Later that night, I took out a pair of scissors, and while looking in the mirror, I cut the cord. I rubbed my neck with my hands and felt my body viscerally relax. I had no idea that wearing this necklace was sparking such a stress response in my body. I cried. My body had been wanting and waiting for this. It was one small step on the journey to stop holding back my body from expressing itself and letting me know what it needed and what didn't work for it. It was one small step toward releasing food from the responsibility of stuffing down or numbing out from truths wanting to be heard.

There were many other things that were drawn onto my body that ultimately guided me in different ways of what parts of me maybe needed more attention that my relationship with food had been distracting me from. A black dark hole in my gut, a crying heart, two lines drawn where I had to have hernia surgery when I was 6 weeks old.

Visually seeing my body's story gave me non-verbal information around what needed to be attended to and loved up.

This is an activity you can do as well to begin to cultivate awareness around what your food habits and patterns have been protecting you from and the parts of you that may still be holding onto past intense experiences you have been through. To make this exercise easier, you can simply draw an outline of a human on a piece of paper or you can search online, outline of a human, and print one out. Then, you can start with what you can visually see. For example, I have a mole on the right side of my neck and a scar on the bottom of my foot. You can start to draw these things on that you can see externally. You can add as many details as you want like your hair or your eyebrows or the unique shape of your eyes. Then, move on to what you can't see. This might be reflecting on memories you have had with your body. Things that you feel internally but perhaps cannot see externally. Did you break a bone? Were you in an unsupportive relationship at one point in time? Do you struggle with pain or digestive issues or have intense feelings about a certain body part? Visually draw these things onto your body in any way you want to represent them.

As you complete drawing your body's story visually, notice where the most emotions or sensations show up around certain things that you have drawn. These are the areas that are needing your attention. These are the parts of your body that are holding onto something that is waiting to be digested, processed, and assimilated. What is being held in these parts of your body is the reason your food behaviors got created to begin with to protect you. Be gentle with yourself in these explorations. Change starts with cultivating awareness and you get to hang out with that awareness for as long as you need to.

You can email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime to set up a free 20 minute Connect Call and feel free to take a picture of your drawing and send it to me!