Embodied Self-Love, Practicing Fierce Self-Compassion

Welcome to my first blog post! I plan on posting once a month—the first Wednesday of the month—with a therapist’s musings on mental health on the mats. Thank you for joining me on this journey!

It took me some time to decide on what I wanted to write about for the first blog post. I oscillated between a generic “benefits of martial arts,” something more specific but clinical like “grounding strategies in martial arts,” or maybe looking at the parallels between the role of a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy practitioner and a therapist-coach. These will be future topics, for sure (because I’m a nerd), but I decided to start with something more personal, a turning point for me in my relationship with my body represented and embodied in something seemingly very small in martial arts practice: the act of wrapping my hands.

Me wrapping my hands in Connection Martial Art’s studio

Before I get into that, I need to explain what led up to it. For many years, I had experienced trauma in sport, on top of challenges at home. This wasn’t a single incident trauma like a car crash or a mugging, but prolonged and chronic trauma within relationships with the people who were supposed to keep me safe in my sport—my coaches.

It made me question myself; it made it hard for me to develop a sense of identity; it made me avoidant in relationships; it ignited the spark of out-of-control perfectionism as I tried to control something in my life. I struggled with anorexia nervosa, compulsive over-exercise, anxiety, and depression. I believed that I had to work harder, deprive myself more, punish myself, because I was not as worthy as other people—I was inferior, so I had to make up for it. My relationship with my eating disorder (collectively manifesting in my relationships with food, my body, and exercise) was akin to an abusive relationship. In fact, in one of the poems I wrote during one of the more intense stages of the illness, I called my eating disorder “an abusive lover.”

I don’t live like this now. I have learned to love and appreciate my body for what it can do and the rest it needs. I have learned to exercise not because I feel like I have to, but because I want to—I love the way it makes my body feel, I love the flow states I can fall into, and I love the adventure of doing new things. I also love the self-compassion I have learned to view my body with, and the new perspective I have on life in general. In letting go of the idea that I could control everything about my body, I have found a freedom within myself I never thought I would experience. There are certainly still hard days—days where I find myself obsessing over the scale, days where the urge to restrict or over-exercise are particularly strong—but I can tolerate this distress now. It doesn’t send me into a spiral like it used to, and I am very quickly able to ground myself with the skills I’ve learned through my own therapy and treatment (even though I was the quintessential ‘resistant client’ until I found martial arts. I apologize to all the professionals along the way who had to deal with me lol. But that’s another story.)

How did this shift? With many moments building up over time to culminate in a realization that I was able to feel in my body. In other words, this realization wasn’t just cognitive, it was something I was able to embody, to really believe. These seemingly small moments—my instructor in Taekwon-Do, during one of my very early classes, encouraging his students to listen to their bodies in class; my kickboxing coach telling me that everyone has a different style of fighting, and personalizing training for my style and what I was good at—in these moments, I felt SEEN. These moments built over time until I was able to see myself, until I was able to feel safe in my body, until I was able to believe that my body was worth being taken care of. This is what brings me to wrapping my hands.

For me, wrapping my hands was a profound shift in how I viewed my body and my relationship to it. It was an act of routine that signalled to me that it was time to leave the outside world outside, and to focus on being in the present moment on the mats. It was also a profound act of embodied self-care. In sports, I had never thought to take care of my body. The opposite was encouraged, in fact—”no pain, no gain,” keep pushing, keep working, always strive higher. This was what was taught to me. I once competed in a soccer tournament on a sprained ankle. It still gets really stiff in the cold.

Wrapping my hands was me taking care of my body, and of—for the first time in my life—feeling powerful in it. Very immediately, I was able to draw a connection between taking care of my body (by wrapping my hands) and feeling more powerful in it (because I could hit harder with hand wraps). It created the association in my mind of taking care of my body leading to better performance. In my experience and in what I had been taught, it was abusing my body (e.g., restricting calories, rigid workout regimes, denial of things that brought me pleasure, ignoring and pushing through injuries, etc.) that got results—or at least got the comments and accolades from others based on our distorted and disordered societal standards.

Wrapping my hands became an act of mindfulness, and a radical act of embodied self-love that I practiced every time I stepped onto the mats. It became my act of resistance against the harmful narratives in our society about fitness. In her new book, “Fierce Self-Compassion,” Kristin Neff introduces the concept of fierce self-compassion. She defines it as involving:

. . . ‘acting in the world’ to alleviate suffering. It tends to involve protecting, providing for, and motivating ourselves. Sometimes we need to stand tall and say no, draw boundaries, or fight injustice. . . And if we’re stuck in a bad situation or habits that are harmful, it means doing something different. Not because we’re unacceptable as we are, but because we care.”

Wrapping my hands is me doing something different. It is me fighting the injustice of harmful fitness narratives. In a world that tells us that we have to be a certain way to be accepted, I stand up against that by taking care of myself, symbolized and embodied by wrapping my hands.

How do you embody self-love in martial arts? How do you practice fierce self-compassion on the mats?

Thanks for making it this far!

See you on the mats.

Nicole