9781626569768

depends on your amnesia for its survival. Our singular focus in this chapter
is to help you practice the third Peace. Making peace with your body is not
about finding some obscure pathway to the peninsula of “liking my thighs.”
Making peace with your body is about awakening to who you have always
been: the physical, spiritual, and energetic manifestation of radical selflove.
Together, we will disrupt decades of tired body-shame practices using
the only map we ever needed for this journey: a map back to ourselves.
Body terrorism is a hideous tower whose primary support beam is the
belief that there is a hierarchy of bodies. We uphold the system by
internalizing this hierarchy and using it to situate our own value and worth
in the world. When our personal value is dependent on the lesser value of
other bodies, radical self-love is unachievable. By this point, my hope is
that you can see how you and millions of others have been manipulated into
a system of body shame. More importantly, I want you to know that this
system is destructible, and the fastest way to obliterate its control over us is
to do the scary work of tearing down those pillars of hierarchy inside
ourselves. At the same time, we must trust that what will be left standing is
our own divine enoughness, absent of any need for comparison.
Radical Reflection
Theodore Roosevelt is famously quoted as saying, “Comparison is the
thief of Joy.” He was totally right! Go get your joy back!
Living a radical self-love life is a process of de-indoctrination. It
demands that we look unflinchingly at our current set of beliefs about
ourselves and the world and get willing to explore them. I call this the act of
being fear-facing. Fear-facingness is not the absence of fear but the
interrogation of it. While agonizing over the completion of this book, I
spent some time emptying my brain at a friend’s home on a private beach in
Long Island, Bahamas. The island was slow and kind, like a good
grandfather. During one of our excursions we drove westward, down miles
of crumbled, unforgiving asphalt, until we arrived at a small beach. The
sign at the edge of the road read, “Warning. Dean’s Hole is the deepest in