The Woman's Belly Book: Finding Your True Center for More Energy, Confidence, and Pleasure

PRAISE FOR THE WOMAN’S BELLY BOOK

"Lisa Sarasohn is one of the most authentic individuals I have ever known — she lives what she believes. Her message of ‘celebration’ infuses her teaching, her writing, and her relationships. The Woman’s Belly Book is the perfect antidote to the media’s mission to keep us all buffed, botoxed, and brainless. This book is a terrific resource."

— Adrienne Ressler, MA, LMSW,

national training director of the Renfrew Center Foundation

This warm and friendly book is filled with womb wisdom, belly laughs, gut feelings, and pelvic power. It is a guide to buried treasure. I recommend it highly.

— Susun S. Weed, author of

New Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way

Here is a chance to fill your belly with a banquet of delicious, wholesome advice and inspiration for empowerment and self-esteem. Enjoy!

— Donna Henes, author of

The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife

"We desperately need new insights and tools to begin to appreciate, honor, and nourish our core essence and physical being. Many other books inspire us to ‘talk the talk’ of making peace with our bodies, but The Woman’s Belly Book shows us how to ‘walk the walk.’ "

— Margo Maine, PhD, author of

The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to Be Perfect

A lovely, wise, and illuminating book that helps women celebrate our bodies and our vital centers. A much-needed antidote to advertising that often makes women anxious about our bodies.

— Jean Kilbourne, EdD, author of

Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel

"The Woman’s Belly Book is for every woman who has ever stood in front of her mirror, sucking in her belly, wishing to be different. Lisa teaches us how to cherish the power center within us with a wealth of exercises, modern science, and wisdom from ancient cultures."

— Lavinia Plonka, author of

What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to Courageous Living

"The Woman’s Belly Book stimulated a powerful spiritual awakening in me. I became more aware of the spiritual energy available to me. I learned to relax and enjoy my body rather than feeling restricted by it. Viewing my body and my sexuality as sacred greatly enhanced my visceral connection with the source of universal love. Lisa’s exercises and words are powerful medicine, graceful and inspiring."

— Elizabeth Fisher, author of

Rise Up and Call Her Name: A Woman-Honoring Journey

into Global Earth-Based Spiritualities

"The Woman’s Belly Book is a blazing trail home to a woman’s power, self-esteem, creativity, sexual energy, self-love, and respect for her own beauty. Brilliantly, Lisa opens the veil to women’s mysteries, to a place that every woman possesses but hardly dares to venture. Lisa will show you how to honor yourself here and be gentle with what surfaces. The Woman’s Belly Book is a treasure map to finding and honoring the wisdom deep in you. Let’s go mining for truth down there! Are you ready?" — ALisa Starkweather, founder of the Women’s Belly & Womb Conference

As a researcher and clinician who has spent years trying to help ‘solve’ women’s weight concerns, it’s clear to me that it’s not another diet or exercise plan that’s going to save us. But check out Lisa Sarasohn’s winning prescription, helpful for women of all sizes and shapes: drop the negative judgment and celebrate your belly. Finally, a solution — and one that also honors the earth and our community!

— Linda Bacon, PhD, nutrition researcher, University of California, Davis

LISA SARAHON

NEW WORLD LIBRARY

NOVATO, CALIFORNIA

New World Library

14 Pamaron Way

Novato, California 94949

Copyright © 2006 by Self-Health Education, Inc.

Poem by Carol Barre on page 188 used by permission. All other poems by Lisa Sarasohn.

Portions of this book originally appeared in The Woman’s Belly Book: Finding Your Treasure Within, published in 2003 by Self-Health Education.

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for educational purposes only. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis or treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. Please consult your health care provider before undertaking any activity or exercise described in this book. No expressed or implied guarantee as to the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given nor liability taken.

The author has made every effort to secure permission to use copyrighted material as required. If any acknowledgments have been inadvertently omitted, please contact the publisher to correct such oversights in forthcoming editions.

Illustrations by Lisa Sarasohn

Text design and typography by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sarasohn, Lisa.

The woman’s belly book : finding your true center for more energy, confidence, and pleasure / Lisa

Sarasohn.— 1st New World Library ed.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-57731-537-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-57731-537-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Women—Health and hygiene. 2. Yoga. I. Title.

RA781.7.S254 2006

613.7’045—dc22

2005036812

ISBN-10: 1-57731-537-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-57731-537-7

First printing, May 2006

Printed in Canada on acid-free, partially recycled paper

A proud member of the Green Press Initiative

10  9  8  7  6  5  4

This book is dedicated to you.

Contents

Welcome

Introduction: The Treasure Inside You

PART 1: BEFRIENDING YOUR BELLY

Chapter 1. Core Principles, Core Practices

Chapter 2. A Cultural Exposé

Chapter 3. What’s In a Belly?

Chapter 4. Secrets of Your Body’s Center

PART 2: SPARKING YOUR SOUL POWER

Chapter 5. Practice Pointers

Chapter 6. Vitality: Keep Looking and Feeling Great

Chapter 7. Pleasure: Spice Up Your Sensuality

Chapter 8. Confidence: Activate Your Self-Assurance

Chapter 9. Compassion: Fill Your Heart to Overflowing

Chapter 10. Creativity: Unleash Your Self-Expression

Chapter 11. Intuition: Amplify Your Inner Guidance

Chapter 12. Purpose: Make Your Dreams Come True

PART 3: LIVING A GUTSY LIFE

Chapter 13. Designing Your Practice

Chapter 14. Restoring Your World

Appendix 1. Women’s Bellies in History and Culture

Appendix 2. The Gutsy Women’s Workout

Acknowledgments

Notes

Illustration Sources

Bibliography and Resources

Index

About the Author

Welcome

I imagine you’re wondering, Is this book for me? Will it make a difference in my life?

This book is about knowing your body’s center — your belly — as your center of being, the site of your soul power.

The life force focused in your belly activates your physical, emotional, and spiritual vitality. It’s the source of your passion and creativity, your courage and confidence, your capacity to love fully. It’s the starting point of your intuition, insight, and sense of purpose. The vital energy centered in your belly is your release from stress, your guide to good health. It is the origin of your inner strength. It’s your connection to the source of life itself.

You can develop the Source Energy concentrated in your body’s center. You can direct its expression to enhance every dimension of your life. This book is a guide for doing exactly that.

But still, is this book for you? It’s for you if any of the following are true for you:

You’ve dieted to trim your tummy or you’ve crunched your abs to make your stomach flat — without getting the results you want. You’re fed up. You want to try a different approach.

You’ve had enough of feeling bad about your body. You realize your belly will never be board-flat. You’re ready to feel good about yourself as a whole.

You suspect that if only you could make peace with your belly, you could tap into a wealth of creativity, wisdom, and inner guidance.

You want to take charge of your sexual energy and fully own your pro-creative power.

You’re getting ready to have a child, and you want to address your concerns about giving birth, mothering, and body image even before you get pregnant.

You’ve had a hysterectomy or given birth by cesarean section and still feel torn up. You want to feel whole again.

You’re passing through menopause and want to access the core energy that’s becoming all the more available to you at this stage of your life.

You already enjoy yoga, qigong, tai chi, martial arts, African dance, or belly dancing, and you want to experience another approach to body-centered movement.

You’re looking for an invigorating, power-centering exercise program you can easily do in five to seven minutes.

You’re seeking a body-centered path to personal and spiritual empowerment.

You’re a health educator, movement instructor, counselor, bodywork therapist, or health care provider working with women who have any of the concerns listed here.

In addition to a wealth of other material, this book presents The Gutsy Women’s Workout as a belly-energizing practice for women with all levels of experience — including no experience at all — in movement arts such as yoga, qigong, tai chi, and belly dancing. And even if you’re not interested in developing a movement practice at this time, there’s plenty here to engage and reward your attention.

This book may be for you — in conjunction with appropriate medical or psychotherapeutic guidance — if you’ve struggled with an eating disorder, experienced abdominal pain or illness, or survived an assault focused on your belly. Please consult with your health care provider to determine whether and how this book can serve you.

This book is for you to enjoy with the other women in your family as a foundation for fostering respect across the generations.

This book is for you and your friends to use as a basis for mutual support as you find ways to value your belly, your body, yourself.

In these times, it takes guts — courage, determination, and daring — to consider honoring your belly and the soul power it contains. And so I welcome you, a gutsy woman, to The Woman’s Belly Book.

Introduction

The Treasure Inside You

This book is and isn’t about your belly. It’s about the life-giving, life-saving, life-affirming power that already dwells within your body’s center — within your belly. This magnificent power is the source of everything I imagine you desire in life: good health, high energy, great sex, unflappable confidence, loving relationships, infinite creativity, meaningful work, unfailing intuition, and an un-shakable sense of purpose.

The power focused within your body’s center is kin to the Power of Being that creates, sustains, and renews the world. It’s the power that, through your body, gives birth to children, generating life itself. It is procreative power in a larger sense as well. It is pro-creative, the power to promote creation in any dimension you choose, according to your intention.

This pro-creative life force is your connection to Source Energy. It’s your soul in action, your soul power. Where do you rendezvous with this power? In your body’s center, within your belly. Whatever your belly’s shape or size, this soul power is the priceless treasure inside. In essence, it’s who you are.

FINDING TREASURE

Imagine you found a bowl. Maybe you unearthed it when you were digging in the garden. Maybe it’s something that caught your eye as you skimmed through a yard sale. However it came to you, this bowl is not necessarily a pretty sight. Its lid is stuck on tight — you can’t even open it. It may be scarred or tarnished. It certainly isn’t fashionable or stylish. What will people say if you put it on display?

You put the bowl away, in a dark corner of a closet. You’re relieved to hide it and forget about it.

Years pass. Then comes the day you’re ready to move to a new place. You ask a friend to help you pack. Out of the chaos of cartons, your friend comes to you holding something in her hands. It’s the bowl you stowed away all those years ago.

Your friend tells you something surprising. Given what she’s learned about antiques, and maybe even archeology, she knows that this bowl is very valuable indeed. What’s more, there’s something inside. When she holds it up to your ear and gives it a gentle shake, you can hear something rattle.

How will you determine the bowl’s true value? Are you going to open it and find out what’s inside?

Your friend keeps you company as you consider your options. She tells you what she believes the bowl is worth and how to safely open its lid, if that’s what you want to do.

Together with this book, I am that friend. This bowl that you may have forgotten, that you may have hidden with some degree of shame, is your belly. Now, holding this book in your hands, you’re on the verge of rediscovering the bowl, your belly, and the priceless something — the treasure — inside.

HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE MY BELLY

This book originated with my own need for healing. I’ve field-tested all the exercises for deepening awareness and the belly-energizing moves you’ll find here. I’ve needed to — they saved my life.

When I was fourteen, my well-meaning mother presented me with a girdle, something to trim my tummy and slim my thighs so I could wear the straight skirts that were fashionable then. An artifact of the early sixties, this item was the gestapo of girdles. It was so stiff that, when I held it between my hands and tried to pull, it wouldn’t give an inch. When I packed myself into it, a diamond-shaped reinforcement panel clamped itself over my tummy, and rectangular reinforcement strips patrolled the outside of each thigh.

The three or four times that I wore this contraption, stuffing my curvaceous belly into this prison for wayward flesh, I could barely breathe. I felt like I was suffocating — the thing was killing me. So I hid it in the back of my bottom drawer and never wore it again.

But the girdle had already delivered an elaborate message: Your comfort doesn’t matter, whether you can breathe doesn’t matter, whether you can live fully and freely doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you look good. If your belly is too big, if it doesn’t fit in, you have to hide it, crush it. Your belly shouldn’t be seen — it’s embarrassing, shameful, wrong. You’re a misfit by nature: there’s just too much of you. You have to hold yourself in; you don’t deserve room to breathe. Don’t take up too much space. What’s important is that you fit into the very narrow definition of what’s acceptable. Left to be yourself, unconstricted, unrestrained, you’ll stick out, bulge out, be totally inappropriate.

A few years later, when I was seventeen, I appointed the stick-figured fashion model Twiggy as my ideal of womanhood, my Goddess of Thin. I started dieting. I ate nothing but cottage cheese and drank only water for weeks at a time.

At first, dieting gave me a welcome sense of control. I’d finally found a way to assert my will. When I was dieting I could say, No, this will not go in my mouth. That sense of control came at a cost, though. In order to restrict my intake of food, I had to override the sensations arising in my belly — not only hunger but also anger, fear, grief, desire, pleasure, and joy.

Dieting delivered this message: You don’t deserve nourishment. Food is bad, wrong, dangerous. Your appetites are by definition dangerous. Don’t notice what’s happening in your belly; those sensations are dangerous and should be ignored. Erase sensation. Empty yourself out. If you feel empty and hollow in your belly, you’re doing something right.

My body naturally reacted to such deprivation with an uncontrollable craving for food. Weeks of dieting alternated with weeks of binge eating. If I ate one cookie, I’d eat the whole bag.

During the years that followed, I tried one kind of diet after another. The scope of my life narrowed to what I could and couldn’t eat, my weight, my shape, what size pants I could squeeze into. I was always on edge, always policing myself.

By the time I was twenty-four, I knew I was losing the war I’d been waging against my belly. It was becoming obvious that I would never find lasting happiness either in consuming another bag of cookies or in squeezing myself into size 7 jeans.

Mercifully, I remembered a yoga demonstration I had witnessed as a teenager. Not knowing how else to help myself, I began taking classes in Kripalu yoga — kripalu meaning compassion in Sanskrit, the traditional language of yoga. Practicing yoga nurtured my body, eased my mind, and attended to my spirit in ways that food couldn’t. I began to live beyond obsession with my weight and shape.

Falling in love with yoga, I trained as a yoga instructor in 1979 and later as a yoga therapist. As part of my continuing training, I learned movement and breathing exercises derived from a Japanese style of yoga developed by Masahiro Oki. This approach to yoga focuses on developing hara — the Japanese word for the belly as the body’s physical and spiritual center, the source of our spiritual power.

The belly as the source of our spiritual power? Who knew? Here was a totally new take on the belly.

As I continued to practice yoga, my eating behavior evened out quite a bit. I’d still go through periods of bingeing, though, when my emotions threatened to overwhelm me. My eating was nowhere near as frantic as it had been in the past, but there were still times when I felt hopeless. Would this pattern ever change?

One night I woke up from a sound sleep when, apparently, someone turned the light on in my room. Brilliant light filled the space — but, as I quickly learned, my bedside lamp was off.

I don’t ordinarily receive visits from the supernatural. In fact, although I keep an open mind, I’m relatively skeptical about paranormal happenings. But I knew that I was dealing with something here, and that I had better sit up and pay attention. I heard a message; a transmission came to me from this blazing light, not so much in words but as knowledge directly conveyed. The message was Clean up your act with food, or you’re going to die.

I noted this instruction, lay back down, and returned to sleep. In the days that followed, I didn’t dismiss the message I’d received — it would have been hard to ignore such a wake-up call. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I can’t say my behavior changed in any way.

About two weeks later, again a bright, blazing light woke me from a sound sleep. Sitting up, I listened for a message. I didn’t hear words this time. Instead, I sensed a gesture — the kind of gesture a person makes when she’s standing in front of you with her arms crossed over her chest, weight on one foot, tapping the toes of the other foot against the floor. The kind of gesture that says, Well, we’re waiting. We haven’t forgotten you. We’re watching to see whether you’ll ante up. I understood that they (whoever they were) were waiting to see whether I’d do something with myself, rise to the challenge, take charge.

Again, I took this event at face value, lay back down, and returned to sleep.

Not long afterward, I picked up a book I’d been avoiding for a while, Susan Kano’s Making Peace with Food. The author herself had struggled with the self-starving eating disorder called anorexia. Without mincing words, she pointed out the futile self-absorption of my situation. I heard her saying to me, How much time and attention are you devoting to worrying about your weight and shape? Why don’t you devote that energy and attention to your life purpose instead?

My life purpose? My life has a purpose? Until that moment I hadn’t considered that my life had a purpose other than to avoid punishment and please the authorities in their external and internalized forms — my parents, my older sister, my employer, my supervisors. The notion that I had a life purpose was so exhilarating that I didn’t care whether I ever found my purpose. It was enough to know that, by birthright, I had one.

Within days, though, a purpose did reveal itself — bright, shining, and clear: I resolved to practice the hara-strengthening exercises I was learning on a regular basis. With regular practice, I began