To create health, you have to trust your gut. And to trust your gut, you’ve got to reclaim the wisdom of your belly. The Woman’s Belly Book shows you how.
—Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
How do we live a life that is ours instead of the life we think we should live? We don’t think our way there — we feel it, we intuit it, we listen to our breath, our heart, and our bellies. Lisa’s book is brimming with incredibly powerful ways to listen to your life through your belly. This is a fresh, delicious body treat!”
—Jennifer Louden, author of The Woman’s Comfort Book
Most women focus on how to change their bellies — instead of how our bellies can change us. This is what I love about Lisa Sarasohn’s book. We can all learn to make peace with the belly’s shape, and tap into power and energy sources there I never would have imagined existed. Bye-bye Xanax! Hello The Woman’s Belly Book.
—Susan Reinhardt, humorist, speaker, and author of Not Tonight Honey, Wait ‘Til I’m a Size 6
In a culture obsessed with tightening the abdomen, The Woman’s Belly Book is a refreshing and practical change of pace. Open it anywhere and practice the techniques Lisa suggests. Not only will you feel better, but you will also have fun connecting with your powerful belly and its innate wisdom.
—Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD, author of Living Your Yoga: Finding the spiritual in everyday life
Author 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, Body Image Specialist and National Training Director, Renfrew Center Foundation
Bright and Beautiful Threads
Cristina Eisenberg
When I became a young woman in the late sixties, one of the first things my mother did was buy me a panty-girdle. Then pantyhose arrived on the scene and the sixties revolution hit, and I never wore another girdle. And so it was with great amusement that I read Lisa Sarasohn’s accounts of corsets and girdles and the women’s liberation of one of our most powerful body parts — the belly. The Woman’s Belly Bookprovides a refreshing way of looking at our bellies — the vessel of our vitality as women, and the source of our emotions and sexuality.
Yoga instructor and bodywork therapist Sarasohn is also an award-winning essayist, poet, and public speaker. She has filled The Woman’s Belly Book with womb wisdom and belly laughter. Using simple exercises, Sarasohn teaches you the importance of breath, and how to allow your belly to move out and in as you inhale and exhale, increasing your supply of oxygen. She guides readers through belly relaxing exercises designed to soothe tension and enhance sleep. But her exercises go way beyond conventional body wisdom, deep into Goddess spirituality.
My favorite is the life-affirming Bright Blessings standing pose, in which you move through the cycles of maiden, mother, and crone, defining these three realms symbolically, with body movements that center on your belly. These motions gather energy from the earth, trees, and sky and bring it into your womb, to be received and stored as blessings. Doing this exercise makes me feel full of life and opens up my core to the day’s possibilities.
In the chapter titled “Secrets of Your Body’s Center” Sarasohn covers tough subjects, such as eating disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, and how the gut monitors the pressure in our daily lives. By breathing deeply and rhythmically, you can send soothing signals to your involuntary nervous system. Sarasohn likens this to rocking a cradle ever so gently.
Journaling and creativity exercises, such as writing a letter to your belly, add another delightful dimension. Sarasohn provides poignant and heartwarming examples from students of how miraculous things can happen when you release the pro-creative power that your belly embodies. All of these activities are intended to help you open your core, receive blessings into the center of your being, and live your dreams.
The bright and beautiful threads of celebration, self-acceptance, and creative, sexual energy that run through this book can guide women to a powerful spiritual awakening. It’s so utterly and blissfully simple — and it all begins with our bellies.
[SageWoman, Issue No. 71, Winter 2007]
Loving Your Belly 101
Deb Lemire
The Woman’s Belly Book is a wonderful introduction to the often uncharted territory of loving your body and loving yourself.
It may sound odd to characterize “loving yourself” as uncharted territory, but for many women the idea that they could love their bodies is something that has never occurred to them.
Throughout the book Lisa uses the analogy of uncovering an earthen bowl that is sealed up and filled with treasure. She gently takes your hand and leads you down a path toward the recognition that your belly is the center of your self, the home to your “soul-power,” the source of your wisdom and creativity. You must love your belly because “whatever happens to the center happens to the whole.”
A couple of weeks ago I sat in my studio in my home with three friends and we decided to go through Lisa’s book and see what we thought about it. The four of us have some common ground, but we all had very different bellies and very different relationships with our bellies.
None of us were new to the concept of learning to love ourselves. We were all familiar with, had attended or even facilitated workshops or classes that were designed to help women overcome the social conditioning of self-hate.
Even though much of the beginning of the book was information we were familiar with, we found ourselves talking about memories and feelings it stirred up, often getting sidetracked to tell a story or laugh about something we had remembered.
We talked about the scars on our bellies, some unavoidable and some at the hands of lazy doctors; how one believed, when she was young, that her grandma’s belly button came untied and that is why she died; and how carrying shame about our bellies affected our lives on many different levels.
We recognized ourselves as we read through many of the personal thoughts that are shared throughout the book from women who participated in workshops with Lisa. We laughed so hard we could not breathe as we tried out the Belly Laugh exercise.
Lisa’s training as a yoga instructor and her struggle with an eating disorder gives her a unique insight to understanding the body, spirit and mind connection. The book is filled with practical methodology and sage advice.
Now, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of books written with a “how to love yourself” theme. Many of them don’t really mean it. They are just soldiers in the diet industry’s army. And we all know the diet industry thrives on making sure we hate ourselves enough to participate in it.
But this book is different. Not just because you truly believe that Lisa understands where body hatred comes from; not just because the book takes a practical “how-to guide” approach; not just because at times it is sprinkled with nuggets of profound wisdom.
This book is different because you will come to understand as Lisa has, that “Woman’s belly and the power it contains are necessary to our survival, both as individuals and as a tribe. What’s necessary to our survival is sacred.”
Our survival as a species depends on women’s bellies. Not just because of our capacity to bear children, but because of our procreative powers to heal the world into which our children are born.
So gather the women you know. Spend a couple weeks or so with the book. Meet over it. Talk about it. Explore it. Laugh with it. Remind yourself of the time when women and their bellies were sacred.
As women come together and begin to fully realize their power, as we allow ourselves to love our bellies and rise to our full potential, we will reveal our treasure within, and the world will change.
[epitome, October 2004]
Becoming Belly-Proud
La Zorra Feliz
I resist books that lay down the law, tell you what’s what and how to live your life. They provoke something like an allergic reaction in me, caused by an early exposure to fundamentalism that sensitized me to any sort of preaching. Just a whiff of expert advice causes antibodies like “Sez who?” and “Who died and made you Goddess?” to rush in and attack the foreign body of someone else’s wisdom.
I don’t do well with self-help books—can’t go near ’em without taking an antihistamine and a hit on my inhaler. I’m much better with fiction and life-writing, where you can pull your own lessons without having them predigested, processed and purified for your consumption.
So when Lisa Sarasohn tells me at the beginning of her recently released The Woman’s Belly Book that “I’m not asking you to engage in a self-improvement program,” I’m relieved, though a tad suspicious. But by the end of the book, she earned my trust. She kept faith with her promise.
Sarasohn is the self-crowned Belly Queen. (If we don’t crown ourselves, who else is going to?) She has the grounds to claim expert standing, if she chooses, with more than 20 years as a yoga teacher, health educator and yoga therapist.
She also has personal experience of shame-based eating disorders and of helping women to heal their relationships with their despised bodies. But instead of speaking ex cathedra from her belly button, she has written a book that in form as well as content honors the wisdom of women.
Her tone is conversational and inquiring rather than authoritarian as she explores the roots, effects and solutions to our estrangement from our bellies. She addresses questions to her readers, inviting them to feel inside for their own answers, sounding like she would be genuinely glad if you sent her a note telling her your thoughts on the matter.
She includes quotations from many women about their body image oppressions and liberations. She tells about her own experiences. She shares her take on myths and patterns of language. Mostly she speaks in terms of “we” instead of telling “you” what to do.
Her book is written in small, bite-sized pieces, like a recipe book, a how-to book for putting into practice the decision to love ourselves in our bodies. You get a sense that her words are grounded in deep study of physiology, psychology, gender issues, cross-cultural spirituality, mythology and exercise, but her book is not theoretical. Many of us already have a theoretical appreciation for the female belly as the source of life on both literal and metaphysical levels.
We have round-bellied figures on our altars, and we vow to protect our daughters from the tide of brain-wash in which we all swim. But what can we do for ourselves, in the culture we actually live in, with the upbringing we’ve actually had? What can we do to make ourselves, in Sarasohn’s useful word, more “belly-proud”?
This book offers a menu of simple gifts to enrich our appreciation for and connection with our bellies, which she sees as the seat of our passion and the hope of the world. Ranging from breathing exercises to art projects, visualizations, life inventories, laughter coaching and writing prompts, the activities add up to a multi-media return to worship of the manifest source of life.
Sarasohn clearly did not mean this book to be a quick read to set on a shelf somewhere for reference; she really means us to do these things, alone if we must, but with friends if we can. (One of my favorites is meditatively painting a pair of cotton undies in a way that “honors your belly in style.”)
The book was published in 2003, following her 2000 videotape, which centers on a 12-minute ritual that combines exercise, breath and the accompanying lovely guided meditation and prayer. I have a cheerful image of Sarasohn’s ritual—which looks a lot like an exercise routine—insinuating itself into health spas, assisting in the subversion of the beauty parlors that once oppressed us, as they evolve into temples of health and sensual body pleasures like massage and yoga.
Women who are working with body image issues or with making physical their devotion to the great feminine Mystery will be glad to have both the book and the video. Though both book and video are self-produced, both are immaculately edited, professional and a good value for their prices. Now I’m just wondering when the author will tackle the subject of our sacred thighs.
Love Your Belly
Sharon Turnbull
A sacred space, one that has the great convenience of being close at hand, no travel needed, is your own belly.
Many of us (dare I say most of us) have a love-hate relationship with this love-basket, baby-cradle but saggy/baggy part of our anatomy. How delightful it was to discover an entire book devoted to the subject—an unusual book, a guide to activating the energy concentrated in your body’s center.
The Woman’s Belly Book features breathing exercises, invigorating moves drawn from yoga, playful ways to befriend your belly, and words of wisdom that help you learn to treasure your belly, your body, yourself, no matter what kind of shape you’re in.
There’s even a belly-breathing/muscle relaxing exercise that will literally empty your mind and put you to sleep. I’ve shared it with a couple of my insomniac clients, and they report it really works!
[Goddess Path, October 2004]