Mid-Section Blues

I have fought with my mid-section most of my life. The lower abdomen that the Chinese name the dan tien, the area that rests between the hips, the navel, above the legs. My physical build is in the tradition of Titian’s paintings, you see. This was a marvelous thing in the 15^th century (or whenever) when he painted female nudes with a sizeable ‘Venus mound’ around their mid-section, then considered beautiful. Yet today, this area of my anatomy is nothing less than an Achilles heel or vulnerability with respect to a healthy sense of self, body-confidence, sense of voice.

How does one fight one’s own anatomy? you may ask. Most women I know do, for good and ill. Every woman I’ve ever met has greater or lesser distaste for some part of her physical build, be it legs, face, breasts, eyes, feet or whatever. In the internal strand of argument, voices of disdain or fear loom large in the psyche. “Wow are you fat there,” or “You don’t look very normal, let alone pretty,” or “You’re not as beautiful as (fill in the blank with either name or media-image).” The external strand of argument may manifest in actions as extreme as cutting, eating disorders, binge-dieting and more. These internal and external strands of argument may exist for men as well, though I suspect the actual manifestations would differ substantially. Though perhaps not, for some. The more I reflect here, the more I’m impressed with how many of us live continual arguments between our bodies and the surrounding media-saturated culture with its norms of advertised beauty and marketed appearance.

I write here to explore my own living argument, but also to learn more about it in the engaged artistry that prose and poetry seem to offer me today. I often write to find out what I’m thinking, to learn more of my internal dialogues, to heal and strengthen myself in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam or repair of the world. The moral responsibility within this wisdom tradition is to repair oneself each and every day, for the work of repairing the world around you, within your reach. You cannot ever change the world, goes the saying, but you can change yourself and be in the world in a new way…which results in a new world or new life, each day.

The first thing that strikes me as ironic in these “mid-section blues”? A woman’s mid-section is the reality and symbol of new life, for herself and others, and yet I seem to wrestle my mind and bodyself to the ground every time I venture close to it. How odd, to resist new life. Health and new life for me reside, flow from here, says Chinese wisdom. The dan tien is central to one’s energy flow, one’s qi. Though I’m not a big proponent of Chinese medicine or its cosmologies of energy and flow, I do respect its wisdom. When I have explored beginning practices of qi gong, I have noticed a change in my body-energy and depth of awareness. Still, I procrastinate from practice, avoid my body’s language, and then tangle myself up in mental knots about my own physicality. So, it strikes me as significant that, at least in this frame of listening, I’m at odds with an arguable center of my body’s energies. Another woman’s voice observed a connection between my mid-section blues and the fact that my husband and I chose not to have children. “The place representative of a woman’s strength, voice, contribution to the world is what you seem to avoid, to keep underdeveloped. Why is that?” she asked. For her in this sense, my mid-section was primarily a womb, a center of life for others, the avenue through which human beings come into the world. There’s a grain of truth here, though of course any decision about children/no-children is much more complex and multifaceted than her narrow view. Not only do I resist my body’s energies for myself, she was suggesting, but I resist my body’s energies for the (physical) life of others. Given that extreme focus of energies—new life for self and others resisted?—no wonder I don’t spend any time there.

When I listen to my world today, attending to it in my mind rooted or directed from the dan tien, what do I hear, see, sense? First thing I observe is awareness of posture. Living from the core straightens my mind and spine. That’s interesting. I stand taller if and when I live from the core. I also find myself breathing more deeply. More breath expands my chest as well, with an acceptance that my upper body is just as it ought to be. Said impishly, I am reminded that I have breasts for which some women pay lots of money! More poignantly, it’s amusing how I try to shelter or hide that fact. I find myself aware of cycle issues—not only the ebb and flow of my own body’s rhythms but the connection between all life and incessant flow of time, change.

Perhaps it is time for a longitudinal experiment of listening to the world through the dan tien, of intentionally strengthening the core muscles of the body, simply to see what new life for self and others may grow. One thing I know from listening in this fashion: nothing in academic professional preparations touches the intimate wisdom felt here on the cusp of life’s energies made one’s own.