My new bathroom has a large mirror facing the tub.  the bathroom is tiny tiny tiny and there is no where to hide.  This may be TMI.  Fair warning.

So I’m climbing out of the tub and come face to face with myself and think: Venus of Willendorf.

What would it take to make that a positive instead of a very negative thought?

The Venus is a celebration of womanhood, possibly a goddess – figures like her found in ancient homes – not much but speculation exists around the original and the other figurines like her that have been found.

Wikipedia says:

Similar sculptures, first discovered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are traditionally referred to in archaeology as “Venus figurines”, due to the widely-held belief that depictions of nude women with exaggerated sexual features represented an early fertility fetish, perhaps a mother goddess. The reference to Venus is metaphorical, since the figurines predate the mythological figure of Venus by many thousands of years. Some scholars reject this terminology, instead referring to the statuette as the “Woman of” or “Woman from Willendorf”.

And still that thought is negative.

Jacquelyn Baxman wrote a good blog on this recently:

How many of us are raised to believe we are not enough?  Taught by someone else’s repetitive actions that their judgment of us matters more than our own feelings and desires, taught that we are inferior, weaker, that we fail their expectations, that we are not worthy of their standards.  Their standards are born out of their own fears, not ours.  We are all weakened by the agenda of broken souls, people who have not had their own dreams fulfilled.  They were not able to be enough for themselves. Now we are told we are not enough for them.

she ends: We are all beautiful.  We have always been enough.  We always will be. (Read her whole post here and check out the rest of her blog while you’re there.)

This morning, a 2010 post of mine came up on my FaceBook memories (gotta love what is turning into message to the future thanks to FaceBook).  In it I talk about decluttering (then the latest craze), but really, it’s about dissatisfaction, which I what I’m talking about in the beginning here, and I said:

Here’s a Secret:  it’s one more way to hook you into believing that your own needs aren’t okay, so you must need someone to help you find the okayness that you seem to have overlooked.  Seth Godin names it the merchandising of dissatisfaction.

Wanting something other than what you have is moving from lack.  You lack whatever it is that you think you need (be it the latest consumer item or a totally uncluttered living space).  Marney Makridakis suggests instead that you move toward what you love.  If you move from love you are always moving from abundance.  Love creates more love.  Abundance. (See “From Lack to Love” here)

If I move toward loving myself, I will no longer eat in reaction to not being good enough (yes, that’s what hooks me) so why bother.

Thanks, Me, of 7 years ago.  I needed that.

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

Overkill through excesses, or excessive behaviors, is acted out by women who are famished for a life that has meaning and makes sense for them.  When a woman has gone without her cycles or creative needs for long periods of time, she begins a rampage of – you name it –  alcohol, drugs, anger, spirituality, oppression of others, promiscuity, pregnancy, study, creation, control, education, orderliness, body fitness, junk food, to name a few areas of common excess.  When women do this, they are compensating for the loss of regular cycles of self-expression, soul-expression, soul satiation.  Clarissa Pinkola-Estes (emphasis mine)