*These transcripts aren’t perfect! But who is?*
My friend Kennan graduated from art school and got a quote-unquote real job. Like so many of my coaching clients, she sat adjacent to the work she was called to do, serving as an administrative assistant to a top gallery director in NYC. Steven Pressfield calls this a shadow career, sitting across the desk from the artist you long to be, too tired and burnt out by the end of an 8-6 to paint or make anything.
One evening in December, Kennan left the gallery after a long opening reception of a new young artist, and stepping out into the street and Christmas lights, she bundled herself up for the long walk home, flipping the collar of her oversized coat over her ears. She’d forgotten a hat. Not that any beanie could contain her massive black curls. Even though she could have grabbed the train, Kennan almost always chose walking. The sound of her low heeled boots on the pavement were in harmony with the beat of her heart. She looked up as she rounded a corner and caught a glimpse of herself shining back from a store window. Her hair sat on top of her head, erupting from her coat like a floral bouquet. It covered her entire face. The lines of the peacoat drew the eye in just so, and the gold buttons glimmered; she extended her neck like a swan. Suddenly she felt an intense desire to paint, not just paint any old thing but this. This was a feeling she’d not felt since grad school. She grabbed her phone and tried to grab a selfie awkwardly in the cold; her gloves were nowhere to be found either. When she arrived home, it was after midnight, and she felt more energized than ever. She fell asleep sketching the beginnings of what would be her first major collection.
This podcast is for Kennan
It’s for anyone with complicated feelings about their physical self
It’s for artists who feel disembodied.
This show is for anyone interested in debunking that “tortured artist” stereotype, for those who want to believe that the creative life can bring us deep satisfaction, healing, and even joy. I’m so glad you’re here.
I’m Merideth Hite Estevez, and this is Artists for Joy, the podcast.
SHORT MUSIC BREAK
each week, I will share stories of artists seeking joy… We’ll explore how so many travelers along this artist’s way have left us breadcrumbs—wisdom and inspiration that can help us stay joyful on the journey.
Today’s episode is all about the spiritual work of loving yourself. I will tell you why Pilates makes me cry and I’ll share how Kennan stepped out of the shadows and into a fulfilling life as an artist. Plus, I’ll answer a question from a listener about creative blocks, and the coda will give you something to consider this week. But first, here’s some more music.
A Pilates studio is not a common place to have a spiritual encounter. As I laid back on the very intimidating machine with its levers, straps, bells, and whistles, I heard the teacher call it a reformer. Hmm, I remember thinking to myself, I don’t know if I’m up for any sort of reformation. My relationship with exercise has been tenuous at best when, after my second pregnancy, I discovered that a nerve in my right foot was now being pinched by two of my formerly friendly foot bones, making running (my preferred exercise activity) impossible. But My daily walks were treating me well. Until one day, a new teacher, a young mom like me, stopped me while I walked past the information table one day at the gym and asked if I wanted to try her new pilates class.
My body and I have been working on our relationship for as long as I can remember. I’ve talked on the show before, way back in season 1, about my struggles with body image, with loving and accepting myself in physical form. I’ll link to that episode in the show notes. After struggling with disordered eating while I lived in NY, which, looking back, was sort of an issue since high school, all I can tell you is that for as long as I can remember, I have taken issue with my shape and size. Through calorie restriction and excess exercise, I have been working to make myself smaller almost all my life.
I told a story in that first episode about this that resonated with so many of you; back in my worst body image days, I kept a pair of size 0 jeans, and I would try them on to ensure they fit almost every day. They were too tight and uncomfortable to wear out of the house, my secret shame jeans. If I didn’t fit into them, I’d fall into a spiral of starvation and sadness until they buttoned again. So many of you said you have treated yourself like this. Numbers on the scale or certain measurements or clothing that you use to torture yourself into submission, to make yourself smaller, perform your disappearing act.
With the help of therapy and as soon as I ended a couple of toxic relationships, I was able to stop those behaviors and begin healing. So these days, you could say that my body and I have mostly suspended our hostilities; a truce has been named. There’s a whole other episode in here about what pregnancy and childbirth and living with an autoimmune disease do to your body image, good and bad, so I’ll spare you, but this week, when I turned the big 4-0 on Tuesday, I found myself in a pilates class of all places, being asked to pay attention again to my body. Trying not to look her directly in the eye and yet longing to love her fully, just the way she is. Wondering if that was even possible.
As I stared at the ceiling in the dim studio, the teacher’s gentle voice explained with patience what combinations of simple movements to do, and I instantly liked this pilates thing because most of the exercises involved lying down. Even though I was a little uncomfortable initially, I let my body relax into it. I thought about all we’d been through, the two of us. The exercises gently invited my twice-cut c-section spot to wake up, I felt the scar tissue stretch. As the teacher invited us to open the front channel of our body, with each breath to look for strength deeper and deeper, I felt the buried muscles of my core, muscles I hadn’t noticed in decades, I felt them firing; the reformers gentle rocking shook them awake from some deep slumber. And that’s when something in me shifted.
The word core has origins in the French word for heart. When I read that this week, it made sudden sense. The core is the heart of the body. And I don’t know how else to describe it, but that day in Pilates, I somehow felt like I was tending to my body’s heart.
The tears ran down the sides of my face and onto the cushions of the machine. I tried to hold it together (who cries in a Pilates class??), but I felt such a rush of deep empathy and compassion for myself; the emotion was palpable. I wasn’t so much being reformed as I was being reborn.
Listen, this isn’t an ad for Pilates. Although I do highly recommend you give it a try. Haha, It’s just a reminder that you are an artist, a person inside a body, and your body deserves your respect and compassion; it deserves to be tended to. This time of year, we get so many messages about our bodies. Don’t we? That’s what I know now at 40 that I wish I had known 20 years ago: being at war with the very thing that holds you upright is like sinking your own ship. Because no matter how much weight or how many inches you lose, it will never be enough if you are doing it out of hatred instead of loving kindness to yourself. And that’s the thing: the pilates workout isn’t easy; you lift your own body weight and balance and stretch in ways that take work, but what I learned is that exercise can be a gift you give yourself, an invitation to stir and strengthen your body’s heart, instead of just another way to make yourself disappear.
In class that day, it was like I was being introduced to my body again for the first time. A long lost loved one, showing up on the doorstep of your consciousness, a prodigal body, tired and weak, asking to be seen and loved and tended to. I felt I was being invited to love her again, and with each lift of the leg and quivering core muscle, with each inhale, I said yes. Loving yourself is spiritual work.
There’s something else I haven’t told you about why loving my body and myself is so hard these days. The particular flavor of my autoimmune disease doesn’t have one simple cause. They don’t know why my stomach cells are deteriorating so rapidly. But you know, one thing they mentioned could have caused it? Disordered eating. Gross oversimplification here, but I imagine it like this: You deprive your stomach of nutrients for so long, and one day, she makes adjustments to stop accepting nutrients at all. For the last year, I’ve wrestled with the guilt and feelings of blame for having potentially caused my current issues. It is my fault that I am sick. I brought this on myself.
Do you ever do this? The mental gymnastics of trying to make sense of bad things. It isn’t just the shame of not living up to some unattainable beauty standards, is it? For so many of us, it is more than that. Maybe you are at enmity with your physical form because it's proof of how you’ve abandoned yourself. It’s the evidence you refuse to see because it’s easier to ignore it instead of dealing with how we got here. Tending to your body’s needs would mean admitting the ways you believe you have failed and telling the truth. It means confronting trauma or pain. If you believe that you are what you eat… if you believe not giving up your aluminum deodorant soon enough is the reason you have cancer… or that your failure to think positive thoughts is why you caught that cold…I see these kinds of thoughts everywhere, in my self and my coaching clients… It’s like our body is just some secret shoe that is dropping just like they expected it would…you’ll pay for this, and oh, we are. We are paying for it in the form of numbness, weakness, disgust, and more pain. And so you punish yourself more. Through restriction or excess, through quiet hatred and insecurity or physically dangerous behaviors or just neglect, all the while, there are muscles in your core doing the work to hold you upright, even now. You are still here after all you’ve been through, and you are a miracle, whatever kind of shape or size or white blood cell count or b-12 level.
Our actions and even our thoughts make a difference they have consequences, AND it isn’t your FAULT. I won’t let myself carry that weight for one more moment and you shouldn’t either.. I realized in Pilates that these thoughts of blaming myself for my autoimmune disease were definitely not serving me. If our thoughts matter then those thoughts definitely aren’t helping me. It is just the same old war she and I have always been fighting. A new sneak attack across enemy lines; on the outside, we were working to make peace, but inside, I was still burning her down with judgment and shame. As I slipped my legs into the straps and lifted my own body weight. I thought, “Both things can be true. What we do in our body and what we think in our mind matter, AND each moment, I have a choice to love her or hate her. To accept her or to judge her.”
As my abs burned so deep within my core, I heard God saying, I made this body good, and it’s still good, even and maybe especially in its weakness. In weakness, you remember my capacity to make you stronger.” When we partner with our body, when we speak the language of breath and flex and skin and goosebumps and all ten toes on the bar, then tending to her becomes an act of remembering our belovedness. Accepting grace. Not earning it, not changing so we can be loved, but loving her right now, this minute. On that machine, I sensed how I was created with reverence and a beauty as deep as my weak and scarred abdominal muscles, a beauty that the world keeps trying to measure but can’t, beauty like a piston firing in an engine, turning fuel into energy, always propelling me forward even in weakness. That day, I met again for the first time, the soft animal of my body (as poet Mary Oliver describes it), and all I could think about was how I couldn’t wait to tell you about it, to invite you to meet you too, to love and tend to yourself, again, and invite you to accept the spiritual and holy invitation of movement, to let it make you more creative, more joyful, more imperfectly whole.
Kennan told me that beginning her creative work again after a long break started because of that walk home in the cold. In the safe and reassuring rhythm of her steps against concrete she was able to look at herself, her life, and her choices in a way she had been avoiding. That day in the NYC lamplight, she remembered her belovedness, the joy of staticy hair and seeing her breath, her spirit, the purest pleasure of being at home inside a body. So she painted that. And then she put on wigs and glasses and painted herself again. She rented high-fashion gowns, took photos, and painted herself in clothes that she’d never actually wear. She eventually was able to quit her job and find something that left her more time to paint. Through a couple of fellowships, she will soon be able to be an artist full time. Most importantly though, these self-portraits, this work of seeing her self, meeting her body there in it’s many forms, it has healed her. She said in an interview recently, “I wanted so badly to create a body of work, and when these paintings came forth I suddenly realized my body of work is an extension of my physical body. Each painting is an act of radical self acceptance and play. I think every artist does that in a way, even if they don’t paint themselves, there’s a little bit of each of us in everything we make, it’s all a self portrait.”
Kennan reminded me that tending to your physical self, learning to live in peace inside of a body, is the work of creative recovery; and of course it is.
In “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron talks about what she calls the Zen of sports. How taking a walk can help you feel more creative, allow you to listen to your life, and she doesn’t say this directly, but she eludes to a core belief (there’s that word again) that movement is central to creative thriving. And that’s what I experienced that day in pilates. That’s what I believe Kennan felt as she walked to the train on that chilly night. Moving invites us into conversation with ourselves and something bigger than ourselves; it helps us on the spiritual path to accepting, forgiving, and cherishing our body.
Accept the spiritual invitation to move your body. Have your abs not burned within you? Tend to the core of your body in whatever way feels right today. Every glance in the mirror, whether you are a painter who does self-portraits or not, is an opportunity to accept and love what you see. When you create from this place of freedom and recognize your own beauty, it feels like anything is possible.
I’ll be right back.
Today’s listener question is a quick one from IG: Meredith what are some of your favorite gifts to give artists or by artists for the holidays? I have a couple of friends I’d like to get something small and love to support artists who are building their own business.
I love this question. It think it is a really important reminder to all of us to shop with intention this season if you can because it really makes a difference. I will put a few links in the show notes for folks I absolutely love supporting. One is my good friend writer kristin vanderlip who creates beautiful products. She’s got her journals which are called “Rest: a journal for lament” so really thoughtful gift for someone grieving this holiday season. She also has some lovely candles and other creative things that artists would love like creative date cards. I bought a couple of her original oil pastels, if you join her email list you can get notified when those go live again, they are so beautiful and available at a great price. I know it is sometimes hard to buy originals on a budget and I always feel so bad that I can’t afford large works of art by all my friends, but look for smaller pieces that you could put on your desk or book shelf, that are still an investment, but cost a little less. Other folks I love supporting are Sara Delighted Papercuts, she’s got this amazing game called the playdate deck which is full of fun improv games. But she also does papercuts on bags and tea towels and she even does commissions, so I have bought many things from kristin and sara and so those are two I would recommend.
Whatever you choose to by this season, think about putting your money directly into the hands of a working artist. It makes me feel so good when I do it, and brings me so much joy knowing a little piece of these amazing women lives with someone I love or here on my own desk as I type. Might seem basic, but use your holiday funds to support the actual human beings on your instagram feed and in your life, it’s a pretty great feeling.
Thanks again for submitting that question, reminder that all these links will be in the show notes and so check those out. There is also the link for you to email me and ask me a question to answer on the show including our voicemail number where you can leave us a message that we will play on the show.
Now for today’s coda
Amelia and Emily Nagoski in their book about burnout, describe the stress cycle something like this: imagine you are being chased by a hungry lion, you realize you are in danger and you run as fast as you can, until you get to safety. Where you rest in the comfort of a lion free environment. The cycle is alarm, resistance, exhaustion. They posit that most people in our modern day get stuck in the resistance step of the stress cycle for a few reasons, 1. We attempt to deal with the stressors (which are chronic and never ever actually go away) instead of the stress itself. We deal with the stressors not the stress. 2. Sometimes it is safest and most social appropriate not to deal with the stress, but instead stuff it down or act strong, this is very common with women, because..of course it is.. Now not all stress is bad, but these authors remind us that unprocessed stress leaves you feeling stuck. It becomes toxic and it leads to burn out…when we don’t complete the stress cycle, when we don’t run from the lions in our lives until we are actually physically exhausted so our bodies can truly believe they are safe.
So my question for you today is this, how will you complete the cycle? What Julia Cameron wrote about the Zen of Sports, what I experienced at Pilates, is confirmed in this latest science, when our bodies move we release more than persperation and lactic acid, we release the fear and the anxiety we carry from the lions that never seem to stop chasing us. This exertion of effort is like sending a telegram to your nervous system that you are safe, it’s reconnecting the lines of communication, however broken, however long separated you may feel from your body. And you what else does this? Creativity. The authors tell us that creativity too, especially when we name our feelings and create with emotional honesty, can help us complete the stress cycle, too.
Creativity and Movement work in tandem, and so here’s your invitation to reconnect with your body this week. Not out of guilt or from the need to change your shape or size, but in support of getting lost in the rhythm of your footsteps on the sidewalk, saying yes to the spiritual invitation of lifting your own body weight, holding her, accepting her. Just as she is.
That’s it for this week’s episode of artist’s for joy. It was written and produced by me, meredith hite estevez. Artists for joy LLC is a woman-led small business where we craft workshops, talks, podcasts, and performances that help people harness the power of creative expression to make their lives better. This podcast is free for your listening pleasure, and if you’d like to support the work of artists for joy, click the link in the show notes to buy me a coffee.
Todays music features cellos Erin Ellis performing works of Da’Albaco. Read more about Erin by clicking the link in the show notes. Our theme song is by Angela Sheik.
Next week I will be back for another musical meditation that will invite you to move as you reflect on some coaching questions around body image etc, so make sure you subscribe and follow wherever you listen.
Our next cohort for the artist’s way begins in february and so if you’ve been listening to this show for a while
Until next week, take good care.
Today’s sounds of joy is a little conversation I had with my 5 year old about jobs. She was wondering what all possible jobs there were for people to be. She even shares what she wants to be when she grows up. Enjoy.