Your Body Is a Revolution: Healing Our Relationships with Our Bodies, Each Other, and the Earth

In this inspiring debut, Teng, a former Miss Canada, recounts her quest to reconnect with her body and aims to help readers do the same. Teng describes a dissociation from her body that began in childhood and was reinforced by a ballet culture that prized thinness and church sermons that demonized carnal desires. Pressures to adhere to social and physical standards increased when she began competing in pageants as a young adult, and persisted later in her marriage. But after divorce upended her life, Teng set out to reclaim “the relationship with my body that I had once known.” Drawing on her experience as a somatic therapy practitioner, Teng explains how bodies store trauma through conditioned nervous system responses to stressful events (i.e., fight, flight, freeze, or fawn), and recommends processing these memories through meditation or journaling. Elsewhere she discusses “tracking,” which helps one discern how different physical sensations (muscle tightness, tingling)offer insight into emotions. As well, Teng identifies the ways religion promotes bodily shame, and how patriarchy and racism cause physical fear responses. Teng skillfully mines her experiences as a former pageant queen, a biracial woman, and a Christian to dissect the complicated ways body shame appears in society, and avoids simplified takeaways. Teng’s passion will motivate readers on the path to bodily acceptance. (May)