I’m not even going to get into what we do to girls and women when it comes to taking up space with their bodies. If you’re my reader, you know about that, and you know it’s a problem.
I will say that every week when I teach my prenatal yoga class, I find myself saying “take up space.”
In Goddess Pose.
Coming out of chair squats.
Throughout the Warrior series (my favourite).
“Take up space.”
The space we’re raised to occupy
I met a wonderful woman last fall, who helped me with my kids a few days a week this past winter. She really made an impression on me. I liked the way she spoke.
I’m finding the older I get, the more I deepen into my self, including my love language (words). When people say “actions speak louder than words” I’m like first, there’s a grammatical error in that adage, and second, actually, for some of us, words are the loudest of all.
Digression.
This woman – the one helping me with my kids – and I had a conversation one morning about the space we’re raised to occupy, sometimes based on gender, or some other (equally useless) status marker. And how that can follow us our whole lives.
There’s another wonderful woman in my life. She also helped me with my children, a lot, over the past two years. We were talking about the space men occupied in the home when she was young, based on the fact they brought home the money. The money was seen as the most important thing, so they got to act like kings. But their wives and kids were working equally hard, tidying up their socks and cooking food for them.
It made an impression.
Space for you, space for others
I tell people to take up space. It’s what I’m about. And to challenge the programming we’re raised with – because of our family or cultural experience – as to how much space we’re “qualified” to inhabit.
But I also want us to MAKE space for the people who haven’t heard the message yet, or who aren’t ready to hear the message, or, possibly, never will.
Growing = more space
I believe my job is to become the best version of myself possible. I believe your job is the same. I believe that’s how we make the world better. It’s actually very simple. And complicated at once.
A woman growing a baby is entitled to more space. A person experiencing loss or hardship is entitled to more space.
A person going along all tickity-boo is also entitled to space, though.
We all are.
Growing means taking up more space. It means occupying more space with more of your authentic good-ness.
So that’s today’s message: take up more space. Just breathe and relax into it.
It’s allowed. It’s encouraged. It’s how you discover all that you are, and it’s part of the process of becoming the best version of yourself possible.
Period.
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