I have watched thousands of women walk into my clinic over 25 years, and so many of them are at war with their own body.
You know the moment.
You catch yourself in the mirror; unplanned, unposed, and quickly look away.
- The stomach.
- The thighs.
- The arms.
- The face at 6 am before it has had a chance to arrange itself into something acceptable.
You feel repulsed.
You reject the bits that don’t measure up, one part at a time, until there is very little of you left that you actually like.
If that is you, I want you to know something before we go any further.
You were not born hating your body.
You were groomed into it.
Nobody Chooses This, It Is Trained Into Us
Think about the first time you ever felt ashamed of your body.
A comment from a relative.
A magazine cover.
A school changing room.
A diet your mother was on.
A joke that landed wrong and never left.
None of us were born hating ourselves.
We were taught, message by message, image by image, comparison by comparison, that our body was a project to be fixed rather than a home to be lived in.
Women in particular have been sold this story so relentlessly that most don’t even remember agreeing to it.
It was just always there, humming in the background, telling you that you were too much or not enough, and it started long before you had the wisdom to question it.
So if you feel repulsed when you catch your own reflection, that is not a character flaw.
That is decades of conditioning doing exactly what it was designed to do.
And men are not exempt from this either, even though it shows up differently.
The tight jaw.
The way a man might talk about his own body like it is a machine that keeps letting him down, keeps breaking, keeps failing to perform.
The quiet disgust that never gets spoken out loud because men are taught even less permission than women to admit they feel it at all.
- We have normalized hating our bodies.
- We joke about it at dinner parties.
- We apologise for our bodies before anyone else can judge them first.
- We have made self-hatred so ordinary that most people don’t even notice they are doing it anymore.
But here is what nobody tells you.
Your body has been listening the whole time.
The Body Keeps the Score
Every time you say I hate my stomach, your stomach hears you.
Every time you look in the mirror and sigh, or turn away, or pick yourself apart, your body registers that as rejection.
And a body that feels rejected cannot heal.
It stays braced.
Guarded.
On alert.
Think about it like this.
If you lived with someone who criticised you every single day, who told you that you were disgusting, that you were too much or not enough, that you were the problem, would you feel safe around them?
Would your nervous system settle?
Would you thrive?
Of course not.
Yet that is exactly what so many of us do to our own bodies, every single day, without even realising it.
Your body cannot tell the difference between an external voice and your own inner voice.
To your nervous system, criticism is criticism.
Rejection is rejection.
It does not matter if the voice belongs to someone else or to you.
Did you know there is something even worse than self hatred?
There is another pattern, and it is easy to miss because it looks nothing like hate.
It looks like being fine.
It looks like coping.
It looks like getting on with it.
It is indifference.
Hate at least means you are still paying attention.
Indifference means you have stopped listening altogether.
It means the cries of your body, the tiredness, the tension, the pain, the little whispers that something is not right, get stonewalled. Ignored.
Pushed down so far you don’t even register them anymore.
Indifference is the absence of love.
In some ways it is quieter and harder to catch than hate, because at least hate is a relationship.
Indifference is abandonment.
You might recognize it in yourself if any of this feels familiar.
You cannot remember the last time you asked yourself what you actually wanted, not what was needed of you.
You treat exhaustion as a personality trait, rather than a signal.
You push through pain until it becomes background noise, the headache, the tight shoulder, the gut ache, all running underneath everything now, unheard.
You forget to eat, or you eat standing at the bench, whatever is fastest, because your hunger stopped being urgent a long time ago.
You say I’m fine on autopilot, and it is not exactly a lie, you genuinely don’t know if you are fine because you stopped checking.
You postpone your own appointments for years, the dentist, the doctor, the massage you keep meaning to book, while everyone else gets seen first.
You feel guilty the moment you rest, so you find something to do instead, even when your body is begging you to stop.
You keep going through the motions of a life you cannot feel, present at dinner, at work, at pickup, while some part of you is somewhere else entirely.
You only stop when your body finally forces you to, an injury, a collapse, a diagnosis, the last resort of a body whose whispers were ignored for years, and now it has to shout.
I see this all the time in my clinic.
Someone will come in for a diagnostic session and I will ask them how their body feels, and they will look at me blankly.
They genuinely don’t know.
They have been so disconnected for so long that they have lost the ability to even feel what is happening inside them.
If that is you, please hear me when I say this gently.
You are not broken.
You are blocked.
My Own Body Taught Me This, Not Through Hate, But Through Being Ignored
I ignored my body for decades.
Back in the days, I was a racehorse.
- Always running.
- Always producing.
- Always the one everyone else could lean on.
My body sent me signals along the way, I am sure of it, but I was too busy to notice, too needed to stop, too used to pushing through to ever consider that pushing through was the problem.
Then in 2006 I was hit by a truck.
- More than 40 fractures.
- Spinal and internal injuries.
- A closed head injury.
The Universe, in the most physical way possible, clipped my wings.
Here is the part that surprises people.
Lying in that hospital bed, in genuine agony from injuries that would take most people years to recover from, I also felt something I had not felt in 25 years.
Relief.
I was fully catered for.
Fed, washed, checked on, cared for, with absolutely nothing required of me except to lie still and heal.
For the first time in a quarter of a century I could hear myself think.
Even through the pain, even through the fear of what my body might never do again, there was a strange and sacred stillness in that bed that I had been starving for without ever admitting it.
I call that experience a sacred pause.
Not because it was easy.
It was one of the hardest seasons of my life.
But because it was the first time my body was allowed to simply be looked after, rather than looked to.
I was back at work in five months.
Not because I hated my body into healing.
Because for the first time, I let it be cared for instead of relied upon, and it responded.
That accident became the doorway into everything I now teach.
You Cannot Bully a Body Into Wellness
Here is the truth that took me 25 years and thousands of clients to fully understand.
You cannot bully your body into healing.
You cannot shame your stomach flat.
You cannot hate your skin clear.
You cannot criticize your nervous system into calm.
It simply does not work that way, and if it worked for you already, you would not still be reading this email.
Real healing requires something different.
It requires safety.
It requires your body to feel that you are finally on its side, after however many years of being either the enemy or a stranger.
And here is the part most people don’t want to hear.
You cannot flip that switch on your own, overnight, through willpower or a new mindset quote on Instagram.
Self-love is not instant.
It is not a decision you make once, and then it sticks forever.
Three Things Have To Be Rebuilt, Slowly and Safely
Through all my years of doing this work, I have come to see there are three things every single person needs to relearn, whether they arrived at self-hatred through years of criticism, or at indifference through years of simply being too busy or too needed to notice their own body at all.
The first is learning to love yourself.
Not as a slogan, but as a felt experience in the body, built session by session, until your nervous system actually believes it rather than just your mind repeating it.
The second is learning to receive.
This one catches so many people off guard, especially women, especially the ones who have spent their whole lives giving, caring, producing, holding everyone else together.
Receiving touch, receiving care, receiving stillness without earning it first, is a state many of us were never taught.
The word receiving often doesn’t even exist in women’s subconscious dictionary, and it has to be shown and practiced in a safe space before it can become natural.
The third is becoming sensitive to your own needs and desires again.
Not what you should want.
Not what is expected of you.
What you actually want, in your body, in your day, in your life.
This sensitivity gets buried under years of hate or indifference, and it has to be gently uncovered, layer by layer.
This goes for men just as much as women, even though the path there often looks different on the surface.
And Here Is the Part I Have Watched Happen Over and Over
When someone begins to heal emotionally, their body starts to thank them for it.
- The tension eases.
- The sleep improves.
- The gut settles.
- The skin clears.
I have watched it happen more times than I could count.
And it works the other way too.
When someone’s body begins to heal, physically, through skilled touch, through the nervous system finally being allowed to settle, their emotional world starts to shift as well.
The self hatred softens.
The indifference lifts.
They start to feel like a person again, rather than a role they have been playing.
Body and emotion are never separate.
Heal one, and the other follows.
I have seen this happen again and again in 25 years of clinical work, and it never stops moving me.
This Is Exactly Why Sole to Soul Exists
Sole to Soul is not a weekend retreat where you sit and think about loving your body more.
It is three days where your body is actually held.
- Physically.
- Energetically.
- Hands on.
In a way that lets your nervous system finally exhale.
Think of it as a loving incubator.
A safe, contained space where you are not expected to transform decades of self-hatred or self-abandonment in an instant.
Nobody expects that of you.
I certainly don’t.
What we do instead is far more powerful.
We work through your feet, your face, your head, your whole energetic field, and we give your body the one thing it has been missing this whole time.
Consistent, safe, skilled touch that says, I am not against you anymore, and I am not too busy for you anymore either.
I am 100% available, and I am listening.
I am paying attention.
Because your feet are not just something you walk on.
They are a direct line into your nervous system.
A map of your entire body and your entire story.
When we work that map with care, your body starts to soften in a way that talking alone can never achieve.
This bypasses the mind completely.
You don’t have to explain your pain.
You don’t have to relive your story.
Your body simply gets to feel, often for the first time in years, what safety actually feels like.
Every treatment is a sacred pause.
Every immersion is a deep sacred pause.
Three days where you are the one being cared for, the one being catered to, the one finally allowed to just receive.
From Crap Car to Rolls Royce
I like to think of your body as the vehicle you have been given for this one life.
For a lot of us, we have been driving around in what feels like a crap old car.
Rattling.
Breaking down.
Costing us more than we can afford, in energy, in health, in joy.
And the way most people try to fix that is by yelling at the car.
Kicking the tyres.
Blaming the car for breaking down, without ever popping the bonnet to see what it actually needs.
Sole to Soul is where we start building new wheels underneath the vehicle of self love.
Not a quick coat of paint. Real structural work, done gently, done skilfully, done with your whole nervous system in mind.
Because your body was never meant to be a crap car you resent or ignore.
It was built to be a Rolls Royce.
Smooth.
Capable.
Carrying you exactly where you need to go, with grace instead of grinding gears.
That transformation does not happen through hate, and it does not happen through more busyness either.
It happens through being held, worked with, and finally understood.
If You Are Ready to Come Home to Your Body
If you recognize yourself in any of this, the hate in the mirror, the exhaustion of a life too busy to feel, the years of stonewalling your own body’s cries, I want you to know there is a way back.
Sole to Soul runs from the 1st to the 3rd of August, here at the Purple House Estate in Forth, Tasmania.
Three days of being held, (morning & afternoon tea and lunch is provided) worked on, and taught how to reconnect Sole and Soul, so your body and your essence finally start walking together again instead of living separate lives.
You do not need any experience.
You just need a willingness to feel again.
And if you know your journey needs to go even deeper than three days, if the pattern of self-hatred or self-abandonment runs generations deep, the Miracle Method 7 Day Immersion is where we do that fuller dive.
Many of our students choose to do both.
Sole to Soul to come back into the body, and Miracle Method to transform what has been running underneath it all.
To crack the codes of the old faulty programs.
You can find all the details and secure your place here.
Your body has been waiting a long time for you to stop fighting it, or forgetting it.
Come and let it finally feel what it is like to be loved, and looked after, instead.
I can’t wait to help you incubate a new, prosperous version of yourself!
Grada
Grada Robertson, MNM
Master of Natural Medicine & Founder of The Miracle Method
Doctoral Candidate in Natural Medicine (Psychosomatic University / Holographic Manipulation Therapy with Drs. Gabe & Tiffany Roberts)
Grada is a three-time Amazon Bestselling Author of the trilogy: You Are the Miracle, The Underbelly, and Alchemy of Love.
Disclaimer:
Our content is for educational purposes only, based on our personal journey and research. It is not medical advice. We are not medical professionals. Always consult your doctor or healthcare provider for any medical diagnoses or treatment. The information we share is intended for learning and discussion and should not replace professional medical guidance. Any actions you take based on this content are solely your responsibility.