Hi. I am so glad you are here. I am not sure how you got here; perhaps you read my book The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. Maybe you follow me on social media or saw a video of me blabbering on about this radical self-love thing. Either way, welcome. I am excited to be part of this particular journey with you. I believe with the entirety of my being that radical self-love is a pathway to a richer, more miraculous, fecund, joyful life. It is a power-wielding practice that can uproot oppression and grow equity, justice, and compassion on a global scale. Yup. I believe radical self-love does all that. It’s the coconut oil of social change! Unfortunately, accessing the earth-shifting influence of radical self-love is about as easy as accessing the core of a coconut with a baby spoon. Quarrying the magic of this force will take both personal and collective effort. It will take some work.

I once read somewhere that faith without works is dead (or is it the other way around?). While I may not agree with the dead part, I think we can all concur that anything done without consistent practice will be hard to master. Living by a radical self-love ethos will require more of us than posting Instagram memes and personal platitudes. Radical self-love is an action practice. When you dedicate yourself to this work, you will have to invest in a radical self-love routine, examining how you currently operate and creating new patterns of behavior to replace old body-shame operations, which will ultimately give way to a radically new way of being. This endeavor is what will be needed to take our will and power back from those who help cultivate and then profit off our discontentment and disconnection with our own divine beings. This is the work we must do if we wish to beat back the bounty hunters of the Body-Shame Profit Complex and the institutional structures of body terrorism.

Unlike the grueling labor under a system of capitalism, radical self-love invites you to keep the profit of your labor and to willingly watch its overflow rush over all the areas of your life, filling others with a comparable sense of possibility and love. Now that is the kind of work that pays off. Your radical self-love journey restores your relationship with the most influential person in your life: you.

Rediscovering intimacy and connection with a body you may have been on the outs with for decades may feel awkward at first. You may even find that the bullhorn of body shame gets louder initially. Do not fret, friend. Every living thing fights to stay alive, and the Body-Shame Profit Complex and systems of body terrorism are very much alive in each of us. Those systems of self-loathing and internalized oppression may get downright nasty as you move to compost their waste into the nutrient-rich soil of your new life. That response is natural and common.

What I would like you to let seep into the whole of your heart is that your inherent sense of radical self-love has fought to stay alive as well. It is why you are here, pulling up the weeds of body shame and reclaiming the right to live unapologetically in your body today. Go forth with great faith and courage, my dear. Your journey home to you is more than deserved. I also want to let you in on a little secret. I know how this story ends. Psst: radical self-love wins.

How to Use This Workbook

I hate rules! Consequently, I will not offer many, but I would like to propose some guidance as you journey through this workbook. Each tool and activity is meant to build on the tools that came before it, so there is value in starting at the beginning and working your way to the end. However, I also trust that if you are being led to start in the middle, there is a reason that is specific to you, and I encourage you to trust your inner guidance. There is no prize for completing all the activities in the shortest amount of time. In fact, speeding through the activities will likely make them less impactful and limit the space needed to truly integrate the ideas into your being. Be patient and gentle with yourself. When you notice resistance to any of the ideas or exercises, practice lovingly sitting with the resistance. Ask it what it wants you to know. Allow it to become a child whispering a precious secret in your ear. Receive it as important information for your radical self-love journey. Be with the resistance until it releases into willingness.

You may be asked to do certain activities over a prolonged period like a week or a month. Focus on doing these activities one at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Start with what feels easeful and work up to those things that feel more challenging. Remember, this work is not about “proving” anything to yourself or anyone else. This workbook is an invitation to unlearn body shame and invite the embodied experience of radical self-love; there is nothing you need to prove to do that.

In this book, you will be asked to draw, color, doodle, talk to friends, take risks, and perhaps step outside of what feels like your natural gifts and talents. I encourage you to release the need to be “good” at what you are doing and instead strive to be authentic. Perfection is the enemy of radical self-love because it is an impossible illusion. When the voice of perfectionism chimes in, take a deep breath, remember that the work is about the process, not about the product, and give yourself permission to be fabulously unapologetically imperfect.

You Are Not a Car

Some of us, before this whole conversation about radical self-love, didn’t so much hate our bodies as we engaged them as if they were vehicles, like a car we drove around. We paid only as much attention as was necessary to get the car started and get on with our day. We put gas in the car so we did not end up stuck on the side of a deserted highway or on some backwoods road out of a horror film. We occasionally took the car to the shop if it seemed like something extreme was up. Sometimes we trashed the car, littering the passenger seats with wrappers and water bottles. Some of us went for months without visiting a car wash. We would awaken, get in our cars, and go, navigating our lives while giving little thought to our vehicles until we needed them again.

This model was not sustainable. There are some key differences between a car and your body, the primary one being that should you wake up and find that your car won’t start, you will either buy a new car or find a new mode of transportation. Should you find that your body won’t start, we can safely assume you didn’t wake up. To treat our bodies like cars is to essentially treat ourselves like something disposable.

You, my love, are not disposable. Besides, your body wants nothing more than to be your buddy through this ride called life, and that means you (and your body) will need a solid set of tools for the road.

The Thinking, Doing, Being Process

If you have picked up this workbook, then it is likely that some part of you feels called to the work of radical self-love and believes that what is inside this book might help you get there. My hope is that, through the practices in this book, you move from radical self-love as an intellectual idea to radical self-love as a guiding principle and internal lighthouse as you navigate the daily seas of body shame. I invite you to read The Body Is Not An Apology as it provides the theories and concepts that serve as the foundation for the activities you will undertake in this workbook. In it I highlight how we’ve been exploited by a world that hoards power and profits off of our self-loathing. I offer the practice of radical self-love as a key to bankrupting the Body-Shame Profit Complex, and I present radical self-love as one of the foundational tools in dismantling global systems of oppression and, ultimately, reinstating our sovereign power to exist unapologetically in the bodies we have right now. Radical self-love can change the world, but we must see it beyond concept or methodology. It must be practical if it is to be transformative.

Reading about radical self-love will not be enough to transform ourselves or this majestic mess of a planet we have inherited. Radical self-love is a return to the love of our whole being, and to truly mine the fullness of its riches we must engage a whole-being approach to our lives and bodies. Creating a radical self-love life is a three-step process: