Coming Home to a Body You Have Spent Years Fighting

Some women come to training from curiosity. Many arrive from a much older place: a long, quiet argument with their own body that has been running since adolescence.

In that argument the body is the opposing party. It is the thing that is wrong, that must be corrected, disciplined, hidden, improved. Exercise becomes the negotiation — or the punishment. And the strangest part is how normal this feels, how many women describe it in almost identical language, as though it were simply a stage of life.

It is possible to stop. Not by deciding to love what you see, which rarely works on command, but by rebuilding a connection that was interrupted a long time ago — one that has been studied properly and has a name.

How the argument started

The framework most often used to describe the mechanism is objectification theory, set out in 1997 by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts. Their argument is that in cultures where women's bodies are habitually evaluated from the outside, women learn to take that outside view of themselves — to relate to their own body primarily as something being looked at.

The consequence is a kind of exile. If your primary relationship with your body is visual and external, you are living beside it rather than inside it. You know what your arms look like. You have far less idea what they feel like, what they can do, or when they are tired.

Add a decade or two of dieting, of tracking, of bodies discussed as projects, and the war becomes the default state. Not because you are vain or fragile, but because it was taught thoroughly and rewarded consistently.

The sense you stopped listening to

There is a name for the channel that goes quiet: interoception. It is the sense of the internal state of the body — hunger, thirst, breath, heart rate, temperature, muscular effort, the vague signals that tell you something is wrong long before you can articulate what.

Neuroscientists including Bud Craig and Antonio Damasio have placed the insular cortex at the centre of how these signals are integrated, and interoception has become a serious research field rather than a wellness metaphor. In 2012, Wolf Mehling and colleagues published the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, a questionnaire that separates simply noticing bodily sensation from qualities such as trusting your body and not being distressed by discomfort.

That distinction matters. Plenty of women notice their bodies constantly — that is not the deficit. What is often missing is the trusting part: the sense that the signals are useful information rather than accusations. Research has linked difficulties in this area to disordered eating and to anxiety, and the practical version is familiar. You override the tiredness. You do not notice hunger until it is faintness. You cannot tell the difference between a hard session and an injury.

A body you are fighting cannot be a body you are listening to. The war costs you your instruments.

What embodiment actually means

Psychologist Niva Piran spent years interviewing girls and women about their relationship with their bodies, and built from it a developmental theory of embodiment. Rather than treating body image as a private opinion about appearance, she describes embodiment as an experience with several dimensions — including physical freedom, the ability to move and take up space; mental freedom, being free from the constant internal commentary; and the social power to inhabit a body without it being a liability.

The useful implication is that this is not fixed. Embodiment can be interrupted by environments, and it can be rebuilt by different ones.

What actually rebuilds the connection

The route back runs through sensation and capability, not through mirrors and resolutions.

• Train for feeling, not shape. Ask how did that feel rather than how did that look. A hinge that felt braced and powerful is a better data point than a photograph.
• Do things that demand attention. Balance work, uneven trails, swimming, climbing. Anything where the internal signal is the only useful guide pulls attention inward automatically.
• Use your breath deliberately. Slow breathing with a longer exhale than inhale is one of the simplest ways to shift how activated you feel. It is also a direct conversation with a signal you may have spent years ignoring.
• Get outside the visual. Barefoot on grass, cool water on skin, hands in soil, heat and cold. Sensation that has nothing to do with being seen.
• Let hunger and tiredness mean something again. Eating when hungry, stopping when full and resting when tired are not indulgences. They are how you re-establish that the signals are worth sending.
• Change the language. My legs are strong today and my shoulders are tired are descriptions. Most of what women say about their bodies is judgement.

If your relationship with food or with your body is causing you real distress, this is territory for a qualified professional rather than an article.

What changes when the war ends

The first thing that changes is your training, because you finally have data. You can tell the difference between fatigue that needs pushing through and fatigue that needs a day off. You get injured less. You progress more, because you stop wasting weeks either overreaching or hiding.

The second thing is subtler and matters more. A body you are collaborating with is not a body you have to think about constantly. The commentary goes quiet. That silence is space — for attention, for other people, for a life that is not about managing your appearance.

A place designed for coming back

Phoenix Oasis, the women-only sports and transformation retreat under construction on thirty hectares near Rivera, in Huila, Colombia, is being built for exactly this return. The setting is part of the design: the hills of the Magdalena valley, river water, the thermal springs the area is known for, and a landscape that asks the body to do things rather than to be looked at.

When the retreat opens on 30 June 2028, the stays — Wake-Up Call, Reboot, Shift and Molting — are planned as women-only spaces for a reason. Being unobserved is not a luxury here; it is a condition. The intention is that a woman leaves with a body she consults rather than one she negotiates with. You can follow how the site and the stays are being shaped on the page for our future retreat programmes.