My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Why I Started Writing Letters to My Body
By Amelia, 29 — Asheville, NC
I teach yoga for a living. I say things like “honor your body” and “listen to what your body is telling you” six times a day, five days a week, in a warm room that smells like eucalyptus and sweat. I have said these words so many times that they stopped meaning anything to me. They became filler, like saying “bless you” after a sneeze. My mouth moved. The sounds came out. My students nodded. And underneath all of it, I was a person who had not actually listened to her own body in years.
I want to be honest about that, because I think there are a lot of people who live in that gap — the space between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. I could sequence a ninety-minute flow that moved from grounding to opening to surrender. I could talk about the sacral chakra with a straight face. But when I went home at night and sat on my couch with a bowl of cereal, I felt like a stranger wearing someone else’s skin.
It started, if I’m being precise, on a Thursday in January. I’d had a bad week. Not dramatic-bad, not crisis-bad, just the low, gray kind of bad where nothing is technically wrong but everything feels slightly off. My shoulders ached from demonstrating chaturanga too many times. My lower back had that deep, dull throb it gets when the weather turns cold. I was tired in the way that sleep doesn’t fix.
I was sitting in my bathtub — no candles, no bath salts, just hot water and the overhead light buzzing — and I looked down at my legs and thought, with real bitterness: You never work the way I want you to.
And then I felt ashamed of that thought. Because I’m supposed to be the body-positive yoga teacher. I’m supposed to love my thighs and thank my spine and be grateful for the miracle of having a body at all. But in that moment, in the tub, with the fluorescent light making everything look slightly green, I didn’t feel grateful. I felt tired of managing a body that mostly just felt like a series of problems to solve.
The Notebook on the Nightstand
The letter idea came from my therapist, which is not a very interesting origin story, I know. She suggested it almost offhandedly — “Have you ever tried writing to your body? Not about it. To it.” I almost laughed. It sounded like something I would assign in a workshop. But she had this way of looking at me that made me feel like she could see exactly how disconnected I was from my own advice, so I said I’d try.
That night I sat on my bed with a composition notebook — the black-and-white marbled kind, because I am not the sort of person who owns a beautiful leather journal — and I wrote:
Dear Body, I’m sorry I only notice you when something hurts.
That was the whole letter. One sentence. I closed the notebook and put it on my nightstand and turned off the light and lay there in the dark feeling ridiculous and also, somehow, a tiny bit lighter.
The next night I wrote a little more. I wrote about my hands — how they’ve adjusted hundreds of students’ shoulders but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really paid attention to the feeling of my own fingers on my own skin. I wrote about my hips, which pop and click like a old house settling. I wrote about the small scar on my left knee from a bike accident when I was eleven, and how I used to trace it with my fingertip when I was nervous, like a worry stone built into my body.
The letters got longer. They got stranger. Some nights they were apologies. Some nights they were thank-you notes. One night I wrote a letter to my stomach that was mostly just a list of everything I’d eaten that day, described with as much tenderness as I could manage. Oatmeal with too much brown sugar. A cold leftover samosa eaten standing up. Tea with milk, twice. It felt like an inventory of being alive.
The Night Things Changed
About three weeks in, something shifted. I don’t want to make it sound like a movie montage where the sad woman becomes the happy woman through the power of journaling. It wasn’t like that. It was more like a door I’d thought was painted shut turned out to just be stuck, and all it needed was a little pressure in the right spot.
I was writing a letter to my shoulders — my shoulders, which carry everything, which I punish daily and never thank — and I realized I was crying. Not sad crying. Not happy crying. Just the kind of crying that happens when you finally say the thing you’ve been not-saying for a long time. I wrote: I’ve been asking you to perform for other people’s healing while ignoring that you need your own.
I put the notebook down. I ran a bath again, but this time I did it differently. I turned off the overhead light and used the little lamp from the hallway instead. I put on an album I loved in college — Feist, The Reminder — and I got in the water and just stayed there. Not stretching. Not thinking about lesson plans. Not scrolling my phone. Just being a body in warm water.
Something Shifted
After that night, I started treating my evenings differently. Not every evening — I’m not a monk, and some nights I still eat cereal on the couch and watch reality TV until I fall asleep. But a few times a week, I started making space. A bath. A slow cup of tea. Sometimes I’d use a warming massager I’d ordered from HiMoment on my lower back, where the tension lives, and just let the heat unknot things while I breathed. Small rituals. Nothing Instagram-worthy. Just me, paying attention.
The letters changed too. They became less like apologies and more like conversations. One night I wrote to my body: You held a handstand today for twelve seconds and I forgot to be impressed. I’m impressed now. Thank you for that. Another night: I know you wanted to stay in bed this morning. I’m sorry I didn’t let you. Tomorrow we sleep in.
A friend asked me once why I didn’t just think these things. Why I had to write them down. And I think the answer is that writing makes you slow down enough to actually mean it. When I think “I should be kinder to my body,” it’s just another thought in the scroll, gone before it lands. When I write “Dear Body, you did a brave thing today and I saw it,” something in me actually registers it. The pen makes it real. The slowness makes it stick.
I started noticing changes in my teaching, too. Not big ones. But when I said “honor your body” in class, I could feel the words again. They had weight. Because I’d been doing it, clumsily and imperfectly, in my notebook every night. I wasn’t teaching from theory anymore. I was teaching from the bathtub, from the composition notebook, from the quiet embarrassment of writing love letters to my own kneecaps.
One of my students — a woman in her sixties who comes to the Tuesday morning gentle flow — stopped me after class one day and said, “Something’s different about you. You seem softer.” I almost cried again. Softer. That was exactly the word.
What I Know Now
I’m not going to pretend I’ve arrived somewhere. I haven’t. There are still days when my body feels like a machine I’m obligated to maintain, not a home I get to live in. There are still mornings when I catch my reflection and the first thought is a criticism, not a greeting. The notebook doesn’t fix that. Nothing fixes that, not permanently.
But here’s what I know now, at twenty-nine, that I didn’t know at twenty-eight: my body is not a project. It’s not a problem to manage or a vessel to optimize. It’s the only place I actually live. And it has been keeping me alive this whole time — through the bad weeks, the cold winters, the fluorescent-lit bathtub moments — without me once saying thank you.
So I say it now. Not perfectly. Not poetically. In a cheap notebook with a pen that skips. But I say it.
Last night’s letter was short. Just three lines:
Dear Body,
The cherry trees on Merrimon Ave are blooming.
Thank you for having eyes to see them.
I closed the notebook. I turned off the lamp. And I lay in the dark, and for once, I wasn’t a stranger. I was just a woman in her bed, breathing, alive, home.
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