Belonging to Yourself: Reclaiming Identity and Self-Validation
We live in a world hungry to define us. Institutions, roles, and gatekeepers hand out belonging in rationed portions — approval if we align, punishment if we dissent. For many artists, academics, and performers, this conditional belonging becomes a mirror through which we learn to see ourselves: Am I good enough? Do I fit here? Is my worth sanctioned by this title, this degree, this stage, this credential?
But what happens when that mirror cracks — when the institution changes, fails, betrays, or disappears altogether?
What happens when your art no longer aligns with an audience’s taste?
What happens when your body can no longer sustain the exact performance you built your identity around?
In those moments, we discover an uncomfortable but liberating truth: Belonging handed to you can be taken away. Belonging that grows inside you cannot.
The Body Remembers Who You Are
In somatic practice, we remember that our body carries our identity long before any institution recognizes it. Your heartbeat, your breath, your impulses to move and rest — these are your first home. When you root your sense of self in your own nervous system, you begin to belong to yourself again. This belonging is not earned through perfection or productivity; it is reclaimed through presence.
Self-Validation as a Radical Act
Self-validation is not arrogance. It is the practice of meeting yourself with dignity — acknowledging your own experience without outsourcing your worth. This does not mean you shut out community or accountability. It means you are no longer hostage to the shifting measures of external approval.
When you validate your own voice, your own boundaries, your own “enough-ness,” you stop living in wait for permission. You release the exhausting performance of “proving yourself” to structures that may never see your whole humanity anyway.
How Do We Reclaim This?
Belonging to yourself is not a switch you flip — it is a practice. Here are a few gentle invitations:
Track your body’s signals. Notice when your stomach knots in meetings, when your shoulders tense reading an email, when your chest expands with relief in a trusted space. Your body is telling you where you feel seen — and where you feel erased.
Separate your work from your worth. Let your work be an expression, not a justification. You do not earn the right to belong — you remember it.
Name what’s yours to hold. No institution can define your dignity. Let them name your title, but not your soul.
In a culture of conditional belonging, reclaiming your self-belonging is an act of quiet revolution.
You are already whole. Your body remembers. Your breath reminds you.
May you practice the radical belonging of standing inside yourself — even when the world demands you perform something smaller.
If you’re ready to explore how to reclaim belonging in your body, in your artistry, and in your daily life, join me inside Becoming mBODYed — where we practice not just how to belong somewhere, but how to belong to ourselves.