A: We live in a country where weight and body image are treated poorly and everyone diets at some point in their lives. Food, fat and size are considered the enemy. Women are presented with stick-thin images of twenty-year-old-looking models and actresses as the ideal of femininity and sexual attractiveness.

I recently saw a film called Chocolat. The French star, Juliette Binoche, is very striking with a lush and curvaceous body. I took notice of her body immediately. I could identify with her body; it was familiar. The sight of a woman who obviously ate food, as well as nurtured the senses and longings of a whole village, reminds me that we Americans seem to have lost touch with the full-bodied woman/mother/goddess qualities of generosity, sensuality and nurturing.

We've replaced these attributes of the feminine with a small, tight, adolescent, girl-woman who embodies youth and boyishness. Being large in America is seen as a disease and large people are discriminated against. I find this appalling. Personally, being less than large and still not Hollywood thin, I have at times tried to diet my way to "perfection." Succeeding did not bring me the happiness I thought it would and I have decided to let my body be the body it wants to be. Still, the voices are in my head. I don't take them seriously even though I still notice them speaking to me. Size and shape are personal as well as cultural issues that we all face.

Our distorted cultural bias toward thinness is obvious everywhere including workshops and seminars. There are few workshops that demystify our attitude toward body size. There is one, however that addresses this issue in the context of the workshops. The Human Awareness Institute in the San Francisco Bay area produces a series of workshops on Sex, Love and Intimacy, and size is addressed in these workshops. I have taken these workshops and have seen that there are a wide range of body types and sizes present - from thin to very large and everything in between. Enjoy!