Life Without a Bra – Liberating Myself From Chronic Pain & Discomfort
For nearly a decade I have put on a bra only in the certain knowledge that it will be removed again within 10 minutes.
Apart from that brief spell my breasts have been free to move as they will under my clothes for so many years that I can barely remember a life in which wearing a bra all day, every day was obligatory.
From my early teens until my late 40s I thought bras, for me, were non-negotiable. I am a large breasted woman, from a family of large breasted women, and the message from my family, friends, magazines, and Trinny and Susannah (do you remember them?!) – was that as a big breasted woman I had to wear a supportive, underwired bra to give me shape and to stop my boobs from drooping down to my knees.
Obediently I complied. For about 35 years. I was certain that if I skipped even one day the great catastrophe of “saggy breasts” would befall me.
Every night my breasts ached when I released them, so much so that I had to hold them in my arms to slowly acclimatise them to life-without-the-bra.
For decades I suffered from a stiff, immobile neck which cost me significant money with acupuncturists, chiropractors and osteopaths as I tried to solve a recurring problem that never really went away.
On hot summer days the wire would rub against the soft skin under my breasts making them red raw.
The skin of my shoulders was always marked by red lines.
My shoulders hunched over with the strain of carrying weight that was not meant for them.
But I never once questioned my choice to strap myself in every morning for the next 12 to 15 hours. I fitted in. To go braless was completely unthinkable. So I didn’t think it.
Then I travelled to Mexico for a week’s tantra retreat with my coach and teacher Layla Martin. It was a long journey involving a connecting flight in Mexico City airport (where, I kid you not, I spent a good hour searching for Gate TBC) and sadly I didn’t think to give my poor body a break from the bra. I was in public, so the bra stayed put.
By the time I got to the privacy of the hotel room, where I was staying one night before I joined the retreat, the skin under my breasts was rubbed raw, in places the unforgiving underwire had broken through the skin. And worse, I was in the heat of the tropics to which my body had, not surprisingly, a very sweaty response. The sweat found its way into my rubbed skin, irritating it further.
I had travelled half way across the world for a week of tantric transformation and my body was feeling irritated and irritable. Not a great start.
I was so tired I just slept. I guess I hoped that the sore, rubbed under-boob skin would be better in the morning, like it usually is.
It wasn’t.
I journeyed the final leg to the retreat in a bra that was killing me and it still didn’t occur to me to just take the damned thing off.
Thank goodness for Layla and for the week I had travelled to attend.
At some level I knew there was going to be nudity involved on the retreat. I guess a bit like my clients know that nudity is going to be a part of my sessions! But I was incredibly unpractised at being nude in front of more than one person, I was far, far more used to being naked with one man than with 40 plus women and I wondered how Layla was going to persuade us all to remove our clothes.
As with all her work, she did it with ritual. And it’s a ritual I have adapted to use in some of my couple’s sessions.
We were put into groups of 5 in which one person would receive sensory stimulation from the other 4. The practice began with the receiving person standing in the middle of a circle created by the other women. This person would remove her clothes, item by item, stating one thing she wanted to gain from the week with each item she removed.
In this “Goddess Reveal” we were removing “old skin” and as we did so we were calling in the person we felt ready to become.
Once undressed the receiving woman lay down in the middle of her group to receive positive messaging in a multi-sensory way. One woman gently stroked her skin with rose petals, another held beautiful scents under her nose whilst stimulating taste with delicious fresh fruits. The other two women spoke positive affirmations into her ears – one person in each ear, overwhelming the conscious mind, making it impossible for it to object and offer resistance.
At the end of my turn as the goddess in the middle, I opened my eyes to find my naked body covered in pink rose petals. I had never felt so beautiful, radiant, held and seen in my whole life. The women were complete strangers to me and yet had gifted me with one of the most impactful 20 minutes of my life.
At the end of the ritual we were all naked and we remained so, in the tropical heat of Mexico, for the rest of the week. Above all it felt completely natural and normal. What I had assumed would feel uncomfortable or awkward felt anything but. Freed from our clothes, and the identities we put on with them, we were more equal and more beautiful than I had ever previously experienced in a group of women before.
It was a week devoted to pleasure and deep healing. To reconnection. To inner truth and knowing. To unconditional love for self. We did all of this using self pleasure, dance, ritual and breathwork.
Inside the structure we were safe to become wild and untamed. I roared. I laughed. I cried. I spoke my truth. And I felt energy in my body on a completely different level. This was the week in which I experienced my true humanity, I felt more alive, more present and more ME than I had ever felt before.
One day, after another incredibly powerful practice, a young German woman, who I thought was the most beautiful amongst us, said, “I am looking around at all your beautiful bodies, all so different and yet all so perfect, and I realise that if YOU are all so beautiful then I must be too?!”
We laughed, because every single one of us thought she was undeniably beautiful, how could she possibly think otherwise? But her point was spot on. If every woman in the room – all different shapes and sizes and ages, is beautiful, then how is it possible for me to be the sole exception?
We all stood still and absorbed this profound truth. We are all beautiful. We are all perfect. We are all frigging magnificent!
That was another moment that changed my life.
Looking around the room every single body was unique, no two were the same and yet every single body was perfect and balanced. I realised it’s the clothes that we try to fit into that make us less than perfect, WE are all utterly beautiful.
I saw how all of our freed breasts moved in perfect harmony with our bodies – as if they were made to fit (imagine that?!) All different shapes, sizes and ages, we all look balanced, natural, perfect.
One woman kept her bra on for the week (she had made a promise to her husband not to remove it) and she was the only one whose body looked odd. I was really struck by how odd a body looked wearing a bra. Her breasts didn’t move with her body. They perched a bit too high and a bit too forward, they didn’t look right at all.
I realised bras are made to make clothes look good, not to make bodies either look, or feel, good.
Spending a week with 40 plus naked women I understood why men who love women generally love every female body. We are all unbelievably beautiful! I wish every woman could experience this embodied experience. It would destroy the beauty industry, but make for much much happier humans and far more intimate relationships.
When the week came to an end we realised we needed to put clothes on again. We had only been free of them for a week and yet it already felt deeply alien and a hostile act to restrict our bodies in such a way. The skin under my breasts had had a wonderful rest but, in the sweaty heat of Mexico, hadn’t healed.
I selected layers for my travelling home outfit and packed the rest away in the suitcase that would go in the aeroplane hold. My bra was zipped away into my case. It travelled home with me but I was a changed woman and I would never unthinkingly wear it again.
Who can forget this advert? When I was a young woman this image was on every billboard on every city street across the country, probably the world.
It must have made a lasting impression on me because when I think “SEXY” I think “HELLO BOYS.” This image was clearly at the back of my mind when I styled my first Anabelle pictures (if you call rummaging in your underwear drawer on the morning of your first photo shoot “styling”?!)
After Mexico I didn’t burn my bras, I just wear them selectively, choosing to only wear a bra for impact, for that important first impression when I open the door to my client. Red lipstick, bouncy blonde hair and black plunge bra – what’s not to like?! I do still love the feeling of a man removing my bra and don’t want to lose that additional moment of joy from my life.
Bras are great for certain situations – like the pleasure of feeling hands on your back fiddling with the catch – and certain outfits require them, but in my day to day life I feel so much freer and way more comfortable without a wire digging into my soft flesh.
Returning to normality after Mexico was hard. I landed back in England at the beginning of a warm summer, the sun was warm enough for me to be naked as I had been on retreat, but I have no privacy in my garden and I knew my kids would object.
I ached to feel as vibrant and alive as I had in Mexico, I yearned to feel the sun on all of my skin again but I had to compromise. Clothes would stay on but my bra would stay off.
And that is how I took off my bra. It wasn’t a great big political act or statement. It was just me finding a way to honour my body’s deep yearning to feel a little bit less clothed, constricted and uncomfortable.
As much as I loved the feeling of my freed breasts (especially the soft arousal of my nipples rubbing against my clothes) I lived with a nagging fear of The Great Catastrophe.
If I persisted in being wild and untamed and allowing strangers in Waitrose to see my nipples pushing against the fabric of my clothes – surely I would get punished by the gods and receive the cursed “saggy breasts”?
My rebellious nature, which had definitely found herself expressed and loved in Mexico, said, “Fuck it!” but there was always a highly conditioned, frightened voice within me cautioning compliance.
First there’s the problem of the visible nipples, not naked but still visible – what would Mark Zuckerberg make of them? Should I walk around with two nipple stars attached to my clothing?
And there’s always been the deeply embedded fear of The Great Catastrophe.
Were my careless, bra-less ways going to lead me to deeply unsexy, saggy boobs? Wouldn’t I be better to play it safe and invest a bit in discomfort today for the pleasure of well shaped boobs tomorrow?
Then Substack offered me an article entitled “What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Wearing A Bra For 30 Days.” I was brushing my teeth before bed and clicked on the article, fully expecting to read about The Great Catastrophe and how it was too late for me – how I was doomed (there’s nothing like a bit of doom scrolling just before bed is there?!)
Imagine my surprise and delight when I read that, on the contrary, abandoning my bra nearly a decade ago was one of the best things I ever did for my health.
Yep. You read right. Bras are bad for women’s health and the less we wear them, the better.
Let’s start with The Great Catastrophe. Turns out to be another honking myth. Who’da guessed?!
Breasts are more than milk sacks with horny nipples attached. They are MUSCLES, which just like the vagina or arm or leg muscles need to be used to work. When you stop walking your leg muscles suffer muscle atrophy. It’s the same with breasts. When the muscles of the breast are not used to support the weight of the breast the muscles lose their ability to support their own weight.
Our breast muscles are supported in their work by ligaments – Cooper’s Ligaments to be exact – and they become more active and effective at holding the breast tissue in position when they are allowed to do their job.
Wearing bras reduces the ability of the body to support itself. Much like staying in a wheelchair after a broken leg has healed reduces your ability to walk again. This is why removing my bra at the end of the day had been painful for years – the unworked muscles and ligaments were being asked to carry their weight after denying them decades of the necessary training.
The bra story gets worse.
If you’re a woman you know that your bra is meant to fit tightly around your back. The shoulder straps are to hold shape, not carry weight. Much like the hip strap on a heavy back pack redistributes the weight from your shoulders to your hips.
However, as most women will also tell you, soon after a bra fitting (and how often do we actually have those in our decades of bra wearing?) the back strap loosens, and as we have shoulder straps we don’t really worry about it too much. Thus our shoulders end up doing a job that they are not equipped to do.
This is the reason so many of us suffer from chronic pain across our shoulders and in our necks. The bra has taken the job of supporting our own breasts away from the muscles and ligaments designed for the job and redistributed it to our shoulders which were never designed to carry this load.
This explains why, since my return from Mexico, I have not needed to visit anyone to help me with neck pain. I don’t suffer from it any more. I hadn’t made the connection.
I thought it was because I live a life with much less stress than I used to. I am sure being less stressed is good for me, and I am also sure that allowing my breasts to develop independence and strength has been very good for a body that is blessed/cursed with large breasts.
I’ve spoken at length about the sore skin I suffered from wearing an underwire bra. This is just an irritant compared to the real problem.
The underwire inhibits the lymphatic system in the body from draining properly. The lymphatic system is the drainage system that clears cellular waste, immune debris and excess fluid. WASTE AND DEBRIS – i.e. shit you do not want in your body is inhibited from leaving your body by the wire in your bra!
No wonder I have more energy in my mid 50s than I did in my mid 40s. I have spent nearly a decade with my body removing waste in the way it was designed to – huzzah!!
And it gets worse, especially from a tantric whore’s perspective.
The tightness of the bra’s back strap inhibits a woman’s ability to expand her chest fully to inhale the oxygen we use to stay alive. It’s pretty obvious that the bra is what remains of the corset that stopped women breathing for hundreds of years. We thought we had escaped. But we haven’t. We are still routinely wearing a garment that makes it harder to breathe than it should be.
This is not a small matter. The air we breathe in – notably oxygen – is carried through our blood stream to every single cell in our bodies where it is used to create energy – the energy our bodies use to keep us healthy, vital, vibrant, active, alert, engaged, sexy – alive. When your body is limited in its ability to inhale oxygen your energy, and your life, is deeply inhibited.
There’s an irony here. Women wear bras to look sexy (they raise our boobs and enhance our waists) but by wearing them we probably feel a lot less sexy. Because who feels sexy suffering from a sore neck, with a build up of waste fluid in your body, with boobs that ache because they can’t self support and lacking the oxygen we need to create energy in our cells?
I had no idea when I abandoned my “everyday bra” that I was doing something so good for my body. No doctor ever suggested that I stop wearing a bra so that my lymphatic system could drain properly and so reduce the build up of toxins in my body that may lead to cancer. Of course they don’t, they don’t want to empower me to live healthily, they want to make money from scans, operations and toxic drugs.
I had no idea that The Great Catastrophe was happening every day I continued to wear the contraption that I was told would prevent it. I had no idea that the best (and scientifically proven) way to prevent The Great Catastrophe was to allow my breasts to do the job they were designed to do and support themselves.
My breasts are happier. My nipples are WAY happier! My neck is happier. The cells in every part of my body are happier. And from making a decision that SAVES me money every year.
I cannot think of another thing that saves me money as my health improves.
Huzzah!
