On any given day in your life, I bet you receive the message – subtly or blatantly, once or many times – that your body needs improvement. In one form or another – whether it is to do with your weight, your ageing, your fitness, your style, your energy-levels, your six-pack, your health or the whiteness of your teeth – it is a generally accepted (and money-making) notion that your body should be better than it is now.
Those of us so-inclined absorb these ‘should’ messages from:
- The conversations and behaviour of people around us
- Images in the media
- Experts (doctors, dieticians, medical aids, gyms, supplement-sellers etc)
The perfection of the body is a time-and-culture-specific obsession that we have accepted as normal, even healthy. Yet, interestingly, with more focus, information and resources than ever before directed at ‘health and wellness’ (which is often, more accurately, about perfection and control), we are more out of balance and unhealthy as a culture than probably ever before.
I cannot see the value in wholeheartedly prostrating yourself to anyone else’s opinions, society’s (fickle) aesthetics or the ever-changing knowledge of experts. To do so not only disempowers you, it also drives a wedge between your mind and the real, natural desires of your body.
It’s very hard to tune in to your body’s natural tastes, built-in balancing signals, unique sexual expression and its own preferences for movement when you are privileging the external conversation (i.e. the one that OTHER PEOPLE are having about your body) over the internal conversation. This internal conversation with your body (which some really lucky people seem to just do naturally, though I am not one of them) is where you receive the signals about being full or hungry, which specific foods would most light you up at any moment, how your system wants to move at any given time, where and how much stress you are carrying, whether or not you are truly attracted to somebody or something and so on. Vital information! Yet almost impossible to decipher while we place so much stock on the externally-focused comparison between where we are and where we ‘should’ be.
In the light of this overwhelming and shaming bombardment of ‘should’ messages, I really do understand (and have gone there myself) the impulse to go right the other way and say ‘screw you’ to all the ideals, rules and social conventions about how we should eat, exercise and look. Resist the shallowness, love yourself the way you are and all that.
Alternative messages, like these below, are finding an increasingly bigger voice and more appreciative audience, the more the rules about bodies get shoved down our throats:
- All bodies are beautiful the way they are
- It doesn’t matter what you look like, who you are is more important
- Fat is a feminist issue
- Beauty is a subjective and political idea used to keep people (esp women) ashamed and powerless
I happen to believe all the above statements, and I can’t think of much that is more boring than spending the majority of my energy, thoughts, money and time on my looks.
However (and it’s a big however), I also cannot just dismiss the imbalance and suffering that comes from emotional eating, addictions, and a deep-seated resistance to movement. If your pain is showing up in your body, this is not simply something to accept and pretend is all about society’s shallowness.
That leaves us (as a commitment to truth inevitably does) facing a paradox:
Do I love my body just the way it is OR
Do I get going to improve it?
The only answer to this paradox (and you’ll have to stretch past your left brain for a minute), is ‘yes’. To both.
I recognise that these two options appear to be contradictory and mutually exclusive, but that is only a problem to the intellect. Seriously. The heart, spirit and body can all happily accept and make use of contradiction which, in this case, means that it is quite possible to choose love and real gratitude for every inch of your current body, while also daring yourself to get real and tell the full truth about why, how and what we eat, drink, snort, rest, have sex, touch, exercise and all the other marvelous pleasures and possibilities a body has.
So many of our thoughts and habits related to our bodies are in shadow, in shame, and are secrets that only we (and maybe our housemates) know. We keep our bodies covered up, ensuring that they are both despised and fetishised at the same time. This is why, on Embody, we work actively with inter alia these two principles:
- Only that which is fully seen can be fully loved and
- You can only transform that which you love (not hate!)
Most of the time we try to run our lives on exactly the opposite principles of these two (admittedly, startling) truths, but Embody (my signature body-love workshop) works the other way round. In a spirit of gentleness, respect and courage we encourage you to let yourself be heard and seen and, insodoing, uncover the truths that your body is speaking on your behalf: what it is grieving or raging against or desiring or holding onto on your behalf.
Through this process you can reach a quiet and consistent peace, forgiving (and perhaps even celebrating!) your body for where it’s at. But this acceptance doesn’t mean you give yourself license to eat mindlessly, ignore your natural pleasure in moving or pretend that all your choices make you happy! The fundamental difference is that you now make new decisions, not because you abhore what you are, but because you are committed to your own joy.
Only from this place, followed by a set of new, consistent choices, can you take your body to different (and sustainable) levels of energy, play, grace and strength.
(Angela’s radical EMBODY workshop runs twice more in 2011 on 18-20 November and 2 – 4 December. For more information see http://angeladeutschmann.com/workshops/embody.htm)
Tags: Body acceptance, Body image, Body love, Embody, paradox, peace with your body
