Body Image & Loving Yourself
Who doesn’t want a pleasant life? We all want that right? Of course. Would anyone say they don’t want to be having pleasant experiences both inside and outside? I don’t think so. So why aren’t we? Doesn’t everyone deserve to have a pleasant life? What do we need to change in order for us to have a mostly pleasant life? And if we all want a pleasant life, how can we work together to have that?
The foundation that has both created and continually supports my choice to have a pleasant life is yoga. Through yoga, which is to me my personal journey to understand my existence, an important framework has slowly developed that requires me to be responsible for what I create. And to know that I have called experiences to me that my soul needs to learn from. When I say yoga, I’m talking about a lot more than a class that you take two or three times a week. I’m talking about a dynamic process of being present in your life and a way of paying attention to your life that creates a loving, honest understanding of yourself. Yoga is such a beautiful system that encompasses all aspects of existence. While mainstream yoga is mostly about the physical practice and working with the body, and that definitely has value, what I’m talking about is yoga as a process that reveals the deeper inner workings of your life, an energy management system, a way of creating the life you want to live, and a way of managing the body without being attached to it and hopelessly identified with it. A lot of the yoga taught in the US is simply creating more attachment to the body and what it can do and how it looks. And this not only outside of what yoga is all about in the first place but can not possibly create a foundation for having a truly pleasant life. Why? Because the body is going to change. It’s going to age. This is inevitable and if we have built our identity around that body and it looking a certain way, what will we do when it changes? Obviously, being healthy inside and out is important and everyone’s personal responsibility and as far I’m concerned a big reason we are having the covid experience, so I’m not talking about keeping the body and mind healthy. It is your vehicle for this human experience just like the car that you use to go to the store. But you aren’t your car and the essence that is you isn’t your body. Identifying yourself as the physical body is a false identification because you are not that. Your body is on loan from the earth and at death you must pay the entire loan back. Think about that. If you are the body, at death there is no more you. That basically means you think this is your one and only life. You get one shot to do everything you want to do. Seems kind of impossible to me. And I am aware of a lifetime I had during the times of Atlantis so I know this is not my one and only life. You are free to think whatever you want. If you’re choosing to think something that is disturbing or upsetting to you then there’s no reason for you to wonder why you feel disturbed or upset. And there’s no reason to blame something else for it. You are the one that creates the nonsense in your head. You are responsible for what you let into your temple in terms of images, content, information and experiences. It’s a big job to be the proverbial gatekeeper for the mind and body but I’m the best person for the job. If I acknowledge that opportunity then I pay close attention to what I let in. It’s a simple system.
The ideal our society bombards us with in terms of beauty has minimally improved but it is still predominantly young or youthful and let’s not forget, manipulated digitally to remove any imperfections, creating an ideal that truly cannot be matched and is inauthentic if it has been altered. What a beautiful, healthy female body should look like and how it should be adorned is the source of much confusion and unhappiness for many people especially women. After all, it is natural for the body to age and change and because a body is older does not make it less attractive or that life of less consequence. Our society both glorifies and chases after youth which can never be held. We've all seen or even know someone who is desperately trying not to grow old. We may have had our own “battle” with aging or holding on to our youth or trying to achieve an ideal that society has programmed us to believe is important to who we are. I know I’ve certainly been given a lot of opportunities in this area. Plastic, which is an outrageously appropriate word for it, surgeries are at all time high with breast augmentation sitting at the top of the list and younger and younger women going under the knife. There is no judgment on this end for having made a decision to augment your breasts or have any other procedure you like. Just a few questions. What part of you sat in judgment of what the creator gave you at birth? Is that a part you want to encourage? I know, you feel better about yourself and how you look and how your clothes fit, right? But there is an inevitable truth that you have identified yourself as a body and compared your body to other bodies and found yours lacking in some way. Just as our society has programmed you to do. To focus on things that have nothing to do with your soul or your personal journey to understanding your existence. Does your soul care what size your breasts are? No. I understand reconstructive surgery. My mother had reconstructive surgery but I personally thought it looked awful. And I’ll say it. It both looked awful, with and without the reconstruction.
But going back to the topic of having a pleasant life, what has having bigger breasts truly contributed to that? Anything? And if you being happy with your body or happier, is your answer, sit with that. What if your soul came here to learn to love the body you have just as it is? To see it’s beauty and perfection, to not judge any part of it or wish it to be other than it is, to learn to fully accept and love your body? Who among us isn’t here to learn to fully love and accept themselves including their bodies? What is the ultimate value of that? From where I’m sitting it’s extremely high. Loving and accepting ourselves fully and completely is one of the primary reasons we are here and few of us can say we truly love and accept ourselves in every way. And I personally would like to eradicate the idea that you are your body and that the size of your breasts is relevant in any way whatsoever to your value as a woman or a human. I’m sure there are a lot of opinions about this topic and I honor your right to have a perspective different from mine and I have no interest in changing your mind. I do have an interest in educating our young women to care about something other than their fingernails, eyelashes, hair, breasts and whether some boy likes them. Seriously. Wouldn’t it be more valuable for them to care about how to be effective communicators, or how to improve their ability to concentrate and focus which is most assuredly not helped by the phones they are glued to, or how to become truly healthy without it being about dieting and how much they weigh? I think we all know it would. Moms, your daughters are watching you. Quietly, without saying a word, you are teaching them many things. So please take the time to be sure you're sharing the kinds of teachings that will allow them to transcend this societal and cultural nonsense about youth and beauty. We can celebrate youth and beauty of course but the ideal that has been set is both unrealistic and unnatural. No matter what you do, your body and looks will change. And the more attached you are to youth and beauty and the attention you can get using your body and looks, the bigger and harder the fall as you inevitably age. And if you truly want to have a pleasant inner life, this over identification with the body, which actually limits us more than we can imagine, can not be allowed to go unchecked. If we want a world free from prejudice then we have to stop comparing and judging ourselves and others by how we look or the color of our skin or where on the planet we live.
A pleasant inner life must have a strong foundation. Identifying with something that is transient like how you look, creates an unstable foundation that can and will change. What you think about yourself and your inner dialogue play a most crucial role in whether your experience is pleasant or not. Do you speak kindly to yourself? Do you set the bar so high that it’s impossible for you to reach and consequently end up finding fault with yourself for not measuring up? Do you create a self imposed schedule for yourself that no one could accomplish and again give yourself a hard time for not getting it all done when there’s no real reason that it all needed to be done today in the first place? How you see yourself has everything to do with how others see you.
Along with this over identification with the body there is another way of choosing to live your life that deserves careful attention. Too much attention on what we like and dislike can also undermine having a pleasant life. Is your life ever 100% the way you like? No. And it never will be. So if your life is based on your likes and dislikes you will constantly be chasing what you like and avoiding what you dislike. How much fun does that sound like to you? Life is a mix of what we like and don't like, isn’t it true? So maybe relaxing around those ways we have of categorizing things in this dualistic divisive way would be a good idea. If we remain neutral and accepting without qualifying things as good or bad or we like this or that or we don’t, our life will begin to flow more smoothly. Chasing what we like will not only be exhausting but futile. If instead, we remain neutral, able to accept either end of the spectrum without a big fuss or a huge celebration, we are creating a more stable foundation for pleasantness. Life is responding to you and your energies, thoughts, actions and feelings. When we truly begin to understand that, we know that it’s always a good idea to check in around how people are responding to us. Sure there are a few people that never learned to be happy. I’m not talking about them. Paying more attention to ourselves and how people are responding to us will provide important feedback as well as opportunities to complete relationships we have outgrown. On the most basic level, if we want pleasant, it starts with us being pleasant. So see if tomorrow you can go through one entire day being pleasant yourself. This is not to be taken too seriously. Just observe. Can you go one whole day and be totally pleasant? This is just another skill we need. It must be developed like any other skill. Have fun with it and see what you learn.
The reality science has been digesting for the last 100 years is that everything is energy and energy is everything. What we think of as the physical universe is not physical at all.