The following is one of the best pieces I have read on relating to your body healthily. My good friend Christine Mason McCaull wrote it and was kind enough to let me include it in The Tao of Dating for Women. She is a truly remarkable woman: entrepreneur, CEO, yoga teacher, artist, environmentalist, TED organizer, writer, and mother of four amazing children. Many of my readers have found this piece useful, and it's so eloquent and empowering that I really can't improve upon it. I hope you find it useful, too.
1. Wherever you are, love your body as it is right now. I mean now, not when it achieves some desired future state or as it was at a reminisced point of peak fitness. I mean now, not when it is ailment-free. It's a magnificent machine, and does wonders for you everyday.
Maybe it only gets your spirit from the bed to the bathroom, or maybe it allows you to have babies, or peel a banana or walk to the store or dance Swan Lake or hold a handstand. Whether it is fat or tall or small or imbalanced or polished or bearded or wispy or unpredictable -- just love it for what it does for you. Appreciate all the elements and miracles that allow you to live -- strong legs, ample hips, the crook of the elbow. The fullness of the heart-beating, veins-throbbing, stomach-growling you!
2. Decommoditize yourself. Your body may be valued in the abstract by the culture at large for its sexuality, its reproductive and productive capacity, its creative capacity -- or any number of other things. Don't allow yourself to be commoditized! There is no cookie-cutter beauty, sexuality, age, or attractiveness. These are cultural constructs, and there is no need to accept these constructs or support their ongoing existence. If you were born in a different place and time, the rules would have been different. They are not real!
Plus, realize that a lot of people make money by trying to convince you that you should be different. They take your resources and power by trying to trick you into thinking you will have more resources and power or love by investing in a stereotype of beauty. Imagine what would happen if the scores of hours and all the emotional and intellectual energy that went into counting calories or self-berating actually went into living! Take a cue from artist Stefan Sagmeister, who says: "Trying to look good limits my life." Derive your value from being most fully alive, from the times when you are intimate, compassionate, caring, creative, engaged -- not from the outward projection.
3. Decommoditize others. Stop praising other people for the values of the commodity-body culture, and start calling out those qualities that make them most themselves, approachable, reachable, human! Begin to notice and compliment people when they embody values that are more to the point: for their humor, intelligence, flair, originality, intensity, focus. Tell them "I love it when you smile -- you light up the room!" Even better, take the time to pause and look into people's eyes and lift the veil that separates you. Check your own judgment at the door and try to see the person behind the body.
4. Get real. Look around you at real people and real bodies of all ages. How does skin age? Joints age? What's genetic? What's diet and habit? What is the range of appearance? How many people do you see that look like the magazines? This is the range and magnificence of humanity and there is no shame in it. Those who would judge have not yet seen this truth. In this context you are but one in six billion -- and probably not that different from most.
Want to get really real? Go somewhere and be naked, in a non-sexual way. There are hundreds of places where hippies, free spirits, and those that want to be free go and take their clothes off and lay in the sunshine or ride a bike or swim or just enjoy what Benjamin Franklin called "the air bath"-- his recommended practice of laying naked in the open air for an hour a day. See people -- scrawny, broad, dimpled, pimpled, beautiful people from eight to 108 being naked just because and not judging each other at all. Feel the sun on your breasts and give yourself a love bath. Walk among others similarly attired and 99.8 percent won't have a thing to say -- you are just a body among bodies, free with no shame.
5. Heal old traumas in the body. All of the violent messages, imagery, dysmorphia, lack of relevant and meaningful comparison points, abuse, injury -- let it fall away. Develop a practice of appreciation, gratitude and genuine feeling of being in your body -- how the breath moves, how the limbs move, and become free. Any combination of awareness, yogic exercise and breathwork will help you let go of those things which don't serve you.
6. Show your body love through action. When you love someone or something, you start caring for it, you bring it nice things, you polish it, nurture it, do nice things for it. Take it out to play! Let your love for your body come out naturally -- not as a compulsive desire to fix something or get somewhere, but lovingly and kindly from a place of joy. Change through effort stemming from joy, not from a desire to get somewhere for any other reason.
7. Show your love through kind words and appreciation. The same goes for praise and appreciation. Whenever you hear the old tape in your head saying something like "I am so fat!" counteract it with three positive mantras: "This body serves me well, and lets me paint. It lets me climb on the roof, and I am damn happy in the sack." Practice self-massage, giving gratitude for all the parts from toe to crown.
Your body is a plaything for the spirit. Even in saying "I am working on myself," you acknowledge the duality of the spirit, the I, the self, as separate from the body. In moments of peak meditation or tantric experience, you can catch a glimpse behind the veil of the body, seeing to the bottomless depths of another person's soul. Your senses allow experience. Imagine your body as a hula hoop swirling around the soul. Enjoy it, marvel at what it can do, how it works; engage it with the world around you in every possible way.
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