Accept Your Body To Reconcile Yourself With Life

Sometimes the body itself is seen as a judge assesses a criminal and condemns his crimes. Or like a customer disappointed by a product that does not satisfy their illusions.

Perhaps it is perceived as something alien that hinders the achievement of objectives or a fuller well-being. Looking in the mirror perhaps generates disenchantment instead of love, since you want to literally eliminate any defect that contradicts the image you want to offer to the world.

I have also looked at myself like that. At school I was not one of the best in gymnastics and, from a very young age, like so many women, I perceived myself as overweight and with wide hips.

However, when I was pregnant and was experiencing my transformation, as well as that of the being that was within me, this idea assailed me: “Luckily my body takes care of this miraculous process by itself. If it depended on my mind or my effort it would be impossible to take it all into account. “

We tend to forget something as obvious as that thanks to the body one is alive and can generate life. We come out of one body and live in another.

Learn to listen and love your body

Every second the body regulates itself and carries out complex functions on its own. Being grateful for this biological intelligence present in every cell of the organism is the first step to reconcile with the body. The mind can judge, label and even enslave the body, but it itself would not exist without it and its natural wisdom.

It is true that those silhouettes with perfect curves, impeccable leanness, toned muscles and youth are nothing short of eternal. It is difficult to escape the desire to look like them, especially when your image constantly appears in advertisements, magazines, movies …

The multiplying power of the consumer society achieves that a few model bodies constitute the ideal to which a large part of humanity aspires.

Such is their influence that Indian women already bleach their skin and some from the Far East have their eyes operated to round them out. In the West, it has become common to go under the knife to “correct” the face or other parts of the body.

From the ideal body to the real one

What mechanisms drive you to see your own body as a material to mold or an animal to domesticate?

From birth the person receives information from the outside that makes up their concept of beauty. Parents, classmates and teachers make comments that determine the assessment that each one makes of their physical appearance.

Hundreds of images of bodies considered perfect – not always faithful to reality – draw in the mind the idea of ​​what our body “should be”. And when comparing their body with that ideal model, women, and more and more men, judge themselves harshly.

80% of 18-year-old Spanish women have ever followed a diet to lose weight, and 60% of them have done so since they were 13 years old. Augusto Cury, psychiatrist and author of The dictatorship of beauty and the women’s revolution (Ed. Zenith, 2012), states that only 3% of Western women feel comfortable with their body.

Faced with this cult of perfection, more and more movements arise that question it. Thus, the photographer Jade Beall triumphs on Instagram with her portraits of naked bodies of women in which the imprint of pregnancy, lactation and age are shown without false retouching. The unique beauty of all these real bodies is evident in each image.

The author of the photographs, collected in the book The bodies of mothers: a beautiful body project ( ” The bodies of mothers: the project of a nice body “), note that teen felt that no one could love her because of her acne and she looked out of the mirror only by candlelight. Now his goal seeks to redefine the cultural concept of what is beautiful.

The whole picture

Spinoza pointed out that beauty is not so much a quality of the admired object as an effect generated by the observer. Beauty is relative. It varies throughout history, with culture or education, and depends on point of view. That is why it is healthy to question those beliefs that narrow the vision that each one has of their body.

Just as an anorexic person calls himself fat by being in the bones, sometimes people distort their perception of themselves by paying attention only to one area or areas of their body. The label of low, ugly or flabby can prevent appreciating the whole picture and lead to forgetting that each person is always much more than a part of their body, and even much more than the sum of all of them.

In fact, the beauty of a being is impossible to fully apprehend. Who is able to see himself in full?

Happiness is corporeal

This short-sightedness, which stems from a dangerous mind-body dissociation, can only be maintained if it is based exclusively on thought.

As soon as one begins to attend to the information that the body whispers through the sensations and its desires and desires are revalued, without underestimating them in the name of logic, then the natural pleasure that springs from satisfying the bodily needs prevails over any tribulation. .

Education has burned into each one different shoulds that subjugate the body-object-machine, until a pain or an illness forces us to pay attention to that stranger who suddenly stops and screams in his own way.

However, it takes little to initiate a dialogue with the body. A simple massage putting awareness in each area that is worked, touching yourself in front of the mirror with curiosity and tenderness, paying attention to your breathing, moving to the sound of music …

And above all, learn to look at the body from within, because, as Salvador Pániker says, “happiness could well be defined as a bodily state”.

A dialogue without words

It is about connecting with the body’s energy, stopping to listen to the sensations that arise from this source of life and pleasure when you are given a meal, a caress or move in a certain way. Seeking to accompany the body or to be carried away by it, instead of forcing and submitting.

Observe it without judgment to individually redefine the concept of the body from the sense, from the bodily experience. In this discovery there is a crucial question: In what part of the body do I feel discomfort or pleasure?

Touch in all its variants is a simple and powerful way to rebuild the love lost for the body. The taste of the touch of a hand or another body undoes the weight of any idea. With pleasure, imperfections are diluted, disappear.

Integrative activities

The awareness generated by yoga or tai chi, through breathing and different postures and movements, also facilitates the connection with the body, teaches its language and builds a healing union between body, mind and spirit.

Perhaps that is why these psychophysical techniques are gaining ground in the West, since they allow to reduce anxiety and stress, linked to a dominant mind and out of step with the body.

Any movement and physical activity carried out with awareness favors a more harmonious relationship between mind and body. The endorphins that are generated allow you to feel comfortable in your own skin. But again it is necessary not to lose sight of the body and its sensations for the sake of a goal.

The potential of dance

Personally, the way that has helped me the most to enter the body and hear its three-dimensional voice is dancing. Moving from the inside out allows the inner to take shape and gesture.

Dancing without looking for anything, without trying to do it right or wrong, but for the pleasure of generating new sensations through movement and checking the body’s enormous capacity for expression.

With this, another awareness is taken of the different parts of the body that make up the being and that are full of information and history. The mind-body union arises naturally thanks to the combination of music, emotion and movement that quiets the mental dialogues.

The dance puts related aspects that separated traditional education: emotion and reason, pleasure and effort, sensory perception and concept, word and image. By dancing, body and mind merge with the present in an experience of joy and creativity that can be individual or shared.

To love each other again

When an attitude develops in which the person takes responsibility for the internal information provided by the body, harmful habits such as a sedentary lifestyle or an unbalanced diet are modified not for “duty”, but to enjoy more inner well-being.

Developing a gaze of love towards the body does not mean determining whether the body is beautiful or ugly, but rather returning home to take care of what is ours, what we are and what links us to life. It is lightening the weight of appearances to accompany the body in its impulses.

It is to create a new benchmark of morality, beauty and health from the bodily experience.

The way the body is treated says a lot about how the life that comes through it is accepted. In each gesture is contained a way of relating to the world and of gratefully receiving the inheritance of the ancestors.

Loving the body means loving nature, not as a source of wealth to exploit, but as a wonder to preserve and respect, a manifestation of life full of mysteries that bring us closer to fullness.

Strategies to pamper your body:

• Give prominence to your body and write what it tells you: “I am a body that …”. Remember in the most sensory way possible your moments of pleasure, meals, first day on the bike, joys, illnesses … Are they still relevant?
• If you criticize your body, what sensations are awakened? Is what you say to yourself true? Under what criteria? How do you punish him? Can you drop this thought? If your body spoke, what would it say?
• Each should involves a kind of weight lifting for the body. Substitute “I must” for “I want.” Do you feel something change in the body?