 REPOSTED FROM THE TRANS-SCEND BLOG 2016 We all think we have the worst (fill in the appropriate body part here) in the entire history of human beings. It’s too big, it’s too small, it’s flat, it’s puffy, it’s lumpy, it’s flabby, and it’s whatever you think it is. I had that, plus, well… you know… I was supposed to be a boy!! I mean damn I had boobs for f’ sake, but that is neither here nor there. The real issue is that there is so much bombarding us daily about having the perfect everything and without it we will never be happy, find love, or get the right job, the right car, the right house, the right partner, the right kids or the right dog. Wow, there is a lot riding on how our bodies look isn’t there? What is perfection though? I mean yes we are shown it every day. We see the supermodels, the actresses, the glam shots, the commercials, the ads. We see the airbrushed women who have become the embodiment of the breathing Barbie doll. You remember Barbie, right, that doll that would never, ever be an actual living woman because her proportions are all out of whack. Yeah, they totally airbrushed Barbie while putting together her plastic body in a factory, a lot like the models we see today. Ever see one of those women without the makeup? Heck, it isn’t just makeup, it’s everything the computer can do these days, it’s Avatar selling you a lie!!
Yeah, I know, I can say all that and still it doesn’t change the fact that you still won’t like whatever it is you don’t like about yourself. The fact that we have such self-hate, yeah I refuse to say “low self-esteem” that’s bullshit, let’s just call it what it is, we honestly hate that part of our body and if we hate something about ourselves we actually hate our whole self. Don’t sugar coat it, say it, feel the actual feeling of hating yourself, why because you already do you just don’t admit to yourself. It’s the first step to loving our bodies… 1. Hating our bodies makes it impossible to be happy. Seriously, do you really think you have any chance at happiness if you start with hating the one person you are going to be with for the rest of your life? I despised myself for years, I didn’t realize that was what I was doing but I finally hit a point where I decided to give up smoking after nearly 20 years, know why? “Because I don’t want to kill myself anymore.” That is seriously what I said to my girlfriend at the time and then I had to take a step back and really hear myself. I had been trying to kill myself for years. I had cut myself, put cigarettes out on my skin, put myself in dangerous situations, did drugs, drank too much, drove to fast, smoked and did pretty much everything else we tend to think of as “normal” and never once did I realize I had truly wanted to die (the only times I knew that for sure was when I deliberately tried to slit my wrists). I had been tempting fate for years in hopes that I could finally pull it off because I had that much hate for my own body. It can be so subtle and yet it causes such a toll, not only on your body but on your psyche. That was one of the first moments where I realized I could actually be happy if I let it all go. That I could have a life if I would just give myself a break. That isn’t to say I didn’t have happy moments, but they never lasted, they can’t, why because it’s based on the lie that you like yourself. If you are unhappy with yourself, you can’t be happy with life because you are starting off unhappy. 2. It would change our world. It never seems to occur to us when we are in the middle of it that others might hate their bodies too and if we do start to realize this then we start to compare. “Well you shouldn’t feel bad at least you are pretty but look at my ass!” Yeah, we try to make ourselves out to be worse than our friends. We try to make them feel better by saying how much more we hate ourselves, and for good reason, than they should. We degrade ourselves even more to make them feel better. Why? Because we are used to verbally abusing ourselves on a daily basis. If we were actually hitting ourselves daily we might see it a little differently but no, we are just using words. Having come from a home where there was both physical and mental abuse I can tell you that the bruises on the outside eventually go away, the ones on the inside though, they are constantly reinforced and hurt even more. We never seem to realize that everyone is going through the same thing. That no matter what people look like they are always finding something they believe is wrong with them. We have high numbers of divorce, child abuse, spousal abuse, depression, drug abuse, alcohol abuse and I could keep going. Seems to me there might be some sort of correlation to hating oneself and all of that, just thinking out loud here. 3. It would change our unconscious reactions. I realized the other day that when I pass a mirror or a reflective surface that it will tell me if my unconscious is focused on my body or not. When I was growing up I had some pretty severe acne and my mother used to constantly harp on me about it. This caused me to be hyper focused on my face and whether or not I was broken out or not so every time I passed a mirror or window I constantly looked at my face. I wasn’t checking my hair, wasn’t looking into my eyes, wasn’t seeing if I had something in my teeth, I was trying to figure out if I had gotten any uglier since morning. If any more pimples had popped up, if my face was exploding with ugly. I constantly focused on my looks in relation to my acne and I continually broke out. We are never told that thoughts are things, that we can bring about change by focusing on things or that we have the power to create. These ideas all surface in the more new agey type areas but they happen to be reinforced by science now. Some call it creation, some call it manifesting, and some just call it magic. Dr. Emoto did experiments with single words and their effect on water and found results where one word could change the molecular structure of it. The words used were “love” and “hate”, it actually changed the molecules. We are made up of around 60% water, thoughts can change us. So observe what you are observing as you pass by a reflection. You may not notice any words come at the time but if your eyes are shifting to that area(s) that you feel is a “problem” you are focused on negative ideas about yourself. Use a bit of #3 and when you pass by your reflection again start saying “I love you”. Sometimes I will even put my hands on the area while I say it so that I can more readily direct the words/feeling there. I want you to try and feel love an appreciation for that area. After all it’s part of the body that allows you to live and breathe here, love and appreciate it. 4. It would change the way we speak to ourselves and others. This is a fascinating one, not only can words affect our very being but sometimes we aren’t even aware that the way we say things has a different meaning than how we believed they did. Take for example this sentence: “I love my body but I just need to lose a few pounds.” Now for the most part we see this as a sentence from a perfectly normal, healthy, well-adjusted person. I mean they said “I love my body” they must, you know, love their body, right? Well… okay the “but” is the issue here… “But” generally means forget everything I just said and listen to this. Like, “I love you, but…” yeah, don’t expect there to be good news after that. By using just one tiny word that person just said something negative about their body and in a very underhanded way. How often do we speak to ourselves or others that way. Do we cut our friends down without realizing it, how about family, co-workers or just random people. They may not even realize how underhanded the sentence actually was and consequently may not realize that they are negatively impacting themselves. One other area where things occur is in judging others. Many philosophies understand that when I say “Wow, that dude is fat.” I’m actually judging the person not based on how they are but how I see myself. Now yes, the guy might be rather large, however if I don’t feel that way about myself I probably wouldn’t even notice. It goes back to how we feel about life and ourselves, when we are at our happiest we don’t notice negative things, case in point did you realize the person you just fell in love with 3 months ago actually snores? 3 months ago you probably thought it was so cute and now you just want to smother them with a pillow. So pay attention to your judgments of others, it may in fact be pointing out how you feel about yourself. 5. It would change how we see ourselves. I’ve noticed that the number one feeling I seem to have about myself is something so buried I never realized it before: unworthy. Then I started realizing via speaking with friends and family and reading things on the internet that we all feel some degree of unworthiness whether or not we recognize it. There a ton of philosophies on why we feel this, when and how it starts and whatnot and also one very easy way to fix it: stop believing it, it’s a lie. How do I know this, because I’ve investigated the feeling many times all the way down to the core and someone or something is always responsible for my believing it, I just don’t have to. Again, no one can say anything negative about you that is true, no one. They may think they can, you may think they can, the truth though is that it is about themselves, what they are going through, what they are dealing, it has nothing to do with you. So, if someone else gave me the idea that I was unworthy, gave my friends that same idea too then it is false and I’m pretty sure if that is true for myself, all the people I know and the ones that I’ve read about that also disbelieve it then it is surely wrong about you. You are worthy. You are worthy of love, you are worthy of happiness, you are worthy of friends and family. Anything you might think you are unworthy of change your mind right now, you are the only that can. How would it feel to love your body? You won’t really know until you actually do. I can’t tell you for sure what it will feel like for you but I can guarantee it will change you. When we start to love ourselves, we start to understand what it is to respect ourselves, we gain confidence we never knew we had, we are able to stand in our own power and rejoice in new found feelings. Loving ourselves is the beginning to changing our worlds for the better. Can you imagine that, can you imagine looking at yourself in the mirror and not say “damn, I’m …” but instead say “Damn, I love myself.” Try it, go find a mirror, look yourself in the eye and say “I love you”. How does it feel? Awkward, uncomfortable, stupid, like it’s a lie maybe? Yeah, I’ve been there. In fact, it’s going to take repetition to get it to even feel normal rolling off your tongue. Many religions and philosophies swear by mantras and this is one that you need to start reciting. I do it when I go to bed, I learned from a friend about placing my hand on my heart and repeating “I am love” as part of a consciousness practice, I then changed it to “I love my body” and sometimes “I love myself”. It took weeks before I got any kind of reaction but then finally I started to get this cool tingly feeling in my heart area and soon I could start to say it to my reflection in the mirror. For me it’s been an ongoing process that I have to go back to periodically mostly because I believe the more you begin to love yourself the more you dig some deep, deep core stuff up and so you start the process over so again each time so that the old junk you move out gets replaced by love. All of these ideas are things I observe about myself on a daily basis. Do I love my body? I’m giving it a damn good shot, I’m far happier with it than I ever was before and I will continue to build on my relationship with it. No matter what else happens, what I say, how I feel, what I observe I always go back to the above. It is like any other relationship, you have to be observant and diligent and believe in the relationship. What better to believe in than the partnership with yourself and the body that makes it possible to move about this world. No matter what else happens with any other relationship I have, this will always be at my core and I will continue to tell it how much I love and appreciate it, after all we all want to hear those words.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
|
RSS Feed