WBB ESSAYS

- Karly of FirstOurselves.com

The Self Care/Loving your Body Connection

As I see it, self care and loving your body are not that far apart. How are they related? Their appearance or absence in your life are primarily influenced by how you feel about yourself: your value and self worth as a person. Self care and body love are merely behaviors; the effect, not the cause. They are following your internal belief system, not guiding it.

What's guiding your behavior is your internal beliefs. If you want to love your body, if you want to say no to obligations that leave you drained, if you want to add more joy to your life, if you want to honor your needs, you must first and foremost believe that you are worthy of these things. And you believe that you are worthy of pleasure, joy, love and acceptance by embracing that you are worthy, joyful, beloved, and accepted.

Yes, it's primarily an inside job. If you believe you are a worthy, lovable human being, then you will most likely believe your body is worthy and lovable, too. If you believe you are worthy and lovable, then you will treat yourself as someone who is worthy of love and care. By contrast, if you are harsh, critical and demanding towards your body, I will bet that you are also harsh, critical, and demanding towards yourself. Believing that you need to be a size four to be worthy is just one more version of the lie that your entire being needs to be perfect to be worthy.

If you beat yourself up for gaining ten pounds, you'll probably beat yourself up for burning a dinner or losing your temper with your children. Why? These thoughts are all the work of our inner critic, which feeds off our unworthiness until it seeps into every area of our lives: home, work, family, and health.

I think about the years that I spent dieting, desperately trying to lose fifteen pounds. While I exercised punitively (one mile for every indulgence the preceding night), and punished myself with stringent food restrictions, I also denied myself comfort, care, friendship, and nurturing. I treated my body as I treated myself: harshly. I treated others as I treated myself: harshly. I was prickly with my family and loved ones, because the same criticism I directed towards myself I directed towards others.

Thank goodness for the grace of change. Today, I can see correlations, the varied offspring of my journey of self love: as I give myself permission to relish and enjoy food, I've given myself permission to relish and enjoy my other earthy, lusty desires for sexual connection, pleasure, and joy.

As I relax about my weight and the number on the scale, I relax about money and the number in my bank account.

As I relax my expectations for what I should look like, I relax my expectations for what my house should look like.

As I've relaxed my perfectionist standards for myself, I've also relaxed my standards for my children, my husband, and my family.

As I let myself feel beautiful, I let other women be beautiful, without the jealousy I'd previously felt.

As I nurture my body with good food, exercise, fabulous, flattering clothes, and pampering, I likewise nurture myself with juicy novels, afternoon naps, girlfriend time, and window shopping.

As I deeply and completely love and accept my body, with its quirks, imperfections, and blemishes, I am also able to completely love and accept others with their quirks and imperfections. As I've loved my body, I've loved myself; as I've loved myself, I've extended that love outward, to others. It's a spiral of change that softened my ego, quieted my judgments, and created peaceful relationships where heretofore was friction.

As I love myself, I love my body. As I love my body, I love myself. As I love myself, I love others; I love my life. It's a mutally reciprocal road, that extends inward, outward, and eventually, upward, reawakening each of us to our true, divine nature.