Overcoming Body- Dyspmorphia and Loving Who You Are
I am almost finished reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. This is the type of spiritual development book that will crack your brain open and send you on a journey of deepening self-discovery and identifying who you are beneath form.
Something I learned in this book is to look deeper into the emotions I feel towards my body. With social media being such an integral part of identity in modern society, being able to separate what you look like, with who you are, is a lost concept.
“The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes cam, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is aways undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still.”
When you are in stillness, you can watch your thoughts more closely. You don’t even realize how many judgmental thoughts cross your mind about yourself and others in any given day. Negative thoughts that keep you connected only to external stimuli and thus, preventing you from understanding who you are underneath the surface
I like to do an exercise with people to help them come into their bodies further and understand their essence. I ask them to imagine losing the ability to feel, no sensation felt by your nervous system and thus no reaction or response. At the same time you cannot see, you cannot hear, and you cannot smell or taste anymore. In one quick sweep your 5 senses are lost.
The 5 senses relate only to the body. These capabilities our body has provide us with our ability to experience the world. But if they are taken away from you, what remains? Are you still there? Of course you would be,what remains is just your essence of existence that exists beyond the experience of form.
We all have the capacity to experience this phenomenon of being our true nature, once we move on from identifying solely with what we look like.
The last 2 years have been life-changing for me. It is incredible, that all the spiritual teachings say that through suffering is enlightenment. As I continue to read and digest them it becomes truer to me still.
I also recently listened to a podcast who talked about the people who have done 10 + ayawasca trips and come back exclaiming their wonders they experienced while on the journey with the plant medicine and how they believe they have “transformed.”
What the guest on the podcast eloquently explained was that a monk once told him that enlightenment ( and by enlightenment I mean the inner peace revealed while existing on Earth) is contant work. It is not a single journey with a plant medicine or a single near death experience, the meaning of life cannot be reduced to a flash. It is instead the constant, consistent work you do everyday to be better for yourself and others.
“Only those who have transcended the world can bring about a better world.”
images I’d have saved under “Body Goals” on Pinterest
Everyday, I believe I am practicing peace towards myself and towards others. I strive to be an active listener not someone who needs to be the loudest, I reduce my judgments towards others, I try to obersve nature, people, animals in a way that afffirms to me that we are made of the same materials and exist because of the same energy and therefore are one with each other…and mostly I try to heal the negative self talk and damage I have done to my own form and mind.
When I was 11 years old I started skipping breakfast in the morning without my parents noticing to try and stay skinny. It was the sole thought that I only had friends because I was thin that kept my brain operating for so long on the basis that thin meant friends, which meant acceptance, which meant love, which meant validation.
Spiral into my early 20’s and modeling made it all the worse. But I know that I am far from alone in these sentiments. Addictions to the body is something I can say for certain is a widespread disease across most females. We are addicted to how we look and how we are perceived by others, and this addiction causes us incredible mental and physical pain.
When I was modeling, I could’ve sworn I looked like a cow. I was browsing through my photo albums the other day and I found my weekly and sometimes biweekly photos I would take in the mirror to scan my body and look for where I felt I needed to lose weight.
My thighs were forever my point of insecurity, my wide shoulders next, and my wide hips. I would stare and nitpick for hours at the photos and admittedly I would use photoshopping apps to change the shape of my body to fit what I wanted.
When I look at those photos now my brain is almost confused, because I remember taking them and thinking omg I look so big, but now I can’t believe how unhealthily skinny I looked. Bones showing on my chest, thighs looking awkard as they slip out of my hip bones and create two goal posts with no dimension.
Body dysmorphia is scary and I sometimes can’t believe how real it is. It doesn’t matter how many times people tell you you look amazing or good, if your inner mind doesn’t believe it, it simply is not true.
Part of my constant work includes what I have talked about so many times before, and that is affirmations. I truly think that they are something that helped heal me and love my body. About a year ago is when I started listening to Youtube videos every morning with repeated healing affirmations that slowly, along with other work, helped shift my brain into a more loving place for my thoughts.
When I quit modeling, (read more here), it gave me the freedom from my mind that I was craving, I just needed to take an affirmative action towards giving myself what I needed.
I started eating more normally and intuitively without any shame or guilt. I used to not want to shower in the evenings and only in the morning, because I didn’t want to see what my body looked like after I just ate a bunch of food, all these little micro habits that contributed to self-hatred and ultimately kept me from being and loving who I am.
And the whole purpose of overcoming these types of things is so that you can give more of your true self to others with the real you. When you believe, unequivocally, in who you are and the many wonderful things you are capable of, people feel it, it emanates off of you and people are attracted to that.
I look in the mirror now and actually see the shape of my body, not the version I was trying to manipulate. I see the beauty in my curves and love my gap-less thighs. This body was gifted to me from DNA of my ancestors who fought and survived.
Something else I did that really helped me was my 5 month social media break I took last year. It was like a cleanse you do before a diet-lifestyle change. A pre-cursor to creating the life I want, an amuse-bouche. I had to disconnect to connect. Self-discovery requires little social input.
When I got back on social media, I was conscious, no longer unconsciously scrolling and spiralling into, “ I wish I looked like her, I wish I had her hair, I wish I had her legs, I wish I had her life.” Consciousness is the gateway to internal happiness and will safeguard you against the traps the mind often sets to keep you unhappy.
I remember telling my partner that I felt like I could finally actually see my body in the mirror, and I love it. It felt weird to say outloud something positive about myself, mainly because most of the time people sum that up to boastfulness, but saying outloud to yourself that you are beautiful could be exactly the type of brain cracking activity you need to get out of your negative habitual pattern thinking and routines. Do it NOW, say I Am Beautiful!
I am finally becoming who I innately have aways been. I am learning that this form allows me to learn and grow. And I am loving the process along with the results.
My greatest teachers are often the animals I surround myself with. They don’t look to be objectively attractive or perceived in a certain way to live life and feel good, they just be, and all I could ever desire out of this life is to be me.