"When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace."
The Dalai Lama
How often do you practice loving acts towards your Body? Most people who struggle with negative body image and disordered eating are stuck in a cycle of destruction and punishment that is closer to a relationship from hell than a loving partnership. The relationship is also more often about getting rather than giving, as you focus on what your Body can do for you rather than what you can do for your Body. This can lead to pain and emptiness, as it runs counter to the souls that we really are.
Can you remember falling in love? When I first met my future husband, I only saw the best in him and continually felt the impulse to make loving gestures towards him. I wanted him to know how much I loved and appreciated him and wanted him to feel the pleasure of receiving love. I drove almost an hour to personally deliver him flowers after our third date, offered him countless massages, and liked nothing better than cooking dinners to make him happy. It never felt like I was forcing myself to act lovingly. It felt effortless, as though I had finally uncovered who I had always wanted to be.
Active Loving asks you to behave toward your body (or another) as though you had just fallen in love. Your task is to help your Body feel appreciated, supported, valued and enjoyed. You are going to learn to romance your Body by showing it through definite actions (taught below) that you see it with the awe and reverence that it deserves.
You might initially be resistant to implement these tasks. Who wants to act lovingly towards someone you have despised your whole life? Many of the actions might feel forced and you might even feel resentful that you have to do something for another that you don’t want to do (especially if you already do a lot for others, which many people do). The most exciting point to remember is what Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." When you practice loving acts of kindness, you connect to your heart, your soul, and engage it to work it for you. Though it might feel strenuous in the short-term, the long-term rewards of connecting to love, gratitude, and giving are incomparable. Try some of these exercises and see. What do you have to lose? You can always go back to what you’ve been doing, right?
Exercises
• Make a gratitude list every night: At night, write down at least 5 things that you are grateful for about your body. Just watch and see how it changes your outlook!
• Practice giving gratitude to your body throughout the day. This can occur when you are exercising (thank you muscles, thank you heart, etc…), after you eat (thank you digestive system…), when you walk (thank you muscles and bones…). The possibilities are endless and you will become increasingly connected to how incredible your body is!!
• Notice the gifts that your relationship with your Body has brought you. Your Body is a most important spiritual partner: it teaches you important relationship skills; is a mirror of where you still need work; and it takes on the many unloving actions you dole out. Thank it for its endless patience, compassion, and love.
• Do a monthly Valentine/Birthday Day for your Body. This is a day of giving special treatment to your Body. It is a day in which you fully give of yourself to thank your Body for all it does for you. This could include a massage (yeah!), an embodied hike, lots of nutritious foods, etc…
• Whenever you notice that you are in the middle of Outside-In thinking (I hate my stomach, I look fat in these pants, I wish I had lost weight…), immediately CHANGE YOUR PERCEPTION and drop into the Inside-Out: put your focus on a body part, from a cell to a whole system, bring awareness to how this body part helps you in your life, and thank it from deep in your heart. This exercise can be done hundreds of times a day. It rewires brain physiology and hugely impacts your mind and body.
• Learn something new about your Body every day/every week. We know so little about what our bodies do for us every second of the day. I have a huge Body Atlas which I keep at my bedside and I make sure to read at least one new piece of information about my body every day.
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In the last few months, you have learned to be in deep contact with your body, to listen to your body, and to communicate lovingly with your body. This month, we focus on the practice of Give and Take, a “must” skill for anyone in a loving relationship. Unhealthy relationships are often imbalanced in this area, with one person doing most of the giving while the other is doing most of the taking. This becomes a win/lose situation. A healthy relationship requires you to sometimes give and sometimes take, sometimes get your needs met and sometimes meet the other’s needs. This requires love, compassion, and patience, and faith that balancing giving and taking can be a win/win situation.
Let’s focus on practicing Give and Take in your relationship with your body. What happens when you’ve listened to your body and uncovered that it needs something different than you? Your body might want some protein because you’ve just worked out while you are dying for warm chocolate chip cookies to reward your hard efforts. Your body might be telling you it’s full while you want to keep on eating. Don’t you wish you had not learned to listen to your body?! When you didn’t listen, it was so much easier to do what exactly what you wanted! Now that you’re listening, you have to decide how you are going to take your body’s needs into account.
Conflicting needs are a daily occurrence in relationships. Some of these are simple, such as when your partner wants to take a nap while you want to see a movie or when a friend wants to go out partying while you want to watch reruns of Lost. Others are more complex, such as when your partner wants to move to Hawaii while you could never leave New York, or when you want to have a child while your spouse wants to remain childless. How do you work with conflicting needs? Do you usually give in to another or do you meet your needs first? Are you a giver or a taker? The way you were raised might answer these questions. You might have been raised to take others’ needs into account first or you might have learned to take care of yourself first.
Consider three choices in the process of Give and Take. 1. In the first, you give and the other takes. If your body needs protein while you want cookies, you give your Body the protein it needs and forego the cookies. This can often feels like deprivation to those who struggle with food issues. 2. The second choice involves you taking and the other giving. You have the cookies and ignore the body’s needs. While this can initially make you feel great, you can end up malnourished and unhealthy. 3. The third choice involves compromise. Rather than a win/lose situation –one person has to lose if the other wins-, you make it win/win by meeting both of your needs, though not necessarily always at the same time.
What does the win/win choice look like? Here are a couple of examples. 1. You give your Body protein and then have your chocolate chip cookies. You feed your Body what it needs and still nurture yourself. Deprivation does not even enter your mind, as you know that you will still get what you want. 2. You have your cookies first while kindly promising your Body that you will feed it protein later. This creates balance in the system and a nourished Body that can support you in your life. In either case, both entities in the relationship are taken into account, something which does not usually happen when we are in the middle of a binge.
In the next couple of exercises, you will first assess how you practice Give and Take in your relationship with your body today. In the next one, you practice a more skillful balance of Give and Take.
Part I: Assessing the current relationship
Let’s look at the way you currently practice Give and Take in your relationship with your body. NOTICE what you do when you Body tells you it wants something and you want something different. Let’s say you’ve listened to your Body tell you that it wants greens while you really want ice cream. What’s your immediate reaction? Do you want to hear your body? Do you want to ignore it? Do you want what you want when you want it, regardless of the consequences? If you are in a safe situation, say it out loud to your body: “I don’t CARE what you want”, as though you were speaking to a partner. Bringing that voice into consciousness and being truthful shows you an honest mirror of who you are in the relationship. This allows you to decide whether this is good enough for you or whether you want to make changes.
What do you want? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What does Body want?
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What do you want to do about it (be honest)?
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Part II: Shifting the relationship
To improve on this skill, practice balanced give-and-take by making sure that both of your needs (you and your body) are met, though that doesn’t necessarily need to happen at the same time.
After you’ve listened to your needs and your body’s needs, if they are different, you have two choices: You can either a) decide to give yourself what you want first, but make sure to meet your body’s needs later: “I will eat chocolate now but I promise to give you protein and vegetables later tonight”. (When you speak to your body, use a loving tone of voice and make sure to follow through on your promise); or b) feed your body what it’s asking for and take care of yourself later: “I will give you protein and veggies now and will have ice cream tonight”. You will quickly notice how any possible deprivation thoughts will disappear when you know that you too will be taken care of. And amazingly, I often find that I don’t want the ice cream (or whatever I thought I really wanted) after I’ve fed my body what it needed.
What do you want? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What does Body want?
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What do you want to do about it if you practice loving Give and Take?
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At the end of both of these exercises, take the time to reflect on the practice of Give and Take. Know that there is no perfect way to do it, just a continued consideration of both partners in the relationship and a striving to be kind and loving to both.
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