The Business of Bad Body Image

Love is also an action you choose.

I am in the business of aligning my mildly crooked spine, through physical therapeutic training,¹ and it is working, on many levels. Scoliosis has been conditioned into my body since I was 12, not-so-coincidentally coinciding with the development of my eating disorder (which I have written at length about here).

I may never know the extent to which bodies hold onto memories of pain, but I know that they do. I’ve been starting to think, lately, that it’s more the subconscious mind’s affair, to hold onto memories, than it is the body’s; that said, the body and the mind work together. What happens in one affects the other.

From a very young age, I was so conscious of how my body interacted with the world. I started hunching my shoulders, numbing through restriction, and shrinking instead of growing before I’d even made it out of middle school. Maybe my spine compromised itself in response to my inner turmoil. Maybe it’s one of those things that just happen; those things I have a hard time just accepting.

Despite my many years spent practicing yoga and learning—through Western and Eastern disciplines, alike—that the mind, body, and spirit are intertwined, it still came as a shock to realize that the methodical, physical process of untwisting my spine has also become an emotional process of detangling the shame that has gotten stuck in my bones. What I thought were old insecurities and impulses have come to the forefront of my mind, again. The difference is that now I see them as not-my-self, and they are not the default. The difference is that I know where they take me, and I no longer believe they lead to where I want to go.

In response to all this, I’ve been struggling with my body image. Understandably so: I am currently focusing intently on the mechanics of my body, and in doing so, dredging up the memories of how I used to obsessively manipulate my body. But still, it seems so trite, to talk about being critical of my appearance. Of course it’s deeper than just the way I look on the outside—and also, it isn’t at all. The whole drama of my inner world is still, in some areas, very shallow. And that’s ok.

Growing to accept and love myself and my body has been the most excruciating challenge; at the same time, when that mode is operating, it feels easy. We are designed to love ourselves: it is a natural way of being. We are, at the core, love, unconditional.

I am seeing, over and over, that true transformation and healing arises out of love, rather than forced out of greed or lack. So much of the anorexia stems from my own internalized lack: each step of my recovery—in order to actually stick—has had to be motivated by love.

It was deeply upsetting, recently, to reach the limit of my self-love. I guess that means it wasn’t love, at all, but a kind of general positive feeling I’d been maintaining toward myself. What a hypocrite I must be—I constantly talk about love, and here I am, so twisted up about my appearance, which hasn’t even changed.

It struck me that because I could see that some part of me had imposed that limit, I could choose to go beyond it. In fact, I have no choice but to go beyond it. If I’m as dedicated to living an honest and loving life as I say I am, I have no other option but to walk the talk.

I am open to remembering love for my body. I am open to allowing my body to transform and support me more fully. Help me transform this pain into freedom. I surrender all that is in my way.

What’s been helping me move through this wave of self-criticism is noticing how imperfect everyone else is around me. This may sound antithetical, but it’s really very practical. The practice: to actively notice and look at people. To see their visible (subjective) imperfections, and, at the same time, consider the person in their entirety.

Here is a human, and all their complex pieces make up this complex whole. How deserving they are of love.

My favorite definition of “meditation” is “to become familiar with”, and this is what I’ve been doing: becoming familiar with the feeling of witnessing imperfection in others. I keep finding the feeling of neutral acceptance, and then, quite often, love or warmth.

For someone who has been haunted by perfectionism for as long as she can remember, this is an especially profound meditation. What I realize in these moments of noticing “imperfections” is that I do not care about any of it. If my heart is open, and I am looking through the lens of love, everything imperfect seems absolutely perfect. A beautiful paradox.

This practice works for both superficial imperfections (the stained shirt, the acne, the crooked teeth or greasy hair) and the more internal ones (the road rage or the flakiness). You can meditate on strangers or on people you know intimately. The point is to discover the energy of love and acceptance for the other, and in turn, direct it toward yourself. We are each just a person, flaws and all. We are each a part of this same great whole.

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I spoke to my dear and wise friend Emily about this space of unease I’m inhabiting, and she reminded me that love is also an action that you can choose. You don’t have to wait for self-love to make itself known: by choosing to love yourself a little more, now, you build trust between you and love. The more you experiment with love, the more you will continue to see that it shows up when you call upon it. To choose to love yourself is to embody the frequency of loving, and let that guide your words and actions.

I’m learning that loving myself most often means that I am present enough to see the ways my mind is ensnaring me in self-destruction, and making the choice to not be ensnared. It doesn’t always work. But I’ll keep doing it.

True transformation happens on its own; it emerges out of a place of already enough. I know that if I really want to align my spine and change the way my body moves, I have to approach it from a place of already being good and whole enough. I have to be willing and wanting to be free of the pain trapped between my vertebrae, and the conditioned restrictive behaviors that live in my mind. I’m choosing to trust that this pure intention is present within me, already. It will emerge in full force in its own perfect timing.

Why do you choose to love yourself?

I’m choosing to love myself because I am curious about the life that wants to be lived through me, and I want to be here to watch it unfold. Because I have things and people in the world that are important to me, and because frankly, it’s boring to be captured by fear and lack.

Every time I realize I’m not being loving, I start again. Honestly, there isn’t any other choice.

What would love do?

Maggie

1. It’s called Functional Patterns and is absolutely incredible—people train with it to get out of pain and reorient the way their bodies move. It works.