Tag Archives: body image

A Body Incredible

  By | ,
6 Comments

Image: Body Electric by Atomicjeep on Flickr

I am not always happy with you, body. You have bits that wobble in a way that I don’t like. You have marks and discolorations that annoy. Your blood pressure is fussy. You have rheumatoid arthritis and the associated pain. Your hamstrings are tight and your lower back is too. You grow hair in places I could pass on, but not in the areas where I would like some. Some days I would happily trade you in for another.

But, look what you have done:

  • 46+ years of heart beating, 60-100 beats per minute or more, on and on through over 24,500,000 minutes.
  • The same length of time in breathing, in and out, chest rising and falling knowing on your own when more is needed or less.
  • Countless meals digested and processed into energy to power the movement, the breath, the heartbeat, the thoughts.
  • The care and growing of six full beings. Six FULL beings that developed there, with precision, with care.
  • Moving through waiting tables, bartending, teaching, and other tasks with little obvious direction required.
  • Accomplishing the art of balance, mostly on the soles of two feet that represent a tiny portion of the overall surface of the body, micro-movements occurring in every instant to maintain the fragile balance. Sometimes even balancing on hands or head or one leg, or on a narrow surface, or while negotiating a tricky path.
  • Shifting and changing to accommodate the life changes around, belly growing and shrinking in pregnancy, center of balance moving when needed, producing this hormone or that one, more stomach acid or less, heart pumping harder or slowing.
  • Helping me to find my way to new modes of being in the body that create and support new modes of being in the mind and the heart.
  • Healing wounds and bruises and viruses, mostly with only the internal mechanisms of cell growth and immune response.
  • And so much more…

And still more to do.

So, body, you are pretty impressive.

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

~ Walt Whitman, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’

Yoga and Eating Disorder – The Other Side?

  By | ,
7 Comments

Recently, I’ve found myself reading a lot of discourse about yoga and body identity – including eating disorders.  For the most part, when it is directly addressed, the focus seems to be on the ways in which yoga can aid in the recovery from eating disorder.  There are even much cited studies from 2005 and 2009 that show a “scientific” connection between doing yoga and recovery from E.D.  But, I want to just trouble that conclusion for a moment.  I’ve written in the past about how yoga can operate as a positive force in combating body issues, including eating disorder.  And, I don’t want this to be perceived as a “taking back” of that point, but I think that the crucial word here is can.  Yoga can assist in eating disorder recovery.  But, that doesn’t mean it will and it doesn’t make it a cure.

Before I go on, let me be clear here about what I mean by eating disorder.  From my perspective, and based on my own scholarly work regarding the issues, I elect to operate from a definition that is not based primarily on body size/shape, nor on official diagnosis.  From my viewpoint, having a weight that is higher than the currently accepted social norm is not an eating disorder.  Having a weight that is lower than the currently accepted social norm is not an eating disorder.  An individual can have a perfectly “normal” weight and still have a disordered relationship with food and the body.  And, from my view, “eating disordered” isn’t about an official diagnosis of anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating, etc.  In fact, I would argue that most people in the U.S., and probably even a  higher percentage of women, have a disordered relationship with food.  I see it as a continuum.  On one end would be a perfectly healthy relationship with food.  On the other end would be a totally destructive relationship with food.  Few people are at either end of the continuum.  Most of us are in the middle somewhere.  This means that there isn’t a specific cut-off where we can say that someone has leapt over the barrier from healthy to unhealthy relationship with food.  This being my belief, functionally I tend to define eating disorder as a state in which the relationship with food significantly negatively impacts other parts of the individual’s life.  Those other parts can include other relationships, physical health, emotional well-being, occupation, school success, etc.   So, that’s where I’m coming from.

Looking at it from this standpoint, I can see, and have seen in my own life, how developing a more yogic mindset can assist in E.D. recovery (moving toward that perfectly healthy end of the continuum).  Such a mindset encourages us to see the unity between self and other, to value the self in a different way, to see the body as both less and more important (less important in appearance, more important in the need to maintain its health so that we can work on the other issues), to let go of our attachments/aversions (to food, to fat, to being thin, and so on).  But, and this is an important but, that is about really having that yoga philosophy and having it resonate through the whole worldview.  And that isn’t what yoga ends up being always.

In the U.S. (and I’m not saying it isn’t this way other places – I just don’t live there), yoga often is understood to mean primarily or only the physical practice.  And, I don’t just mean by people who don’t regularly do yoga.  I still find myself thinking “no yoga today” when I mean no asana.  And, therein lies the rub – or one of them.  If yoga is mostly about the physical, it not only might not reduce eating disordered behavior/thoughts, it may increase them.  This is the yoga that makes curvy yogis say that they feel disenfranchised by studios, yoga organizations, and yoga publications.  This is the yoga that leads to contests that seem to be primarily about appearance.  This is the  yoga that promotes the notion that a yoga body should look like X.  And all of these beliefs are contributory to the perceptions of reality that create eating disorder.

But, it doesn’t end there.  Even when yoga is understood as going beyond the physical, there are beliefs and understandings floating around in yoga-land that can be problematic for recovery.  What serious student of yoga has not heard stories of ______ (great guru of choice) who only consumed 1 ________ (fruit, vegetable) a day because he/she was so beyond the needs of the physical body?  There are a lot of these legends in the yoga culture.   That’s dangerous, because “I don’t need food at all” and “If I don’t eat, I will be a better person” sound an awful lot like anorexic  thoughts.   The competitiveness that has  become a part of yoga culture is another issue.  There is no denying the pervasiveness of the “x style is better than y,”  “x guru is better than y guru,”  “so-and-so is a more real yoga practice than such and such” that goes on.  Maybe it shouldn’t be there, but it is.   Is it surprising that this might contribute to an eating disordered worldview that is already based on preoccupation with being more-than or less-than, better-than or worse-than?

So, yeah.  I don’t really have some big pronouncement to end with here.  I guess my point is that, before we wander around patting our own backs (ha ha, yoga joke) about how good yoga is for treatment of eating disorders, let’s take the time to recognize the ways in which the yoga culture we have created can be contributory as well.  If yoga is about unity, let’s understand that “yoga” isn’t all good, any more than it is all bad.  It just is.

Namaste,

L

p.s. While I fully respect how the revelation of detailed personal battles with eating disorder can be useful to speaker and audience, I have elected not to do that here, not as a condemnation of anyone else’s choices, but just because of where I am right now.

p.p.s.  I had a very hard time selecting an image for this post without it appearing that I was being overly critical of one particular person or establishment or presenting images that might be bad triggers.  So, this boring fork was the result of that debate.

This is the Body I Have

  By | ,
8 Comments

It’s so easy to engage in body criticism, body shame, and body sadness.  Social scientific research, media reports, and everyday experience suggest that many of us engage in daily mental accusations against our own bodies.  This is  understandable, and as someone with a history of eating disorder, it’s certainly something I can relate to.  But, from a pragmatic perspective or a yogic perspective, such self-negation doesn’t do much that is good for us.  We can use constructive analysis of the body to help us focus our health efforts, but non-constructive negative self-talk only clutters our minds with more vrtti, places our focus on the physical over the emotional or spiritual, emphasizes the division between self and other, etc.  Yet, coming up with some positive things to say about and to the self isn’t always easy.  In this post, I present to you some examples of honest but positive affirmations related to the body that can become a part of the ongoing self-talk we all engage in.  Not every affirmation works for every person, as we all have different bodies, but we can all find positive things to say about the body.

My body is so miraculous.  It’s a cybernetic (self-correcting) system in action!

24 hours a day, I breathe and I don’t even have to think about how to make that happen.  That’s amazing.

I love that I can experience the taste of sweet, salty, bitter, and spicy food on my tongue.  Yay for my tastebuds!

I’m so grateful that I can get from place to place with my own two feet (or one foot or hands – whatever you use for locomotion).

This body I’m in allows me to hug, touch, kiss, hold hands with those that I care for and that’s a fabulous thing.

It’s so wonderful to be able to see, and hear all of the beauty in this world.

I’m so pleased for a digestive system that allows me to enjoy food that sustains me.  My gut rocks!

My eyes (lips, toes, knees) are so pretty.

Oranges, violets, and vanilla (or chocolate, roses, and beer?) smell so fabulous to me.  I love having a nose.

It feels amazing to run my toes or fingers through sand and water. I’m so happy for fingers and toes!

When I stretch, I feel like I’m opening myself up to the world.  That is so nice!

My skin is such a pretty shade.

I’m grateful for this body that allows me to interact online with others who love the things I do.

My body is one hundred percent unique!

Some of this may be a little too corny for you, but it’s really no more corny than the time we spend thinking “My butt is too big,” “I can’t do a backbend like Jill,”  “I wish I could run a marathon,”  “Why isn’t my hair curly?”  Why do we say things like this to ourselves when we would never ever think they are ok to say to someone else?  Treat yourself as lovingly as you would a child in your care.  What would you be willing to say to him/her about his/her body?

Tell yourself 3 good things about your body right now.  Do it again tomorrow and the day after.  Eventually, maybe you’ll believe it even if you don’t right now.  Eventually, maybe it will crowd out some of the negative self talk.

Namaste,

L