Love Yourself–Including Your Body
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I’ve been listening to the audio book, The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. She has this wonderfully sad and funny scene in the book where the narrator, now an old man, volunteers to pose nude for an art class. He wonders if they will accept him because his body is so imperfect, so wrinkled, so unattractive. As he disrobes behind a curtain he has second thoughts about his foolishness. As he stands before the roomful of artists he cringes at the fact that he cannot hide parts of him that bring him shame.
Don’t we all do the same–wonder if we will be accepted because our bodies are so “imperfect,” or try to hide those parts of us that bring us shame? We’re not as tall as we would like to be. Our hair is not as curly or as straight as we think it should be. Our nose is too big or too pointed or too broad. We are too fat or too thin. Maybe your breasts are too small or your butt is too big. Personally, compared to our society’s standards of beauty, I am too short, to thick in the middle, and too pale. I have small hands and unruly hair that sometimes grows in the wrong places. My ear lobes are almost non-existent and my eyes are small and squinty. Just look at my picture on my home page and you can see for yourself!
Our tendency (and I include myself here) is to stand before the mirror and curse ourselves, to tell ourselves we are ugly. We do this because our culture lies to us. It tells us that unless we are attractive (by some arbitrary standard that keeps shifting), no one will love us. Marketers of clothing, make-up, exercise equipment, hair-coloring, etc. want us to believe that love is somehow dependent upon what we look like. If we don’t have the right shape or the right bounce in our hair then we must sit on the sidelines while other “more attractive” people fall in love and have fun in life. That is a lie.
Unfortunately, this lie is one we all believe to some degree or another. Even the most “beautiful” people loathe their body at times because the standard that we all try to achieve is unreachable. We are taught to hate our physical bodies.
If we are to love our physical bodies we will still get on the exercise machine regularly. We will eat correctly in order to provide the necessary and healthy fuel our bodies need. We will avoid the poisons of nicotine, drugs, alcohol, fatty foods, and other harmful substances. We will take care of our body, not in order to sculpt it into some unrealistic god or goddess figure. Rather we will take care of our body because we want it to be healthy so we might live our lives to the fullest.
I do not exercise as much as I should, and I don’t always eat the correct foods. In these failures I am not demonstrating love for myself. However, I do the most damage to myself when I simply fail to accept my body for what it is and embrace it as good.
I don’t have to have an unrealistically ”perfect” body to be able to love myself. Rather, only when I choose to believe that my body is already perfect do I truly love. I am complete and whole, without defect and unmatched. My body is already an ideal and fitting part of my humanity. I need no other. I simply must care for the one I have.
Comparing ourselves to impossible standards does nothing but fuel hatred for ourselves. As long as we are longing for something else (which we will never have) we can never be fully pleased with ourselves. I must take care of the body I have, but first I must accept it as mine, a body given to me by God.
To love others as we love ourselves, then, means that we must not tie love to outward appearances. It means we must embrace and find pleasure in those all along the spectrum of sizes and shapes. We must radically change the way we view and judge others. This is almost impossible to do, however, if we can’t accept our own bodily “imperfections.” You are who God has made you. Love your body and care for it well.
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