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You and Your Body
Learn how to nurture your lifelong companion–your body.
By Susan Bierma
Whether you like it or not, your body is your lifelong companion. You are in a relationship with it—and it’s not the kind where can pack up your bags and slam the door behind you when things go sour. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do you part. So why not approach it like any relationship you want to work? Listen. Nurture. Support. Feed its passion. The payoff is a mutually beneficial partnership that energizes you and helps you achieve your life goals. .
"You and I are not our bodies," says Maria Nemeth, Ph.D., founder of the Mastering Life’s Energies and Befriending Your Body seminars, and recent guest of the Oprah Winfrey show. "If we look at any philosophical or spiritual approach, we know we are much more than our body. But we have a body and because of that, we have a relationship with this body. And if we want to be successful in life, we have to learn how to have a relationship with this body that’s a partnership and not adversarial."
Imagine going to a couples counselor with your body. What would it say about being in a relationship with you? According to Nemeth, what many of our bodies might say is: "She never feeds me. She never rests me. She’s always comparing me to other people and if I get the slightest imperfection, she wants to hide me. I don’t know if she really even cares about me."
"Often when people take their body’s point of view, they come up short," Nemeth says.
Looking for love in all the wrong places
Nemeth says the first step to improving your relationship with your body is to quit worrying about whether you love your body and instead realize your body loves you. "If you look at whether or not you love your body, what’s going to happen is all your complaints about your body will come up," Nemeth says. "Instead, the question is this: how would you behave if you knew your body loved you absolutely and all it wanted to do is support you?"
"That was a new way of thinking for me," says Linda Tell, who recently went through one of Nemeth’s workshops. "It made me realize I wasn’t treating my body very kindly. I wasn’t paying attention to the signals it was giving me. When it said it was tired and wanted to rest, I would keep pushing myself. Or if I was eating, and it gave me cues that it had enough, and `this doesn’t really taste good’, I just kept forcing it down. I wouldn’t want to treat another person that way. So, if I personalize the concept of my body—seeing it as someone who loves me—why would I treat it badly? That was a real eye-opener."
Working with your body, not against it
But what if you feel your body has betrayed you in some way—perhaps it’s a sports-related injury when you’re training for an event, or some other ailment that’s slowing you down? "Your body does not betray you," Nemeth insists. "Your body is subject to the laws of physical nature. Often your body is doing the best it can, but something needs to be tended to."
Instead of becoming frustrated and angry with your body and exercising through the pain, for example, Nemeth suggests working through the problem as you would in any successful relationship. "Within the context that you love each other, you work out the best strategy for taking care of that pain." See a doctor. Adjust your training. Whatever you do, don’t ignore a problem—take action to address it.
Similarly, you wouldn’t like it if your partner or friends were constantly comparing you to other people and held you up to impossible standards. So don’t do it to your body. "We are assailed at a very early age with these idealized, brushed photo-finish, no varicose veins, cellulite-free looking people and we become interested in having bodies that, as closely as possible, approximate these shapes," Nemeth says. "There’s nothing wrong with looking good. The problem is taking your attention away from the body you have and putting it on all these external images. That creates a disconnect."
Rather than trying to achieve a certain weight or size—based on what you think your body "should" look like—Nemeth suggests creating goals around what you would like to do with your body that would be fun. For example, Nemeth’s goal is to hike down and up the Grand Canyon with "ease, clarity and grace," singing her lungs out as she does it. "Logically, in order to hike down the Grand Canyon and back, I have to train. Along the way, I’m losing weight, but it’s a side effect, not a goal."
You and your body’s goal might be riding your bike from inn to inn during the fall leaf change in Vermont, running your first 10k, being able to give your kids a run for their money out on the playground for an hour, or competing in your favorite sport for a city league.
If you think about it from the relationship standpoint, it makes sense. What works better in your relationships with other people—trying to change and control the other person, or working together toward a common purpose that brings you both joy?
Taking a partnership approach to exercising has helped Tell see results she could never achieve in the past. "I’m seeing changes in my strength and measurements, and I’ve lost 5 pounds in two months, which is pretty incredible. One of the things I see now is that my body has been patient with me, and many times I have not been patient with my body. I’m giving myself more time, rather than expecting it’s going to happen immediately."
Shifting Your Focus
To shift from a disconnected or negative stance toward your body to a productive partnership you need to "clean out the closet of your mind," Nemeth says. "Get rid of all the old clothes that no longer work for you. In the closet of our minds, those are thoughts."
Here are two exercises she provides to help us do that:
Exercise # 1:
Draw a big square on a piece of paper and label it Box A. In it, write down every complaint you have ever had about your body. Start from your toes and go all the way up—from your thick ankles up to your funny ears, or whatever the case may be. But don’t stop there, also include limiting traits about your body, such as, "I have no balance, therefore I could never ski" or "I don’t have good hand-eye coordination, so I could never golf".
Then draw another big square next to it and label it Box B. In it, write down all the fun things you would do with your body if it weren’t for everything in Box A. One of Nemeth’s clients, a woman in her 50s, wrote down "Surfing in Waikiki". "And you know what, she ended up doing it and having a ball," Nemeth says.
After you’ve filled in your squares, notice which one gives you energy and which drains your energy, in which there is an opening for possibilities versus a repeat of the same patterns you’ve always followed, and how you will feel and behave toward your body based on the contents of each.
Now choose which box you are going to focus your attention on for the rest of your life. Whichever one you choose, tear up the other one.
If you choose to focus on Box A—your list of complaints—at least you’ll know why you always get what you’ve always gotten, Nemeth says.
If you choose Box B, you might want to perform some sort of ritual to destroy Box A, such as burning it in a bowl. "You are hereby declaring that you will focus on your fun goals and ways to achieve them, and that every time you notice yourself focusing on your complaints about your body, you will tell your mind, `Thank you so much for sharing, but I choose to focus on box B,’" says Nemeth. "And you will even inform your friends: `every time you hear me talk Box A stuff, you have my permission to point it out to me.’"
Exercise # 2:
Sit down with your favorite lotion and rub it into your hands. As you do this, appreciate everything your hands have done for you over the years. "One woman remembered how her hands held her first child for the first time," Nemeth says. "And one guy looked at his hands and remembered all the times his hands saved him from falling, because he’s a rock climber. It doesn’t take more than 10 minutes, but you will be amazed at how appreciative you will become for your body."
Tapping into your body’s wisdom
Your relationship with your body can be a reciprocal cycle of feedback, wisdom, support and energy. This exercise from Nemeth will help you open up the lines of communication.
Exercise # 3:
Find a quiet place and lie down or sit in a chair. Take deep breaths, concentrating on your heart area, "because it’s through your heart that your body speaks to you, not through your head," Nemeth says. When you feel a warmth or a sense of opening in your heart area, ask your body the following questions:
- What is it that ou want to do with me in this lifetime?
- What is your wish for me? What is your hope for me?
- How would you like to support me?
- Why have you chosen to be my body? ("This one may seem really weird, but it’s wonderful," Nemeth says)
- How can I support you?
- What would you like from me?
- How can I be a loving partner to you?
- What have you been trying to tell me?
- How can we be in partnership?
- How can we best play together?
- What makes you happy?
- How does it feel to know that I know how much you love me? ("It’s a convoluted question, but it’s important.")
Nemeth suggests you do this a few times, "because your body is eager to respond to you, but the problem is, you’re not used to listening to your body."
"One of the things I realized from this exercise is how tired I sometimes get and that I don’t acknowledge that," Tell says. "If I do take a break, I often sit down and turn on the TV, but the message that comes through to me is that my mind is tired too, wants a break, and the TV is not making me feel rested. That was a huge awakening. As a result, I decided to take a nap every day."
Eventually, you can tap into your body’s wisdom more frequently and spontaneously, Nemeth says, and ask at any time, "Is this something you really want to do or eat?"
According to Nemeth, your body is just waiting to support you in reaching your life’s potential if you’ll let it. "One of the things you’ll discover is that your relationship with your body, unlike other people, is probably one of the most unconditionally loving partnerships you’re ever going to be in. It’s up to you to wake up to this unconditional love. If you do, you have a chance to use this special energy of physical vitality to bring about your most relevant and meaningful goals and dreams for life."
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