Loving the Body, Loving the Self

The attitude of "heroism" is based upon the assumption that we are bad, impure, that we are not worthy, are not ready for spiritual understanding. We must reform ourselves, be different from what we are . . . We become vegetarians and we become this and that. There are so many things to become. We think our path is spiritual because it is literally against the flow of what we used to be, but it is merely the way of false heroism, and the only one who is heroic in this way is ego.
   - Chogyam Trungpa

When we hate and abuse the body and its earthly life and joy for Heaven's sake, what do we expect? That out of this life that we have presumed to despise and this world that we have presumed to destroy, we would somehow salvage a soul capable of eternal bliss? And what do we expect when with equal and opposite ingratitude, we try to make of the finite body an infinite reservoir of dispirited and meaningless pleasures?
   - Wendell Berry

In our image-oriented culture it is often said we love our bodies too much. Again, the opposite is true -- we do not love them nearly enough. We demand or wish them to be a certain way, we sacrifice them for other goals, we adopt unnatural postures or even surgery to force them into the image of our vanity, we use drugs to extract pleasure from them. We ignore our bodies' true needs and enslave them to the indulgence of ego.

Typically, what love we do offer our bodies is a conditional love. Would the bodybuilder preening in front of the mirror still admire his body if it turned to flab? Would the beauty queen still love her face if it were disfigured? Love of a temporary, false, or idealized image of oneself is called vanity, and it betrays a rejection of the true self underneath. The so-called body worship of our society is really just image-worship, institutionalized vanity. True love of oneself (or another) does not require a person to measure up.

Neither does "health worship" reflect a sincere love of the body. There are people, most notably extreme adherents of various dietary philosophies or exercise regimens, who worship bodily health, seeing it as an indication of virtue, and disease as a sign of, or punishment for, some impurity of diet or practice. According to this calculus, the healthy zealot of our scenario is superior to the sick people of the world. He is better than they are. He has found the True Gospel, and will not hesitate to proselytize. Very often (as with anyone who clings to pride) the result is humiliation -- and what could be more humiliating to the health zealot than a serious illness? But even if the health-worshipper never gets sick, what good does his health do? The body is our vehicle for living and acting in the world; it is meant to be used. There is more to health, to wholeness, than mere physical integrity. You have been incarnated as this body for a purpose, and to achieve it your body possesses tremendous strength, resilience, and resources.

Unfortunately, we often squander these resources pursuing trivial goals, fighting ourselves all the way. For example, in Hatha Yoga practice some people try always to push on to advanced postures, thereby proving themselves worthy and good. Conditioned by the judgmental "be a good girl" approach to child-rearing, and the conditional rewards of our educational system, they need to achieve something in order to give themselves license to feel good about themselves. The body, pushed faster and farther than it wants to go, does its best to comply. Your body serves you so faithfully that it will suffer injury just to comply with your wishes. If you hurt yourself in a deep backbend, don't get mad at your back. "I thought that's what you wanted me to do, " says your back, "and I had to break some things to do it. Aren't you happy?"

However you decide to use -- or misuse -- its strength and resources, the body does its best to oblige you. First it makes small sacrifices, minimizing the harm to its smooth functioning. It will happily sacrifice liver cells to protect you from the toxic effects of alcohol. The pancreas will exhaust itself to protect you against the effects of too much sugar. The body always chooses a lesser harm over a greater. When your intake of toxins exceeds the capacities of your body's cleansing mechanisms, it deposits them inside the body, in places where they will do the least immediate damage. Eventually, though, the body is overwhelmed. But even as it degenerates, even as whole organs and systems lose their ability to function, still the body fights on. All the while it sends you messages: "Please don't do this." And the loudest of these kindly messages we call pain.

For many of us it is hard to see pain as a kindly message, or the body as anything but a betrayer, an enemy, or, at best, a stranger-especially when you suffer chronic pain or a serious illness. It is a great leap of faith to trust your body, because from earliest childhood the media teaches you to loathe it by propagating idealized body images and concepts of beauty that no one can possibly measure up to. To this loathing, the dominant medical culture adds fear and distrust, for it sees the body as an errant machine, a traitor that breaks down and becomes sick because something is wrong with it.

In fact, the body always does its heroic best under the circumstances thrust upon it -- either through our own ignorance, or through the environment we're born into. Moshe Feldenkrais, demonstrating his Feldenkrais Method on a woman with severe scoliosis, observed to his class, "It's not her fault! She has done the best she could! That right shoulder is the only way she survived! If she didn't get scoliosis, she would be dead!" From conception onward, we have been subject to any number of physical and psychic toxins that challenged the healthy development of body and mind. Accordingly, our bodies have bent into various physical, chemical, and emotional contortions to accommodate these injuries.

Imagine a tree growing in rocky soil, next to a cliff, in the shade of bigger trees. To survive it must grow crooked to search out light and water. We wouldn't call it a bad tree for being crooked though; on the contrary, it is a wonderful tree, a heroic tree. Your body is the same, compensating and adapting as best it can to the barren, rocky soil and occluded sunlight of our modern society.

I'm not saying that if you are sick and tired you should learn to live with it. What I'm saying is that wherever you are right now physically, it is your body's wise response to the circumstances thrust upon it. Some of these may be beyond your immediate control -- for example, prenatal or early childhood trauma. But a lot of it may be just not listening to your body. Your body told you what it wanted, but you did not listen; you gave it harmful things, and your body did its best to adapt to them.

Like a young child, your body loves you totally and instinctively. Like a faithful dog, it stays loyal even when you kick and abuse it. What is the proper way to treat a trusting young child? With patience and unconditional love. And that is also the proper way to treat your body.

As for the body, so also for your whole self. In this chapter I have distinguished between "you" and "your body," but as we have seen, this is a false distinction, though sometimes expedient. It is not as though your body were wise and "good" and the rest of you, foolish and "bad." Think again of the crooked tree, growing as best it can. Everything you are and everything you have done is a natural response to the conditions under which you live. Even the ego, much-maligned among practitioners of Eastern spirituality, is an aspect of a fundamentally unified and divine Self doing its job with perfect wisdom according to the circumstances thrust upon it. It is the ego's job to look out for your best interests, as the ego perceives them. The problem is that the ego's perception of your best interests is often mistaken, even incoherent, ultimately leading to suffering without end.

Thus we see that the problem is not excessive self-love, but rather not enough of it. Self-love has a bad name in our culture. We are supposed to love other people more. We are supposed to be unselfish. I recommend the opposite: be more selfish. The hurts of the world come not from selfishness, but from a deluded view of what self-interest really is and what the self really is. To be effective in your selfishness requires a constant examination of the things you strive for. Are they really doing you any good? I'm telling you to take your selfishness seriously. Be selfish wholeheartedly. Elsewhere I have written, "Rational self-interest has become the dupe of our culture's priorities, so that it is neither rational, nor in our interest." When we deeply examine what we ordinarily think of as selfishness, we find a sad delusion. I imagine a vast orchard, the trees laden with ripe fruit, and myself sitting in the middle of it, warily guarding a small pile of gnarled apples. True selfishness would not be to guard an even bigger pile even more carefully; it would be to stop worrying about the pile and open up to the abundance around me. Without such examination we remain in Hell forever, thinking that our new five-thousand-square-foot house didn't make us happy because what we really needed was ten thousand square feet. On the other hand, very often one must acquire a thing first in order to discover that it doesn't bring happiness after all. That is why even deluded selfishness is potentially a path to liberation, and why I urge you to be selfish as best as you are able. Believe it or not, to be genuinely selfish requires courage. When the investment in something is large enough, we dare not ask ourselves if it has made us happy for fear of the answer. After staying in studying throughout high school and college, missing all those fun times, then all those years of med school, and all those sleepless nights as an intern . . . after all those sacrifices, dare you admit that you hate being a doctor? To be selfish is no easy thing. How many of us, in our heart of hearts, are really good to ourselves?

The realm of food is a way to practice being good to yourself. Think of the greedy eater, eating more than his share, stuffing himself. That's an example of deluded self-interest, of not being good to oneself. The glutton really is getting more food. More more more! But he is hurting himself. If he were more selfish, if he made being good to himself his number one priority, maybe he wouldn't eat so much. It is an irony and a miracle. When you really decide to be good to yourself with food, the end result is a healthier diet, not a less healthy diet, even if the path to that diet might start out with an extra-large helping of ice cream!

To be good to yourself with food is such a simple thing. Your body tells you what it wants. Don't overcomplicate the matter.

The proper attitude toward one's self, with all its flaws, all its folly, all its selfishness and hurting of others, is one of pity, compassion, and understanding. Discipline is a crucial part of the spiritual path, but it arises out of a compassionate desire to prevent future suffering, not a hostile crusade to punish, correct, or improve oneself. It is a remembering, a gentle reminding.

It is the same discipline you might impose on a sweet and trusting child. Your body is like a child, not a stranger-child, but one that tells you its every need, if only in a very quiet voice. Be kind to yourself.

Chapter 11 from The Yoga of Eating