Learning to love your (imperfect) body

This subject is a struggle for many of my students, and perhaps it is for you as well: how do you love your body that’s imperfect? How do you love your body that’s in pain or discomfort? How do you love your body that’s not meeting your expectations? 

You could spend a significant amount of your time and energy trying to make your body perfect, believing that you will love your body once you achieve that perfection. You could believe, I will love my body once I’m this weight, or this size or I look this way, or once this pain is gone. Essentially saying, I’ll love my body once I’m comfortable with it.

Or you might have a kind of resignation toward your body. You might put up with your body in whatever state it’s in or experience you’re having. This view is a reluctant acceptance of your body rather than real love toward it. In both of these previous examples there is a lack of love. This lack of love affects how go about your day, both mentally and physically. A lack of love and appreciation of your body literally affects how you move, causing more obstruction, compression and discomfort.

Instead of trying to “improve” your body from a place of dissatisfaction, you could spend a bit of that energy learning to lovingly appreciate your body for what it is and learning how to use your body well. This is what I teach using the Alexander Technique: how your body moves and how you can move it well. Have you been taught that before? Perhaps you’ve been taught to move your body through exercise or other means, but did you learn how to move your body as a whole, coordinated structure? How you move is a key component to how you feel. 

I teach how to access and control the inherent balance and freedom of your body in your moment-to-moment and day-to-day movement and be an empowered advocate for your well-being right now (despite all your perceived imperfections) and get connected to your as yet unperceived beauty and grandeur. You may be quick to perceive your body’s imperfections and easily miss what is amazing, what is well, what is good about your body and the immediate role you can play in your own well-being. In other words, since your body is with you all the time and indeed is you, the way you move affects your mental state and vice versa. If you are moving against your body’s design, moving with compression, aggression, you’re moving with pain. You can learn to recognize this and stop doing it and instead move with your body’s design, moving with freedom and balance.

When you understand how you move and how to control how you move it’s much easier to love your body because you’ll know how to consciously work with it instead of unconsciously against it. Then working on anything else that involves your body becomes much more enjoyable, which is nearly everything!  For example if you decide you want to work with exercising or your flexibility or your pain or discomfort, you’ll be coming from a place of love and loving acceptance, rather than from punishment or impairment. You’re more likely to achieve your goals when you’re coming from a place of caring and love and  you’re much more likely to enjoy the process of achieving those goals.

Loving your body doesn’t mean you stop playing. It doesn’t mean you become static. It means that your approach to change, your approach to explorations in diet or exercise or movement, etc. will be informed from a place of love. When that happens it’s much more enjoyable, there’s much more hope in it and more potential for positive change. And it’s a lot more fun. 

If you haven’t consciously explored the way your body can work and your body’s potential, if you’re a bit stuck in your perception of your body and your perception of yourself, it can be quite the challenge to view yourself and your body from a place of love. Loving your body can easily remain an idea rather than an actual practice. I greatly appreciate the work that I do in teaching the Alexander Technique because through this lens you can actually learn to love your body, among many other beneficial things. It won’t simply be a concept you intellectually understand. It takes more than intellectual understanding; it takes time and practice to do it. It’s possible to embody this appreciation and love. So I present to you a way to learn to love your body through the Alexander Technique, to access your own body’s potential and how and why you can love it. Through this you’ll be empowered in both body and mind.