Stop Waiting To Love Yourself Because Of Your Weight.
{Photo via Pinterest}
By Jena la Flamme
When you hate yourself and your body, you view pleasure as the enemy, and you deny yourself pleasure out of spite.
You only have one life, and you can’t afford to waste it hating yourself or denying yourself pleasure, even if you are in a body that is not magazine-perfect.
I want you to wake up and be outraged that until now you have let extra weight on your belly and thighs jeopardize your opportunity to embrace the glory of being alive.
If you had a child with a physical disability, would you love her any less? Of course not! So look beyond what you perceive as your body’s physical imperfections, and love her as profoundly and unconditionally as you would your own child.
Although we think looking good will be the magic that finally makes us feel good about ourselves, the reality is the opposite; feeling good will make us think we look good. Have you ever noticed that your body image varies, even within the course of a day?
Have you ever gotten dressed in the morning, thinking you looked terrible, but later something unexpectedly wonderful happened and your mood brightened, and you then started to think, while wearing the very same outfit that you actually looked pretty good?
Imagine yourself in the throws of sensual or sexual pleasure; there’s no mental space available for you to start thinking you look bad because you’re focused on a feeling rather than a conscious thought — you’re focused on a feeling of pleasure.
When you are engaged in the moment and feeling great, your attention is on your experience, and any thoughts of a bad body image cease to exist. In effect, you are crowding out the bad thoughts and replacing them with a positive feeling.
When you are in your pleasure, your mind surrenders, and you stop worrying. When you feel good, no longer listening to your inner verbal attack, your body also relaxes, and lo and behold, you have the experience of feeling you look good.
As your attention shifts from how bad you look to how good you feel, over time, without even trying to lose weight, you will slim down, which in turn supports your good body image. You will then find yourself in a virtuous cycle I call the Infinite Body-Love Loop.
In other words, pleasure, the heroine of our story, is yet again the catalyst that breaks the cycle.
{Photo credit: Jena la Flamme}
If you are waiting until you think you look good to allow yourself to really experience pleasure and feel good, you’ll be a dog forever chasing its tail. You can count on the mind to arrive at the conclusion that you are not good enough.
So if you are waiting to think you look good in order to feel good, you may wait forever, no matter what you weigh.
To embark on the pleasurable journey of developing a positive body image, the most fundamental way to feel good is to feel good about being alive.
Anyone can access this feeling at any time because it is simply a shift in awareness, from complacency to gratitude, regardless of your struggle with your weight and food.
Loving yourself is a wonderful and liberating feeling, and it is a requirement for receiving pleasure and fully authoring your life. When you love yourself, you have so much more energy, inspiration, and mental and emotional capacity to bring to the world and to create for yourself a life of true pleasure.
If you’re caught in a downward spiral of thinking that you need to lose weight to feel good about your body, it’s time to wake up to the realization that you’ve been trying to win an unwinnable game.
In the same way that the media suggests that being thin is the answer to all your dreams, I’d like you instead to believe that loving yourself and your body is the key to your dreams coming true.
Loving yourself is a gateway that just being thin can never be.
The Infinite Body-Shame Loop and the Infinite Body-Love Loop are mutually exclusive. You can’t enjoy your body and be ashamed of it at the same time. Losing weight is not the ticket to loving your body, nor is it the ticket to experiencing pleasure in your body or your life.
Unless you learn how to experience pleasure now, losing a dress size is not going to solve the problem. No matter how you look, your female body can still be a source of tremendous pleasure.
There’s nothing your female animal wants more than that, and when you’re fully in your pleasure, you can’t help but love yourself.
*****
Jena la Flamme works with women of all ages to heal emotional eating, reach their healthy weight, love their bodies and feel great through her live Pleasure Camps, online programs, popular website, social media outlets, and private coaching. She is the author of Pleasurable Weight Loss: The Secrets to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Loving Your Life Today. Jena lives and teaches in New York City. You can contact her via her website, Facebook, or Twitter.
{Loving Me}
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