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MOTIVATION: love your body.
What if someone hated you because of the way you LOOK.
Instead of appreciating all that you DO.
That’s precisely what we do to our own bodies every day.
Read an awesome Strala Yoga blog post on the topic.
(via Making Peace with Our Body through Yoga | Strala Yoga)
How many of us can sincerely say that we love our bodies? (not just because we have the perfect size, height, or right amount of muscles) Until I started practicing yoga, I didn’t realize how disconnected we can be from our body. We can be quite demanding towards our body, especially when it comes to appearance: we want it to look a certain way or weigh a certain amount. On the other hand, we can also be so detached from our body that we just don’t care about what it looks like (but I will save this topic for future discussion). When we try to make our body meet our mind’s expectations, we can easily abuse our bodies without even realizing it.
For various reasons, many of us develop an expectation for what our body should look like. We want to be leaner, taller, or more muscular. It could be to have a successful relationship, fit into a particular group of people, or succeed in a career. Working out and dieting are probably the most common approaches to achieve these goals. These two approaches can do good things for us, but done without mindfulness of our body, workout can simply feel like a chore, and dieting often means depriving ourselves of the food we like. Most of us who engage in mindless, repetitive exercise would find it hard to be excited to do the workout. Also, probably few people would be naturally inclined to choose kale or spinach over say, pizza or burger. We may feel like we are constantly at war with our body, because we have to force it do the workout we don’t really want to do, and eat the food that that we don’t particularly enjoy.
