Ep. 30 Why It's So Hard to Accept Your Body

Why it's so hard to accept our bodies, I believe comes down to one thing, attachment.

If we look at little children, they don't have to accept their bodies.

They just do.

It's not even really a thing.

They're probably not even super aware of their bodies as being anything separate from them.

It's just this vehicle that they're in.

I don't know if you can remember back to when you were a child.

You weren't really thinking about your body.

You were just immersed in whatever it was that you were doing.

And in fact, you may even forget those moments because they weren't significant.

You were just living life.

You might remember more the moments where you started to become self-conscious of your body.

They tend to stand out more.

Those negative ones have more of an impact on us.

But I can remember being a kid doing cartwheels, running around, playing.

My body wasn't a thought.

It's not like I was thinking, "Oh, this is my body.

It looks like this.

It's doing that." I was just immersed in play, immersed in the world.

And all children come into this world doing that.

It's not until we learn concepts and ideas and that they have some kind of meaning attached to them.

It's not the same in every culture or in every household.

This is why over the course of history and time, there have been different beauty ideals and different standards, because the meaning that was given to how a body looked or how a body was changed.

So if it's a positive meaning and we attach to it, we identify with it, we feel good about ourselves.

But if it's a bad meaning, a negative meaning, and in our culture right now it's pretty black and white, it's thin good, fat bad.