No one would deny that we spend huge amounts of time, effort, and money trying to make our bodies more attractive.
I would make a suggestion for an additional effort: that we spend time seeing that the body we each have right now is already beautiful, awesome, and a wonder to behold.
But what about those twenty extra pounds, you might say, or my horrible hair, or my lack of hair, or the bags under my eyes? On and on we can go, focusing on all the things that make our bodies less than they should be.When you take a moment to consider, you see those objections are based on a cultural projection. Many cultures, past and present, consider what we call too fat to be very appealing; what we call too thin to be provocative and attractive; what we call frumpy to be stylish. In present-day Western culture, only a narrowly defined type of human body is touted by the style-makers as attractive.
Somehow we ignore that only about one-fourth of 1 percent of people actually have that kind of body and they spend practically their whole lives keeping it that way so they can be photographed for the rest of us to feel bad about!
Crazy, right? But it takes time — quiet, reflective, contemplative time — to see the truth of this. The cultural forces telling you the opposite are strong. Today, be gentle and loving with your body.
— David Kundtz in Quiet Mind