You are SUPPOSED to have FLESH!
I’ve been inspired by my muses to invoke the passion of the flesh! I want all of you to go out your doors, grab someone you see and yell to them, “I am here to love your flesh! All your flesh! Not just the perfect parts but the equally imperfect parts as well! All of you is beautiful! All of you is lovely!”
What you do after that, well, we are adults.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve had several incidents happen that make me realize I have to help people actively embrace their flesh. There is so much antagonistic imagery promoting negative self-imagery as a result of some perfect ideal, and I think we have to CHANGE THE CONVERSATION.
Fortunately I’m not alone.
I found a website called: Bodyimagemovement.com.au and was inspired by Taryn Brumfitt’s willingness to “put it out there” and change the conversation ( see photo of Taryn above) . She asked 100 women what they thought about their bodies and everyone said something negative, until she asked a woman with Cerebral Palsy in a wheel chair. She said, “Soft and lucious.”
Anne Lamont writes: “Oh my god what if you wake up and you’re 65 or 75, and you never got your memoir or your novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”
Healthy yes? Perfect, no. This is about living your best self. The problem with this concept is that we always think our best self is about the future. It isn’t. That’s the “dream self” or the “ideal self” or the “I wish things were different self” but it’s not about that. It’s about the best self now, this second, this instant. It’s about fully inhabiting your “best you can be at this very instant” self.
This takes lots of practice. So many of us are in such pain about our circumstances and we are so easily comfortable with living in the past or the future that we don’t know how to embrace ourselves in the now.
And feeling that “being imperfect is wrong” all the time is a hopeless stuck feeling.
Engaging in negative habits reinforces our feelings of not perfect and not living our best self. Perhaps we’re not. Those habits are worthwhile to examine and slowly change. But the habit is NOT WHO YOU ARE. It is a developed coping mechanism designed to help you survive the circumstances of your life. Indeed it is the habit that helped you survive to get you to this moment right here right now.
Too bad habits can’t be cut off like an annoying hang nail, but they can change. We are such lovely beings capable of change.
So while you are working on your changes, and work you must do, embrace the loveliness that is indeed you, the being who is willing to be brave enough to even examine all the parts of you, both the lovely and perfectly lovely imperfect parts and embrace your whole self. The fleshy you.
Be the first to comment