Accepting the blank page
To love one’s body is a concept a minority of humanity experience. To be able to gaze in the mirror and smile at the reflection does not match the experience most of us have. Like many others, I spent all of my adult life looking at my reflection in disgust, never appreciating how my body was in that moment. I always believed I was overweight and it would only be when I look back on old photos I realised that my judgment was subjective. Oh what I would give for that body I treated with disdain now. How did I ever think she was overweight or ugly? This cycle would continue until I decided one day I had enough.
I decided to work on accepting my body. What I had learned from mass media was that if you truly wanted to lose weight, you needed to first accept where you were. Every day I would look in the mirror and repeat affirmations such as “I accept my body exactly how she is” every day. Over time I noticed that nothing changed. I still felt the same shame and anger when I glanced the mirror or tried to squeeze into my size-too-small-i-will-fit-them-one-day jeans.
It wasn’t until recently that I began to question what accepting really meant? If my body is here autonomously, keeping itself alive, why does it need me to accept it? When did my ego all of a sudden become so important that in order for life to exist, I must accept it first? My body doesn’t need accepting, she needs me to get out of her way so she can enjoy life. The issue wasn’t that I wasn’t accepting my body, I was judging my body. So all I needed to do was stop. Instead of reciting affirmations I didn’t really believe, I cut myself off at the pass when I spotted a judging thought. I would change the subject with my critical mind.
After a few months of this, nothing appeared to change, until one day it did (correlating with entering my fourth year of deconditioning in Human Design; Gate 46 is the gate of initiation through love, expressing love through the body). I began to see my body as something to appreciate, to love and accept for how it shows up today. This shift in perspective aligned with other perspectives I began noticing across my life.
I now see accepting ourselves as a multi faceted experience. It arises in how we view our body, how we view our mind and how we view our lives. I really am starting to see how we honestly have no choice in this experience. We are all made up of atoms and dark matter that shattered from one source billions of years ago and all these shattered essences activate and operate at set times and places. Our whole world has already been mapped out and we are now playing out the story, as Shakespeare reminded us all the world’s a stage. He was right. I guess that truth is what keeps him relevant today, hundreds of years later.
Any thought that enters my mind is a thought that was generated half a second before I was even aware of it. So my thoughts aren’t really “mine”and the concept of me and I aren’t what I thought they were. My thoughts aren’t mine, this world doesn’t exist how I see it, my emotions are not mine but energy in motion, and I don’t exist how I think I do. It leaves me to ask - what’s the problem? What am I holding on to? Am I able to let go of this concrete idea that I am an entity separate from everyone and everything else? Am I able to fully experience the groundlessness of the true reality of what lies underneath? Am I able to release my grip on the concept of control and recline into the rocking flow of the river?
Just like my relationship with my body wasn’t about addition, it was about subtraction. It wasn’t about me needing to accept it, it was about me needing to stop judging it. We spend our lives believing we have control over it, yet the reality is we have nothing to control. The more we add, the more we feed our belief of control. The more we subtract, the more we edge towards nothingness. We are afraid of the nothingness, we are afraid of the truth of what this is. So we add, we layer, we re-cover, we judge, we make drama, we make things real to avoid seeing what is real.
This is where all our suffering comes from, our refusal to let go. How ironic, as I had discovered with my body, nothing needs our control or acceptance in order to play itself out. We cause suffering only to ourselves, yet we continue to behave like this thinking tomorrow will be better.
Except tomorrow won’t be better, because everything is already perfect, we just can’t see it yet. Instead of thinking we need to attain or accept something to enjoy our lives, we actually need to let go. We already have what we seek, but we have turned the other way. We avoid the mirror because it triggers the pain caused by a lifetime of rejection. We are holding on to the pain for it gives us something that feels real, it gives us something that feels like solid ground. When in reality we are rejecting the truth and judging who we are. We rather have a story than a blank page, and until we give that up, we will continue to suffer.
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