Loving Your Body

To help your healing get started, I often recommend sending some love to the part of your body that’s hurting.

However, in our world of judgement, criticism and supermodels with ‘perfect’ figures, that’s not always as easy as it sounds.

So, here’s some help to get loving your body.

Why love your body?

Your body knows your thoughts

Like everything in the universe, your body has consciousness, and is affected by its environment and the messages it receives from your thoughts. Every body system, limb, and organ, right down to individual cells and your DNA is aware of the your thoughts. Imagine how you’d feel if you were on the receiving end of some of the thoughts you have about your body!

Love is more effective than criticism

When your foot is sore, you have a headache, or some other discomfort, it’s easy to criticise your body because it’s holding you back from getting on with your life. However, the discomfort is your body telling you it needs some attention, and just like with relationships with people, it’s far more effective to give your body attention with love, than with criticism!

Love is nurturing

Emoto’s experiments have shown that ‘loved’ water forms beautiful crystals, whereas water subject to ‘hate’ or ‘anger’ forms ugly, jarring crystals. Considering over half your body is comprised of water, it seems well worth sending your body some love for this reason alone!

Other experiments, which you can try yourself, include: sticking labels with ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on jars of cooked rice and see how the ‘hated’ rice goes mouldy much more quickly than the ‘loved’ rice; or, more constructively, sticking ‘love’ and ‘hate’ labels on pots of soil with seeds, and watch the loved seeds growing into more healthy plants.

So, it makes sense to love your body rather than criticise or hate it!

3 Approaches to loving your body

Now you appreciate the value of loving your body, it’s time to get started!

1. The intuitive shortcut

When a young child bumps their head, or you bump your own head, you probably instinctively place your hand over the bump. When you do so you’re using is an ancient instinct to give your body some love. No analysis or preparation, you just do it1

So you can simply place a loving hand over the part of your body that’s hurting.

2. Adding ‘the loving feeling’

There’s a Hawaiian healing custom, where family and friends who want to help a person heal, first find the loving feeling in themselves, then place their hand on the person. In effect they transmit love to the person. Imagine how much more helpful that is than the typical anxious faces around a hospital bed.

You can do the same thing to send love to your own body.

To find the loving feeling, think of a situation where you felt very happy, such as holding a baby, being in your favourite place, or listening to music.  Allow yourself to rest into that feeling, noticing the sensations you experience. You may like to hold your hand over your heart, to help move out of your thinking and into your loving feeling. Practice doing this a few times, so that you can easily find that loving feeling and experience it for a few seconds or minutes.

Now, to send love to your body, first experience the loving feeling, then transfer it to the part of your body that hurts, through your hand.

Alternatively, you can find the loving feeling, and then mentally direct it to your whole body, or the part that’s hurting.

3. Be inspired

Finally, to inspire you to celebrate and love your body, check out Melanie Weidner’s YouTube video, Our Body Is Amazing (8 mins), below. Since I first watched it over a year ago, I find myself spontaneously saying ‘My Body Is Amazing’ to myself, which is another way to give her some love!

Practice loving your body, and lay a firm foundation for your healing!

And please share other ways you send love to your body.