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Spirituality
A New Perspective for the New Year
The spiritual dimensions of eating and body image problems
Posted January 1, 2010
To whom does your body belong?
The answer to this question seems so obvious that I find myself reluctant to ask it. Everybody knows that each human body belongs to the person who inhabits it (or who is it, depending on how you understand embodiment). Isn't it abundantly clear that each person is the owner and master of her or his own flesh? Doesn't your body belong exclusively to you?
The Vietnamese Zen master, peace activist, poet, and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh, suggests another perspective, one that might be especially beneficial for those who have felt isolated and imprisoned in their bodies because of a preoccupation with food and/or thinness.
In For a Future to Be Possible: Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life, Nhat Hanh notes that "In modern life, people think that their body belongs to them and they can do anything they want to it." In nations like the U.S., the law itself supports the claim that "It's my body and I'll do what I want to with it" (62). The mentality behind this assertion is familiar to those of us who have sought to empower ourselves by controlling our bodies. Exerting mastery over our flesh (by refusing to eat or by exercising to the point of exhaustion, for example) gives us a temporary taste of the power we long to experience in our lives. Moreover, the possibility of reinventing your "self" by renovating your body holds immense promise in an image-driven society that upholds the autonomous, self-made individual as the paragon of "success."
But according to Nhat Hanh, the notion that we own and control our bodies is a manifestation of our culture's individualism-an ideology that creates suffering on both personal and societal levels because it ignores the fundamentally interrelated nature of reality. Not just mystics but scientists as well have recognized this basic interdependence. Albert Einstein called humans' tendency to experience themselves as separate from others as "a kind of optical delusion of...consciousness." According to Einstein, this delusion becomes "a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires," blinding us to the beauty of reality as a whole.
Both Nhat Hanh's and Einstein's insights underscore what many people with eating and body image problems already know all-too-painfully well, namely, that a life focused primarily on personal achievement-epitomized in the relentless quest for a "better" body-is a set-up for misery. It's not that the drive for thinness proves that we are bad and selfish; it's that this quest is essentially out of alignment with our basic nature, which is interdependent with everything else and thrives through that interconnection.
In a mistaken attempt to alleviate the various sufferings we accumulate in our lives, many of us turn to the project of perfecting our bodies as a way to experience some relief. The feeling of personal accomplishment that accompanies our weight-loss efforts (when we succeed) can temporarily allay feelings of depression, anxiety, powerlessness, and grief. But the kind of strength and stability we really need in order to feel grounded and growing through the changes of our lives cannot be kindled through counting and burning calories. The project of a perfect body is much too small and self-absorbing to bring us the happiness and well being we are looking for.
Fortunately, there is an alternative way to understand and experience your physicality. Instead of thinking of and treating your body as a kind of personal possession, you might understand the physical part of yourself as belonging to a much wider web of relations, including your ancestors, family, and potential descendants, the larger human community, and the earth itself, with its infinite variety of bodies- animals, plants, insects, rocks, clouds, etc.-all yearning to experience life to the fullest. In this view, Nhat Hanh writes, "to keep your body healthy is to express gratitude to the whole cosmos, to all your ancestors, and also not to betray the future generations" (62). This perspective is not unlike the Christian understanding of the body as "a temple of God," which needs to be treated with care and respect.
What if instead of starting the new year with a decision to "improve" your body through the latest diets and weight-loss regimes, you resolved to devote your attention to living in greater harmony with your body and with all the other bodies with whom you share the planet?
Adopting this alternative resolution, and the perspective embedded in it, helps us see and embody the inextricable connection between our personal well-being and the welfare of all beings. This new ethic would encourage us to eat in ways that nourish our own flesh while caring for and respecting the earth that sustains us. Instead of deciding what to eat based on caloric content or fat grams, for example, we can choose foods that are whole (i.e., unprocessed), organic, grown in a sustainable way, local, and fresh, and we can eat them mindfully to increase our enjoyment of them as well as our appreciation for those who grew, harvested, transported, and prepared them.
We can also show our appreciation for the bodies on which our own bodies depend by getting the exercise we need. This requires us to tune into our need for physical activity so that we know when we need more movement and when we've had enough. Neither too much exercise nor too little will give us the physical-mental-spiritual balance that keeps us healthy and enables us to flourish. When we exercise in ways that get our hearts beating and enjoy our bodies' capacity for movement without concern for how many calories we've burned, we are simultaneously expressing gratitude to our ancestors while giving the gift of our health to future generations.
Ultimately, exchanging the personal pursuit of physical perfection for the larger aim of living harmoniously in your body amid the wider web of human and non-human life brings the kind of peace and well being that is truly satisfying. Each choice we make to nurture, appreciate, and respect our bodies and the bodies of others reverberates throughout the cosmos. Each time we choose to eat and exercise in ways that nurture our bodies' real needs, we are expressing our gratitude and extending our healing to all beings. At the same time, we are moving out of the lonely prison of preoccupation with food and thinness and reconnecting with the rest of the world.
This seems like a wonderful perspective to take at the start of this new year.
