Body Issues

Today, I am in so much pain that I can barely move. It will pass, I hope.

What I ask of myself is complete acceptance of this experience and of every experience. This acceptance is the gateway to unconditional love of self.

And this unconditional love of self is necessary if we are to experience heaven on Earth.

So, I explore unconditional love of my self, unconditional love of my physical body, which is the part of myself that I have had the most difficulty with loving.

My body is not beautiful in the way that we define beauty these days. It is fifty-four years old. It is short and squat and broad and fleshy. It is often unable to do the things that I would like it to do. I often experience pain in my body, or discomfort.

Yet my body is a miracle of being. It is a biological electro-magnetic and energetic vessel of consciousness and experience. It is my passport into and through the realm of the physical, and it is in the realm of the physical that I have pledged to create a turning of dark into light, of fear into love and of despair into joy.

I have looked long and hard in the bright cold light of a winter day at the image of my body in a full-length mirror. And I have forgiven my body for not being what this society tells me my body should be. I have come to see my body as perfect just as it is. It was not easy for me to do this, and it did not happen quickly. It took a long time and I had to admit my own feelings of self-blame and self-loathing before I could move into the self-acceptance that truly does feel like a miracle of love.

The path to this is one of unconditional love. Love the part of yourself that has not loved yourself. Love the part of yourself that has judged yourself as unworthy, your body as fat, your legs as too short and then love the part of yourself that is your body, is your legs and belly and thighs. Then move on from there, always with more love, always with more acceptance of the truth of your being.

It is through my body that I am able to be love in the world. It is through my body that I am able to court the frequency of unconditional love and to share it, to ground it into the Earth and to radiate it out to others. It is through my body that I am able to create and experience heaven on Earth.

I am celebrating the wonders of my physical body, seeing my physical body in a new way, as a vessel for what I AM.

What I AM is love. What I AM is love in the world. It is not so easy to be love in the world as it is to be love in some celestial paradise. I made a pledge to be love in the world. And a part of that work, a large and difficult, but essential part of that work, is to love my own body, just as it is.