Falling in love requires internal, self- love. Therefore, if falling in love with your body meets resistance via self-deprecation, low self-worth, and an inner critic, reexamination is beneficial. An expectation of standards from magazine models and Hollywood mavens is unfair scrutiny. Airbrushed, makeup, hair styling, and obsessive lifestyles to create and maintain the smoothest, fittest, and healthiest-looking contours constitute unreasonable comparisons. By releasing ourselves from the fanfare, surrendering to reality, and reissuing perspectives on what defines beauty, the normal, natural body represents the ultimate physique, where acceptance and self-love live.
Vital basics including breathing, internal organs, and the five senses, function effortlessly until a breakdown causes pause for resuscitation. Appreciating one’s bodily mechanics, walking, running, and a host of taken-for-granted physical capabilities, is gratitude worth feeling. Experiencing emotions, also a distinctive human quality is worth consideration of grandeur as well. Loving your body’s abilities requires awareness, attention, and acknowledgement for all these systems entail.
Beyond the necessary internal physical and cerebral components, the external, aesthetic body remains. From hair to face, arms to stomach, and legs to buttocks, we analyze physical traits, determining them as fine or foul. With or without careful consideration, we conclude beauty or beast, ugly and ostracized, or stunning and celebrated. No matter the circumstance, the eye of the beholder assesses and determines self-beauty. Whether wanting to love or leave, our physical, exterior assets enhance or destroy themselves by diet and/or exercise, or perhaps are polished or refined by cosmetics, surgery, or elixirs promising to delay, decrease, or disperse the lines of time.
When we observe our image in the mirror, do we ruminate with kind reaction, positive emotion, or loving response? Does our reflection empower or deflate our emotional strength? Joyful with our observation containing pride and comfort within our skin, conjures inner love correlated to a happy existence. Without love within and an acceptance, appreciation, and gratitude for the external parts, a void continues to plague us. This hole exacerbates self-deprecating inner thoughts that hurt our emotional well-being.
The body to fall in love with is the one we occupy, the God-given one, the one “souled” as is. A fitness journey unleashes a body’s strength, definition, and stamina; a healthy food lifestyle cleanses the interior, enhances physical energy, nurtures with nutrients; and an internal voice stating I am beautiful beyond measure, perfect before any action required, ringing loudly is critical. No external transformation changes who we are since internal love or lack thereof consistently decides our fate.
Finding and feeling self- love is the essence for the love of the body, mind, and spirit. Falling in love with your body enhances falling in love with your soul; they connect as one. “Love the one you’re with,” constitutes gratitude, pride, and love for the one body given to us, a gift not to be forsaken nor weighed down. Fall in love with your body and soul; there are no returns. All bodies are “souled” as is.