Body Thoughts

There is your opinion of your body, and there is the experience of being in it.

Imagine walking down the beach in a bathing suit. You may be thinking about your thighs, your stomach, or what other people think when they look at you.

While all of that is happening, you are also in a body. You are experiencing sensations from within it.

Those are different experiences. Your thoughts about your body can be so loud that you miss the experience of being in your body altogether.

I want to help you separate them. This work is not only about weight loss. It is about being present with the experience of being alive.

You experience the world through your mind and body

When you go for a walk, you may think you simply went outside and saw what was there. But your brain interpreted what you saw. It used what it already knew and filled in gaps.

Your thoughts created an experience, including emotions you felt in your body.

You can have a thought about a tree and feel something. You can touch the tree and experience a physical sensation. With your own body, you have another layer: you are using your body to experience your body.

That is why this can feel a little complicated. Stay with it. The distinctions give you a way to notice what is happening instead of treating every judgment as the truth of your body.

Begin with the facts

Separate the facts of your body from your thoughts about it.

You have a toe. You have a thigh. You have skin. But even a simple word can carry judgment. If saying thigh immediately brings up horror, you may need to use more neutral language.

You can describe a thigh bone with tissue and skin around it. Keep adjusting the description until you can approach it as a fact rather than an evaluation.

This is worth practicing. Many of us cannot name a part of our body without also thinking about how it should look or how it differs from what we want.

The exercise is to identify what is physically there without making that description into an argument with your body.

Write the judgments separately

Now write the recurring thoughts you have about your body. Your thighs are too big. Your legs are too short. You are not tall enough, do not look good enough, or have too many wrinkles.

Those are thoughts. They create emotion.

My son once told me I was getting old-lady legs. He noticed veins and the appearance of my skin and offered his interpretation. He did not seem upset about it. He was making an observation and adding his own judgment.

I could notice the difference between the physical characteristics of my legs and what he called them.

Even a description such as having varicose veins can bring up negative meaning for someone. Keep that meaning separate from the facts so you can see what your mind is adding.

There is a third experience

There are facts about your body. There are judgments about your body. Then there is experiencing your body from within.

Focus your attention on your thigh. Do not touch it from the outside or evaluate how it looks. What does it feel like to be in that part of your body?

You can begin with one body part so the exercise is easier to understand. What is the sensation in your finger? What is the experience of your stomach or your shoulders from the inside?

You are not asking whether that part looks good. You are experiencing what is happening there.

That experience is separate from your weight, from the mirror, and from the opinion you have practiced about your appearance.

Feeling cold is different from thinking about cold

Consider the sensation of being cold. You can experience it physically. You can also begin thinking that you hate it, need to get somewhere warm, and should not have to feel this way.

Now you have the physical sensation and the emotions created by your thoughts about it.

If you drop the complaints for a moment and focus on what cold feels like in your body, you have a different experience. You are describing a sensation instead of adding a judgment.

The same distinction applies when you name pain. Saying you are in pain is not the full description of what it feels like from within. You can become more specific about the sensation instead of stopping at the label.

The purpose is to see the difference between what you feel in your body and what you think about feeling it.

Use writing to describe sensations

Writing is one of the best ways I know to practice this. I describe the sensations directly and watch for the moment I move into an opinion or interpretation.

With hunger, I can describe where the sensation is located, whether it feels hot or cold, and what is happening in my body.

That is different from saying I should not be hungry because I just ate, that I need food immediately, or that I want a particular food. Those are thoughts about the sensation.

Keep the description clear. Notice when your mind starts telling a story. Then return to what you are experiencing.

You can be both the watcher and the feeler: aware of your thinking and present with the sensations in your body.

Being in your body helps you allow urges

When we buffer, we are often trying to get away from the experience in our bodies. We do not want to feel an emotion, so we look for something outside ourselves that will change it.

We may use food, alcohol, or another form of stimulation to avoid being present with what is happening.

Allowing an urge asks you to return to that experience. You become willing to feel the sensation without immediately reacting to it or judging it.

Separating the sensation from your thoughts about it helps you understand what you are actually allowing. You are not required to agree with every complaint your mind makes about the experience.

You can be present from the inside out instead of continually trying to change yourself from the outside in.

Even positive body thoughts are still thoughts

I teach you to choose loving thoughts about your body. That can create a beautiful emotional experience, and I do recommend it.

But a positive thought is still different from directly experiencing your body.

Think about seeing a hummingbird. If you immediately label it and think about everything you know about hummingbirds, you are having an experience shaped by your knowledge and language. That is different from being present with the bird without all those labels.

We do something similar with our bodies. We experience our ideas about them and may mistake those ideas for the whole experience.

This exercise lets you practice another way of being present.

Come back to the body you are in

If you feel that your body is too big, too heavy, or wrong in some way, notice what happens when you experience it from within instead of looking at it through judgment.

Focus on your arms, your shoulders, your stomach, or your thighs. Describe the sensations without evaluating your appearance.

You do not have to solve every thought about your body before trying this. You can recognize that the judgment is in your mind and let yourself experience being here.

You are alive. You are human. Your worthiness is not changed by skin, tissue, or the thoughts you have about them.

There is your opinion of your body. And there is being in your body. Practice noticing the difference.