November 10, 2010
Be Light: A Love-based Approach to Life and Weight Loss
This weeks article is a guest post from one of my incredible yoga teachers. He has been so kind as so share his story with all of us. I highly recommend David!!
Be Light: A Love-based Approach to Life and Weight Loss
By David Miller
Weight loss is a charged subject for me to write about as it’s been something that I have struggled with off and on throughout much of my life. From my teen years on, my weight and self image has fluctuated dramatically. It can be easy for me to cast the situation from a sociological standpoint and argue that what is considered overweight now was once the height of fashion and that our society has an unhealthy obsession with looking like stick people. That argument is nice from a philosophical level but it doesn’t hold water when I’m actually looking at myself in the mirror. This reaction my mind has to the image of my body is the only issue inside of weight loss that means much to me. All other viewpoints regarding weight loss and body type can be interesting intellectually but don’t really matter.
Before getting to this reaction I would concern myself primarily about how I look to others but I will never be sure that I’m good enough. Even if people tell me that I look good, there was always be a part of my mind that doubted them, after all people lie all the time to make those around them feel better. As for health issues related to weight, I might get wound up in the fear regarding health and weight when I’d feel short of breath or heavy after eating fatty food but as soon as I started to feel better the health concerns evaporated more quickly that spilled water on a hot day.
Eventually I uncovered the core situation that I was dealing with and that was how my own mind reacted to the image of my own body when confronted with it. I then broke this further down to its most basic components: mind and body. I’d go so far as to say that mind itself was a more surface layer and going deeper the real issue was one of heart and body. Certainly, I had numerous negative mental loops about the state of my body, but these thoughts were largely the result of the primal emotional response my body evoked.
At first, I worked to “fix” these basic responses. This was generally unsuccessful and what little success there was turned out to be short-lived. So I decided to radically change my approach, instead of deciding how I should react I took the Zen approach and chose simply to observe the reaction. I chose to stop avoiding my image as I’d previously done and instead sit and stare at myself intently and to allow whatever feelings needed to rise up to do so. Many of these feelings weren’t pleasant. I saw my body as the end result of all the aspects of myself I didn’t like and it was easy to justify the fat and stretch marks as my karmic “just desserts”. However as I stared long enough and found it impossible to be completely negative all the time and eventually I started to see signs of things inside me that weren’t so dire: the twinkle in my eyes when I smiled, or even my face when I contorted it into a goofy form. Slowly but surely, I began to really and genuinely feel love towards myself and more specifically, towards my reflected presence in the mirror in front of me. I was able to look myself in the eyes and said “I love you David Miller” and really mean it. From that point on I could not simply see my body as an only terrible thing because I could recognize the light and life inside of it. As grew the recognition so too grew the love.
Then something very interesting and quite radical began to happen, as I changed the way that I looked at my body my body began to change the way it looked. Let me repeat that and break it out from the paragraph so that you get just what a far out and amazing living concept we’re dealing with here:
As I changed the way that I looked at my body, my body began to change the way it looked.
I lost weight and it stayed off in a way it never had before. Was this weight loss magic, or was it tied to better eating and exercise choices? Of course it wasn’t magic, but I had tried those same eating and exercise choices before but they’d never stuck because deep down I didn’t think that I was worthy of a body that looked and felt healthy. Since that time I’ve lost some 70 pounds. That number has fluctuated to some degree but it has never gotten up even close to my peak and this powerful change all started with something so simple and easy. It started first with observation of my reaction and then grew when I started looking myself in the eyes and loving what I saw.
Normally we go through this process the other way around, we think “Once I’ve lost x number of pounds then I’ll be able to be proud of how I look in the mirror and until that point, I’m just going to have to go through life looking like a complete mess.” We set up the mental state that the body looking anything less than our imagined ideal is hideous. I believe that this way of thinking is a mistake in that it creates a baseline viewpoint of the body as something bad that needs to be brought to a place where it can finally become good. Suddenly all the work we do towards helping along our body becomes very HARD WORK.
Some of us are well able to buckle down and DO HARD WORK, others of us less so. The problem with viewing your body as hard work is that even if you look great there is an underlying tension that will always be present for you inside your relation to your body. Yes, that frustration can bring pride to those of you who are fit but even that pride will cause pain. And yet with love we can bypass this frustration, find true and abiding love for our physicality and that love will allow our own best weight to naturally arise.
One final note, what if you try the method of looking yourself in the mirror in the eyes and saying that you love yourself but you really cannot feel it? What do you do then? Then you fake it until you make it. Do the work, tell yourself that it works and then watch to see if it actually does work. Be sure you actually look yourself in the eyes and not just a general staring off to the side of yourself. Almost anyone’s eyes can become quite radiant and if you stare at them long enough, there’s a good chance you’ll begin to genuinely see that radiance. How long should you stare? I’d say at least 5 minutes. You need to stare to the point that you move past the point of the staring being awkward. You have to stare until you actually begin to see.
You already are the beautiful and radiant person that you are working towards. You don’t need to create a new self. All you need to do is to recognize the radiance of the self that already is.
In love and light,
David Miller
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1420226318
David Miller is a yoga teacher, a teacher training and also the manager of the Huntington Beach CorePower Yoga (http://www.corepoweryoga.com/classschedules/california.aspx?location=24) He is blessed to be working around his true passion and is reminded of just how lucky he is almost every day. Any correspondence can be addressed to david.miller@corepoweryoga.com.
pah said,
November 11, 2010 at 6:09 pm
i truly appreciate this post. thank you.