The New Year is resolution time and one of the most popular is to ‘get fit’. With that in mind I thought I would explore the idea of body image for a few days.
Who Owns You?
I saw a report about a murder trial yesterday where a woman is accused of stabbing and murdering her boyfriend. Her defense is that she was abused and it wasn’t murder but self-defense. One of the pieces of evidence is a photo of her in this t-shirt.
Jodi Arias
The defense submitted this t-shirt as evidence that the boyfriend, Travis Alexander, was possessive, going so far as to feel that Jodi was his property and making a shirt that stated such. Now, I don’t know anything about the trial, her guilt or innocence. I am simply using this as an example of how someone can abdicate ownership of themselves. Sometimes it is emotional or psychological, but it can also be physical. You can give up your rights to your own body (or have them taken away under force). A slave is what you become.
A Quandary
This is the quandary we humans find ourselves in. We both own our own body and we are slave to it, bowing to what it tells us to do. If we decide to sit on the couch all day every day, our body has no choice but to obey our command. It will not get up and take a walk unless we tell it to (sleepwalking excluded).
Owning Your Body
As a running coach I start each new season with some simple ideas for the participants. One of these ideas is that we really only have 2 things we run with. Our minds and our bodies. I ask them which controls which? The answer? The mind controls the body. We tell it to run and it runs. The body does what the mind tells it to do. Your body is slave to your mind.
Body Owning You
But that same body we can make bow to our mind’s wishes is also the body that can make our mind cease to exist. Our mind is dependent on our body. Without our body we can’t think, talk, listen, eat, laugh, cry, run, sleep, make love, etc. We cease to function. There are examples such as a concussion that takes our ability to think clearly away for a time or Alzheimers where our physical body slowly but surely causes our ability to think to diminish completely. And then we have the final example of death, where our brain function completely stops and all we could do and all we were conscious of via that brain ceases to exist.
The Bad Marriage
You have heard of marriages, you might even be in one, where you are constantly fighting with each other. You are not on each other’s side and the marriage is destructive. That is what we often do with the relationship between our minds and our bodies. We put our bodies through utter crap and then expect it to sustain us. We follow down paths of destructive thoughts and judgmental ideas about our bodies (and others) and then are surprised when our body and it’s shape becomes something we hate.
The Good Marriage
In the body/mind dichotomy analogy the marriage will always end in divorce. The body will indeed eventually die and our mind/consciousness/spirit/soul will either cease to exist or go on to another plane of existence without the body with which it started.
What we want is that while the marriage is intact for there to be a healthy, happy, and communicative relationship. Our mind listens to our body and takes it seriously and our body listens to our mind and does what is asked of it. It is no different than a real marriage, it takes patience, compromise, communications, love and attention for it to work.
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Drawing © 2019 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
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