Making Peace with Your Body
Today, I’m happy to share an article I wrote for Spirituality & Health magazine featuring wisdom from Andrea Wachter, the expert psychotherapist and meditation teacher who will be leading our free online workshop on May 20, Making Peace with Your Body. Please join us!
Release toxic body image programming
An important component of emotional healing and spiritual growth involves identifying and challenging the conditioned beliefs we’ve unintentionally adopted that don’t foster our wellbeing. These usually include thoughts about our physical appearance. Whether consciously or unconsciously, many of us are convinced that to be worthy of love and admiration we need to look a certain way—the way our current society deems ideal. This can make us feel shamefully lacking and lead to a highly critical and antagonistic relationship with our bodies.
Psychotherapist and meditation teacher Andrea Wachter—author of three books tackling body image issues and teacher of a popular course on Insight Timer called “Making Peace with the Body You Live In”—explains that comparing often goes hand-in-hand with despairing. “Because of programming that often begins when we’re very young, many of us have been hypnotized to believe that we’re supposed to look a certain way, a way that is often very different from how we are naturally meant to look,” Wachter explains. Whether it’s our weight, shape, height, hair, or skin, this type of programming leads to suffering. “When we look in the mirror, instead of looking with eyes of love, many people view themselves with eyes of criticism, or even hate.”
Andrea Wachter
In 2021, the weight loss industry in the United States was estimated to be over $70 billion, which means that massive amounts of advertising dollars are being aimed at convincing people that their happiness depends on being thin. “This type of messaging often leads to what I call the “diet/riot roller coaster,” says Wachter. “Restricting leads most people to obsession and rebellion. Dieting causes people to lose touch with their natural hunger, natural fullness, and essentially their natural feelings and desires.”
As someone who wasted decades of her life on a diet/riot roller-coaster fueled by body hatred, Wachter is passionate about helping people break free from the toxic programming that causes people to turn against their bodies. “We compare ourselves to images of bodies in the media that have been retouched, and then reject ourselves for not looking more like bodies that don’t actually exist,” explains Wachter, who points out that there is nothing objective about our society’s beauty standards. “There are cultures that aren’t programmed the way we are, ones that appreciate diverse body types and welcome aging. In fact, there are cultures that send women to fattening huts before they get married so that they’ll be more attractive to their husbands. Constantly critiquing and criticizing our bodies is the result of a massive, wide-spread hypnotic spell of body perfection.”
Wachter believes that in the same way we take a stand for or against many important social issues in our efforts to be agents of positive change, we can learn to take a stand against perfectionism, fat phobia, dieting, and body obsession. “It’s not our fault that we’ve received this programming, but we can learn to say, ‘No! I am going to become my body’s staunchest ally and stop agreeing with messages that rob me of fully enjoying my precious time on this planet.’”
The Roots of Negative Body Image
Wachter explains that negative body image messaging has been so successful because we all have a basic need to feel loved and secure, and we’ve been told that to fit in we should look a certain way. But this programming actually results in feelings of shame and rejection—exactly the opposite of what we’re deeply yearning for.
When we wake up to the fact that the programming is the problem, not our bodies, we can understand why people who have an “ideal” body according to society might still feel miserable, while others who may not fit into those narrow confines feel free, comfortable, and confident. “We all have the power to stop looking at ourselves through eyes that scan for flaws. We can begin to prioritize acceptance and appreciation. Self-hate pretends it is helping by whipping us into shape, but self-hate never leads to lasting peace or happiness.”
Four Practices to Foster Body Love
Andrea Wachter offers many techniques to help people become their own “body buddy” instead of their “body bully.” Here are some practices she recommends:
Self-reflection:
“It can be helpful to reflect back on your life and see if there were moments when something painful occurred that led you to conclude that your body was somehow unacceptable. I call these ‘dart in the heart moments’—turning points that moved us away from feeling comfortable in our bodies and into evaluating and criticizing our bodies. Can you remember any of these moments and offer that younger part of you some compassion and wisdom?”
Put negative thoughts on your watch list:
“When we’re gardening, weeds that we didn’t plant show up, but we make sure to remove them as soon as we can. In this same way, we can be diligent about bringing awareness to our self-critical thoughts and stay committed to challenging them as soon as they sprout. We all have the power to pull the mental weeds that inhibit our healthy growth, and we all have the power to plant new seeds of kindness, compassion, and acceptance that nurture our confidence and happiness. Every time you catch a negative thought and decide not to believe it, you can praise yourself for being aware enough to break the spell and upgrade your thinking.”
Take a Moment Micro-Meditation
Tiny pauses to be right here, right now can have big results. Our Take a Moment series of micro-meditations—all under two minutes long—make taking mindful pauses as easy as possible. We invite you to "Take a Moment" to find the calm that is always within you.
