…the root insecurity can remain about one’s body. Many adults feel deep down that their body is either too fat or too short or too tall or too old or too “ugly,” as if there were some perfect way that it should be. Sadly we may never feel completely comfortable with the way our body is. We may never feel completely at home in it…These feelings really stem from a restricted way of looking at your body in the first place. Our thoughts about our body can limit drastically the range of feelings we allow ourselves to experience.
When we put energy into actually experiencing our body and we refuse to get caught up in the overlay of judgmental thinking about it, our whole view of it and of ourself can change dramatically. To begin with, what it does is remarkable! It can walk and talk and sit up and reach for things; it can judge distance and digest food and know things through touch. Usually we take these abilities completely for granted and don’t appreciate what our bodies can actually do until we are injured or sick. Then we realize how nice it was when we could do the things we can’t do anymore.
So before we convince ourselves that our bodies are too this or too that, shouldn’t we get more in touch with how wonderful it is to have a body in the first place, no matter what it looks or feels like?
The way to do this is to tune in to your body and be mindful of it without judging it. You have already begun this process by becoming mindful of your breathing in the sitting meditation… you are tuning in to the sensations your body generates associated with life itself…When you tune in to them, you are reclaiming your own life in that moment and your own body, literally making yourself more real and more alive.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Full Catastrophe Living Chapter 5