Body Schema

How often to we pay tribute to our bodies? I read recently something that for some peculiar reason impacted me...it said, 'The two most obvious things about human beings is that they have bodies and they are bodies.'

A sense of awareness, ownership, that your body belongs to you. Feeling movements, balance. Our abilities to locate ourselves, to sense our body size and shape and the awareness that our body has boundaries that separate us from other bodies and objects and within them lies countless mechanisms.

Suppose the human body is just a thing, a flesh and blood thing, but a thing nevertheless, an object, a machine. Like many machines, the body has its fuels and lubricants, its ways of relaying sensory information to and from the central processing unit, and the functions which it performs. Like all machines, it needs maintenance, cleaning, and maybe even some polishing up. This may be true of your body, but not mine. My body is a thing only up to a point, after which I start to take it personally. The pleasure and pain that emanate from my body are uniquely mine and no one else's and they establish not just a sense of ownership but a sense of being. I am a person by virtue of the fact that I am located in my body and nowhere else, and that body has a historical and physical location from which I can identify myself within the world.

I used to compare my body to a temple, as I can understand now, I was right. We have nothing much more to care for in our time than for ourselves and our bodies which serve as our mode of transporting and communicating with the outside world. It allows for perspectives for others, its all they can see and its all they can link us with, if not upon a fresh friendship. Our bodies are viewed in many many different ways throughout the day. Our posture at work, our position on a bicycle, our stance in line, our form, shape, fat, muscle, hair, and those things that we cloth our bodies with, which are mainly superficial. However, what's important here is to know that we need to create and craft our bodies into something we are proud of and that we love and we can embrace, our bodies should be cherished and loved.

Moreover, a sense of self worth or personal validation should not be greatly influenced by our expectations of external embrace, of that of our bodies nor of our mentality. Our value and sense of self worth comes from within ourselves, a deep emotional powerful conclusion that we hold to be true about ourselves...