Your Body is Amazing
Our bodies really are amazing – the things they can do, what they can withstand, the variety in how they’re put together all on the same basic theme. If anything else this amazing came into our life, we’d celebrate it without question.
We’re pretty ungrateful to our bodies, though.
As a people, we spend way more time and energy focused on what our bodies DON’T do, or how our bodies AREN’T than we do on all the plusses. I get it, sort of – when things go wrong they require a lot of energy to set things right, and it’s super easy to take things for granted when they’re going right.
We can change that for ourselves.
Let’s apply some positivity to our bodies, starting with the purely physical elements. I see a lot of negativity floating around about the skin we’re in, for example. When was the last time you heard someone mention their back when it wasn’t connected to pain? How about hearing someone happy about their belly? Let’s flip those scripts for a moment:
Skin: This huge organ surrounds us literally from head to toe and back again, and does its best to protect us from a variety of threats. It participates in temperature control and our ability to use the sense of touch. It comes in a variety of really neat colors. It REGROWS when necessary! It changes in elasticity as we age and stretches to accommodate changes in our body.
Back/Spine: Our spine participates in just about everything we do – sitting, standing, bending, turning, dancing – every day. Its clever design allows for a full range of motion while standing (or sitting) in one spot, and it supports all of our weight as we grow.
Belly/Mid-section: So many organs live here! And our body is built to protect those organs by having our muscles surround them. That wasn’t safe enough, though, so we also have a layer of fat before getting to the skin – and all of those pieces are important and worthy of celebration!
Our whole physical being holds value above and beyond the value of any one piece or part. And our body is home. It’s the vehicle with which we do good things (and less-good things), and we only get the one.
How will you celebrate your body this month? How can we help?