This topic looms large and is so high on most people’s agenda that it merits its own chapter. A large proportion of people, particularly women, have issues with their body image and this has a profound influence on their inner peace and self esteem. But I have left dealing with it until now because it is vital that you first understood the material on loving yourself, the Law of Attraction, and visualisation before I covered it. Hopefully, by now you will have seen a pattern in my advice and be able to work some of this out for yourself.
In my experience, nearly everyone would like to change things about their body so you can be forgiven for succumbing to this yourself from time to time. But the advice given in the previous chapters pertains. It is paramount that you accept yourself and love yourself as you are. There is someone for everyone and the important things are to be loving, positive, authentic and fun to be with. If you are like this then nothing about your body will hold you back in life or preclude you from being loved.
Most people need to feel that they are ‘fit for life’ and be ‘comfortable’ with their general weight and fitness to have the energy and motivation to strive to follow a journey of spiritual development. You need to strive for a level of health and wellness that is right for you to provide the platform for you to develop your spirituality. But you need to be realistic about what is sensible and achievable for you.
There is so much written on keeping fit and eating and drinking sensibly and healthily that I would simply encourage you to choose and define your own practices, diet and exercise programme. You should consider what are the key ingredients for you and construct something that is relevant and challenging while at the same time achievable. I suggest you write your plan down; it does not need to be long. In fact, I would suggest keeping it simple and to one page. I would also encourage you to accept gracefully the general deterioration of advancing years and be realistic about striving for levels of fitness that are commensurate with your age.
I want to remind you about visualisation and goals in the context of getting fit and losing weight. If you visualise the body and level of fitness that you desire, then you have taken the first step to thinking and behaving in the very way that will attract the body that you want. But you have to be sincere and honest about it because, as you now know, that is how attraction works. If underneath, you are still at the mercy of negative energy and negative emotion then that will control the type of body you will attract. The good news is that deciding what you want to change, with a positive and genuine heart, is enough to begin making it happen.
You have to feel good about yourself and love yourself and that includes your body and physical appearance. If you feel bad about your body or, even more extreme, you actually hate your body, then you will continue attracting more ‘feeling bad’ about your body. This will manifest itself in lack of willpower to gain control of your diet and fitness due to negative feelings such as, ‘it is all hopeless, I am not worth it, I will always be overweight, eating to combat depression, eating is the only pleasure I get’, and so on. You have to feel that you are already beautiful, you have to already love yourself and your body, and feel good about all your other qualities such as your personality and character, your eyes and smile, and then you will attract the good things you want regarding your weight and fitness.
It is all about how you think about yourself and how you think about food. You can reprogram how you think about your body, weight and food. One way of doing this is through hypnotherapy. If you can afford to see a professional hypnotherapy practitioner then fine but if not do not worry as you can achieve this for yourself by down loading weight loss / dieting tracks from e.g. Itunes. You can use these to reprogram your sub-conscious mind to eat only what you really need, and to eat only healthy foods and to be satisfied by smaller proportions. But it can only be successful if you love and respect your body and treat it with kindness. When I was much younger , before I understood these things , when I went on a diet I used to declare war on my body and consider it the enemy! How wrong I was. It is absolutely not your enemy. Your body has served you faithfully so far and you should in your mind thank it and be grateful to it. If you do not have this attitude then any weight loss programme is doomed to failure.
By all means set some goals for improving your fitness and weight loss. But remember as we have already covered, there is only the present moment and the role of these goals is the positive attitude, positive energy and emotion that working towards a goal generates moment by moment. So, the outcome or result of a goal is not about the achievement of the goal but the cumulative effect of the positive thinking along the way, moment by moment. Returning to the example of losing weight this could translate into the feeling that your weight is no longer out of control, and that instead you are now in control of it and your feelings about it. What endures and shapes you is the cumulative positive emotion and positive energy that is engendered by feeling that you are now in control of your thoughts and behaviours. So if you adopt a fitness and weight loss program you will start to feel better about yourself right from the outset on day 1. It is not something that you have to wait for until you have achieved a goal.
So in summary having goals about your body’s appearance is fine but you need the wisdom to truly understand that it is the change in your thoughts - cultivating loving yourself , self esteem, being in control of your thoughts - that is engendered by pursuing the goal- which is the source of happiness. And loving your body as it is, is part of being happy in the moment and loving yourself unconditionally.