By Andrea Wachter, LMFT
If you’ve innocently downloaded a bad body image from our appearance-obsessed culture, this letter is for you. May these words help you foster compassion and appreciation for your body and reclaim more moments of your precious life.
Dear Mind,
This is your body. I want you to be kind to me. Do you know how unbelievably painful it is to be constantly critiqued and criticized?
Do you know that kindness and compassion lift me up and harsh criticisms take me down?
I need you to stop bullying me. I need you to value and appreciate how much I do for you and to take kind care of me.
I want you to treat me with respect, nourish me, and allow me to enjoy what I eat.
I want you to tune into my needs and nurture me with fresh air, movement, rest, connection, and quiet.
I need you to have compassion and tenderness for the variety of emotions and sensations that well-up in me. You can call on our heart for that. It’s waiting on stand-by.
I need you to slow down sometimes and really connect with me—appreciate all the things I do to keep us going, like breathing steadily, pumping blood, healing wounds, digesting food, and so much more.
I wish you’d notice more of my breaths and less of your stressful stories. Every breath is unique. These lungs will never take this exact breath again. Each breath is like a one-time show, and you miss it when you’re constantly thinking about other things.
When you worry and stress, you make this system more nervous. I know it is a nervous system after all, but when you pay so much attention to your stressful stories and scenarios, it makes me feel more nervous than this system was designed to feel.
Please make an effort to balance screen use with other ways of caring for me. When you’re scrolling through content that doesn’t feel good or helpful for us, I create unpleasant sensations. I hope you’ll pay attention to my signals.
Will you make more of an effort to delete the programming that taught you to pick on me, ignore me, or treat me like a never-ending improvement project? I know it’s not your fault, but we’re in this together. If you’re mean to me, I’m stuck.
I need you to be nice to me. I need you to accept me. I need you to stop calling me names.
Would you please stop comparing me to others? When you focus on stereotypes of beauty and other people’s appearances, you miss so much of what I do for you. You overlook my uniqueness and this one life we’ve been given.
I know it’s programming that taught you to critique and compare me to others. It’s not your fault. But I need you to get an upgrade or get help if you need to.
Let’s not lose more precious moments than we’ve already lost.
Thanks for listening. I hope you will truly hear me.
I will continue to breathe, pump blood, and perform countless other miraculous tasks as I await your response.
Love,
Your body