Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 35 Why You Can't Stop Hating Your Body (and the 3 Steps That Change Everything)
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: Have you ever noticed that you don't have to try to criticize your body? You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, see a photo of yourself, or trying a pair of jeans. And almost instantly your mind starts telling you what's wrong. It happens so automatically that it feels like the truth. But what if it isn't? What if hating your body isn't a part of who you are, but rather a habit your mind has practiced for years? In today's episode, I want to explore why I believe that's true. Why these critical thoughts feel so convincing, and how you can begin to break the habit so you can experience more peace in your relationship with your body. Let's dive in. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right, and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural work. And what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. Do you notice that you're not trying to criticize your body? It's not like you're intentionally setting out to say, today I'm gonna think some really negative things about my body. Of course not. It just happens. You see a photo of yourself or catch a glimpse of yourself walking down the street in a window, or you're on the beach and then all of a sudden those insecure thoughts come up. The thoughts, they just appear. You're not trying to do it. They just pop into your mind. And they happen automatically. And because of that, it can feel like reality. It just feels like this is the truth. But what if that isn't actually reality? What if it's simply a habit? I mean, what does it even mean to hate your body or just dislike your body if hate feels too strong of a word? It's really just a collection of negative thoughts. That we keep having over and over and are believing about our bodies. It's thoughts like I'm fat, and of course, that means something bad. I'm old, and that's a negative. I looked better before. Whatever those thoughts may be for you, they come with a feeling, a negative feeling, like sadness, fear, shame, disappointment, disgust, anxiety. When we are believing these thoughts automatically, we believe that it's our body that is making us feel that way. But it's actually the meaning that our mind is attaching to how our body looks. It's actually the thoughts that are showing up in our mind with this negative meaning that we're innocently and often unconsciously believing and taking as truth. Where did these thoughts come from? We weren't born with them. I use the example all the time. Look at little children. Look at two, three, four-year-old children. They are not standing in front of the mirror criticizing their body. They are free. They're at the beach running around, they're doing cartwheels, they're having fun. They aren't thinking that their body is a problem because they haven't learned it yet. Now it may start around the age of four and increase from there, but for the most part, they're pretty free of it. So, where did these thoughts come from for you? For almost all of us, it comes from the media, television, movies, advertisement, now social media may come directly from family, could have been comments that were made directly to you about your body, or just comments about other people's appearance. And because they are so frequent in our culture, because we saw that some people were receiving more positive attention, more status. If they look good, our mind said, this is important. If I look this way, I'm going to be important. I'm going to have value. I'm going to have status. And so it attached to that. It just took these thoughts in and believed them full stop without questioning them. And because so many other people around us are believing it, we just take it as fact. It's like at one point everybody thought the world was flat, and so you just were taught the world was flat, and that's how it was. Literally the same thing is happening with our beauty standards. It goes unquestioned. We just see people doing whatever they can to maintain their youthful look or keep their weight down. And over the years, the repetition of these ideas just makes it feel true. I'd like you to consider that the mind is. Always producing thoughts and images all on its own. We're not even doing it. The mind is like a computer that's been programmed. And it's been programmed with these ideas of fat, bad, thing, good, young, good, old, bad, and every variation of that. And then it spits out these thoughts in our mind. You're not consciously deciding that you're going to have a critical thought about yourself. In fact, if you look right now, can you know what the next thought is that you're going to have? Of course not. You don't know. It's just gonna pop into your head. And so the same thing is happening with these critical body thoughts. The habit is that we give our attention to these thoughts and we believe them. And if you've ever tried to break a habit or break an addiction, it is not easy. It's not a smooth path, it takes some effort. But we know that it can be done. One of the reasons why it is so hard to break this habit of giving attention to these thoughts. Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about it in this way is that these repeated thoughts end up creating a familiar emotional and psychological state within us. Over time, our minds and bodies become a Accustomed to those familiar feelings. So when you begin to start thinking differently or being open to the ideas of maybe my body is okay, maybe I am beautiful, that can actually feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar, really strange, and even sometimes wrong because we're so used to feeling the opposite. That's what feels normal to us. That's what feels true. But all that's happening when we start entertaining these different thoughts or start pulling our attention away from those critical body thoughts that we're so used to thinking is that we're stepping outside of a pattern. And as we know, change is uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean that it's wrong and it doesn't mean that it's untrue. It just means that it's different. Listening to these negative thoughts about our body and ourself over and over again is hurting us. It's bringing us down. You can feel it in your body, the constant low level of anxiety, of stress, of feeling down about yourself, of feeling less than. It's not helping us, but we're so familiar with it. It just feels like this is how I am, because we've been so far removed from the experience of how it is to experience ourselves free of these thoughts. So I want to share three steps that you can do start. Breaking this habit of somewhat of an addiction to these negative thoughts about your body and about yourself. The very first step is to become aware of the thoughts. I know that sounds simple, but these thoughts are so prevalent, they're so constant. Oftentimes we're not even aware that we're having them. I know I've worked with clients in the past who don't realize they're having these thoughts until They've said something out loud. And because we've been doing this work and bringing attention to it, they'll say, ⁓ my gosh, I didn't even know I was making that judgment about my body. But all of a sudden they became aware of it because we started bringing attention to it. If you find it challenging to notice these negative thoughts, you might even be thinking, I don't know, I'm not really having any critical thoughts or I don't know what they are. Notice the feeling first. You can ask yourself, what would I have to be believing in order to be feeling this way right now? And then simply notice whatever the mind starts to answer. And that's going to get you familiar with these thoughts. The second step is to now deepen the separation between the thoughts and you. You hear a thought that says, I'm not good enough or nobody's gonna like me or I'm unattractive. There's separation. You're no longer consumed by the thought. We want to deepen that separation. And one way you can do that is notice that that you are the one noticing the thought. Turn your attention around towards yourself and say, can I see that I am here and there is a thought? I know that may sound really basic, but it's actually really deep. We're not often aware that we are here observing thoughts and feelings. So spend a little bit more time to say, okay, I'm gonna just notice that I am here and I'm experiencing the sensation of these feelings, or I'm hearing the thoughts that are in my head or seeing a visual in my mind. That will start to deepen that separation. And that is exactly what meditation is for. Meditation is nice to help you relax and to chill out, but the reason why that works is because it separates us from all of the noisy, stressful thinking. A metaphor I like to use is imagine you're seeing thought bubbles coming up. All of those negative thoughts and feelings are like little bubbles that are floating up in your awareness. And you can see them, you can feel them. But they're not you. They're in a thought bubble. That's actually what's happening. But what mostly happens is our awareness kind of merges with that bubble. It's like our head could go into the bubble. And then all of a sudden that thought becomes a reality. As opposed to when you have separation from it, it's what's called witness consciousness. And you're seeing them as thought bubbles, that creates some distance. It doesn't mean you're gonna necessarily all of a sudden feel better. You're going to be feeling the feeling of that thought. So if there's a thought that says, I'm ugly, that has a negative feeling to it when you're really believing it about yourself. Notice that you're feeling it. And when you do, there's space there. And so we want to deepen that space. And then the third step is to imagine you're. actively withdrawing your attention from those thought bubbles. The only way that these thoughts have power is through our attention. Thought bubbles don't have any power on their own. They only do if we're looking at it. If you can imagine you're watching a movie screen but then all of a sudden you turn away from it. Well, it doesn't have that impact over you as it does when you're fully immersed into watching what you're watching. You don't fight with the thoughts, you don't try to argue with the thoughts, you're not even trying to change the thoughts. You don't need to replace them with positive thoughts. You just notice them. And on their own, they're going to start to float on by. And those thoughts are gonna come back. It's not like a one and done deal, but every time you do that, imagine it's like you're. Draining the battery of your cell phone. When we take the cord out, it's already starting to lose its energy. Think of it like you're unplugging the cord from your cell phone over and over again. And the longer you can have periods of unplugging it, the more the energy drains. That's what we're doing with these thoughts. Those thoughts will start to weaken. And they'll have less power over us. It's really simple what I'm sharing, sometimes frustratingly so. It can seem like, no, there's gotta be more. This can't be it. But really and truly, this is it because we can't have an experience without a perception of it. Our experience of our body really and truly is in our perception. If we're thinking positively about our body, we're gonna feel positively about it. If we have a negative thought about it, we're gonna feel bad about it. But we don't have to just be replacing all of the negative thoughts because I'm sure you've tried believing something different about your body and you don't believe it. There's no point in trying to force or convince yourself into something that you don't believe. Rather, it's a lot less effortful to just say, I'm gonna feel that feeling, I'm gonna let it move through. I'm going to notice those thoughts and I'm going to let them go through. Just because they're here doesn't mean that they're the truth. Just because other people are believing them too, doesn't mean that they're the truth. And understand that when other people are believing these thoughts, they are suffering too. Just look at the people that you know in your life who are believing these thoughts. They're struggling with it themselves. The more that we withdraw from these negative thoughts, What it's doing is actually putting us back in touch with the truth of who we are, with our wisdom. And we're able to care for our body from a place of peace and love instead of from feeling like we're not enough. It's simple, but please don't discount it. If you were to make this your practice, I guarantee you. So much about how you feel about your body and yourself would change. This is the core of the work that I do with my coaching clients. We get into your personal thoughts, your personal patterns, and work on developing that awareness and shifting your relationship to those thoughts that have just been keeping you in the same pattern for years. If you'd like support with that, you can learn more at the link in the description below. I hope this episode helped you today. Look forward to being with you in the next one. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help this show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember, you're already everything you've been trying to become. Enough, worthy, and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.