I thought it’d be a good week to discuss and share some thoughts about what we think, feel, and decide about the vessel we inhabit. It could probably be the topic of weekly blog posts for the next ten years but we’ll start here. Enjoy!
I’ve been abroad for the last couple weeks. When I travel I enjoy exploring culture, history, religious beliefs, and numerous other idiosyncrasies with my fellow humans around the world.
During my time over here I’ve visited a spa in Hungary a couple times. It’s an enormous facility with many baths, both indoor and outdoor, and other services being offered like facials, massage, pedicures, food, and libations. I’ve guesstimated that on a slow day there are likely 1,000 patrons and on a busy day maybe twice that much. Some serious people watching at its finest, to say the least. One thing that’s for sure is that if varying levels of clothing are introduced then sexuality, issues with our bodies, and peculiar mating rituals will ensue. And I notice something that seems to be present in many people is that they look uncomfortable.
Here’s where my thoughts are for this episode; whatever we think or feel about ourselves always translates in our communication with one another.
I consider myself an expert on finite interpersonal communication. I think I picked it up as a kid in situations where reading people meant a lot, often survival. This happened frequently, so my intuition got pretty honed. I know many people with similar experiences in life that picked up some great skills in this area. Anyway… what we think and/or feel translates and gets conveyed in all of our body language, facial features, eye contact, posture, and so on. It’s damn near impossible to fake all that but it can be done.
So here’s the deal, we all have to look deeply into how we feel about ourselves and others in order to do the work needed so that what we want to feel and our authentic selves gets communicated.
Body image, shame, and self confidence issues are a part of being human. I know that at times I have experiences where I’m in complete acceptance of myself, but it doesn’t happen all the time. I know many men and women who have society’s standard for perfection and they too have experiences of insecurity or inadequacy, no matter how fleeting, where they doubt their beauty and magnificence in physical form.
What I know from the thousands of men and women that I’ve talked to is that what we find the most attractive is confidence. Confidence doesn’t come from being perfect but from acceptance. Another thing I know is that the powerful negative judgments we have about another is very often linked to something in ourselves that we’ve yet to accept. Hmm…
So deciding what we want our bodies to be able to do and comparing ourselves to how close we are to achieving that is much better than comparing ourselves to what someone else looks like.