The Body You’re So Quick to Criticize

I have some really cool stats I want to share with you that are mind blowing to me:

Our heart beats around 100,000 times a day. We take approximately 22,000 breaths a day. We have 37 trillion cells! And they are constantly renewing themselves. Your stomach lining every few days, your skin every few weeks and your bones about every decade. If you were to stretch your blood vessels out they would be 60,000 miles long and could circle the earth twice. Your heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood each day. Your brain fires 86 billion neurons each day, all of your thoughts, memories, insights, dreams.

These are just a few things I discovered and there are plenty more. What I’m getting at is our body is truly miraculous. It is doing so many things behind the scenes for us constantly, and so many of them we are unaware of.

I bring this up because we are so quick to critique our bodies. I know I am guilty of it. I am not sure I know a single person who doesn’t fixate on some flaw they see in themselves. My boys thank goodness still love their bodies, and I haven’t heard them mention anything negative about their appearances yet. They are living in their bodies and moving all the time. I wonder when it is that we switch from inhabiting our bodies to examining our bodies. Looking in the mirror and judging from the outside in, instead of feeling from the inside out. One of the things I truly love most about yoga is that it connects us to what our bodies can do and are doing in each moment, instead of how our bodies look or perform. Yoga is a practice, not a performance.

I get down on my abdomen skin a lot. I had two pregnancies, and the second one I carried twins. The skin just stretches, and once I lost the weight pretty quickly with nursing and being so busy, it became lax. It’s almost a bit worse if you do lose the weight more rapidly, because the skin doesn’t have time to catch up.

But when I fixate on some excess skin, it takes me away from the fact that this skin is the skin I’m in, and it’s pretty dang cool. 37 trillion cells, and the skin is regenerating, and isn’t actually the exact same skin from years ago. I’m constantly rebuilding myself on a cellular level. Not to mention the fact it carried two babies at once to full term.

This isn’t unique to me, everyone reading this right now has a body doing the exact same quiet work. Your body is healing, replacing cells, carrying you through whatever you’re going through, whether you ever stopped to notice it or not. I’m sure you have that one area or a few areas that bug you and you wish you could change. And look, there is nothing wrong with wanting to improve our outer appearance, but I think it’s a great reminder to appreciate what our bodies can do for us instead of how they appear, or in addition to how they appear. The second I start moving I quit fixating on the things that truly make me, me. Why would I want to get rid of a part of me, that is the thought I have the most, “I wish I could get rid of this skin,” that worked so hard to bring other miracles into this world.

My body is a miracle. It truly is. And so is yours. Sometimes it’s hard to believe just how much our bodies are doing for us all day long. I am truly grateful to be inside such a cool operating system, and I hope this is a reminder to feel that way about your own.

Close your eyes and quietly repeat in your mind:

My body is a miracle.

My body is a miracle.

My body is a miracle.