I have vacillated back and forth, liking my body, then hating it,
liking, than hating it. I found that regular, moderate exercise made me
feel lighter with more energy. I continue to eat healthy food.
Then
I went on retreat in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, fell on some stone
steps and bruised my knees, which were already hurting from so much
sitting meditation. Two men helped me to the infirmary and a kindly,
gray haired man who was trained as nurse tended to my wounds. He is an
advanced practioner and gave me many
ideas for deepening my practice. Then he said to me "You exude
gentleness and warmth. You remind me of an earth mama. I find it very
attractive." I thought, OK, I'll accept that and for the rest of the
retreat I kept thinking to myself, "I am a warm, gentle earth mama."
The
thought stuck in my mind as I went to a second retreat in Vermont. And
the craziest thing happened. A nice looking man from Texas started
flirting with me. It was very subtle. He would always sit by me at lunch
and walk with me as we went to and from the Pavilion to the cafeteria.
It was harmless. We were both married and on retreat. And then on the
way home. I struck up a conversation with a man who was married and he
gave me his whole life story. I listened because he seemed to need
someone to listen. We had to get off the plane in Phoenix and he
followed me to the sandwich place and sat down at the table with me as
we ate our sandwiches. And like a good puppy he followed me
back to the plane. He went on to San Diego and I got on a plane for
Oakland.
I am happily married and have spent many years being
single so I am not someone who actively seeks or is dependent on male
validation. And even after this attention, I was ambivalent about my
body. I noticed that everyone at Buddhist events I went to were thin.
And the thought occurred to me that I wasn't ambivalent about the fat so
much as being different from most people. I felt fearful and self
conscious about looking different. And then I thought, I am not ugly, I
am just different. I am in a minority of heavier people, but being
different doesn't mean that I am ugly. So I looked at myself in the
mirror both naked and clothed and noticed how large my breasts were and
the perfect round curve of my belly and the semi hourglass shape of my
torso and I liked it. I didn't talk myself into liking it, the love came
effortlessly. I imagined myself telling my parents, who
are always nagging me to lose weight for health reasons, that I do not
have a problem with the way I look. I notice that most people, at least
the ones I consider worth knowing, respond positively to me. For the
first time since I put on this weight, I look in the mirror and smile.
There has definitely been a shift forward.
A friend told me that a
friend of hers made a negative comment about my body after she first
met me but wouldn't tell me what the comment was because she didn't want
to repeat something hurtful, which was fine with me. I felt threatened
again. I didn't feel ugly or angry, I felt unsafe, like I was going to
be picked off from the herd because I was different. Like being a Jew in
Nazi Germany. Then I felt the love for my body and myself. It's OK, I
told myself. I am safe. So, the obsession with thinness and the
rejection of fatness by society can not only be annoying and insulting,
it can be scary.
In the book, A
Romantic Education, the author Patricia Hampl talks about how the ideal
of women's bodies changed after World War II.
"...the model is
reminiscent of the vacant starved face of a just-liberated prisoner of
Auschwitz...We have, unconsciously and hesitantly, claimed the beauty
that must be ours, as if it were a historical, even an evolutionary
inevitability. There in the swank fashion magazines is the
sexless...figure, thin to the point of horror, looking out from the page
with the bewildered vacuity of a refugee. Thin, thin beyond flesh. All you need is high cheekbones and you have to be thin.
You must be thin beyond health or hope. There is no thinness, no
disappearance of flesh extreme enough to satisfy our idea of beauty--
for we call it beauty, this bruised sacrilege of the body. The human
figure changed with the Second World War. The spontaneous image clouded
and came back in that horrible way, the skeleton in its gruesome
pajamas."
