My Body Is My Greatest Guru.

My body has been my greatest guru.

Through my body, I have learned about impermanence. Through my body, I have learned not just to accept, but to love what I was taught to see as disgusting.

This body has allowed me to see that people are vastly more complex than their physical appearance. This body has forced me to be myself, despite how I make others feel.

This body has taught me to love the unlovable. To accept this moment as it is….right now.

This body has taught me about death and how our lives in this body are temporary.

I am grateful for my body because it has led me to deeper levels of love I didn’t know I could feel. It has protected me against the misconception of identifying with my body.

Many of us learn this through aging, the realization that our physical appearance is not the same as it was when we were younger. I learned this through my fatness, through changing this body: to being fat, to super thin, to fat again, and so on and so on.

My guru has shown me the path to liberation, and it does not lie in how we look, but in how we exist here with one another.

This body has taught me compassion, kindness, and joy. Even when it is hard, my body has taught me to see deeper into the soul of my friends, and not to depend solely on what is seen.

My body has taught me how this society thinks and feels. It has shown me, by action and example, the backward nature of these shared agreements we all live by.

And how interesting our ability is to create a world out of truth, and yet, to simply hide from that truth.

Oh, my dear body, how I have judged you over the years, yet you have been the love I have been looking for all this time.

Within our relationship was the “how” to exist. As much as I fought you and wished you were different, even when you were exactly what I wanted, exactly what I needed I have always known, deep down, it would come to this:

That loving you would be my biggest obstacle to freedom.

So thank you, body, for your wisdom and your continued wisdom.

I commit to being a humble student of your teachings.