You can’t get away from yourself.
No matter what you do, where you go, what types of behaviours you indulge in, or what you think about all day long, there is no escape.
You come into this world in a body and, although it changes constantly, you will be in it until you are gone.
Is there any reason to make this an unpleasant place to live? If you are going to be in the same body every single day, wouldn’t you rather it be a pleasant relationship?
Strangely enough, the mind doesn’t always have the body’s best interests at heart. We eat things we shouldn’t, drink lots of things we definitely shouldn’t, don’t get enough rest, don’t exercise enough, and force ourselves to keep going even when the body is sick and needs a break.
Some people take better care of their cars than they do the vehicle that carries them around every moment of every day.
It’s possible to become so disconnected from the body that we can intentionally cause it harm. Any excessive behaviours such as alcoholism or drug addiction are extreme examples of this, but there are other more subtle ones as well.
We eat too much sugar, drink too much caffeine, eat too much of anything at one time and cause our bodies to have to go into crisis mode.
At no point would our bodies choose the kinds of things that we impose upon them every day.
When your lifestyle is constantly inflicting harm on yourself it is a self-destructive way to live. The ability of the body to heal is amazing. Just watch how a cut on your skin goes through various stages of repair until you can barely see that there was ever a problem at all.
To function properly, the body needs a little help. If you continually engage in behaviours that are injurious, you don’t give yourself a chance to heal.
Sleep is the time when it is able to make repairs, fight disease, rebuild and rejuvenate. Yet we often go to bed with full stomachs that make digestion the only work the body can do. The repairs have to wait for another time.
Except another time never comes because we repeat the same mistakes over and over.
By continuously adding to the work that it performs, we saddle our physical selves with too much to do. The system gets overworked and then something goes wrong. Then we might take the time to try to make it better, but usually we just reach for medication to mask the symptoms instead.
You can only ignore the cries of the body for so long though. Eventually there could be a significant malfunction in the entire system and you won’t be able to ignore it anymore.
It would seem insane to stand and allow someone to hit you over the head with a hammer over and over. You wouldn’t allow it, it would hurt, and you would do whatever you could to make it stop.
Yet sometimes we take a sledgehammer to our insides without making any attempt to stop doing so. We consume things that aren’t healthy and live such stressful lives that it is a continual assault on ourselves from the inside.
Why don’t we care enough to stop?
This is the vehicle that you get to travel in for the rest of your life. It can be a good relationship or an unhappy one. When the health of the body is compromised, everything about life is affected.
You can’t perform at a high level when the very apparatus of your physical existence isn’t working well.
Begin to pay more attention to what you are doing to yourself that isn’t supporting the desire to live in a healthy body. We make choices in every moment to either help or harm. Figure out which way you would like to live and then start from where you are.
Treat your body at least as well as you treat your car.