IDENTIFICATION WITH THE BODY
Apart from objects, another basic form of identification is with “my” body.
Firstly, the body is male or female, and so the sense of being a man
or woman takes up a significant part of most people's sense of self.
Gender becomes identity.
Identification with gender is encouraged at an early age, and it
forces you into a role, into conditioned patterns of behavior that
affect all aspects of your life, not just sexuality.
It is a role many people become completely trapped in, even more so in
some of the traditional societies than in Western culture where
identification with gender is beginning to lessen somewhat.
In some traditional cultures, the worst fate a woman can have is to be
unwed or barren, and for a man to lack sexual potency and not be able
to produce children.
Life's fulfillment is perceived to be fulfillment of one's gender identity.
In the West, it is the physical appearance of the body that
contributes greatly to the sense of who you think you are: its
strength or weakness, its perceived beauty or ugliness relative to
others.
For many people, their sense of selfworth is intimately bound up with
their physical strength, good looks, fitness, and external appearance.
many feel a diminished sense of selfworth because they perceive their
body as ugly or imperfect.
In some cases, the mental image or concept of “my body” is a complete
distortion of reality.
A young woman may think of herself as overweight and therefore starve
herself when in fact she is quite thin.
She cannot see her body anymore. All she “sees” is the mental concept of her
body, which says “I am fat” or “I will become fat.”
At the root of this condition lies identification with the mind. As
people have become more and more mind identified,
which is the intensification of egoic dysfunction, there has also been
a dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in recent decades.
If the sufferer could look at her body without the interfering
judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they
are instead of believing in them – or better still, if she could feel
her body from within – this would initiate her healing.
Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or
abilities, experience, suffering when those attributes begin to fade
and disappear, as of course they will. Their very identity that was
based on them is then threatened with collapse.
In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive a significant part of
their identity, be it negative or positive, from their body.
To be more precise, they derive their identity from the thought that
they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body,
which after all is no more than a physical form that shares the
destiny of all forms impermanence and ultimately decay.
ECKHART TOLLE
--
Thanks and best regards
J.Suresh
New No.3, Old No.7,
Chamiers road - 1st Lane,
Alwarpet,
Chennai - 600018
Ph: 044 42030947
Mobile: 91 9884071738
--
Thanks and best regards
J.Suresh
New No.3, Old No.7,
Chamiers road - 1st Lane,
Alwarpet,
Chennai - 600018
Ph: 044 42030947
Mobile: 91 9884071738
------------------------------------
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