The Four Agreements of Body Acceptance (Part 4)

This is part Four of my series applying the concepts from the book "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz to self acceptance and body acceptance.  You can read the previous parts here: 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Part 4

Fourth Agreement:  "Always Do Your Best" (Don Miguel Ruiz, "The Four Agreements")

The key part of this agreement is the idea that your best is not a constant, because you are not a machine.  It is okay if your 100% today is very different from your 100% last week.  It is important that you give yourself credit for what you can do today.  In body acceptance, your best today might be going to a protest rally, shaming the haters, standing up to every body-negative message you encounter.  On the other hand, your best might be getting through your day without actually killing someone. 

Christine Miserandino is a writer who came up with what's now called the "spoon" theory.  She was using the analogy to describe the very limited energy available to her as someone living with Lupus, but it has since been adopted by many auto-immune and pain disorder sufferers including those with Fibromyalgia and Celiac. She described her day to a friend in a cafe' in terms of a handful of spoons.  Each activity in her day costs her one or mores spoons, from waking up and showering, to doing the dishes, to dealing with a friend's trouble.  At the end of the day, with one spoon left and many different people and chores bidding for it, she has to make serious choices about what she is capable of accomplishing and what she needs to let go. 

The spoons, of course, represent a unit of energy.  The energy can be any combination of physical, mental, and emotional energy depending on the person and the day.  You may have days when your brain is going a mile-a-minute but you are too physically exhausted or emotionally overwhelmed to really act on your trains of thought.  Or, you may be physically restless but feel like you're thinking through a fog.  If you do suffer from a disorder that saps your physical and emotional energy, the number of "spoons" you can allot to loving and accepting your body may be very limited. 

But everyone, whether or not they have an identified disorder, does have a finite amount of physical, mental and emotional energy each day. Through media, ads, and societal pressure we are sometimes fooled into thinking that it's possible to go through life giving the same or greater smiling 100% every day without fail or discouragement. I have never personally met or heard of a person with no off-days. Have you? I have some days when I feel like I can conquer the world, write a novel and declutter the house in the same afternoon.  On those days, body acceptance is easy.  I can laugh off negative body messages with scorn and engage the haters with cool confidence.  I have other days when a casual fat joke in a television show or a billboard for bariatric surgery will send me into a dark, unshakable, pessimistic funk for the rest of the day.  On the latter days, my best is to simply be forgiving of myself, avoid shaming messages as much as possible, and seek out support from loved ones.  Most days are somewhere in-between.  I suspect that's fairly typical. 

So in deciding to yourself what your "best" effort is towards body acceptance, be careful of setting static or absolute goals for each day.  People with pain disorders know that they often don't know when a flare-up will arrive until it does, and the rest of us could wake up any morning with a cold, a bad night's sleep, or generally an inexplicably crappy mood. The discouragement of not reaching a goal is the worst possible addition you can make on an already discouraging day.  Instead of saying "tomorrow I will accomplish XYZ," it might be helpful to set a sliding scale of goals, where you include some body-love activities that come very easily to you and some that are more difficult.  That way, you can decide how much you do based on what you actually can do. On a low-energy day, reward yourself for the little things.  On a high-energy day, tackle something bigger.  Either way, you find something to feel good about.  Just be honest with yourself about what constitutes your best. 

The Four Agreements of Body Acceptance (Part 3)

This is part two of my series applying the concepts from the book "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz to self acceptance and body acceptance.  You can read the previous parts here: 

Part 1
Part 2

Part 3

Third Agreement:  "Don't Make Assumptions" (Don Miguel Ruiz, "The Four Agreements")

Joy Nash has a great sequence in her YouTube Video A Fat Rant where she stands on a sidewalk and verbalizes the assumption shared by a lot of larger women:  "There's no way that guy would be interested in me.  I'm fat!"

Then she really addresses the assumption.  After all, she explains, there are many different reasons why anyone would choose to talk to someone or not, including the band on the other person's tee shirt. It may have absolutely nothing to do with our bodies, and yet we tend to blame them for every negative encounter we experience. 

We have probably all experienced a moment where we made assumptions about how other people feel about us.  Maybe a stranger glared or a teenager giggled in our direction, or someone seemed to snub or ignore us.  This can trigger a litany of self-criticism and recriminations: 

"That staring woman looks really disapproving.  I'll bet she thinks I'm too (old/fat/tall/short/pierced/weird)."
"He walked right past me without making eye contact...he must be angry with me about something."
"There's no way that person would talk to me; they must find me repulsive."
"Those teenagers are laughing and looking in my direction; they must be making fun of me!"

Interestingly enough, it has been found that we frequently assign motivations and emotions to people based on very little nonverbal input. We assume a person is annoyed when they speak loudly, when in fact they might just speak loudly all the time.  They may even have hearing loss.  In addition, we tend to assign more positive and nuanced emotions or motivations to those we like, and more negative and absolute ones to strangers and those we dislike. 

This means that if the guy who bumps into you without apologizing is a friend, we are more likely to think, "he must be having a rough day" or "he must be thinking hard about something."  If they're a stranger or someone you dislike, you're more likely to simply dismiss them as a rude, insensitive jerk. So when making assumptions about what someone is thinking about you, you are more likely to fill in the spaces with your own fears if you're dealing with strangers. 

You are also more likely to assume the emotions and motivations of others are negative if you are feeling negative yourself.  This creates a loop, where you are feeling down about yourself, leading to assuming negative judgement about you by others, which reinforces the negative feelings you have about yourself.  You create your own negative encounter in your mind without ever actually interacting with the other person.

The good news is that you can break that loop and turn it around.


Golda Poretsky on Body Love Wellness addressed this directly.  Her advice is that every time you find yourself wondering what someone else is thinking about you, replace it with a positive assumption.  "That woman's really staring at me.  I must be looking particularly fabulous today!" or maybe "she's jealous because my burger looks so damn tasty". Or maybe "she's wondering if she can get that top in her size".  Or maybe "she's wondering if she should paint her walls the color of my jacket".  It doesn't matter what you substitute, as long as it is a positive reflection upon you and your body. 

By changing the assumptions to affirmations, you can elevate your mood.  This in turn makes it easier to make positive assumptions. 

Your homework, if you choose to accept it, is to put this into practice.  Go out to a place where you have experienced the negative assumption problem.  Notice people who look at you and assign positive emotions (like approval) to their looks.  Practice it, because you are forming new habits and they take a lot of practice.  Work on catching the negative assumptions and either distract yourself from them or turn them into positives.  take careful note of how it affects your mood. 

The Four Agreements of Body Acceptance (Part 1)

While I'm not a big fan of the writing style and New Age mysticism of the book "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz  the core concept of each agreement applies well to body and self-acceptance.  Some people can really identify with the book, but for those of us who can't,  this is a series of posts distilling it down to the practical. 

Part 1

First Agreement:  "Be Impeccable With Your Word" (Don Miguel Ruiz, "The Four Agreements")

The concept here is based in the idea that you are what you do, and that speech is action.  Every time you speak negatively of your own appearance or that of others, you internalize that negativity and it becomes part of you.

What we often don't realize is that the words we say in our heads may not have the same impact as what we say aloud, but it does have an effect and there tends to be much more of it.  We're taught that it's rude to say negative things, so we say them silently, and to ourselves, and more or less constantly.  Most people are not even aware of the sheer volume of negativity in our lives; it has become normal background noise. 

Wrapped up in the problem is that we tend to suspect in others the actions we are most ashamed of in ourselves.  When you keep a running monologue of criticism of other peoples' bodies, it makes it easy to believe that others are doing the same about our body.  From that comes shyness, body shame, and self-criticism around other people. 

Being "impeccable with your word" means watching what you say to yourself as well as to others.  Each time you find yourself criticizing or reacting negatively to someone's body (your own or someone else's), see if you can cut yourself off.  It's okay to simply tell yourself No. 

Of course, trying to not think about something is extremely difficult for our brains.  There's the old playground trick where you dare someone to not think about pink elephants.  The only way it's possible for most people is to try very hard to think about something else.  So when you catch yourself in a negative thought, deliberately substitute a positive thought. Find something about the person to compliment, or that is at least neutral.  If you can't, at least try to think about something else.  How's the weather?

Dialectic Behavioral Therapy is based on this very concept; that the thoughts, body and emotional state are interconnected.  Changing one can often affect the others (for good or ill).  By policing your negative thoughts, you can elevate mood and improve health.  These are the primary benefits of reducing stress in general, and negative body talk can be very stressful. 

This is something that no one can wave a magic wand and fix, but with effort you can begin to head off criticism at the pass.  Eventually you'll find that instead of having to force yourself to think good things about people, it will happen automatically.  The boost in confidence and happiness this brings is well worth the effort. 

Happiness Project: Memories versus Clutter

Scanning important documents, photos and souvenirs and tossing the originals is one of the frequent decluttering techniques I've seen posted on organizational blogs.  I've always really resisted it, and now I have a good reason.  I've just had a catastrophic computer snafu, and irretrievably lost all copies of every photo I've ever saved electronically.  

Digital is convenient and compact, but anyone who works with digital files regularly should be very aware of their ephemeral existence.  You can back them up in various ways, but they are never entirely safe.  True, paper photos are subject to fire, flood and theft, but electronic images always held an extra element of intangibility and easy loss. 

So I'll get aboard with reducing clutter by ditching hard copy books for digital, because in a pinch I can always get another.  I'll scan unimportant documents like past bills where I can get copies from the companies if needed.   But I don't think I'll ever be comfortable with having my only copy of important photos and writing in electronic form. 

One of my happiness resolutions is to remove all kinds of clutter from my life.  But I think I need to define clutter as that which is unimportant and unnecessary.  Physical objects are not always clutter, and clutter is not always comprised of physical objects (stress, anxiety, overcommitment, etc. can be clutter).  I hereby declare that photos of important moments in my life (within reason) are no longer clutter.  I defy the professional organizers and take back the right to prioritize my own life and belongings. 

In exchange, I need to commit to caring for what's important.  I have photos tossed in boxes and piles that need organizing and arranging in albums.  I should toss photos that no longer evoke good memories, and reduce those that do to a representative sample.  I don't need a hundred pictures of the same beach in Cozumel.  I should scan what I do have and back it up to an online storage medium so that I am protected from both physical and electronic damage.

Maybe that's what clutter means to me: If it isn't worth the effort to protect it, is it really worth having at all?

Taking Pickles Off the Back Burner

So this weekend I caught up on a lot of things, like cleaning and packing five whole boxes of clutter for a giant garage sale next spring.  I felt like I should reward myself by tackling one of the "unnecessary" creative projects I've had sitting in my inspiration box for nearly five years now: homemade pickles.

Every single year when the world is inundated with so many cucumbers that people leave baskets of them in the office break room with a "free" sign, I sigh and say, "I should make pickles this year."  It never actually happens.  The reason it never actually happens is that I always assumed that pickling involved a huge, expensive, messy and complicated process. 

Then I found a recipe for cold-pack pickles on Dave's Cupboard.  It couldn't possibly be that easy...could it?  If the recipe was correct, the only thing I needed that I didn't already have was pickling salt, cucumbers and a few spices. 

So I grabbed some off-season cucumbers, dried spices (the grocery store didn't have fresh dill) and gave it a whirl.  I re-used some plastic yogurt containers to hold everything, sliced the big cucumbers into spears, and after about an hour's work I have four 1 quart containers of pickles brewing in the back of our fridge, each one with slight variations on the base recipe (extra spicy, extra garlic, extra dill). 

I love cold pack pickles:  They're much fresher tasting and crunchier than cooked ones.  The downside is that they do have to be stored in the fridge and are only good for about three months.  But I can make small batches at a time.  It opens up all kinds of possibilities (pickled peppers, anyone?).  The cost would, of course, be much lower if I grew my own herbs. 

After a semester of constant running around on "necessary" tasks, it felt really good to do something entirely for the sake of tasty, creative fun.  It shows that I don't actually have to slow down to take a break.  I won't know for sure if it worked until December 8th when I crack open the pickles, but I love being able to say I make them.  It has to do with the kind of person I want to be.

Happiness Project: When the thing you're mad about, really isn't

What you're mad about is not always what you're yelling about...

I had an interesting moment recently that, unfortunately, did not reflect well on me at the time. All I can say in my defense is that it was an anomaly.

I was struggling to get ready for work on too little sleep, and for some reason everything JD did or said was irritating. Finally, he said something fairly reasonable that sent me into a fuming raging snit. How DARE he be so...so..smug and calm and condescending and all the other things I read into his just sitting there not taking it personally!

Even in the fit of rage I knew he hadn't done anything wrong, and somehow that was even more frustrating. Luckily, he was able to just wait me out. When the fit was over and I came to apologise and admit I didn't know what was going on, he was ready to help me figure it out.

In the actual moment of anger, I was entirely focused on imagining wrongs. Whether it was JD's fault, or the weather's, or my co-worker's, or Yahoo's mail server, I flipped through a litany of criticism of anything and everything, and in that mix I latched onto any justification for my feelings.

Here's the thing. I actually was upset. Trying to deny that or suppress it was pointless since it would only break out in a different direction. Whether or not my emotion was irrational or excessive is beside the point when dealing with the reality that it was. What had to happen was that I had to sort through all the false reasons for the emotion and find the real ones.

The real reasons? Well, I was tired because I had slept badly. That prevented me from thinking clearly. The weather was stormy and my mood crashes with the barometer. Those were mitigating factors, but they weren't reasons. I had to flip through a lot of easy answers to dig out the real one.

It turns out that if I went back to the previous day, I had experienced a serious disappointment over something I had gotten my hopes up about. At the time, I thought I had coped well with it, and even managed to have a good time with some friends without letting my disappointment ruin the atmosphere for everyone else. By the next morning I thought I had accepted and moved on. Apparently not so. Even though it wasn't consciously on my radar, it was still squatting behind my conscious thoughts and screaming "it isn't FAIR!" like an angry toddler. As a result, NOTHING was fair, and I wasn't even aware of it. I was angry at yesterday and screaming at today.

Until I could actually identify and process the real reasons for my anger, it was just going to keep ramping up and polluting everything I did or felt. It was also going to spread like a bad virus to anyone I encountered that day. So here are some pieces of advise for those experiencing this kind of bitter, frustrated, misdirected rage, from my own experience.

1. Don't fight the anger. You are upset. Denying you are upset is only sticking your thumb in the leak. Face the reality that you are upset and tell yourself you have a right to experience that emotion. You are also responsible for what you do with it and under its influence.

2. Avoid the justification game. If you talk to a partner or family member when angry, the tendency is to goad them into losing their temper at you. Not only does this give you a partner in the emotional experience but it then "justifies" your directing anger at them. It's a game you don't want to risk your relationships on. If you can't speak civilly to people, avoid them until you're under control (and let them know what you're doing so that they don't misinterpret).

3. Find a non-living outlet, if necessary. That may mean a physical outlet such as punching a pillow, running around the yard, doing push-ups, etc. Non-living means that you don't get to physically or verbally abuse a person or animal. Screaming, crying, etc. are all options, provided you control it. Give yourself one minute to scream into a pillow, or ten minutes to cry, then check in to see if the frustration has diminished. Sometimes writing out a scathing letter or e-mail ripping to pieces anything that comes to mind can provide an outlet, even if it only helps you identify misdirections for your anger. My snit was just before work, so I had a strict time limit on my outlet so as to get out the door on time. Your goal is to let off enough steam to take the pressure off and bring you back under control.

4. Admit that you don't know what's going on. When you can let go of all the illusive objects of your anger and admit this, the pressure may suddenly drop and the anger drain. If you're still saying "Yeah but" and finding new things to be angry about, you're not there yet.

5. Note your physical condition. Are you exhausted? In pain? Ill? These have a lot of exaggerating effects on negative moods and reduce your self-control. Also, as much as we women HATE that so many emotions are dismissed as "hormonal", hormones have a huge effect on the emotional state of both men and women. If you've recently changed dietary or exercise habits, started new medication, etc. it could be affecting your entire endocrine system. I remember a brand of birth control I had to suddenly discard when within two weeks of starting them I found myself sobbing helplessly over a preview for Dawson's Creek. Switching brands brought me back to normal. Likewise, a friend's reaction to a medication switch coined the term "going Cymbalta on his/her ass" amongst our social circle as a euphemism for uncontrollable rage. It's possible that my newly increased exercise regimen, for example, increased my emotional reaction last week.

6. Identify any big changes or events that have happened recently. Remember that in a physiological sense, any change is stress. You may have gotten great news that triggers fear of change, risk, the unknown, etc. Have you been "coping" (i.e. repressing) an emotional response to an event or person for the last few days/weeks? Has your environment been significantly disrupted (i.e. moving, renovating, decluttering, new furniture, etc.)? Put yourself, in your mind, in a position to really dwell on any of these that apply. Let yourself feel a response to them, even if you think that response is irrational. If you think hard about a recent change or event and it gives you a strong emotional response, you may have found what you're really upset about.

7. Discard false causes. If your reaction to something is entirely disproportionate, it may be a misdirection. If I'm in a fuming snit because I can't find a skirt I wanted to wear, the emotional response is wildly disproportionate to the severity of the problem. If I feel like screaming at an e-mail program because it won't take my mis-typed password, there is a bigger problem than the e-mail program that I'm not seeing. If the house is in chaos because of a lapsed home improvement project, however, a strong feeling of frustration may be perfectly appropriate. These assessments are clues to help you track down the real cause of your upset. If it helps you, pretend you are advising a friend who is complaining about these things. Would you think she's "making a big deal out of nothing" or "over-reacting"? That may tell you something about whether your own emotional response is proportionate.

8. Process. When you have found the real reason for your emotional state, you must process it in order to let it go and prevent it from affecting the rest of your life. Grieve, talk, fix, etc. as appropriate. Sometimes you just need to let yourself be really upset for a while instead of continually struggling against it by inches. Sometimes you need to talk it out with someone else and get sympathy. Sometimes you need to take active steps to correct or remove what's stressing you out. This is where your personal responsibility kicks in, because only you know what will make you feel better. You are also the only one really responsible for what you feel and what you do with it. You'd be amazed how easy it is once you really figure out what's wrong. That first step is the always the most difficult.

Please also remember that I'm not a psychologist, and these are the techniques that specifically work with me on the rare times when I'm experiencing this kind of frustration. If you feel like this kind of situation happens to you a lot and interferes with areas of your life, you might want to get help figuring out the underlying causes. Find a counselor you can trust with your emotional vulnerability and let them help you help yourself.