Body Image: Are You a Temple or a Tool?

 Photo by Howie Berlin    

Sitting outside my doctor’s lab and waiting my turn to “donate” blood, I was struck by a conversation I overheard in which the nurse explained that she’d seen everything and it was “all natural.” What bothered her patient about body image didn’t bother the nurse at all. She said that she could easily see past the body to the person inside and wasn’t troubled by any bodily function. Her idea of the human body? “Natural.” That made me wonder how different people see their bodies and how their body image becomes a prophecy to be fulfilled. They treat their bodies according to how they think of them. Some people regard their bodies as “machines.” They work them hard, make them do what they want, keep them running. These machines sometimes malfunction or break down but there’s a sense of ownership and often, control.A former friend once told me that she regarded her body as her ultimate “tool” to get what she wanted. She had a long history of relying on her looks and sexuality to convince a man to do her bidding so that she has yet to hold a full-time job. Her tool, at mid-life, is beginning to fail her though, and it’s harder to catch a young man’s attention when so many women half her age have newly minted “tools” to get what they want.Several acquaintances and friends refer to their bodies as their “rental units” or “borrowed” for while they’re in this lifetime, but believe they’ll be reincarnated into different bodies in the next lifetimes. How they treat their bodies depends a lot on how they view renting–is it okay to make a mess of it because you don’t own it or do you treat it more gently because it’s not yours?

When I was growing up, I often heard in the Baptist Church that the body was your “temple” and you should treat it as such. This was the usual reasoning for not smoking, not drinking, not having sex before marriage. While I know many spiritual people who have adopted this body image and improved their health and lives tremendously by taking great care of how they nourished and polished their temples, the religion of my childhood gave me a diametrically opposed set of metaphors. The human body was a “temple,” but it was also an “instrument of shame” and a “vessel of suffering.” The wonderful, beautiful temple was also something to be greatly ashamed of and meant to suffer on Earth in preparation for a pleasant stay in Heaven, presumably without the physical body or with a magically younger version, but go figure.

At some point in my life, I’ve thought of my body as a machine, a rental unit, a temple, and even (when I was very young) an instrument of shame. Probably a few other things as well. Not a tool to get my way, though–that’s just not my style. But I think I should pick one image and focus on treating my body that way. I like the temple image. I always have.

How do you think of YOUR body? And how does that affect the way you treat it? 

c Lorna Tedder