Identification with the body

Sharing with you - Identification with the body
Source: ~Eckhart Tolle – A New Earth

“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 and early age, and it forces you into a role, into conditioned patterns of behaviour that effect 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 worse fate a woman can have is to be uwed or barren, and for a man is 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 self-worth is intimately bound up with their physical strength, good looks, fitness, and external appearance. Many feel a diminished sense of self-worth 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, 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 really 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 her good looks, physical strength, or abilities experience suffering when those attributes begin to fade and disappear, as of course they will. Their identity that was based on them is then threatened with collapse. In their 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 I--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.

Equating the physical sense-perceived body that is destined to grow old, wither and die with “I” always leads to suffering sooner or later. To refrain from identifying with the body doesn’t mean that you neglect, despise or no longer care for it. If it is strong, beautiful, or vigorous, you can enjoy and appreciate those attributes-- while they last.
You can improve the body’s condition through right nutrition and exercise. If you don’t equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigour diminishes, or the body becomes incapacitated, this will not affect your sense of worth or identity in any way. In fact, as the body begins to weaken, the formless dimension, the light of consciousness, can shine more easily through the fading form.

It is not just people with good or near-perfect bodies who are likely to equate it with who they are. You can just as easily identify with a “problematic” body and make the body’s imperfection, illness, or disability into your identity. You may then think and speak of yourself as a “sufferer” of this or that chronic illness or disability. You receive a great deal of attention from doctors and others who constantly confirm to you your conceptual identity as a sufferer or a patient. You then consciously cling to the illness because it has become the most important part of who you perceive yourself to be. It has become another thought form with which the ego can identify. Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity and can and does create illness in order to strengthen itself through them.”

If you are working through A Course in Miracles then I recommend you have a look at Lessons 136 and 137 