Body Beloved/SherryTuegel

The Birth of Body Beloved
What happens when you fully love and accept yourself just as you are, no change necessary? I believe it's the birth of real happiness. You begin to fall in love with yourself and open a door to unconditional love for yourself and others.  To really love others without co-dependent need we have to learn to love ourselves unconditionally first.  This doesn't mean you never make healthy changes.  It doesn't mean you don't evolve.  You just love all of you just as you are now, fully accepting your amazing evolving imperfect self.  What has this to do with sex and sensuality?  Everything!

Let me share my own story as the example.  I've gone from defining myself as an overweight, over the hill, lonely divorcee to seeing myself as a large beautiful sexy 63 year old Goddess. Up until 6 years ago I had believed all the social programming that I was too fat to be attractive.  My size 12 body in high school wasn't perfect enough to match Barbie or the 1960's icon Twiggy.  I was surrounded by popular beauty queen/cheer leaders in my family that added to my belief that I and my body were 'not good enough'.  I also believed I was 'nothing without a man' and spent many years desperately and unsuccessfully seeking a partner to fill the 'not enough' emptiness in me.  After my 2nd divorce at the age of 52, I weighed over 270 pounds and believed no one would ever love me or want me again.  Luckily I was wrong, very very wrong!

Had I continued to believe I wasn't good enough and needed a man I'd likely have made that negative belief true.  Happily, that got turned around.  I'd begun a serious healing journey after a deep depression set in the year after both my parents died.  That reignited my spiritual path and led me to the teachings that changed my life.  I learned about Tantra.  Tantra is a spiritual path that sees all of manifestation as the Divine unfolding.  It teaches you to drop shame, let go of right and wrong judgments and accept what is.  It teaches you to question everything and find out for yourself what is truth instead of accepting what you're told.  It's based in the loving heart, the path I've been drawn to all my life.  I found wonderful teachers and healers that helped me love myself, love my own heart and drop the stories that kept me from seeing what a sexy sensual woman I am.  Tantra helped me fully embrace all of me, the light and the dark.  It welcomed my sensual sexual side as natural and taught me it is one doorway into Divine Awakening.   Most religions and governments have made most sex wrong stealing away our most natural form of pleasure and happiness.  Tantra embraces and uses this pleasure to access the Divine that dwells within us.   

So I stopped making myself wrong.  I embraced all of me and this turned my desperate loneliness into enjoyable alone time.   I've drawn amazing, delightful and challenging relationships to me as I allowed my sensuality and sexuality be free to express itself.  I've been told by one young (cougar alert) very sexy Tantric lover that my laughter and lack of pretense makes me a great lover.  It's been such a delight to be able to fully awaken my 'original' loving self; the self that existed before outside judgment imposed stories of limitation.   I've even learned to accept and hold my dark unloving side, my deep and real imperfections. 

Loving and enjoying who you are is one of the sexist things you can do.  It can create a magnetic draw to you.  Once you love yourself and enjoy your own company you turn loneliness into enjoyable aloneness.  When you're no longer desperate for "the other" you start to attract more loving and interesting people into your life.  The amazing thing about becoming desirable to partners was the simplicity of the change.  It only took my dropping the story to change everything.  No matter what age you are you can learn to let go of shame and judgment and begin a journey to open your heart to yourself.  You can choose to embrace and love your body in whatever shape it's in. I even recommend talking to your body as a loving partner, make friends with it!  That open heart and embrace of 'what is' will call in your natural sensual sexual self and, if I am any example, will become a magnet to call in the relationship(s) you long for, the best of which is the one with yourself!

I hope you go ahead and open this door of delight, the delight of being in and accepting your body just as it is.  Sending love to you as you enjoy the journey!

Published in September/October On the Path Magazine
http://www.pathways-belair.com/On-The-Path-Magazine.html