17 February 2014

i am in awe of my body, and i love it.

This weekend I prepared a lesson on Why Should I Treat my Body Like a Temple.  The timing seemed appropriate since lately I've had all kinds of thoughts and opinions about our bodies and how amazing they are by virtue of my experiences with my own body in the last few months or so.

The thing that was funny about being pregnant was how weirdly tolerant I was of all the pregnancy symptoms that were in actuality pretty inconvenient.  Constant constipation and waking up every single night to use the bathroom seemed exciting.  Because, my digestive system is slowing down on purpose and my uterus is expanding and putting pressure on my bladder how cool is that!

There were ten days between finding out that our pregnancy had failed and the miscarriage.  For ten days all of those pregnancy symptoms stuck around.  But we knew that there wasn't a baby coming, so all of that tolerance disappeared.  I could have been angry and frustrated with my body, and for a tiny second I was.  But my body thought it was growing a baby.  It didn't know that anything was wrong, so it kept trying to truck along.  Instead of anger towards my body I felt sympathy.



During my preparation for Sunday I found this statement, which became the focal point of my lesson: The great principle of happiness consists in having a body.  This has greater implications when you consider that the lesson falls under the February theme of the Plan of Salvation, but there is also a more literal interpretation that can be made - that the gift of our bodies is meant to make us happy.  There's no time for or benefit in having prolonged negative feelings towards our bodies, and some of the best things we can do in life is appreciate and properly take care of them.

I can't say that I'm sure I'll be excited about waking up in the middle of every night to use the bathroom again. The novelty of the first pregnancy might already be over.  But I am sure that I'm going to try to make it a point to be understanding and accepting of my body and its changes on a daily basis.

I've heard it said from some women that their appreciation for their bodies dramatically increases after they give birth.  I wasn't expecting to feel the same following my miscarriage, but I do.  I am in awe of my body, and I love it more and more every day.

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