Dear Body

You are wonderful…

Like building bricks, 30 to 40 trillion cells form you. My little yet strong fist-size heart will pump around 182 million litres of blood during my lifetime. My fingers prints, eye print and my toe prints are unique to me. 

I am truly one in billions!

My mouth has around 2,000 taste buds to taste and enjoy food. My eyes can distinguish 10 million different colours. My bones are about 5 times stronger than steel is. The acid inside my stomach has the ability and might to dissolve zinc yet never destroys its walls because the stomach’s cells regenerate quicker than they are destroyed. 

If I laid all of my blood vessels end to end they would stretch 60,000 miles, or go around the world nearly two and a half times! You help me think, create, comfort, invent and be able to love. Because of you, I can enjoy music, see great paintings, soak up breathtaking views. You give me the gift of knowing when I am comforted by the embrace of a friend. Because of you, I feel the kisses of my children and husband, I can gaze the pride in my father’s eyes, the happiness in my mother’s face. Oh, body, you are truly amazing. 

My body, you are fearful too.

A little virus invisible to the eye can kill you. A tiny insect carrying a deadly disease can break and threaten your existence. A little paper cut can cause more pain and discomfort than a broken bone. You can be addictive to drugs, food and drinks and slave after them. You have in you the ability to accumulate dangerous anger that threatens to cripple all your relationships. You feel the pain that no doctor can see or heal. You are easily envious, jealous, bitter and offended. You use manipulation, control and force to get what you want. You exploit your fellow-man, look down on the less fortunate and favour the powerful for your interest. 

So, when I look at you, where shall I focus on, dear body? The wonderful or the fearful part? 


For, If I stop at just your wonderful side, I might be thankful for you and perhaps even prideful. If I looked at the fearful side I might be paranoid and scared to live my life. So, I choose to look through you and not at you only. 

Through you will help me pass seeing just the physical, not that the physical is bad, in contrary it is beautiful, but let us not stop there. My body is more than the cells that make or those that break it. 

It’s formed for a purpose, yes whether in the splendour of its beauty or in the destruction that sickness, you, my body have a purpose. 

So, I am learning to take both arms of my body, the wonderful one and the fearful one and let them embrace me fully. Both sides must come as a whole otherwise I tend to pull one side or the other and that always divides and disconnect the body and mind. Our human nature tends to separate how it looks to the body, we separated it into the parts we like or hate, we dice it, we take sides and stop to look beyond what the mirror shows us. But the psalmist echoes a truth that has survived millenniums. The truth that our bodies are wonderful and fearfully made. That our bodies have a purpose beyond the physical one. That more happens in our bodies in the unseen that what we see. We can start to learn to see through it and enjoy to live in that wonder.

These days I am learning to look through my body more than I am tempted to look at my body. What about you? 

Love Lea xx