learning to love being in your body

Enjoying being in your body and living in peace with your body image are chief mystical benefits of working out.

Barbara Russi Sarnataro captures this beautifully in her article Workouts That Help You Feel Better About Your Body on Web MD. Though she's talking about yoga and Pilates, everything articulated in the excerpts below can apply to all disciplines which hone lean mass development - like weightlifting, of course.

"Even in the midst of a culture that promotes dissatisfaction with our appearance, adherents say that yoga, Pilates, and other mind-body exercises can teach us respect for our bodies -- whatever their shape.

"Body image, how we view ourselves, often lacks compassion," says Steven Hartman, director of professional training at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Mass. "Many of us learn at an early age how to disconnect from our body and our body's signals. We learn not to pay attention to pain, to joy in our bodies."

Through yoga, he says, you can re-create a relationship with the body. In each pose, your attention is drawn not to how you look in your tights, but to whether you feel tight hamstrings or an imbalance in the alignment of your hips. Yoga, says Hartman "helps you have an objective awareness of the body."

Christina Sell, author of Yoga from the Inside Out: Making Peace with Your Body through Yoga, says yoga puts you in the moment.

"It's very here, very now, how you stand on the earth, how the position of the body feels on the mat," says Sell, a certified Anusara yoga instructor. "If you're focusing on the immediacy of the body's sensations and the steadiness of the breath, then the attention rests inside the body as it is, rather than in the mind and its projections and images about what is."

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