Consciously Relating to Your Body

“You can’t expect your body to serve you if you give it nothing to work with. The body of a middle-aged executive isn’t out to sabotage him when the man decides to shovel a foot of snow from his driveway. But if he has ignored his heart for years, there is danger in sudden hard exertion, perhaps fatal danger. The key to the body’s reliability lies in cooperation: only ask for as much as you have given. Compared with other intimate relationships, your body asks for a fraction of what it is willing to give in return. This is another area where it helps to personify your body instead of objectifying it. Think of your body as a willing worker who wants only a meager salary, but who cannot survive on nothing. The salary it asks for is paid in personal attention. If you genuinely want to cooperate with your body, paying it a little attention makes proper diet, exercise, and rest easy – you will be providing those things because you want your willing worker to be happily employed.”