How to Make Friends with Your Aging Body
If you have a negative body image, says Jenna Hollenstein, contemplating the five skandhas can help.
Whether you’re looking at your first gray hair, another stray eyebrow (aka chin hair), early whispers of crow’s feet, or the new belly you’ve acquired, you might feel unprepared for your body to age. When the face looking back at you in the mirror becomes momentarily unrecognizable, there’s no doubt that you, as all things, are impermanent. That can lead to fear, make you feel exposed, and cause you to cling to the past.
Given our culture’s narrow ideals of beauty, youth, and desirability, it can feel as though the relationship with your body—your body image—will inevitably and naturally get worse with age. However, an authentically positive body image doesn’t arise with proximity to the supposed ideal. Quite the contrary, the development of a positive relationship with your body is very much a practice of intentionally noticing narratives, assumptions, and internalized biases and then tracing them back to their source.
“When it comes to our bodies, it’s almost always preferable to navigate life by staying embodied.”
Suffering, impermanence, and egolessness are not new to us as meditators. Yet, perhaps because the relationship with our bodies can feel so fraught and vulnerable, it’s often difficult to remember these basic truths when it comes to the way we look. Peeling back the layers of perception of our bodies can help us make sense of them. Rather than relating to our bodies in a way that’s critical, objectifying, and largely unexamined, we can instead contact something deeper and, as it turns out, more real: the raw perception of embodiment.
Buddhism teaches us that the individual or illusory self has no permanent soul or essence and is merely an aggregate, or “heap,” of different parts that inevitably disintegrate. The components that make up the human experience and the illusory nature of a self are called the five skandhas, and they provide a perfect framework for compassionate contemplation. Looking deeply at the skandhas, we can uncover the origin of our negative body image and the unreality of that image—and in so doing we can unravel some of our misperception. The five skandhas are form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Let’s go through their progression.
How we experience our lives begins with form: the material body and the sense organs. Our experience then advances through to an initial interpretation of sensation as feeling good, bad, or neutral. As we experience sensations and initial pleasure, pain, or neither, perception begins to create meaning through concept and categorization. Then mental formations include all our mental activity—our grasping and aversion through how we think, emote, believe, and behave habitually. Finally, with consciousness, we integrate the skandhas into what is known by the knower. This is subjective knowledge that arises in recognition of the previous four skandhas.
Interestingly, the way many of us experience our very own bodies—and even our ideas about what body image is or should be—begins with a familiar, fixed, and largely negative picture. For example: “I feel terrible about my body. It’s too big. I’ve gained weight over the years, and that’s bad. If I wanted to feel good about my body, I’d need to change many things about it.” Frequently this is where the exploration ends because spending time on it feels too painful.
But if we were to dig deeper, we might discover something like the following:
Consciousness: “I feel terrible about my body. It’s too big. I’ve gained weight over the years, and that’s bad. If I wanted to feel good about my body, I’d need to change many things about it.”
Mental formations: “I used to like my body. If it were how it used to be, then I wouldn’t suffer like this.”
Perception: “Good bodies are thin, young, fit, and able. I exist toward the bottom of the understood hierarchy of bodily goodness.”
Feeling: negative interpretations of daily experiences such as eating, getting dressed, seeing oneself in pictures, and being intimate with a partner.
Form: a tight waistband; feeling of constriction; inability to take a full breath; tensing in other parts of the body.
There’s nothing in life toward which we feel only one way all the time. Our physical appearance is of course no exception. But given the unnuanced discourse about body image—in which having a good body image means loving everything about your body, all the time—it’s not surprising that we struggle. A realistic characterization of body image needs to leave room for what we know to be true for all phenomena: that suffering—or an irritating sense of unsatisfactoriness—is inevitable; that impermanence is real because, honey, none of us is getting any younger; and, as basically good people possessing buddhanature, we deserve gentleness regardless of fleeting changes in how we feel about our bodies.
With this in mind, we can start at the beginning of the skandhas. By prioritizing an ongoing exploration of body image, we can intentionally bring awareness to our physical bodies, our embodied experiences, and specifically the sense perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Any experience in our bodies—emotional or cognitive, good or bad, or otherwise—can serve as our cue to pause, drop into the present-moment body, and connect with form.
Moving our experience of body image from form up through to consciousness might then be experienced like this:
Form: a tight waistband; feeling of constriction; inability to take a full breath; tensing in other parts of the body.
Feeling: negative, unpleasant, dislike!
Perception: “I feel uncomfortable in my body. It’s normal to not like discomfort.”
Mental formations: “I notice myself wanting to turn on my body, to hate it, to change it. When I’ve acted on those impulses in the past, I’ve only hurt myself more. Even though these pants used to fit me comfortably, they just don’t anymore. It’s not inherently good or bad that I’m no longer a certain size.”
Consciousness: “It’s challenging to have a body, and it’s inevitable that we will all face suffering and impermanence with our bodies. The arbitrary whims of what this era considers desirable don’t define me, and my worth isn’t determined by my appearance. What I need right now is gentleness.”
When it comes to our bodies, it’s almost always preferable to navigate life by staying embodied. Any time we find ourselves struggling with body image, enacting internalized biases, or longing for the safety and security we know to be an illusion, it’s an invitation to come back to what’s real: “Right now, it’s like this, and that’s hard. My job as a practitioner is to stay, soften, and keep an open heart even (especially) for myself.”