Dissatisfaction with the body causes endless suffering and fuels the multibillion-dollar diet, cosmetic and plastic surgery industries — which of course are fueling dissatisfaction with the body. As the Irish Poet John Donahue has written, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong… it is our minds that make us homeless.”

A few years ago, a pharmacy in the UK designed a project called “Perceptions of Perfection” that gave a photograph of the same woman to designers in eighteen countries around the world and asked them to photoshop her to look like the ideal woman in their particular cultures. The project has glaring limitations as it focuses primarily on the Americas and Europe with only one Asian country, China, represented and almost nothing from Africa. That said, it shows that beauty really is in the mind of the beholder. You can see the results here.

When we dissociate from our bodies, we dissociate from life itself. As beloved mindfulness teacher Tara Brach has noted, “The most profound and full presence can only be experienced if we’re awake right here in this body – with a quality of sacred presence that comes when, without any resistance or grasping, we really plant ourselves in the universe, in this body, in this being right here.”

Listen to Tara Brach speak on Mindfulness of the Body and Embodied Spirit here.