The Body - A Temple for Spirit and Mind

📬 Letter #3: How I turned self-sabotage into a sanctuary

Every New Year, one agenda item has never been missing from my resolution list—my wish list.

Lose weight.
Get fit.

I grew up a chubby kid. Some mischievous boys at school loved calling me “piggy, pink piggy.” I laughed with them, pretended it didn’t hurt—until it did. I played along as if it were harmless teasing. But it wasn’t. Underneath the smiles and jokes were frustration, self-blame, hatred, and anger.

Looking back, they wanted my reaction. Or maybe they simply enjoyed hurting someone.
Either way, I didn’t know their motivation, but I knew one thing clearly:
I hated my body. And my body was the problem.

During school breaks from grades 3 to 6, I jumped rope obsessively. I watched workout programs on TV and followed (30min, then total exhaustion!). I tried to discipline myself. But emotional eating always won. The cycle of emotional roller coaster, frustration was unstoppable. Dissatisfaction with myself was too heavy and followed me the entire time.

I hate you. I hate this body. It’s ugly. Too fat.

By middle school, the pattern hardened. The self-sabotage deepened. In PE classes, I froze. Every task felt impossible before I even tried. I had already decided:

I’m not athletic. I can’t do this.

I framed myself—mentally and emotionally.

Not once did I feel proud of my body.
Not once did I feel at home inside it.

Every day was lived through judgment, shame, and low self-esteem.
My mind and body were already split.

This was a very real dukkha—suffering—for a young teenage girl. Not just suffering, but the subtle dissatisfaction that comes from resisting what is. And I lived it daily through body shame and self-denial.

The Day the Boar Died

In 2009, I was living in a rural village in India, working in education with JTS, an NGO supporting communities in the Global South through humanitarian relief.

The village’s Puja festival was beginning. One afternoon, drawn by loud commotion, I stepped out of the school office and saw a wild boar—twice the size of a man—being chased by villagers with long wooden poles.

Wow, that’s the real pig. The giant one.

During Puja, the boar would be offered to the gods for peace and abundance, then shared across the community. For a moment, I felt relief; at least today, people would eat well.

Then the hunt turned brutal.

Trapped in a narrow space, the boar ran desperately. Women and children screamed and laughed nervously, as if the chase itself were part of the celebration. Then an elder drove a sharpened pole deep into the boar’s belly.

Fwoomp—!
Screee—!

The boar cried as if to shake the village and collapsed. Caught.

The sound cut through the air.
And through me.

I had never seen an animal killed like this before—alive, in front of me. I was captivated in a way. I moved closer, unable to look away. Another pole went in. Deeper. Tears filled the boar’s eyes.

He wanted to live.
Desperately. Earnestly.
He didn’t want to die.

I was standing right above his head. His eyes and my eyes—we were looking at each other.

His eyes held fear, sorrow, resistance. The dying took time. Breath by breath, his body fought. I felt the pain pass into my own chest.

Between us, something unmistakable was happening.
A moment of direct knowing. I remembered something I had once read:

“When we eat meat, we consume not only protein, but also the emotional state stored in the animal’s body at death.”

The body stores experience.
Not metaphorically. Literally.

Trauma researchers call this somatic memory. Emotions are not just mental events—they are physiological states carried through the nervous system, tissues, and cells.

Animals sense death. Fear floods their bodies. Stress hormones spike. Muscles tighten. Breath shortens. That state remains in the flesh.

And then we eat it.

After witnessing that boar’s death, I couldn’t eat meat for a long time. A lifelong carnivore, I became vegetarian overnight. I couldn’t stop replaying the boar’s eye contact—his emotions, his screams. I couldn’t stop wondering what I had been consuming all these years—emotionally.

Is this why modern life feels so angry?
So aggressive and stressed?
So numb?

The Buddha called this āhāra—nourishment. Not only food, but what we consume through the senses, thoughts, and emotions. Everything we take in shapes the body and mind.