Q: I love my body - except for a few parts I'd improve if I could. But mostly I am rather vain and pleased and it gives me a lot of power to be beautiful. Otherwise I consider myself a spiritual person, but I worry about being so happy about how I look and the time I even spend to make myself look even better with make-up and clothes. Should I fight this and try to overcome this to be a better person?
MM: If you try to fight it, it becomes stronger. You will become vain about being un-vain. You will become vain about your "inner beauty". Just notice the tension in yourself when you are showing off your beauty or standing in front of the mirror trying to make yourself even more beautiful and just relax this particular tension. There is beauty there today, which will disappear in old age - you need to find the knack how to not identify with the beauty today, and the ugliness of tomorrow in old age. Otherwise you have no freedom.
Q: But how do you do that?
MM: Look at your first statement; "I love my body". In a way you are lucky, as most people will say "I hate my body". Both are equally silly tough. Who loves who? Who is it who can say I love or hate - "my" body, or somebody, for that matter?
Is it the body itself that you think is "you". This "I" that the ocean, for example, does not have. The ocean would never say "I hate, or love, my waves". This "I" is foolishness. Without "I", there is beauty or ugliness, but you are free. Free from "I", and all that comes with it - the expectations of beauty and the disappointments of ugliness.
Q: But then, if you tell me that way I am then free, who is free versus un-free?
MM: Precisely!!!
Q: There is no one there!?
MM: ... and there is no "there" there either :-)
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