I've tried for years to accept my thighs.  I remember hearing Phil Donahue talking to someone on his show about how women should accept their bodies and not try to change them through excessive dieting, plastic surgery, etc.  He lambasted the popular culture that worshiped thin women and the market culture that preyed on the insecurities of young women and raided their pocketbooks.  I was in my late teens at the time.  It sounded good to me -- real good; but nobody ever told me how I was supposed to do that.  How does one go about accepting one's thighs?

Ten years later, I began my Zen practice.  I learned how to stop trying to accept my thighs and start practicing accepting my thighs.  First, I stopped calling them names like flabby, fat, ugly, thunder-thighs, and "my genetic curse."  Then I began to show gratitude for them.  After a shower, I would put lotion on my legs feeling their fleshiness and noticing their shape and size without indulging the judging voices that were present.  Sometimes when I would go running, I would turn my attention to their sturdiness, and I began to think of my thighs as real troopers.  They had been with me through everything -- various sports, childbirth, hiking, driving, dancing, etc.  They came along without complaint always ready to support anything I wanted to do.  Even through years of abuse and criticism, they were my faithful companions.  I'll tell you when my gratitude moved into pure admiration was when I went snow skiing.  After falling and getting up many times, I realized how indebted I was to my thighs for their strength and durability.  How could I have criticized and found unacceptable such powerful and willing parts of myself?  Actually, I know how: I had been deeply in the habit of believing the voices of egocentric karmic conditioning.

Radical acceptance is a lovely practice of coming in to all that is without resistance.  For me, it is the process of developing the new habit of returning to "nothing's wrong" mind.  "This is this and it is as it is and nothing's wrong."  I learned that it does no good to try to accept, I have to practice accepting.  The subtle difference is the difference between suffering and joy.  In trying to accept myself, "I" gets to be in charge.  Ego gets to make all the rules and call all the shots.  It decides what needs accepting, what accepting looks like, and how we are doing at this job of accepting.  Trying to accept myself is just another circle on the hamster wheel that leads to more suffering.  On the other hand, practicing accepting is an exercise of the heart.  It feels like a workshop where I get to watch all that comes up, all that is said, all the resistance, and all the willingness.  Practicing acceptance is practicing the precept of "restraint and religious observances."  It means restraining the impulse to push something away and restraining from the habitual negative self-talk.  Practicing self-acceptance for me led to the recognition of "what's wrong mind" and how deeply conditioned I am to live as if something is terribly wrong.  Practicing radical self-acceptance has led directly to deeper acceptance of family,  community, president, situation, dreams, schedule, conditioning, and, of course, thighs.

Gassho.