By Minh-Hai Alex, MS, RDN, CD, RYT, Guest Contributor
Can you guess what emotion I’m feeling in these recent moments?
Looking up at a row of tall eucalyptus trees while visiting my in-laws in San Diego. I had no idea the tree that supplies this familiar essential oil smell was so tall and magnificent!
Seeing a group of people come together to support a homeless encampment community.
Listening to a choir sing Bill Wither’s “Lean on Me.”
I felt awe, which Dacher Keltner, PhD, UC Berkeley researcher describes as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” Physiologically, you might feel teary eyed, a warm chest, or goose bumps on the back of your neck or arms. In his book Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, Keltner writes about everyday moments where we might encounter this emotion including nature, incredible music, practicing spirituality, witnessing others’ incredible generosity, and “collective effervescence” where people gather for things like sports, protests and festivals. It’s what I imagine concertgoers at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour feel.
Awe is a timely topic because it promotes collective wellbeing by increasing pro-social emotions like generosity, connectedness, humility and compassion while decreasing egoism and entitlement. It also gives us an expanded sense of time.
The results in this 8-week study tickle me: researchers asked one group of adults to take a weekly 15-minute awe walk and compared them to a control group who were simply asked to walk for the same amount of time. Even though the control group ended up walking more frequently (probably because they suspected the study was about exercise), the awe group reported higher levels of compassion, gratitude and wellbeing. Study participants were also asked to take selfies during their walk, and this is the part I love: people in the awe group made themselves smaller in the photos over time, and the landscape around them larger. Their smiles also grew wider. In the best way, awe makes us feel smaller, and the world larger.
Most people I work with experience significant body image distress and I can’t help but wonder if intentionally cultivating everyday wonder might be helpful with alleviating body image distress. A quick literature search didn’t reveal much has been studied here, but there are a number of studies showing that taking time to be in nature, a potential source of awe, and away from our culture, can help lessen body image distress.
On a related note, body image experts Lexie Kite, PhD and Lindsay Kite, PhD, author of More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament, write that connecting to spirituality helps decrease self-objectification, a significant risk factor for body image distress, and increase body image resilience. (I like Brene Brown’s definition of spirituality here.) The Kite sisters write, “When women are able to place their lives and experiences in the context of a bigger picture — one where they aren’t defined by their appearance alone — those body-related concerns lose power and shame is lessened.”
It’s probably a pandemic side effect, but lately I find myself longing to cultivate awe and connect to a spiritual community and mindfulness practice. Many mornings after I drop my kids off at school, I take a few minutes to walk around my neighborhood before heading inside to work. I started doing this awhile back because I noticed I think and feel better when I walk outside but lately, I also carry the intention of noticing nature around me with fresh eyes. Sometimes I look up at the sky and feel something mysterious and vast. Occasionally, I peek into others’ houses as I walk by and marvel at all the generations of stories in each house and block. Other times, I’m in my head, mostly distracted by my to-do list or stressor of the day. But I keep making space to be open to the possibility of awe, as it helps me relate to my problems differently not just seeing them from a bird’s eye view but from a cosmos eye view. It reminds me of how little I know in this vast mysterious world that I feel so grateful to be a part of.
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