Читать книгу Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want - Уэйн Дайер, Wayne Dyer W. - Страница 7

The word “athlete” is not meant to disparage athletes or athletic behavior. It is intended as a description of the time in our adult lives when our primary identification is with our physical body and how it functions in our everyday world. This is the time when we measure our worth and our happiness by our physical appearance and abilities.

Those abilities are multitudinous and uniquely personal. They can include such things as how fast we run, how far we throw a ball, how high we can jump and the size of our muscles. We judge the worthiness of our physical appearance by a standard of attractiveness based on the shape, size, color and texture of body parts, hair and complexion. In a consumer culture like ours, judgment even extends to the appearance of our automobiles, houses and clothes.

These are the concerns one has when he or she is in the earliest stage of adult development. This is the time when life seems impossible without a mirror and a steady stream of approval to make us feel secure. The stage of the athlete is the time in our adult development when we are almost completely identified with our performance, attractiveness and achievements.

Many people outgrow the stage of the athlete and make other considerations more significant. Some of us, depending on our personal circumstances, move in and out of this stage. A few stay in the athlete stage for their entire lives.

Whether or not you have moved beyond the athlete stage is determined by how fixated you are on your body as your primary source of self-identification. Obviously, it is healthy to take good care of your body by treating it kindly and exercising and nourishing it in the best way your circumstances allow. Having pride in your physical appearance and enjoying compliments does not mean you are body-fixated. However, if your daily activities revolve around a predetermined standard of performance and appearance, you are in the stage that I am calling “the athlete.”

This is not a stage in which you can practice the art of manifesting. To reach the ability to know and use your divine inner energy, you must move beyond your identification as being exclusively a physical body.