Can I Love Myself and Still Want Cosmetic Surgery? A Body Image Reflection

I’ve sat with this quietly for a while now, but it’s time to write it out loud.

Here I am, someone who has spent decades doing deep inner work, holding space for others to come home to their bodies, to drop masks, to soften into their essence, and I find myself seriously considering getting a Brazilian butt lift. Liposuction. Fat grafted into my arse.

I’ve always, since puberty, dreamed of having a bum that looked like a bum. That soft, full curve I admired in others and never saw in the mirror. It sounds superficial, maybe, but the longing has lived quietly in me for decades.

Even writing that feels like it belongs in someone else’s life. But it’s mine. I’m not here to hide it.

I’m aware that we all make choices about how we shape, enhance, or care for our appearance—whether it’s eyelash extensions, fake tan, hair dye, Botox, or something more invasive that requires lying on an operating table.

The line between self-expression and self-editing is blurry.

I’ve given myself a few months to focus on my body image: to strength train, to nourish myself, to build a relationship with my body and show up for it in every way I can. And then? If, after all that, I still choose to go ahead with surgery, it will be with clarity and respect for the effort I’ve made to meet myself first.

But this choice comes with a conflict I can’t ignore.

In choosing to alter my body, am I co-creating a more distorted world for younger women, reinforcing the idea that this natural, capable, aging, changing body is not enough?

Am I bypassing a deeper layer of self-judgment that I haven’t yet welcomed home?

Does altering my shape somehow contradict the very work I promote, the freedom to be nobody, to unbecome, to live from within?

And there’s this tender piece too. It feels shameful maybe, to the part of me that’s spiritually devoted, the one who has bowed over and over at the altar of self-acceptance. To choose to change my body, my beautiful, alive, already-whole body, feels like a betrayal.

There’s such a strong pull to look a certain way in order to feel a certain way. A longing to know my body differently. To feel it inhabited differently.

Is it an attempt to finally feel that I am enough… or desirable… or safe in being fully seen?

Maybe.

I wonder, too, what the next 40 years of my life would feel like in an aging body I am proud to live in, not one I’m trying to shrink, cover, or manage. Not one I tolerate, but one I delight in.

So the work of discovery begins: Can I find this ' I’m goddamn hot' feeling while walking down the beach in a bikini? Or will I turn to the cosmetic industry to give me the image I believe will make me feel it?

Is there a line between honoring your vessel and editing it?

I want to feel beautiful. To walk through the world with my shoulders back, my stomach relaxed, nothing to hide. My clothes fitting just right. My body reflecting my own sense of power.

But is that just ego dressed up in collagen?

Maybe. But what is truth? Who makes the decisions? Where is right and wrong?

Awakening to truth is not about abandoning the body. But what journey will it take to fully be happy in this body?

For now, I’m letting the questions breathe. I’m not pretending I’m above this desire. I feel compassion for my sweet body that I love so deeply, while dreaming it could look just a little different.

The desire to become the image I dream of reminds me of the desire to be intimate with someone I probably shouldn’t be intimate with. It’s sooo tempting, so easily attainable. And from experience, it feels so damn good in the moment… and then it always ends up messy. The never-ending, never-attainable desire.

So I stay in the inquiry. I trust this process will lead to clarity, and I pray for right action, aligned with Truth.