What if we were taught that our struggle with eating and body image was in fact the archetypal journey that every human being has to go through in order to find happiness? What if we could understand that these issues are not meant to be easily gotten rid of, but rather that they are essential steps in the journey designed to bring us closer to peace and bliss?
I spent most of my life trying to attain happiness by striving to get over my struggles with eating and body image. I really thought that I would be happy the day my food addiction disappeared. I read countless stories of people who had conquered their weight and who now lived a supposedly perfect and blissful life. I so wanted to believe that I too could be a new person if only I could stop overeating. A person without any fears or faults. A person without suffering. It all seemed so easy.
For twenty-five years, I worked like a horse to try to heal of my eating disorder: I exercised like an Olympic athlete, ingested only small amounts of calories a day, and gave myself a good tongue lashing when I failed at either. Unfortunately, I was not getting rid of my struggle: in fact, it was getting worse. The more I tried to conquer my addiction, the stronger it came at me. I kept right on going, though, for I knew it had to be my fault, my lack of willpower or self-control. I always resolved to be better the next day, and would start the whole vicious cycle all over again.
As the years passed, I started noticing something strange. Living with and working on my eating disorder was actually bringing forth gifts which were enriching every aspect of my life. Every quality developed in my struggle became a quality which showed up in my parenting, my healership, my wifehood, and my friendships.
The process of healing my eating disorder taught me to become more patient, compassionate and loving. It taught me to delay gratification and to find out what my real needs were. It allowed me to see the sacredness of our world and to feel gratitude for every moment. It helped me curb my impulsivity, modify my critic and judge, curb my tendency to objectify, and let go of my self-centeredness. And as the effects of these internal changes began to ripple outward to all my relationships, I found that a deeper, more lasting happiness began to creep in.
I also realized that my addiction was in fact my soul’s call for healing. Wanting to eat when I wasn’t hungry, craving different foods at different times, or having to purge when I felt too full were all signals of a more profound imbalance within me which communicated itself through disordered eating. It was as though my deeper Self had learned only one language to express its varied feelings. If I felt sad, I wanted sugar. If I was angry, I would binge and throw up. If I was bored, salty foods kept me busy. The trick, then, became to welcome the cravings and impulses as messages from my inner Self telling me that something was off. If I just stayed with the impulses long enough without acting them out, I would soon find out what was really happening inside of me and what I needed to do about it. Once again, my eating disorder was not the curse I had believed, but it was in fact my most trustworthy messenger.
Additionally, the more I worked with my eating issues and my spirituality, the more I started believing that my body was in fact using cravings to call me to itself so that I could become a fully present human being. When I was not ensconced in my addiction, I had a tendency to live in my mind, lost in a world of thought that kept me away from what was truly happening in the present. Inhabiting my head often got me into all kinds of trouble, as I was living in the past or the future, not aware of the often simpler and kinder reality of the now. What I learned is that the only way to bring myself into the present was to come into my body. As Eckhart Tolle, in his revolutionary book The Power of Now tells us: “The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body…In the end, you will always have to return to the body, where the essential work of transformation takes place.” (p.95) Every craving, every overfull feeling, every moment of emptiness I experienced after a purge forced me to leave the safety of my mind to enter my body, moving me a step closer to being fully awake. This learning still fills me with gratitude for all of my body’s messages, however inconvenient or painful they may feel at times.
Sometime, I forget that there is nothing wrong with me for still struggling with my weight and for not having healed myself quickly and efficiently. However, I soon remember that my struggle has been my greatest teacher, opening me to aspects of myself which I would have never chosen to face without my pain. Today, I am genuinely happy, not the fleeting kind of happy that arises out of a perfect body or a struggle-free life, but the kind of happy that comes from having traveled through my darkness and finding how much light and love is actually there.
So whether we struggle with food, alcohol, drugs, money, gambling, intimacy, or any other kind of pain, we can rest in the knowledge that the journey we have embarked upon is actually the journey towards true happiness. We can know that the lessons that our struggles are trying to teach us are the signposts on the road to peace and bliss. Our wound is our highest gift: let us treat it as such.
posted by Isabelle | 1:08 PM
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