Several years ago I was on a weekend away with some amazing women who are great friends. I had some wonderful, connected, intimate girlfriend conversations. I love the women who are close friends in my life.
One of them said to me something I’ve heard more than a handful of times over the past years.
You’d be so great at offering healing retreats for people recovering from food and eating pain.
People told me that even fifteen years ago.
I would think “yuck, no thanks”.
I know that sounds harsh.
But the years I spent in intense concentration around food, what to eat, what not to eat, what a bad person I was, what a failure, how I couldn’t stop, the wild chaotic cravings, the gorging, the money spent on food binges, the insecurity, the starvation, the torture, the agony….
….I used to think I could never go anywhere near that again.
I didn’t want to hear anyone talk about diets, diet books, recipes, calories, nutrition, vitamins, losing weight, needing to lose weight, or anything to do with ingesting, digesting, consuming or eating.
Unless they talked about it with pure, joyful pleasure.
(Bossy bossy).
But then something changed….
….at first just ever so slightly, then in a more pronounced, solid, grounded way.
This particular change started about a decade ago. Around the same time I did my first School for The Work.
I had not had a binge-eating episode for about fifteen years prior to going to that 9 day school.
Yet, I wasn’t entirely happy when it came to food and eating. I was constantly worried I ate too much, looked bad, or was doing something wrong if I ate a big dessert.
Not exactly peaceful. I’d still see glimpses of myself in a window, and cringe.
Too fat. Too imperfect.
Even though I had come a long, long way from the extreme behavior with food and eating.
But after that school with Byron Katie…
…something clicked about food and eating and hunger and fullness, and how I saw my body in the mirror, that brought many years of therapy and analysis about this “problem” to a resolve.
Instead of feeling nervous or worried about my own inner life with food and eating, something about it was…..over.
The searching was over, the anxiety, the feeling that food was my enemy…over.
For the first time, I actually ate everything and drank everything, without rules or fear or planning or dieting.
Meaning, nothing was taboo in the world. I’d sip an alcoholic drink, eat fried chicken, eat a delicious bite of baguette with gusto. And butter.
It was like I could close my eyes and actually tune in to the feeling of what was enough, knowing it was safe to stop eating, or start eating.
I’d get more food later, when enough-ness wore off. I could feel what foods actually felt really good, and which ones didn’t.
This was what I had always wanted. I even lost a small amount of weight.
After that inner thing clicked in…
…I began to feel more open about answering questions about my experience of becoming normal around food, healing that terrible cycle with food, ending the inner hell.
One day someone said, again, “you should really talk about what you’ve learned to others, help them out.”
I signed up to be a speaker for an organization called Eating Disorders Northwest (it became Northwest Eating Disorders Association later).
As a volunteer, I went to classrooms in high schools and junior highs, and talked at assemblies about having bulimia and almost-anorexia.
Three hundred middle schoolers, all in rapt attention staring at me!
I was a nervous wreck!
But I just told my own story and answered questions.
Then moms started contacting me about working with their daughters, and women began to call me about working on their obsessive behavior with diets and food and exercising.
Another colleague said “you really should teach what you’ve learned, what you know, about recovering…..as a spiritual path.”
I started not to poo-poo it so much anymore.
Even though a part of my mind would say people will think uncomfortable, disparaging things about me.
I thought they’d say eating is a dumb problem, so superficial, such a first world problem of the privileged class, so many others have it worse, who cares about how you eat, how you eat isn’t really that important…
No one ever said those things to me.
I thought them myself.
But I could see, through the slowing down and looking and sweetness that was blossoming in my life around how I ate and thought about food…
…that something very powerful had happened, something I had only dreamed of was possible.
And now, I can turn all those thoughts around, and find the turnarounds to be truer:
Eating is a brilliant problem to have, so deep. It’s a shared problem of so many diverse people in the world. We are all in this together. I care deeply about how I eat (how I think) and how others think about food. How you eat is really important.
It really is that important, when it is.
It’s showing you something about the basics of life…taking in energy, expending energy, supporting yourself, nurturing, giving, caring for you.
“You can examine your life by either looking at the way you live or the way you eat. Both are paths to what is underneath and beyond the eating: to that in you that has never gotten hungry, never binged, never gained or lost a pound.” ~ Geneen Roth
Eating, I accept now, is a spiritual path. I am still on this path as long as I have a body.
Wherever you are, you can share what you’ve gone through and what you’ve learned. You don’t have to wait as long as I did.
In fact, don’t. You don’t have to hold back or keep it inside, the way I did. Or avoid sharing your imperfect self.
You can tell other people about it, you can tell your story freely. Tell anyone and everyone.
You never know when what you tell honestly will help someone change their direction, or when it will help YOU change direction.
Byron Katie talks about going to prison to teach inmates there how to do The work and question their beliefs:
“I love thanking these men for sacrificing their entire lives to teach our children how not to live–and therefore how to live–if they want to be free. I tell them that they are the greatest teachers and that their lives are good and needed. Before I leave, I ask them ‘Would you spend the rest of your life in prison if you knew that it would keep one child from having to live what you’re living?’ And many of these violent men understand, and they just well up with tears like sweet little boys. There is nothing we can do that doesn’t help the planet. That’s the way it really is.” ~ Byron Katie
Whether you’re troubled or happy, share what’s going on inside of you.
The sharing and being who you are is the greatest gift. Really.
Much Love, Grace
P.S. I’ll be back with a video next week 🙂