First World Guilt Tears Us Up

So I'm feeling frustrated because I haven't been able to prepare healthy meals like I'd like to, and a few nights a week we eat 'easy and simple' - read frozen pizza or equivalent and a salad to compensate. And simultaneously I am conscious that there are people who don't have the option of preparing healthy meals, ever, and definitely don't have the option of picking up some quick food from the supermarket on the way home from work.

I find myself splitting.

I hear myself talking myself into guilt ridden situations and remind myself that I, in fact, as a used to be meditater and use to be yoga instructor, should know better than to listen to and believe in the negative chatter conjured up by the monkey mind. And still my shoulders tense and I feel bad.

I know I am splitting.

I feel like Mr Mom. I picture Micheal Keating pigging out in front of soap operas and identify.

My little girl is asleep for at least an hour in the afternoons, and I have piles of dishes and laundry to sort, and I do not want to do it! I refuse to spend that little bit of free time doing house hold chores. I resent the housework like it's eating into my free time, instead of tending to it with love and care. Instead of blessing it with attention and being happy to make it into a comfortable home for my family, I resent it for eating into MY time. And I feel guilty for thinking I deserve My time. I'm sure that nearly every person in my ancestry  didn't have as much free time as I do, and I still want more. It's never ending. And even if I get an extra hour, I want another hour. I am the free time monster.

I know all the sides of the argument - but it's how I feel. I want and feel that I need time to do what I want. To feel like me, without the apartment, without being a female, without being a mother, without being a partner, without being a friend. Just purely selfish me time.   And you know what, even if I had an hour, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I'd probably sit on facebook liking delicious meals and pretty homes and adorable babies and kittens.

I never used to be like this.

I resent the younger me. I resent that she was happy and didn't know it.

Oh, don't think I can't hear your judgement. Oh, but you have a lovely little girl, aren't you happy being a mother with the look of what kind of female are you - pile on the guilt. Thank you.

Disclaimer: I love Lydia. I would not change a thing. She brings so much joy and brings laughter into our home. I adore spending fun time with her, and I'm so glad we can afford to keep her at home in these precious years.

That said, I'm not at all organised in my home or personal life. Everything is out of control and I am getting by. And the fact is, I see it on so many women's faces. They are disheartened  by life. They are despondent  and fed up and miserable.

I don't think I've every been especially pretty, really. But I was alive. I was the happiest person I knew. I vibrated with life and awareness. And somehow, over the past ten years, I have caved inwards and met the little poisonous snarling animal in me that hates existing and sees misery everywhere and understands why people just get up and leave their lives and never come back.

And for a few days, without guilt, and without shoulds, I'm going to sit with this. Out loud. And let it be ok to feel like that. I'm tired of feeling guilty, of feeling like I should know better, of thinking anything that makes how I feel not ok.

We are human. This is it. I don't want words of encouragement or trite things like 'things will look up soon'. I just want to express. And I know I am not alone in this. Just for a few days. Just let it be. That's all. And we'll talk about shifting out of this another time. Just not now.

Thanks for listening. 

My Earliest Food Memories

I'm going to ask some questions about food and eating, and I’d if you’d like, feel free to answer them along with me.

Q: What are your earliest memories of food and eating?

Our dinner table was a stressful place. Eating was always a problem. My father dominated the table with rules about how to eat. Elbows in (don’t cluck like a chicken).  Sit upright. Fork turned over. Eat with the mouth shut. Don’t speak while you were eating. No elbows on the table. Obviously don’t eat off your knife.  Eat everything on the plate or there was no dessert, and if you didn't finish your plate, then you had to eat it cold at the next meal, and sit there at the table until you ate it. Breaking a child’s spirit was seen as correct parenting. Obeying was seen as a prime rule in our house. I often ate until I couldn't eat any more. I have no idea when I am full, and have always been someone who has a huge appetite. 

My father was often angry. And unpredictable. He used to quickly jab a fork into my hand if I didn't follow one of his rules. I often didn't know what I had done. It seemed random.  I was often afraid. I used to eat the things I didn't like first, so when it started to get difficult to eat, I would have to eat the things I liked. That was easier.

Q: How do you feel talking about your childhood and eating? 

The other day, when I first started to think about food when I was a child, my heart started to pound in my chest. My stomach started to get tense. I started to breathe irregularly. I recognized I was having a mild panic attack. I went and laid down on the bed for a moment, and just sat with the emotion as much as I could.

I started working with my child archetypes with Sparrow about 6 years ago, and cleared quite a lot of blocks and I felt happier than I had in a long time. I think that work helped let me feel something echoing down the past.

The main technique I have for blocking pain is to switch off. Emotionally it feels empty, like there is nothing there. But I think it’s just a wall has been put between me and the ‘hurt’.

Recently, shining the light into the darkness of food and eating, I can see quite clearly that I am ready to allow emotion and release from those early memories. Memories that I didn't even realize were a problem.

I was talking to Kate about my early memories this morning, and I could feel, as I feel now, a tightening and constriction around my throat and a dull pressure on my chest, and tightness in my solar plexus. My shoulders are tight and there is a lot of body tension. Obviously there is clearing to be done. Clearing and healing.

Even though I have been working with childhood issues for a long time. Over twenty years. It’s still there, in different layers.

Yes, I've come a long way from the resentful, angry and isolated teenager I felt I was, but there is still so much to release and let go of. So I give myself leave to speak about it once more, and perhaps to write about early eating experiences once more, but then I will move into the healing and releasing. I don’t see any need to dwell in the past. Just enough to bring it up , so that I can catch the tail and finally let it go.

What!? A Food Problem?! Me??

How did I get to be 43 and discover I had issues with eating? And how was it that someone like me, someone who had been keenly observing herself for over twenty years, who was a fitness professional, a yoga, qigong, meditation, pilates instructor, and a personal trainer suddenly discover she was a mindless eater? The mind boggles.

But here I am, 43, and I am here to say I am an addict. I'm addicted to sugar, chocolate, being full (I drink tea all day to maintain a full sensation in the stomach), wheat dressed up as white bread and pastries and I am also addicted to being right, judgements, certain stories in my head that help me to feel like my resentments and my poor behaviour of the past is justified, and myself. I am addicted to myself and my story.

So part of writing this, which I love because its about myself, let’s be honest, is about facing these things about myself. Honestly. As straight forward as I can manage, with as little deviation from the truth as I can muster. Honesty, where it hits the constructs of our defences against the ‘them’ that can hurt us, is tough to muster, but well. Let’s go.

Basically I'm  a mother of an 18 month old and I don’t have the time to exercise like I used to. So I didn't realize I had a problem with eating, because if I put on a bit of weight prior to baby,  I would just do some more exercise. I correlated gaining weight with an eating problem, even though I was never taught that as a fitness professional. I even remember a Fat Albert episode where Fat Albert was eating bowls and bowls of salad, and his skinny friend was eating lots of sugar, and it was the skinny friend who felt sick and couldn't play sport, while Fat Albert was healthy and mobile.

I have been a size 34 for most of my adult life. In the past five years, that has moved up to a 36 and I didn't mind. Now I'm a 38. I don’t think I'm overweight, I'm just bigger than I was before. And I don’t seem to be able to lose the rest of the weight by restricting my food intake. And that’s how I discovered I was addicted. I had a 40 day detox and I lost 4 kilos, but as I'm sure you’re guessing, as soon as I could, I ran straight to the bakery and shoved cake and donuts into my open and salivating mouth.  Mindlessly.

I watched myself, quite surprised. And I looked back and saw a history of binge eating that I had never considered before. It had never been a problem because it didn't show up in fat tissue. When I am in a chaotic moment, apart from breathing, meditation and lots of exercise, I would binge eat or shop. And I was not conscious about it, at all.

So I'm restarting my blog after quite a sabbatical to journal what happens from here. You are very welcome to join me as I move from mindless eating to well, to where ever it takes me. 

The Power of Choice

Hello dear friends,

There is something in the air. The feeling of change and deep psychological and physical shifts. It's happening to many people around me. I can see it in friends, students and the wider world.

I feel that we are in a moment where we have to recognise the power of choice in our lives. It's a critical moment to become aware of our choices and their consequences. It's my wish that you consider the following except from an audio of Ms Myss and if you are interested, or you feel something resonate for you, that you deeply consider your choices. Thank you.

'I wish to highlight for you the significant power of choice, the core gift of the human experience. (...)

The first law I want to introduce is that every thought creates form, for every choice there is a consequence.

This particular law has so much authority, that for most of us it’s not one we pay attention to and yet, it may well be one of the most dominate forces directing every minute of your life. For every choice there is a consequence. (...)

The deeper creative choices we make in life are the ones we are not aware of. Those are the ones that have power. The choices of our attitudes, the choices of our belief systems, the choices of our resentments, the choices of the manner in which we love and the quality of love - all of these subtle choices that we really don't think about moment to moment. The thousands of choices we make, in terms of why we judge someone, how we judge someone, how we choose to see someone- these are choices. Every one of them. And everyone carries incredible potency. (...)

The whole of your life has an anatomical system. It’s duplicated in your physical anatomy system. So when I talk about these laws of choice and consequence you need to be aware that they are registered in your biography and they are registered in your biology.’

Caroline Myss – Advanced Energy Anatomy