Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.
Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.
The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable.
People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don’t want to suffer, they won’t be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.
No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge.
Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.
If you pay attention to when you are hungry, what your body wants, what you are eating, when you’ve had enough, you end the obsession because obsession and awareness cannot coexist.
Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes.
If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.
No matter how developed you are in any other area of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat tells all.
You can rescue yourself. No matter how you feel, no matter what you believe about your worth or your capacity to love and be loved, you can change.
You don’t need a scale to tell you whether you’re allowed to like yourself today. You are. You belong here. No matter what you weigh, you deserve joy and happiness.
Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first.
It’s the nature of hearts to break. It’s in their job description. When a heart is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.
To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act – and to what you do when things don’t go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat.
The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment.
Your relationship to food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom.
Come back to yourself. Return to the voice of your body. Trust that much.
Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.
Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it.