Food Memories: An Update

The other day I was sitting by the window, and happened to look down to the book stack resting at the base of my cushy chair. At the front, facing me, was my not-yet-published memoir, Food Memories. In this moment, I realized that it has been many a day since I have mentioned this creative baby of mine here. I also realized it had been many a day since I had done anything to further its physical manifestation in the world. Somehow, I had completely left it sitting, stagnant and gathering dust.

Now, of course there’s The Virus to take into account for this stagnation. If you’ve been following me, you might remember my post about sending out query letters to publishers and agents, and my determination to do so despite receiving rejections. And that was my sincere intention, no matter how it hurt my brain to wander in marketing-and-selling-myself-land. Yet when this craziness started, I suddenly lost steam, reading left and right about how publishers and agents weren’t exactly excited about taking on new projects at the moment. This mixture, of my hesitancy to market, and the current publishing landscape, brought my efforts to a screeching halt.

I had also finally made the decision to allow one of my distant family members to read my memoir. My intention was to overcome my fear of them knowing these things about me, but also to possibly have him introduce me with a publishing contact of his. He read the book, and liked it, yet had some serious suggestions about its format and asked me questions about my message. He encouraged me to go back and read my book with these suggestions in mind. I picked up my book and began to read it, and my brain started turning to mush around how to, and whether I needed to, rearrange things. I noticed typos and passages that sounded not great. I heard my inner skeptic rushing in loudly that I needed to just give up this silly effort. The push of this was overwhelmingly strong. This was around the same time that The Virus hit.

So into the book stack my proof copy went. Into the shadows, underneath windows, not to be noticed. To give surface to spider’s crawling, a nook for a fly or two, for the dust to settle. There, Food Memories waited.

During this time, and although a bit hopeless and confused what to do, my focus directed in other ways. One of them being leading a group of women through a series of rituals to connect them with The Dark Goddess archetype within. Part of this work is to go into the metaphorical underworld, releasing all which we think makes us who we are. On that list was of course Food Memories. Years and years of effort and hope and purpose have gone into this book. For the first time in a long time I felt inspired like I never had in its writing. Yet having stalled, I felt at an impasse and perhaps like maybe it wasn’t my destiny to release it after all. So on the underworld altar went my memoir. I let Ereshkigal take this possibility from me and rested in the darkness of who I am without it.

Several weeks went by. We all went into the collective underworld together. The moon waned and went dark, calling us all into stillness. I let go. I let go and let myself float in Being.

And then, the moon’s crescent sliver smiled at me and I knew it was time. Time to rise, time to start taking action again. Time to pick up Food Memories and start again.

I began reading yesterday and felt carried through by my own words. I noticed typos and things I might change but I wasn’t affected by it as once before. Overall I felt a renewed vigor to do what it took to carry this book back into the world. I felt, once again, the spark of inspiration and vision I originally had while writing the book. Although the agnostic inside huffaws at the thought, perhaps in releasing the book to the altar of the underworld, a new life and motivation has come back to me. Perhaps. Whyever it has returned, I am thankful.

So, ascendant and waxing as the moon in the sky, I begin again. I ready myself to edit, I ready myself to draft yet another query letter, I ready myself to possibly re-haul my entire proposal to reflect the external and internal shifts that have occurred as a result of The Virus. I will report here, as I was before, how it goes.

Ascendant and waxing, I begin again. Thank you for staying with me.

Temperance…And Fullness

Yesterday, I sat down to write after having had a conversation with the “Recovery Coach” I’ve spoken about in previous posts. One of the main things gleaned from this conversation is my desire to fully face the panic and terror I feel when I approach the sensation of “too full.” The fear of this feeling really kind of controls my life: I arrange my eating patterns, my exercise patterns and my life patterns to avoid this sense of being full.

I’ve got lots of theories about why this feeling brings such terror–none of them related to fear of getting fat by the way–yet despite the mental explorations, one thing remains clear: the fear of feeling full rules my life choices. I value the possibility that it may be because in past lives I was an ascetic monk/Buddha/fasting spiritual leader/single mother dealing with famine and plague, but another thing remains clear: I want to face this fear. I want to face it so many times that the feeling no longer has this much power over my life. I have faced this feeling many times already, still it has such a hold on me. I have lost hope in facing this fear, after it so doggedly reappears, time and time again. Yet for some reason, I keep trying.

Which brings me to Temperance. Before I began writing yesterday, I chose a card that represented what might occur if I chose to once again face this feeling of fullness and the terror it evokes: That card was Temperance.

(Now, just to be frank about my emerging proclamations of woo: I have a fairly loose attachment to what tarot cards are “supposed to mean,” and find much more value in what the image evokes in my mind at the moment I ask the question and see the picture.)

This time the image evoked a sense of facing an addictive pattern, finding balance as a result. And that there is a bigger force in me, my inner alchemist, that will help me do this if I choose to do so. Transformation through facing old, unhelpful patterns.

So I began the not so new pondering of my attachment to the feeling of emptiness as a sort of “high” (which is literally true as our bodies make endorphins to help us feel better about being in famine states) and that letting go of it is like putting down a drug for me. To wholeheartedly sit with being really full is like going through detox for me, strange as that may sound but it is true. My body actually seems like it sends me information that emptiness is preferable to fullness. Fullness is painful, nauseating, etc. Sitting through that feeling until it wanes (which I know it does, I just always wrestle with the unexplainable terror like it never will), is I think my task, my way of “sobriety” or at least finding something new on the other side as a result. I struggle with this concept of addiction, and 12 steps and all that, but for some reason the perspective really works here. To transform, I must go into the fear. I must stop using “nothingness, emptiness” and embrace what it feels like to feel fully in my body, feeling its pulsing, churning, yearning and sorrows. And all of what comes with that.

To realize that my whole life revolves around avoiding this is kind of embarrassing, especially in light of thousands that starve or can’t find enough to eat everyday. Especially in light of thousands dying on respirators from this strange viral pandemic. Surely I have some shame around this. Yet despite that, I can’t ignore that it rocks me terribly. I can’t ignore that it is my shadow, something I hide from others. I can’t ignore that deep in the layers of my unconscious and cellular matter, this sits in me. And this is how I know it is my work, to find freedom from this fear controlling me. To find why being full–and not just with food, but with sexuality, sensuality, pleasure, with life force, with responsibility–why this terrifies me so.

I look at the androgenous towering being in Temperance, and there is a peace on their face, a peace I want to have. A peace that comes from both being in a body–fully–and from being connected to the radiant lightness of the above. I feel my toes, naked, like theirs, feeling the cool waters and the deep, dark soil between toes. I feel the sense of balance and the path beyond that may be shown to me as a result of this tempering, balancing. I don’t know how I will do this, but somehow I feel this energy, this archetype, within me calling me towards it. Perhaps, this time, I won’t feel so alone in my facing of fullness. Perhaps this time I will experience true Alchemy. And maybe not, as my trusty inner skeptic reminds.

But for some reason, I keep trying.

Exorcism, Compassionate Depossession and Woo-Woo Correlations, Oh My!

Photo by Lennart Wittstock on Pexels.com

The other day, as I was dancing around my bedroom with candles alight, I received a question. It’s not a new question, it’s one I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for a long time, going back and forth on the level of sanity in its asking.

The question is this: Could it be that for at least for some people that have struggled with an eating disorder, that our behaviors are mostly an attempt to clear ourselves of introjected energy from the toxic environment around us? Or even an attempt to get rid of cellular matter (by trying to lose weight to the extreme) of ancestral trauma and ghosts of the unwell ancestors living in our tissues? That the fasting and exercising and obsessions (and perhaps purging, although I don’t have direct experience with that), are merely an attempt to do this?

In a world that doesn’t validate that there may be toxic energies that invade and take up space in our minds and bodies, there’s little talk about tools to deal with this kind of thing, and where there is talk, it is usually of the ungrounded crystally new-age type. I have done research on this–mentally, but also experientially. I’ve actually seen an exorcist (weird and campy but too shame based), I’ve undergone shamanic extraction work, done a lot of listening to the Shadow, and recently experienced something called “Compassionate Depossession.” This and what is termed “Ancestral Lineage Healing” have so far been the most grounded, wholistic approach to dealing with the root causes of the behaviors I have struggled with all of my life.

But even so, there’s always this part of me that says, “Really? This new age crap? The institutions and doctors have certified you as someone with a disorder, and this all seems like a rationalization to not just accept how messed up you are. Surely you mustn’t believe that you are wiser than The Professionals on this, and least of all with these non-scientific claims. Surely!”

Yeah. That voice.

But lately, especially at the culmination of the Ancestral Lineage Healing work, my heart and soul have really resonated with this wider, energetic, “non-scientific” possibility. At least it being partially true, with all of the other obvious therapy, dietitian, etc treatment teams involved in what is often a life and death struggle. So I’ve been thinking of claiming that this is a truth I want to explore, and possibly even stand behind in working with myself and others with these issues. I’m contemplating getting trained in some of these techniques, and I guess experience will show me if it really is a load of crap like my old friend the skeptic likes to believe.

In researching this topic today, synchronicity would have it that I found this article https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2018/02/14/living-with-ghosts/, which literally blew me away. All of the issues this person brings forward are things I have thought and wondered, in solitude, for decades. Perhaps in my willingness to claim this new stance, to at least allow myself to explore it, I am being led to others with similar thoughts, to community to explore this with. Or maybe I’ll find myself swimming in a pool of weirdness. Who knows! All I know is that I am incredibly fascinated with these kinds of synchronicities, and with this witchy, animistic, wider perspective on experiencing and treating eating and embodiment difficulties. Feel free to reel me in from the Woo if my posts start straying into ungrounded territory. Or just unsubscribe.

I do hope though, that you’ll stay with me, and take the journey of searching into preposterous crevices and parallels of what that which we feel is wrong with us actually being our best attempts at dealing with the unseen and overwhelming energies that affect our minds and bodies all the time. Will you join me? (Or at least laugh along with me in case this is a result of too much shelter-in-place time on my hands :})

More info if you’re interested:

Ancestral Lineage Healing: http://ancestralmedicine.org/

Compassionate Depossession: http://www.betsybergstrom.com/about/depossession.php

I Will Die For You

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of dreams of cats. Big black ones, forcefully crawling into my arms and caressing my skin with velvety fur. I’ve also been seeing them in my meditations, as gifts, as guides. This is not new, cats have always been a sort of spirit animal for me, in both their physical and ethereal forms.

Yet this morning, I read a friend’s lament over how it seems there has been some evidence of cats contracting the COVID-19 virus, and the potential for them to spread it to humans. Mind you, I don’t just accept that as fact, firstly doubting “news” until clear evidence and trending is shown. The CDC has not stated that this is a threat as of yet: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/animals.html.

However, I know how we react as a species overall, and it saddens me to think what might happen as people start fearing their own companion animals in light of this news. I hope reason makes this not so.

Whatever the response of the rest of my species, it got me thinking. It got me thinking of what I would do if animals started exhibiting signs of being able to spread viruses to us. Of course I don’t know how I’d ultimately react in the moment of this being reality, but my first response was “Hell yeah. About time. I will die for you. Or at least risk it.” Would I give my cat away, abandon it, avoid its touch in fear of this? Would I stay away from the oceans, the trees, the creepy crawlies that touch me as I wander through them? I don’t think so. I welcome the possibility that if Nature thinks its time for us to go, then maybe its time. And hell NO would I harm or abandon an animal because of this.

It reminds me a bit of my journey with a restrictive eating disorder, actually. I’ve often likened my own experience to “fasting for a vision” in the desert, learning from the animals and plants in the circle around me, making the Sacrifice. I feel that in some sense, I have played this out, eating less, living lightly, humbly, respectfully, in the great shadow of the largeness of nature. Taking up less space so that She may have more. Granted, I am working on this, accepting that maybe both me and Nature are worthy of space on this planet, but boy have I had practice with surrendering my health and happiness so that She may not be decimated.

So this reminds me of that. It reminds me of so many things. One thing I know for sure: I will not turn away from the big black cat in my dreams, nor the one snuggling on the top of the red dryer in my laundry room. I will welcome them, into my arms. Even if it means I may die.

Spirits Of Illness

Spirits of Illness

Do you come in service

Or do we ready

For battle

Is it both

Spirits of illness

Do you come to destroy us

Or wake in initiation

Is there a message you carry

Or do you just aim

To lay waste

Spirits of Illness

What is the message

Stay home with the children?

Honor the elders?

Take care of our bodies?

Respect our boundaries?

Go inside and Slow it down?

No wall can separate us?

Or is it

Clear the planet

Lighten the load

Let the trees breathe

The grasses grow

And the Coyotes run wild in the streets

Initiation, Wounded Healers

Tragedy, Victimization

Initiation, Transforming Alchemy

Devastation, Fear Apocalypse

Initiation…Initiation?

Spirits of Illness

Do we find relation

Or do we destroy

Spirits of Illnesss

Plagues, Measles, HIV, Ebola, SARS, Addiction

Spirits of illness

9/11

Spirits of illness

Mass wildfires, lava eruption, flood

Spirits of Illness

Blackouts Blackouts Blackouts

Spirits of illness

Inflammation in our

Breathing

Grieving

Center

Are you another form teaching, preparing

As in the Dream

Do we face you as ally

And learn

How do I stay balanced

In this momentous occasion

Honoring the reflection

The great power of the Death Mother

Yet not willingly succumbing to Her annihilation

May the well ones guide me

May I be guided

Steered

Shown

I put my life in your hands

Spirits of illness

Do you come in service

Or come to destroy me

Is it both

Please show me

I’ve been asking this question

My whole damn life

*Previously published in Pandemic Corona: Poems of Shock, Fear, Realization and Metamorphosis, ed. Pamela Eakins

ED Voices or Body/Psyche Guidance?

Yesterday, I had a call with this new coach I’m working with to experiment with changing behaviors for “recovery.” We made some goals, one of which was this: If I wake up at 3 am hungry, and eat, then I should eat a snack midmorning to not have such a long break in eating before lunch. Especially if I wake hungry at midmorning as I have over the past few months.

So this morning I woke up at 2 am, ravenous. This isn’t new, I’ve been waking at 2-3 am for a while now, needing to eat something substantial just to get back to sleep. But today, after eating the same thing I usually do, I was racked with waves of paralyzing cramping throughout my torso for hours.

This is also not new.

This is one of the reasons why I have resorted to limiting the kinds of things I eat, when I eat them and how much of it I eat. To avoid the strange and overwhelming discomfort I feel at random times when I eat.

I don’t think I’m fat. I don’t think eating certain things are “bad” or “good.” I don’t think I’m a horrible person. I’m just trying to understand the patterns of my body and setting up systems that help me seem to not trigger these attacks. It just seems that sometimes, oftentimes, my body reacts in big ways to what I eat, in ways that debilitate me.

My word, how weird and unnecessary it feels to be whining about this in the midst of this larger, scarier pandemic state we’re all in. I’m aware of this. Yet I write this because even so, it is my experience. And I write because I feel confused. Confused because it felt like the most loving thing to do to let my stomach rest when it was toiling this morning, but this action goes directly against my goal set yesterday. And then I begin to wonder–are the two related? Is there some sort of trickster being lodged in my appetite center that uses body symptoms to keep me from changing?

I did what I always do when I feel confused, and started to write about it. What came foreward is that there is some part of me that feels this coaching “technique” is not aligned with my truth, and my lack of ability to stand up and say this warrants my body needing to scream “STOP!” for me.

This is also not new. As a child, the emergence of insomnia, depression and Anorexia was a way to verbalize to my abusive mother that she needed to STOP. That something needed to STOP. She of course didn’t listen, but social services eventually took me out of the situation and the abuse did stop. So in many ways, I honor my body, or Anorexia, or depression or whatever title you want to put on this force that screamed for me when I couldn’t scream. There is a hint of that now, that if I don’t voice the unalignment of this process, my body might just keep throwing wrenches in the mix for me. Through pain.

The thing I keep wondering is whether the need for this to STOP is an old reaction, one that doesn’t belong anymore, or if it is indeed wise and one I should follow. Do I recognize the pain as an outworn messenger and eat anyway to challenge its old process? Or do I continue to stand steadfastly by it, trusting that to follow its guidance is leading me to my own truth on this whole eating disorder business?

I wish I could just accept the views as they are in the recovery community, that this is a demon that needs to be battled, and to do that I just need to ignore the pain and push past it. Yet for whatever reason, I feel it is more complex than this. I don’t know why I feel this, I just do. And my body, screaming in pain in the wee morning hours, just as I was about to implement a new goal…well it makes me shake my head in such confusion as to what the hell is really true.

As I write this, I allow a chunk of raspberry dark chocolate to melt on my tongue. I take a sip of strong, dark coffee to swirl the flavors around my mouth and taste the concoction glide down my throat. I savor these tastes, this treat I give to myself. I am ready for food now, I am enjoying food now, my body does not rebel. I feel in alignment with my own desires. My body is at peace. Any normal person would trust this. But as someone who has been in and out of hospitals and institutions, diagnosed and labeled, I am confused about whether I am truly able to trust myself, what I want, what feels comfortable to me. Is it my body’s wisdom I follow, or the ED voice tricking me to not push past my own safe limits? This question has haunted me for years, and is one I carry even as I try when I can to go directly against its seeming wishes. I hope someday this all becomes clear. I hope someday I will look back on this from a place of “full recovery” and laugh that it was such a big deal. I’ve been hoping this for decades, and its why I’ve chosen to try one last time this coach.

My body screams STOP. My psyche screams STOP. Or does the “eating disorder” scream STOP? Hoping someday I’ll know for sure.

In other news, I wish all of you health and wellness. I hope that the news is not infiltrating your being so much as to cause you to be in great fear and panic. May we be wise and take precaution, but may we also realize the power and sacredness of our own mind and thoughts.

May we be happy. May we be comfortable. May we be healthy. May we be at peace.

A Lovely Rejection

I read a post the other day that reminded me of Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In this book, one of the most powerful passages for me was his thoughts and experiences getting rejected in his early days by publishers. It is especially relevant to me now as I am poised at the edge of publishing my own first book, and am having to go through the torturous process of describing and summarizing and marketing of my work to companies that I hope to work with. It is the antithesis of what I enjoy about writing, and often makes me want to hide my head in a hole.

Which I could do, of course, but I chose not to. Partially because of the words of Stephen King, who has been by my side since I was a child in my reading escapades. And so of course, I knew I would face that first rejection someday, if I did keep going. And yesterday I received it. It was a kind note, and sent within a day of my query to the editor. It read:

“Thank you so much for thinking of XXX for this important proposal. Ultimately, this isn’t quite a fit for my list, so I’m going to step aside, but I really appreciate the opportunity to consider and wish you all the best in connecting with the right publisher for this project.”

I had several internal responses to this email, but surprisingly none of them were disappointment. I was actually really blown away that this person got back to me so quickly and especially because we are in the middle of plague craziness in our world. Secondly, I felt giddy that she called my proposal “important.” Important! I know this might be a polite way of responding to shit you don’t really like, but it felt very good to think she might have been telling me the truth, too. Ah, my feather’s ruffled and stroked :} And lastly, I reveled in the fact that I, like Mr. King, had just gotten rejected. The first one was over, and the blow didn’t feel as bad as I thought it would. In fact, in reading the response I instead had this unexpected surge of desire to keep going, to write as many queries as I could just to see what would happen.

I printed the letter and stuck it to my wall. I plan to wriggle a few more on that nail over the coming weeks, assuming editors are still functioning as the country goes into panic mode (which honestly makes this post and my feelings about being rejected pale in importance but I share nonetheless). The worry I have had, the one that has kept me circling over and over again about what I should write, how I should say it to best be accepted…well, it’s a bit lessened.

Who knows what successive experiences like this will do to my novel and perhaps naive sense of adventure, but I’m up for it. And I’m so glad to have Mr. King in my head for the ride. Over and over I will tune into his voice cheering me on, imagining him saying: “It doesn’t matter if you get rejected. Just keep querying. Just keep writing. Watch the nail get heavy with slips and enjoy how its weight peels the stucco from the wall.”

How To Be More Confident

How To Be More Confident

Acknowledge and honor the past
But let go of the archaic ways that no longer serve you
Let the Old Bear grieve
Take him into your arms
Dance
Like a jaguar
Merge the opposite energies
Harness your focus
Disperse to unifying

Own the story of your journey
Of Meaningful Coincidence
Of The Chosen One
Ripped apart
Into disbelieving embers
And
Rise from the underworld of nothingness

Hold the opposites
Dance with skeptics and believers
Start with the Dream

Ironically
And perhaps
Crazy making
To some

How to be more confident
Involves
Paradoxically practicing
The wisdom
Of insecurity

Recovery Coaching

As a result of contacting a prior boss to have her review my memoir, I found out she has now started training what are called eating disorder “Recovery Coaches.” These coaches meet with you in person or on line in your everyday life to provide support in facing eating disorder behaviors. They text you, they meet you for meals, they go grocery shopping with you. They do all the things it is so very hard for therapists and regular treatment team providers to do. And all of this is done towards the aim of facilitating “complete recovery,” not just feeling like you’re getting through life but not fully living it.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, “recovery” is an uncomfortable word for me, partly because of the sound of it, to re-cover myself doesn’t sound appealing. Yet it is also uncomfortable for me because as far as I have experienced, a life without some form of these thoughts or behaviors, or at least the awareness of them and needing to set boundaries with them…this kind of life has never become a reality for me. After countless attempts to reach this state. To hear someone say, “Yeah, I don’t really think about it anymore” just floors me. So of course when I heard that there were coaches to help one get to this idyllic place, I was skeptical.

Yet I was also sad. I’ve tried to “get over this” for decades. I’ve turned away from traditional perspectives on treatment, and took my own journey deep into my heart, made sense of it, made it sacred, loved and accepted myself despite my continued cycling up and down with these symptoms. I worked really hard at learning to honor the fact that I may just need to learn how to “deal with it” at this level forever. So to hear that there are these coaches helping one to get to that place, over the rainbow, hearing this brought up so many feelings. There was a disbelief. There was anger. There was confusion.

But there was also a longing. This paradoxical longing stirred into that skepticism. And the fact that there was an opportunity to work with one of these coaches for free, at least initially, feels important somehow.

So I decided to give it one more try. Sure I could pose all skeptic and doubt this possibility that these coaches could somehow work utter magic on my decades-old eating struggles. But I could also be curious. Which is what I chose, to be curious, and now have started working with one of these coaches to see what is possible. To give the longing, the sadness, the yearning to actually experience this sense of moving beyond, to give this a chance. Again.

So this “recovery coach” is texting me at challenging times where we’ve set up goal behavior changes. This person is hearing me yodel about my small but annoyingly restrictive behaviors that keep me bound, in fear, anxiety. That keep me smiling to the world–functioning–but not really fully feeling free. I have hope, but I also know this road could dead-end and the skeptic is here too. The skeptic is ready to be disappointed.

So far, the focus on behaviors is making them stronger, and I hope that does not continue. There is a sense that whatever I am dealing with is bigger than me, and has been with me and my ancestors for many generations. There is a sense that a “recovery coach” may not be able to handle and work through this layer of bigness with me. Yet that doesn’t mean I will discount it. I have also enlisted some support from a spirit-worker I trust to help me see into the bigness of this energy I am wrapped up in, to see if there is anything bigger than myself that is opposing my attempts at shifting behaviors.

I am so ready to transform this, and the coincidence of the recovery coach concept coming to me at this time–when I am about to publish my memoir about my lifetime eating and body struggles–is one I am definitely taking notice of. With the recovery coach helping me with the behavioral moves, and the spirit work helping me to explore and possibly heal the bigger energies tied up in this epigenetic illness pattern, I hope to really feel into this sense of “moving beyond.”

For me, however, I think it may result in a more animist way of being with the spirits of illness rather than never thinking about them again. For me, as I’ve written about in previous blogs and in my memoir, I think that the ED is an initiatory energy, and if it can be honored as an archetypal, transformational force but not allowed to destroy one’s body, then the work is truly done. I feel this is my path, to learn how to work with the spirit of this illness, and to possibly help others struggling, but not to let it take me down. This is where I am letting my curiosity with the concept of “full recovery” and recovery coaches take me. Hopefully I will come out the other end with an uplifting story to share around the fire.

Privilege

Last weekend, I sat in on a workshop entitled “‘Shamanism” and Cultural Appropriation: Indigenous Perspectives.” This was a workshop discussing the use of the word shaman, as well as its tools by non-native people. I attended this workshop as I have been tremendously affected by the lens of shamanism in understanding and working with my food/body struggles on deeper levels. Yet as a white person, I’ve always been sensitive to that which I am swimming in when using or attending any kind of training on this subject.

During this particular panel, the intensity of feelings was almost unbearable in the room–so much pain and lack of understanding about this word. I felt myself struggling, as I feel so very called to this path and using its tools, but don’t quite know how as a white person, to honor this and also be in right relation. My work with Ancestral Healing has been helpful, yet the ache in my heart is still so strong around it all.

I started realizing that some of the chapters in my memoir directly reference my use of these tools, and that I neglected to mention what tribes the tools I used originated from, neglected to give respect. I realized I am pretty indebted to these paths and that actually the core message of my book-that an eating disorder might be a “call to initiation”-was resting on this wisdom.

I feel the “shamanic” and/or animist path has helped me re-vision my struggles with depression, with being in an ill body, but I know my awareness rides on the back of privilege. I know that is where a lot of my “unexplained” grief stems from, where symptoms in my body point to, even if I cannot completely vocalize it clearly, even if I feel so crazy and confused around all of it. I feel somehow that the deathly pull towards starving and restriction has relation to the unhealed woundings and ghosts of the traumas of existence. I wrote this poem to try to explain the complexity of what I feel, trying to also respect, and am wondering if it might belong in my acknowledgments section.

MY PRIVILEGE

To the first peoples of Switzerland, who were colonized

To the first peoples of Germany, who were colonized

To the first peoples of Scandinavia, who were colonized

To the first peoples of Lithuania, who were colonized

To the first peoples of the Netherlands, who were colonized

To the first peoples of British Isles, who were colonized

To the first peoples of the Americas, who were colonized

To the first peoples of The Great Utah Basin, who were colonized

To the first peoples of the West Coast of the Americas, where I stand, who were colonized

To the first plant, animal and living beings, who were colonized

To the meat, vegetable, herb, tree, crops, who were colonized

To the plots of land that will never see the sun under concrete, colonized

To the trauma, disconnection and forgetting that lives on in my bones, blood and gut, colonized

To the sicknesses that are trying to help me see

May I find a way to understand

May I find a way to respect

May I find a way to honor

May I find a way to clear

May I find a way to remember

These hands

These white hands, open

These blue eyes, open

This raw, beating heart, open
Aching

To all who have been a part of me

To all who have suffered

And to all I am a part of

May we find a way

To remember

Our privilege

This privilege

This Body

This Earth

May we find a way