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.
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 :})
Letting Go 