Growing Human(kind)ness by Karly Randolph Pitman

Foster a change of heart

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The love that is up to the challenge

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You can trust where and how the river is carrying you.

Seeing with ‘soft eyes’

This week I got an email from a reader, Emily, who spoke about the transformation she’s experiencing in ‘seeing her eating disorder with self compassion, with kind eyes’ – not an easy thing to do.

Any place where we feel stuck, reactive, or compulsive can bring up shame, self loathing, or criticism.

But underneath overdoing, underdoing or any kind of compulsive ‘doing’ with food lies something tender:  places where we felt shamed, overwhelmed, scared, hurt, or neglected – and all the myriad coping strategies that we erected in an attempt to keep ourselves safe, to care for our pain, and to manage the emotional turmoil that arose as a result.

Fostering compassion and safety with art and story

Sometimes it can feel impossible – or difficult – to access this tenderness towards ourselves and our human frailties. I often find that this tenderness arises in surprising ways, and often when we’re not ‘working’ directly on the food.

In fact, I encourage folks not to spend so much time or effort working on the food. In my experience, as we begin to access a greater sense of compassion, and as we have a safe, loving container to ‘hold’ the stored feelings under the food – like fear, anger, grief, or shame – the feelings flow and unfold, the compulsive behaviors begin to fall away, and our natural leadership, competence and confidence arises.

There are many ways to foster compassion and create safety. One of my favorites is through art and story.

Making art, watching movies or TV shows that move you, listening to music, dancing, singing, creating, playing, moving the body physically, and even lovemaking can be ways to both access your inner wellspring of compassion and to move the stuck feelings that live in the body and nervous system.

In today’s post, I share how this process has unfolded for me through an art project. I hope it inspires you as you find your own ways of creating, discovering, and unfolding into your ‘soft eyes,’ into the vulnerable parts of your being.

When Our Fears ‘Bless and Keep’ Us

This year I’ve been creating what I call “The Book of Love.” The title is a nod to a Peter Gabriel song (I’ve loved Peter Gabriel’s music since high school) and to the book’s contents – a blank book that I’ve filled with poems, bird feathers, leaves, buds, shoots, seeds and other offerings from the animals and foliage around my home, quotes, cards, photos, images, and art – anything, really, that moves and speaks to me and asks to be enfolded into its pages.

I began making the book this winter in a whim of inspiration while watching one of my favorite TV shows, Call the Midwife. In case you haven’t seen it, Call the Midwife is a BBC historical drama that takes place in one of the poorest parts of London in the 50s and 60s, where nuns and midwives deliver and care for the babies, children, women and families of the neighborhood.

It is an understatement to say that I love the show and its compassion, humor, and keen embrace of the human experience.

In one episode, a nun quotes Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic from the 12th century – “God hugs you. You are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God. You shine so finely it surpasses understanding” – that left me crying on my couch, stunned.

I realized I wanted to write it down, and that I wanted to read it regularly.

So I decided to create a book.

When grief comes calling

The quote, and my book, were timely for me. Historically, the winter time is often the hardest time of the year for me, as I often experience some winter depression.

But there was something different about this year – perhaps it was the changing seasons of my teenage children leaving home, or the scandals and #metoo movement that touched some of the scars underneath my own relationship with food, or a low thyroid that needed rest – that led to a more pronounced pain and fatigue.

With the depression, grief had come to visit. It asked, and asked, and then asked again for my care and attention. It asked for me to enter it fully. And it asked for me to trust where it was taking me.

In this landscape of sorrow, sadness and loss, The Book of Love became my way of singing my grief song.

Falling into beauty

So I gathered quotes. I put in a holiday card I got from a dear cousin who has suffered tremendously from schizophrenia. I put in a note my Dad sent along with a check for a child’s birthday gift. I put in a shopping list my mom left on the counter the last time she visited. For whatever reason the sight of that list – ziploc baggies, sponges, kitchen scrubby – things I am often out of when she comes to visit, and things she often picks up for me – leaves my belly soft and tender.

I put in something I had written to my college magazine about struggling with depression and loneliness as an undergrad.

I put in snippets from favorite novels.

As I filled my book’s pages, I felt something moving and shifting inside: an expanding awareness and heightened insight into my own being, like shining a light in a dark room. If you’d asked me, before making this book, I’d have told you that I’d entered this room many times before, and that I knew its landscape well.

I thought I’d entered this room enough – at least enough to metabolize the major griefs of my life so far. I thought that the particular shape, mystery and landscape of my grief were sufficiently known to me.

But these past few months, I’ve come to know its contours and contents with a new intimacy. It was like learning the landscape of a lover’s body – where you learn and love its particulars, what makes this body, this body; how it likes to be held, or touched, or not; and what makes this heart, this heart.

And like a lover, I fell. I fell hard into beauty.

Touching the body of pain with reverence

All of a sudden I could see:  all the ways I have felt so particularly – of this specific thing, of that – and unparticularly – afraid; how deeply I felt that I had to do everything right without any help; the rigidity that arose from this fear; all the ways I thought I should’ve known better; all the ways I blamed myself; all the ways I withdrew from fear of criticism, or shame; all the ways I have been afraid to trust; all the ways I have held myself back or believed that I had to do or be more.

Wave after wave, my eyes were opened. I saw and saw and saw. I was astounded again and again in wonderment – “Oh my goodness! Do you see this? And this?” – touching the body of my pain with tenderness, reverence, and awe.

So many soft spots.

Fear will ‘bless and keep you’

Meditation teacher Tara Brach says that when we directly touch our suffering and sadness, our natural response is compassion. Something in us cracks open – and this ‘something’ holds us in a warm embrace. You feel a tenderness – kind eyes – towards your own being.

It is tender, poignant, malleable, soft.

It is astoundingly beautiful.

Here’s another quote from “The Book of Love,” courtesy of poet William Stafford: “What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you.”

Before this winter, if you would’ve asked me if fear or grief could bless and keep you, I don’t think I would’ve agreed. But I came to experience this blessing for myself. And through it, my pain – or rather, how I see my pain – has changed.

The deeper story

When people share their food stories with me, I feel the tenderness that lies underneath the food. I see the beauty, courage and strength. I invite them to trust the deeper story – the one that is writ underneath the bingeing, the diets, the obsession with food. I invite them to trust their soft spots.

I think we can trust the way the soul guides us into this deeper story. The journey may arise through some uncomfortable messengers – grief, fear, anger, sadness are common ones – and also through art, through telling our story, and through listening to another’s story and seeing ourselves in it.

No matter what form it takes, when we touch our wounds directly, when we dress and tend to them like something precious – something beloved – we come to a new intimacy and understanding. We realize that they are not what we think they are – and that neither are we.

Perhaps this is the doorway to forgiveness.

I don’t know where my book and the grief will ultimately lead me, for the end has not been written. But I do trust that they are leading me somewhere. Like a river, I yield to the movement of the waves, to the current, to the ebb and flow, to the up and down, to the intimacy, the heartache, and to the shore.

As a friend of mine said, “I trust where you’re being led. I trust Her.”

I’ll end this note with one last quote from my book.

This is from Kate Braestrup – a writer, chaplain, and community minister who, when suddenly widowed with four small children, fulfilled her husband’s dream of becoming a minister, eventually serving the game wardens of Maine:  “You can trust human beings with grief….Walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”

To your deeper story, and to the love that is up to the challenge,

Karly

‘Breathe and push’ – transforming food pain into new life

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When I have a spacious weekend afternoon, I enjoy taking a few hours to clean and care for my home. There is something about dusting what is dirty and beautifying my space that is deeply nourishing to me – offering a physical expression of my gratitude and love towards the home where I live and to the objects that I treasure.

Likewise, lately I have been tinkering with tasks of mending and repairing – sewing missing buttons, repairing a ripped seam on a pillow that’s been leaking stuffing in my living room, and taking larger repair projects to a local seamstress to be patched and put back together again.

Like cleaning, there is something deeply nourishing about repairing what had once been broken, and breathing new life into that which had been unused, perhaps over used!, or cast off – especially in a society so fixated on acquiring the new, buying more, and throwing out what is no longer ‘good.’

Mending as an expression of love

Cleaning, repairing, mending: these things are not just tasks or chores, but qualities – expressions of love.

As expressions of love, they can shed light on how we approach anything that needs repairing or that feels no longer ‘good:’ how do we care for own wounds, for those things that need our care, warmth, and tending?

How do we approach our own opened seams and missing buttons – the tears in the fabric of our being? How do we approach each other’s?

Walking into the deeper story

Right now, a person very dear to me is struggling. It is painful, and at times alarming to walk beside them.

But while my heart breaks to see their suffering and pain, I do not see my loved one as troubled, or broken, or damaged, but merely a beloved soul who is feeling overwhelmed, suffering, and needing more support – as anyone might feel or need when experiencing pain.

When my heart is open, I sense the deeper story: their being is being birthed into a greater fullness and wholeness. As my friend Ashley says, something is being born here in the dark. Or, as activist Valarie Kaur, founder of Revolutionary Love puts it – “Breathe and push.”

“Breathe and push”

When something hurts, and when we are in pain, it is our natural, normal human response to feel broken and to then move to fix it – or to fix whatever we believe is its cause, like ourselves.

But if we can trust that something is being born when we are in pain or distress, then we can make room for our experience exactly as it is. Our experience, our pain isn’t wrong. There is room for it to exist, and for it to give birth to whatever it is giving birth to.

As poet John O’ Donohue said, it is a ‘reverence of approach.’

Curduroy and coming home

One of my favorite examples of this ‘reverent approach’ can be found in a children’s story, Corduroy, by beloved children’s author and illustrator Don Freeman.

Corduroy is a curious stuffed bear who lives in a department store downtown – back in the days when many cities had a multi story, downtown department store where you could buy a Sunday dress, sheets for your bed, and yes, a beloved toy, all at the same place.

One day, a young girl, Lisa, sees Corduroy and wants him to be her very own bear. When she shares this with her mother, her mother says no, that she is tired of shopping, that it is time to go home, that Lisa has plenty of stuffed animals – and besides, one of the buttons on Corduroy’s overalls are missing.

Thus ensues an adventure as Corduroy searches for his missing button – for he so wants to be taken home, played with and loved. Ah, don’t we all?

And don’t we all have moments upon moments upon moments when someone has told us in certain terms that we have missing buttons – all the ways we’re not good enough, or are too much, or should be different; all the ways our bodies or our feelings or our needs are not okay – buttons we search and search and search to find or fill or fix, for we so want to be taken home and loved.

In the morning, Lisa comes to buy this little bear, missing button and all.

One of the most poignant moments in the story is when Lisa, after bringing Curduroy home to her apartment, sews on his missing button. She says to him: “I like you the way you are…But you’ll be more comfortable with your shoulder strap fastened.”

So simple, so true.

When our pain becomes bread and water

This story has long struck me as an example of how to approach those things that are small, tender, and vulnerable in ourselves – those things that long for welcome – those things in need of repair, healing, and care.

We are loved just as we are. We are not irrevocably damaged or broken because we need help, support or care: repair, healing, a sewn on button, or when, like the velveteen rabbit, we become shabby and worn from good use.

And like Corduroy, and like my loved one, and like our relationship with food, we may feel more comfortable with two working shoulder straps instead of one.

It’s a question of kindness – attuning to what is needed, and caring for what hurts or chafes or is ill fitting – not of worth.

In my experience, it is through grief and forgiveness that the shrill, hard edges of “I’m broken” start to shift, moving us into a place of softness, where we can see and touch and feel and taste and become intimate with our pain and heartache without the layers of blame, judgment and “I should’ve known better.” It’s what enables us to relate differently to those missing or broken buttons.

We know – deeply know – and it sinks in how much it – we – have hurt.

In this alchemy, our pain becomes bread, and food, and water – a meal that leads us to the table of the sacred within ourselves, the Love that resides at the core of our being. It is a gateway to tenderness, to care, and when needed, to lovingly and tenderly sew on the button on our shoulder straps.

I’ll end with a quote that a student once shared in a class, and one that I think you may like, too. This is from Matthew Brensilver.

“Self compassion is about gently opening to the exquisite tenderness of being human….In the moment of self harshness, we are confronted by our imperfections, our foibles, the limitations of our control and will – and in this confrontation, our heart closes. We forget that in these moments, we’re actually seeing something important and universal about the human condition. Moment by moment, life either softens or hardens the heart. We’re training ourselves so that in these moments, the heart relaxes and we learn something important about being human.”

Wanting more hands on help with food?

If you’re needing hands on help with food, here are ways I’m offering support this month:

The Heart of Food:  this is a new, foundational course to soften anxiety, shame and self judgment with food. If you’ve been interested in my work, but were unsure where to start, this course may be a great fit for you. It will help you in 3 key areas: softening shame, self judgment and blame around your food struggles; gaining understanding and practice in caring for the key emotions and needs that drive you to food, and growing resilience, where you feel more capable, and less victimized, by food.

This do at home course includes monthly Q&As where you can ask questions, connect with others, and get support. The next Q&A is September 19.

Why healing overeating starts with relationship

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I’ve recently created an introductory course on creating emotional healing with food, The Heart of Food. The understanding that grounds this course is that healing begins in the heart.

People often ask me, “Why do you start there? What does the heart have to do with my overeating?”

It’s a great question and understandable. The heart can feel a long way off from things like stopping a binge or overeating less!

Here’s why this step is so crucial: one of the primary keys to getting unstuck from binge eating, overeating, or any food compulsion is healing your relationship with food.

This is especially true with the tricky, frustrating, or painful aspects of this relationship – those things that you’re really struggling with.

Fight, flight and freeze

When we struggle with something – and struggle with something chronically – we tend to get stuck in some painful emotions, moving into primal states of fight, flight and freeze. (Or as I’ve also heard it said, fight, flight, freeze and feed!)

We may feel frustrated, frightened, overwhelmed, or angry – blaming ourselves for not doing better (“Why can’t you get yourself together?!!”)

Or, we may feel caught in a ‘freeze’ state where we feel powerless, helpless, and hopeless. You can also have a mix of both. For example, I tend to go to both ends when I feel really afraid – self blame/aggression, and freezing.

Ouch, these emotions can feel so painful and discouraging, especially when we feel stuck in them.

How relationship heals

In a very simplified nutshell, that’s why it’s important to start with relationship – for relationship can soften and temper these emotional reactions.

This change in relationship supports the outer transformation (changes in how and what you eat) and even the skills that you may need to learn to create new habits and patterns with food.

Here are two ways that a change in relationship can foster healing and different habits with food:

You work with your emotional reactions rather than against them. One of the most helpful ideas I learned from my mentor in developmental science, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, is that emotions have ‘jobs’ to do.

When we change how we relate to our emotions, these emotions can ‘fulfill their role’ and move us to inspired action. We become their ally and midwife, working alongside, stewarding and steering our limbic wiring.

You foster compassion and a space for growth. When we move into the heart, there’s a warm space for our experience, and our emotions. Judgment and blame softens. Our tenderness arises and we feel more merciful towards our vulnerability.

Our relationship with food becomes infused with more compassion, ease, insight, and levity. Food transforms into something you’re relating to, rather than stuck in.

This lays the foundation for outward behavioral change – differences in what and how you eat, in how you use food to self soothe or to care for stress, in how you respond to cravings and impulses, and in how you relate to your emotional, physical and spiritual needs.

You feel more resilient and capable, and less stuck in the ‘freeze’ of helplessness or despair.

You also relate differently to the growth process itself. For it’s not just all ‘heart’ – there may be skills that you need to learn, patterns that need different kinds of support, or structures that you need to implement. Like a fence around a garden, you may need more structured meal times, emotional support for those times when you typically binge, or practice in setting loving limits with yourself.

Healing your relationship with your food struggles is what softens the shame, guilt, or frustration of not knowing how to do something and opens the door to curiosity, humility, and a willingness to learn. We feel safe to grow! We’re more apt to ask for help, to reach out, and to see our growth with food as an opportunity to stretch ourselves, not a punishment.

Wanting more hands on help?

If this resonates with you, you can learn more about The Heart of Food and see the course details here, including a short video where I talk about the course. You can also see the course curriculum and exactly what’s included.

What’s different about this course – regular Q&As with me

One of the new things that I’m offering with this course are monthly Q&A calls with me. While do at home and online courses are easy to use, cost effective, and adaptable – you can start whenever you’re ready or when it’s a good time for you – what they often lack is the regular support and connection that creates long term change for folks.

Without this support, results may be shorter lasting or have a harder time ‘sticking’ over time. That can be really frustrating, especially if you’re sincere and conscientious.

That’s why I’m offering this course in a different format. It’s do at home + support. You have course materials – videos and an ebook – that you watch and study at home, on your own. Then, once a month, you and others who are going through the course meet with me in a live webinar, a Q&A. This combination of support, help for questions, and do at home study gives you a stronger foundation to midwife the new life you long for with food.

You can see the dates for the Q&As here.

If you have any questions about this course and if it’s the right fit for you, kindly send us an email. We want you to get the support that meets your needs.

The road that fosters change with food

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Here it is the heat of the afternoon, a time of being cooked and stewed by the sun in August, the hottest month of the year where I live.

The heat has me thinking of a quote by Viktor Frankl – “What is to give light must endure burning” – and all the ways we get cooked and stewed in the healing journey.

I wanted to take some time to share more about this idea and how it relates to your journey with food. It dovetails off last week’s post where I wrote about walking through the gate of vulnerability – a necessary step (and a catalyst) to heal food compulsions like overeating, sugar obsessing, or binge eating.

The myth of “I should’ve known better”

A very common and painful myth that can arise with any struggle – particularly a chronic one – is the idea that ‘I should’ve known better:’ that your food pain was something you ‘should’ve controlled better.’

This past week, I’ve been reflecting upon forgiveness, and I wonder – perhaps one part of forgiveness is releasing this idea that we should’ve known or done or coped better. For holding onto the idea that we ‘should’ve known better’ is a subtle but powerful way we try to hold onto control – for we want to believe that everything is within our power, and our hands.

In a paradoxical way, blaming ourselves for not doing better is how we try to protect ourselves from feeling the deeper pain of powerlessness, grief or loss. Even though it hurts, it’s a subtle way we try to regain control when things don’t go the way we hoped.

The still point of forgiveness

Forgiveness, by contrast, asks us to let go of both control, and our desire to avoid pain.

It’s a subtle but powerful shift where we turn away from blame (of self and others), assigning responsibility, and all our expectations of how we should’ve done – even though it’s incredibly difficult to do so – and move into a place of deep acceptance:

“I did the best I could with the knowledge, skills, and capacity that I had at the time. If I could have known or done better, I would have.”

It’s a still point of inaction, where we stop trying to figure things out, stop trying to make things different, and stop trying ‘to create a better past,’ to quote Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield.

This still point is a place of vulnerability, humility and exquisite tenderness.

For as we move out of guilt, blame, shame and judgment – and even the very well intentioned desire to understand and make sense of our experiences – we move into a space of presence, of pure feeling, where we simply feel the pain of loss itself, the grief for that which we wish were different.

‘The Well of Grief’

David Whyte captures this experience eloquently and simply in his poem, The Well of Grief:

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Oh, to forgive. It is to grieve, and it is to love. It is to be expanded – not contracted – when things don’t go the way we had hoped.

The grand belonging

When we directly touch our grief – all the ways we ‘wished for something else’ – we not only touch our own grief, but we also touch each other’s. We touch our ancestor’s grief, what Jung calls ‘the lament of the dead.’ We see all the coins of our collected heartache, present, past and future. In this space of shared vulnerability, our individual pain transforms into our collective human pain.

In this opening, we come home to a grander belonging. What an irony – that it is through failure, tenderness, and limitation – and not the fulfillment of our ideals – that we open our hearts to ourselves, to the human experience, and to each other.

How grieving brings rest

I suspect that until we touch and face our grief, we will continue to ‘work’ to feel a sense of worthiness and loveability. We will try really, really hard. We will work to fix our pain, we will work to control our compulsive behavior, we will work to control our weight and binges, and we will work to feel loved and loveable.

It is exhausting, all this trying.

When we face our grief – especially the grief of limit, all the ways we’ve fallen short of our own expectations – we stop trying. It feels like humiliation, because at first we see all the ways we don’t meet our own ideals, all the ways we haven’t ‘measured up.’

But this space of grief – opening to our own limits and imperfection – is actually a place of deep rest. We can set down our blame, our guilt, our frustration, our endless trying, all our strategies and ‘hustles for worthiness’ and rest in the sense of, “I am flawed and imperfect and full of mistakes, and I am deeply loved.”

What a relief! So little to prove, so little to have measure up to, so little to ‘get’ or achieve or have – for we are already loved.

As poet Danna Faulds says, “I and you and all of us are more than enough.”

How forgiveness leads to change with food

It is another irony that once we accept our limits, our typical behavior, and our patterns around our pain, the way we respond to them changes, too.

I see this happening with food in concrete ways like:

  • You ask for help instead of hiding – rather than trying hard to control binges on your own, you’re open with others and ask for help when you’re feeling overwhelmed
  • You experience less spirals of bingeing – you forgive yourself when you make mistakes much more quickly, easing the post binge guilt and shame that feeds more overeating
  • You learn from your mistakes – mistakes are included as part of the journey and become less of a ‘big deal’ – you feel much less perfectionism about getting it ‘right’
  • You give yourself what you need – you feel less resentful and less rebellious towards limits. You can no to yourself when you need to say no.

So today, here I think of all our limits and losses, all the ways we have not loved well or been loved in the ways we’d like.

All the countless binges and overeating and hatred and vitriol sent out towards our bodies. All the shame and sense of brokenness.

To know, to know in the marrow of our bones, that all the stories of our unworthiness are not true, that our ideals are not achievements we need to strive to attain, that we are loved, beloved, home.

How odd and how beautiful that it is grief – and yes, the heart – that takes us there.

Like the endearing Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings, and like the small children who climbed into Jesus’ lap, it is the ‘least of these’ within ourselves that lead us home, and into love.

The gate of vulnerability

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There are a few key ‘gates of healing’ that are necessary to walk through in order to grow out of food compulsions like overeating, sugar obsessing, or binge eating.

I wrote about two of these gates – healing your relationship to vulnerability and healing your relationship to power and sovereignty – here.

Today I’d like to share more about healing your relationship to your vulnerability – for it’s something that’s coming up for a lot of folks right now.

Feeling like a ‘broken self’

Whenever we struggle with something – like food – it can alter our sense of self. Struggling with food can create an impression in our hearts that we’re inherently ‘broken’ – a sense of being damaged and ‘unfixable.’

This impression filters how we see ourselves. It’s as if we become fused with the struggle itself – and that struggle becomes our very identity. Our relationship with food becomes the lens through which we view our entire being.

I remember when I first became conscious of feeling ‘damaged.’ I was a sophomore in college, lonely, struggling to fit it, and coping with the wake of a major episode of depression. I was also caught in bulimia, torn between two opposing needs: my desire for belonging – which meant controlling my food so I could obtain the thinner body I thought I needed to be loved – and my desire for care and nurturing – which I found in binge eating.

So much vulnerability. So tender.

Over time, this impression of being a ‘damaged self’ can lead to other feelings – frustration, fear, overwhelm, and anger. We may blame ourselves for not doing better. Our thoughts may tell us things like – “You should be able to control this. You should be able to get this together. This is all your fault.”

Or, we may feel caught in a ‘freeze’ state where we feel powerless, helpless, and hopeless.

Ouch, so painful.

Moving into the heart

When we move through the gate of vulnerability, we move from the mind – the place of judgment and shoulds – and into the heart. We turn towards our pain to offer it tenderness, compassion and understanding.

There are many ways to do this. Any contemplative, expressive, mindfulness or ‘body based’ practice can help – like yoga, meditation, spiritual practices, movement, art, and creativity – because they move us out of the head and into our bodies, where our experience lies.

We can physically move our energy and attention into the area around the heart. When you feel into your heart, how does your perception of your journey with food change? Do you feel or see yourself differently?

Where everything belongs

When we move into the heart, there’s a warm space for our experience, and our emotions. I think of it as the archetype of the Divine Feminine – a cradle for our being, where we are deeply invited to exist.

This shift fosters several key shifts:

  • There’s more ease and less anxiety. We move out of a space of overcontrolling – trying to control our food, our pain and the situation – and into a place of surrendered care. Our energy shifts from frustration, anger and shoulds to an embrace of, “Ouch. This really hurts.”
  • There’s room for all aspects of ourselves, an invitation for our wholeness. Rather than feeling like our struggles with food are an outcast – something we need to control, contain, or fix – they become something we move to care for, with tenderness, compassion and wisdom. Our vulnerability and struggles are included in the great web of our life and can even be a part of our health, not outside it.
  • There’s a restfulness, a quieting of the internal arguing of all the ways our mind can tell us that we should be different – all the ways we argue with our experience and try to make it better.

The counterintuitive turn towards pain

It sounds counterintuitive, but the place where we feel most vulnerable – the place where we feel like we’ve most screwed up with food – is the very ground of our healing.

It may feel too vulnerable to touch this grief directly at first, especially if there’s been trauma. (Having the help of a therapist, healer, or support group can be crucial when there’s so much vulnerability.)

But with support, presence, and patience these ‘soft spots’ are gently, tenderly faced and felt.

In many ways, moving into the heart is a grieving process. For when we grieve, we’re turning towards our heartache without adding on a layer of self blame, guilt, anger, or shame.

As we grieve, a natural compassion arises towards ourselves. Food transforms into something we’re relating to, rather than stuck in or identified with.

How compassion leads to changes in how you eat

This holy grieving is what helps us unhook from the belief of being a ‘broken self’ and touch the ground of our wholeness. Out of this wholeness arises new ways of seeing ourselves, a greater compassion and tenderness towards our vulnerability, growth, and new life.

This lays the foundation for outward behavioral change – differences in what and how you eat, in how you use food to self soothe or to care for stress, in how you respond to cravings and impulses, and in how you relate to your emotional, physical and spiritual needs. You feel more resilient and capable, and less stuck in the ‘freeze’ state of helplessness or despair.

And in this place, new ideas arise. We can ask for help. We can embrace ourselves and others. And we can face our humaniy with honesty, compassion, and deep, abiding love.

The ‘marvel of what you carry’

In my own life, I’ve traveled through many rounds of grieving, of facing the pain that lay underneath my eating disorders and depression. The more I grieve, the more tender I feel towards myself, and towards others.

Grieving softens my defenses:  my overresponsibility, my trying to be good, my trying to do everything ‘right,’ my trying to be better than others, my anger and righteousness – all the ways I’ve tried to protect the soft shell of my heart, all the ways I’ve tried to hold love close.

Grieving asks me to let go of these strategies and simply feel the vulnerability that lies underneath. It asks me to see – truly see – the love and tenderness that lies in my own heart, and in others’.

In grieving, we embrace our wholeness and imperfection. Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works alongside gang members in Los Angeles, put it this way: ‘rather than criticizing ourselves for how we carry our pain, we can simply marvel at what we carry.’

I’ll close with a poem from Jeanie Greensfelder.

A Love Story

Gather your selves:
critical and kind,
scared and brave,
thoughtless and hurt.

Mistakes and failures
meet accomplishments.
Like loss and love,
they are a package.

Embrace it all.
Such a coming together
is what we came for.

Softening the shame of overeating with the inner protector

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The inner protector, like a mother bear, makes room for our pain and makes room for our human experience.

In my last post, I spoke about a powerful but subtle shift when facing cravings or a binge:  to stop ”trying harder” and ask for help instead.

This orientation – to acknowledge that we’re at our limit and to step in with help and support, rather than trying to make ourselves or the situation better, ‘stronger,’ or different – is an act of compassion, acceptance, and love. It’s a relief to the mind and heart to honor those times when we’re overwhelmed and need help!

Today I want to share another practice that can help in the face of a binge – particularly, the feelings of self blame, judgment, and shame that can arise after bingeing, overeating, or ‘giving in’ to food.

The emotions that arise with a binge

Underneath overeating or binge eating lies something so precious, and something deserving of deep respect and reverence:  our human tenderness and vulnerability. You’ll often find undigested, unprocessed emotion – the wounds and losses, both big and small, that hold stored up anger, grief, fear and more. It’s these emotions that often well and overflow and give rise to overeating or a binge. (I explain this idea in further detail on this page here.)

In the wake of a binge, feelings of guilt, shame, dislike, disgust, anxiety, fear, loathing and frustration can swirl – both about the binge itself, and about the original feelings or pain that drove the binge. Ouch, it’s so painful.

The inner controller

We can feel shame compounded upon shame, or guilt compounded upon guilt:  like we ‘failed’ in how we handled our pain, or ourselves. When we’re inside this feeling of failure, we can so easily go to war against our hearts.

It’s a feeling of, “I should be able to do better” or “I should be different:”  a strong inner sensation of “I should be able to be more in control.”

This is the voice of the inner controller – a very small, very scared part of ourselves. This part of us feels responsible for everything, feels like it has to do everything right, do everything right the first time, believes there is no mercy or margin for error, and feels very alarmed when anything goes awry.

It believes everything is its fault.

The inner controller is not personal – it is collective, and speaks to everyone this way.

Bringing in your inner protector

This is when I invite you to call in your inner protector. (I want to give a nod of recognition to writer, social activist, and coach Tad Hargrave, where I first heard this inner part described as the protector. You can learn more about Tad’s good work here and here.)

Who is the protector? The protector is a part of our interior landscape, the one who holds mercy and compassion for our human fallibility, neediness, and frailty. This part of ourselves is like an older sibling caring for a younger sister or brother with compassion and care.

The inner protector fosters these kinds of feelings – compassion, love, warmth, tenderness, and strength. It also fosters beautiful capacities in us: like the capacity to ask for help, to lean on others, to be vulnerable, to set and honor limits, to soften our impulses, and to ask difficult things of ourselves.

Soul activist Francis Weller writes that one way of looking at self compassion is as the ‘internalized village.’ I think the protector is a part of this internalized village – an inner mother and inner father who protects your dignity and humanity with strength, mercy and compassion.

When our critic arises to flagellate us for our mistakes, the inner protector rises up like a mother bear and says, “Nobody hurts my babies,” shielding our vulnerabilities from criticism and disgust.

It’s a stance of fierce kindness – a soft, sad tenderness that wraps around our wounds. It sees the big, bigger picture, and all the various threads that have shaped our being, and the limits of that control we imagine we should have had.

The inner protector makes room for our pain and makes room for our human experience. It cares for our tenderness rather than blaming ourselves for it – or shaming ourselves because we aren’t handling it better.

An example of the inner protector

Poet May Sarton offers a beautiful example of the inner protector in her poem, Friend of Enemy, from her collection Coming into Eighty. While she writes about befriending her body’s vulnerability as it ages, her words remind me that we can follow this same approach of kindness towards all our vulnerabilities.

Friend of Enemy by May Sarton, from Coming into Eighty

I can look
At my body
As an old friend
Who needs my help,
Or an enemy
Who frustrates me
In every way
With its frailty
And inability to cope.

Old friend,
I shall try
To be of comfort to you
To the end.

Meeting your inner protector

Have you ever felt the inner protector arise?

I can share what its presence feels like for me. Many of you know that I wrestle with winter depression. In November, when the time changes and darkness falls, I often struggle to adjust to the changing weather and the changing of the light.

I remember one day last December when I was feeling particularly alarmed and prickly, and ashamed of these feelings and my emotional reactions. I felt embarrassed, as if I should’ve known better, and discouraged that I wasn’t ‘coping better.’

In a nutshell, I was being too hard on myself.

Suddenly, I felt this inner protector rise, welling up. It said, “No more. I will not chastize myself for being human, for having wounds and vulnerabilities. It is cruel and inhumane to ask the impossible of myself and then to criticize myself for not being able to meet these expectations. I refuse to treat myself this way.”

In response to this voice, I felt a flood of relief. I could feel my heartbeat slow down, and the expectation that I should be able to do more or be more or be better, soften. I felt wrapped in something firm, strong, and protective, like a river being held in a riverbank.

Leaning into the inner protector

We all have both of these parts – the inner controller and the inner protector – as a part of our inner ecosystem and landscape. The fact that they arise is not always something that we can control or demand, and it is not our fault.

But I’ve found that we can lean into this inner protector, and do it with a reverent, compassionate approach towards ourselves.

I’ve found that the best way to access the inner protector is to move into the arena and area of the heart – to view ourselves with soft eyes and a tender hand. It helps to literally bring your physical energy down into your heart and belly, away from your head.
As you move into this space, you may feel the urgent voice of alarm and sharp edge of criticism start to soften a bit.

Through the eyes of the heart, overeating moves from an enemy to fight to a friend in need – something vulnerable to protect and care for.

How the inner protector softens indulgence and supports growth

This change in insight brings out your ‘soft eyes,’ tenderness, and self compassion. Approaching your overeating from your heart feels very different than approaching it from your head and its mental constructs –  all the emotions of contempt, frustration, anger and thoughts about how you’re falling short and “should be doing better.”

People ask me often – “I’m afraid that if I soften towards my mistakes that I will indulge them more.” This fear makes sense, and has enough of a grain of truth in it that we can believe it.

But the inner protector is not an indulger:  it brings in both kindness and shielding. It doesn’t advocate or have the energy of avoidance or permissiveness. It often says no and set limits.

Rather, it is a fierce acknowledgement of the truth of our experience – how we are actually feeling versus how we want to portray ourselves or want to seem or how we think that we should be feeling. This fierce kindness wraps itself around our truth in the moment, softening the shame about falling short so that we can move towards what helps.

This fosters a subtle shift where we move away from our typical responses to our human pain – hiding, trying harder, minimizing, suppressing, perfecting – and into a more honest and compassionate response. This often involves connecting with others in an authentic, healing way.

In a word, we accept our humanity in the moment rather than how we think we should feel or how we wish we felt. In this space of acknowledgment, honesty, and invitation, we find rest, greater ease and support – both with ourselves, and in connection with others.

Needing hands on help?

If you’re needing hands on help with food, here are ways I’m offering support:

The Heart of Food: this is a new course to soften anxiety, shame and self judgment with food. If you’ve been interested in my work, but were unsure where to start, this course may be a great fit for you. It will help you in 3 key areas: softening shame, self judgment and blame around your food struggles; gaining understanding and practice in caring for the key emotions and needs that drive you to food, and growing resilience, where you feel more capable and less victimized by food.

What’s new about this course is that it comes with monthly, group Q&A calls for 5 months. These regular calls give you a chance to ask questions, connect with others, and get support. This is often the ‘missing piece’ that do at home courses don’t offer, and I’m glad to make regular connection a part of your journey. You can learn more and see exactly what’s included here.

The next Q&A is Wednesday, Septembr 19th.

 

 

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