Growing Human(kind)ness by Karly Randolph Pitman

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When food is your ‘mother’ or best friend

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In a Q&A discussion about my course ‘When Food Is Your Mother,’ I answer the question of why we so often relate to foods (especially sugary-foods) as a nurturing mother-kind of figure. Ultimately, when food is a mother, it’s a substitute:  a way to care for our relational, emotional, and physical needs.

It’s where food derives its soothing, calming power.

Over time, this relationship with food becomes an emotional bond – what developmental psychology calls an attachment relationship. The power of this bond is why food compulsions like overeating or binge eating can be so “sticky” and powerful – and why you can continue to overeat or binge even when you consciously yearn to do differently.

Because of this bond, overeating is not healed by stopping the “problem” behavior (the overeating or binge eating) but by healing the root – the bond with food itself.

Curious? Watch the video and learn more:

  • About my own experiences with food and body obsession
  • Why food can be like a mother, lover, best friend

If you want to learn more about healing your emotional bond with food, you can explore my course, When Food is Your Mother.

Why you need to empty to soften compulsive overeating

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Years ago I read a book by Linda Kavelin Popov called A Pace of Grace. In that book, she shared a beautiful phrase and practice – that of emptying our cup. I love this image:  of taking our burdens, cares, hurts, and frustrations and emptying them, pouring them out. This speaks of a deeper truth, as well:  that we must empty before we can be filled.

Why you need to empty

When we don’t empty, our pain, our frustration, our grief, our hurt gets stuck. According to one of my mentors, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, stuck frustration turns foul. Then it comes out sideways, as attack against ourselves or another. Self attack can come in many forms, including self criticism, judgment, or blame. Self attack can also come out as overeating or sugar bingeing.

If you’re highly sensitive, you feel deeply and strongly. You may also feel what others don’t – you may pick up on subtleties and nuances that are under the surface.

According to Dr. Neufeld, simply being sensitive can mean that more things aren’t working – that there’s more you’re already processing or adjusting to or coping with from the get go. (I’m reminded of this when after a long day, an aggravating sock or underwear seam can feel like the end of the world!)

This all points to a great need to empty.

Do you empty your cup?

My friend, how do you empty? Do you give yourself space to empty?

In her audio program, The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren talks about the benefits of “conscious complaining” – of giving ourselves space to empty and to express what isn’t working. Because we live in a culture that can often look down about complaining or negativity, I find that many of us – especially sensitives – do a lot of self editing. We don’t allow ourselves to empty or to show up “as is.”

So what fills the gap?

Using food to empty

I find that many sensitives turn to food when they need emptying. They may feel reluctant to empty with loved ones – they may carry feelings and beliefs of “I’m too much,” “I’m too intense,” or “I’m too sensitive.” They’re afraid if they showed all of themselves they’d be rejected. So either they put on a smile, suppress their true feelings, try and force themselves to think or feel more positively, or shut down their emotions.

This comes at a cost, as it brings deep feelings of loneliness, of isolation, of feeling as if no one understands or gets them. With no refuge, with no safe place to empty, the emotion remains stuck inside. Until it can’t anymore. Hence the food.

So food is what consoles you in this emotional isolation. It’s also a conduit – how you empty. Food serves as the other, the container:  the one who listens to your pain, who holds it, who holds you, who allows the emotional build up to empty, to pour out. The emotion pours out into ice cream, or french fries, or candy bars.

Why food works – and then doesn’t

The pent up emotion and build up is softened, which is one reason why you initially feel better when you eat:  the tension from carrying a build up of pain has receded. Ah, relief. But this only works for about five minutes. Then you feel a deeper emptiness:  the emptiness of emotional isolation. In addition, you may also feel the shame of turning to food for solace.

Food can never attune to us. It can’t offer empathy or deep listening. It can’t validate our emotions. It can’t soothe our nervous systems in the way a loving other can. And yet in the face of emotional isolation, it may feel as if it’s all we have – the only buffer available.

Emotional isolation is often the deepest layer of pain that drives sensitives to eat. That’s one reason why I believe human relationship is the cure for overeating:  both a warm, connected relationship with our own selves and warm, connected relationships with each other.

Meeting your need for attunement

Emotions are meant to move us. They are also meant to be moved. We allow emotions to move when we empty.

In the case of foul frustration, according to Dr. Neufeld, we move it by moving from mad to sad. We move it by fully registering our feelings of futility, fully accepting that what we’re doing is not working. As we’re moved to sadness, to feel our disappointment and loss, we move through it and to the other side of loss.

So as we empty our cup – as our feelings are heard in a warm embrace – there’s space. Emptiness. But it’s a different kind of emptiness. Rather than the emptiness of emotional isolation, abandonment, or rejection, it’s the emptiness of an unburdened heart.

As we move through this emptiness, we move to the other side of loss, of grief, of despair. We move from “there’s so much that isn’t working” to “look at what is working.” We move from sadness to joy. From despair to hope. From loss to new life.

We don’t have to force this process. We don’t have to rush it. We don’t even have to be in control of it. This is one reason why I try not to force myself to feel a certain way, but rather to ride the ebb and flow of my emotions. I trust that “negative” emotions will move to “positive emotions” on their own, when I offer them the space to do so.

This is the design of nature, of our Nature. It is in us. We are simply the willing participant. (Easily said than done, as it means feeling all our emotions.)

If only we truly trusted the wisdom of our emotions. Then we would know that they are there to carry us from one shore to the other, from fullness to emptiness and fullness again.

The next time you’re feeling the drive or a desire for food, I invite you to ask yourself this question:  how can I empty? What do I need to empty?

How can I empty to carry me to the other shore?

Needing more hands on help?

Photo credit: merwing?little dear / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

How allowing feelings heals suffering

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For many intuitive, sensitive, or empathic people, there’s a link between emotional shame, spiritual shame and overeating. Emotional and spiritual shame dams up emotion or tries to control it. The result is both a painful overindentification with emotion, where we believe we are our emotions, and an emotional compression, where emotions get ‘stuck’ in the body and psyche.

The tension from trying to control emotions, the pain of the shame itself, and the pressure of this ‘stuck emotion’ then seeks an outlet or relief in food.

By contrast, when emotions are embraced and invited, they flow like water, like a river. The shame moves; the emotional energy itself moves.

This is important – for as my mentor in developmental psychology says, “emotions have a job to do…they are the engine of maturation.” When we suppress or control emotions, emotions aren’t able to do their job – to move us towards this yearning, growth and unfolding.

But when we open to our emotional experience and soften our attempts to exert control, we become a ballast for this growing up process, the riverbank for the river. Through these riverbanks, our emotional life moves, and flows. The boat on this river is our deep heart, what guides us through the many waters, into the richness and fullness of our humanity.

Through these currents and ebbs and tides, the heart grows wide, deep, humble, and strong.

Read on to learn more.

Of all the things that we’re asked to befriend as tender human beings, I think befriending feelings is the most challenging. It makes sense:  who wants to feel things like loss, pain, grief, jealousy, devastation? Who wants to feel unloveable, like a failure, ugly, too much, not enough? Ouch.

And yet these feelings arise, in all beings.

How we avoid our feelings

Most of us aren’t taught how to care for painful feelings. We see “negative feelings” as something bad, as something to defend ourselves against. Consequently, we do all kinds of things to avoid feeling them.

In my own life, my 20 years of eating disorders, chronic spiritual seeking, and quest for self perfection all arose from the same root fear:  a fear of my feelings. They were all my strategies to keep myself from feeling painful feelings – feelings of unworthiness, “badness,” shame, or ugliness.

My suffering proliferated from there. Because the more I tamped down my feelings, the more depressed and anxious I felt. Depressed because I was minimizing, editing, and repressing the life that was flowing through me. Depressed, because I made myself “wrong” for feeling whatever I was feeling:  I felt so ashamed, bad and unspiritual because of all my passionate, intense, negative emotions.

Anxious because I was so afraid of what my negative emotions said about me: I thought my negative emotions meant I was ugly, shameful, unworthy – not simply temporary feelings that were flowing through me.

Trying to stop the ocean

Most painfully, no matter how hard I pushed myself to be perfect, or how much spiritual seeking I did, or how much I binged (or how clean I ate or how much weight I lost) I couldn’t make the feelings go away.

They would arise, all on their own. It was like trying to stop the waves of the ocean. It was like trying to stop a river from flowing.

Life flows, and flows as energy. And this energy often comes in the form of emotions:  messy emotions, painful emotions, powerful emotions, intense emotions, tender emotions.

Embracing all kinds of weather

Think of all the variety of weather:  rain, storms, clouds, sunshine, heat, cold, snow, ice, wind, humidity, aridity. Think of all the variety of just one form of weather:  pounding rain, a gentle rain, mist, flooding, a steady drizzle, rain while the sun is shining through the clouds.

In the same way there’s a variety of weather in our outer lives, there’s a variety of weather in our inner lives:  anger, sadness, grief, joy, enthusiasm, boredom….

We don’t call rain “wrong” and sunshine “right.” But why do we label emotions in this way?

Why do we fear the dark?

In many spiritual circles and Law of Attraction teachings, “negative emotions” are something to transcend. Some people even state that “negative” emotions have the power to create “bad” things in our lives. So we’re told to elevate above these emotions, to think the higher thought, and to be more positive.

Positivity has its place – absolutely. So does forgiveness – holding onto painful emotions like anger or resentment can also cause suffering.

But why are we so afraid of darkness?

Spiritual shame

Law of Attraction teachings never sat right with my heart, because I feel they cause spiritual shame and insecurity about our very humanity. I find this to be especially true for empathic, intuitive, or highly sensitive people who feel deeply, passionately, and subtly. Because we have a sensitive nature, this means we feel the “negative” emotions as intensely as we feel the “positive” ones.

So if we believe we have to think/feel positively – and yet are feeling lots of intense negative emotions – it can lead to suffering and self blame. We make ourselves wrong for feeling what we’re feeling. This becomes the spiritual shame of, “there’s something wrong with me because I’m feeling so negatively!”

In judging our emotions, we separate from our wholeness and become a smaller self. There’s so much life we have to then make “wrong” because it’s not “positive.” And we shut down, and we close off, and we armor ourselves against life so that it’s only “right.”

We exhaust ourselves, spending so much energy trying to defend ourselves against life – to defend against the feelings that flow through us – because we see these feelings as somehow, bad, wrong. An indictment.

And in doing so, we cut ourselves off from the very aliveness that is our nature.

Include everything

There’s a fundamental rule in improv comedy:  you work with whatever is given. No matter what your fellow actors say or do – no matter how far fetched or ridiculous – you run with it, you work with it. You include it.

I invite you to approach feelings in the same way. Dear one, no matter what you’re given, no matter what you’re feeling, include it.

Rilke said it this way:  “Let everything happen to you.”

Who would you be if you allowed all your feelings?

So this begs a powerful question:  What if you no longer feared your feelings? What if all feelings were allowed in your experience? What if you let everything happen to you?

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but how much more peaceful, relaxed, less anxious might you feel?

To allow life – to allow all of life – to flow through us is to rest in peace. It’s how we find the deepest rest because we know that whatever we’re feeling, we can include it. We can handle it. We can love this, too.

We can drop all the energy we expend trying to control life, our eating, or ourselves so we don’t feel what we don’t want to feel. Instead, we can be present in our actual lives.

This is the ground of love.

Let everything happen to you

We can drop our armor and let it all in. We can allow ourselves to feel whatever we’re feeling in the moment. We can simply let it be – knowing that feelings are not what we are. Feelings become something that come and go, and not something that define us.

(Oh, we are so much deeper, so much bigger.)

Let go of the story that you’re a small, separate self that has to make life go a certain way so that you feel a certain way. Let go, and allow yourself to be carried in the river of life. Rest in this mercy.

Photo credit: Silvia Sala / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

How marriage can help heal addiction

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A few years ago I was asked to write an essay about addiction and marriage. I’d love to share this piece with you.

There’s a scene in the movie Shall We Dance? where Susan Sarandon’s character meets with a private investigator.  She’d hired the investigator to follow her husband, as she was certain he’d been having an affair.  Instead she learns – surprise – that he’s been taking dancing lessons.

This revelation leads to a mix of emotions – a disruption to her sense of how well she knows her husband, a bit of envy towards his beautiful dance partner and their shared passion, and a desire to support him as he weathers the internal crisis that led him to seek solace in dancing.

At one point, she asks the investigator, “Why do we marry?” and offers her own theory in response:  we marry to bear witness to each other’s lives.

Making each other count

Her desire to bear witness reminds me of a line from a Mary Oliver poem, where she writes about how each life is “a flower, as common as a field day, and as singular.”  Where each body is “a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.”

In any loving relationship, we bear witness to each other’s courage, to the singularness, the uniqueness, the preciousness of our lives.  These things matter because they belong to someone we love.  We make each other count.

With that love comes reverence – we care about the minutia of their day as well as the larger unfolding of their human life, the myths that shape their particular story.  As the partner, the observer, the witness, we give greater meaning to these myths.

Journeying into darkness

Now, this sounds good and noble when we’re talking about the hero’s journey – something that has a ring of victory to it.  But what happens when this journey ventures into darkness, when we linger in the underworld?  Do we bear witness at those times?

Most of us express some version of the vow “to love one another in sickness and health” when we marry.  When that vow is tested – and tested to the utmost – it can fray the most fervent desire to bear witness.  Is this any more poignant than with addiction? With mental illness?

Facing our compulsions

I wish I could say that I’ve used something as harmless as dancing to cope with life’s pain.  But my coping strategies haven’t been nearly as elegant.  For most of my life, I’ve been an addict.  The fact that my chosen addiction was food – something that’s relatively socially acceptable, as long as you “control” your weight – doesn’t alter the suffering.

The shame, the self loathing, the guilt, the fear, the desperate, clinging neediness, the desire to heal and the hopelessness that keeps the addiction going – are the same.

I’ve had other, more subtle compulsions, layers underneath the food:  people pleasing, wanting to look good, controlling, and judging.  When life gets painful, uncertain, or hard, I want to run to one of these “false refuges,” as Tara Brach calls them.  It’s my own personal version of fight or flight, how I flee – into food, into control, into one obsession or another.

The pain of addiction

These patterns can cause all sorts of challenge, particularly in my relationships.  While I would say that my relationship with myself has suffered the most of all, my relationship with my spouse is a close second.

When I gorged on food, I was absent from my life.  I ignored my children’s plea for a bedtime snuggle; I avoided making love with my husband to inhale a pound of raisins.  I closed down my heart.  I got pissy and jealous and cared more about getting my fix than noticing the needs of those around me.  I was wrapped around my own pain, and yet consumed with wanting more of what never satisfied.

Intellectually, of course I knew better.  I knew that stuffing myself with 5,000 calories of food won’t solve my problems; it will not make me happy.  But intellect was not the problem.

Finding healing

On my two decade journey of healing my food addiction, I tried just about everything to change. If I’m honest, I was really searching for a “magic bullet” – the spiritual, psychological, or dietary tool that would finally control my addiction. It’s all I knew how to do.

But control wasn’t the problem, nor the solution. What finally brought peace was something quite radical.  Instead of running from my addiction, I turned towards it and listened.

I stopped making myself, my pain or my addiction wrong. In this space of acceptance, of unconditional love, my relationship to my food addiction – and to my very self – changed.

Coming to the rest of unconditional love

I faced the many parts of me that I’d stuffed inside.  I gathered up all my wounds and let them rest.  In so many words, I said to those hurting, tender parts of me, “Sweetheart, it’s okay.  Let me care for you.”

Rather than looking at my addiction as something terrible, grotesque, as something I needed to “cut out,” I looked at it as something tender that needed love.  I saw a wounded little girl, who so desperately wanted to be loved.

If you asked this wounded girl what she believed to be true, this would be her view of reality:  If I can only get my stuff together – with food, with my weight, in life and love – I will finally – finally – feel enough. I’ll finally feel worthy of love.

So I held that little girl in my arms, like you would hold any crying child, and I told her, “Sh, sh, it’s okay. I love all of you.”

Opening through love

When we feel loved, we open.  Through love – self love, the love of others – I opened.

Underneath my addiction, I found layers of unmet needs that I was trying to fill with food.  A need to belong, to be accepted, to know my own goodness.  A need to take up space, to feel okay with taking up space, a need to…. need.  What I most needed was to matter; to believe in my innate worthiness.

Nearly every person I’ve ever met who’s struggled with addiction shares these core wounds. And we can only heal our addictive patterns when we heal these beliefs about how we matter.  We’re not just trying to see the food, the drug, the hit differently.  We work to see ourselves differently

“I see you.”

This is where loving relationship can step in. One of the greatest gifts we can give each other is to say, “I see you. I see your goodness.”  To mirror their strength, essence, their suchness back to them – particularly when they’ve lost the thread on their own.

Poet Nikki Giovanni wrote about this in her poem “Love In Place,” when she described coming across a photo of herself at a much younger age.  While she sees her beauty, her youth, and her eagerness, the memory is her lover’s:  “What I mostly see is me through your eyes.”

It is a mercy to look at ourselves through the eyes of love.  Thankfully, we don’t have to do this on our own.  When we can’t do this for ourselves, friends, lovers, and our communities can do this for us.  It is a noble endeavor.

Standing in the gap

My husband stood in the gap for me.  Over and over, as I tripped and fell in my wilderness, he reminded me of my essence, my goodness.

He did this, first and foremost, by staying in our marriage, even when it wasn’t fun.  He couldn’t have said it any more clearly:  You’re worthy of my love.  I love you and I want you and I choose you.

With this mercy, I could find mercy for my own heart.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done – beyond facing the helplessness I had over food – was to stop hating myself for being an addict.  Once I stopped blaming myself (and blaming others), I had no choice but to face the pain I’d long been avoiding.  What I found was all the myriad ways I tried to avoid hurting.

It’s much easier to eat than to say I’m sorry.

It’s much easier to eat than to have a difficult conversation about what isn’t working.

It’s much easier to eat than to admit that I can’t control life, that I’m not in charge, that my smarts and good grades and beauty and even “doing all the right things” aren’t an inoculation against pain.  There are no guarantees.

It’s much easier to eat than to be this…alive.

And we rise

And this is why I now turn inwards, over and over and over again.  To feel my vulnerability is to feel my life; to live it fully, and this means living the regrets as thoroughly as I live the joys.

Opening to my vulnerability in addiction is not that different from opening to my vulnerability in relationship.  In both we can open, trust, and let go, knowing full well the risk of being hurt.  In both we can look honestly at what’s going on, to see the truth of what’s there.

No, relationships are not easy.  Opening our hearts and shedding our armor is not easy. Dropping our defenses or our desire for control is not easy – or comfortable. And yet, we can and we do and we dare.

To love this fully is to live the hero’s journey.  Along the way we will be broken – yes. And yet, our hearts open, and open, and open – through and to each other.

Thank God.

Wanting more hands on help?

  • How to break free from the broken self trance
  • Learn about the alchemy of self acceptance
  • If you’re wanting support to heal your relationship with food, with you overeating, and with your very self, I recommend my overeating program, Heal Overeating:  Untangled. In this audio based program, you’ll learn how to release the shame of overeating, care for your emotions under the food, and find the deepest rest of unconditional love.

Photo credit: AlicePopkorn / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

4 ways to soothe a reactive brain

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With self acceptance and self compassion, our reactive brains "come down" and come to rest.
With self acceptance and self compassion, our reactive brains “come down” to rest.

One of the most powerful tools for healing is self acceptance. When we understand and know ourselves deeply, we find that we can respond to our habitual tendencies from a deeper well of wisdom – and with greater mercy. We can care for ourselves as we are – and not how we wish we were.

This acceptance is a gift to ourselves:  a gentle nod that says, “This is how it is right now.” We make space for all parts of ourselves, and for all our human messiness.

In particular, I’ve found self acceptance to be very helpful in caring for ourselves when we’re caught in our lower, reptilian brain. This is the part of us that can overreact, freak out, and see everything as, “danger.” We all have this lower brain. But some of us have more reactive brains – and more reactive lower brains – than others.

Are you highly reactive?

In Susan Cain’s thoughtful book Quiet, she describes the research of Jerome Kagan. Dr. Kagan and others have found that some people have more reactive brains than others. In those who are high reactive, there’s higher activity in the amygdala (a part of the lower brain) when confronted with a new stimulus. (I would use the words “highly sensitive” interchangeably with “highly reactive” here, because both point to a highly sensitive nervous system.)

In everyday language, what this means is that if you have a highly reactive brain, your brain perceives new things as more stimulating or even more threatening than those with low reactive brains.

On the surface, this high reactivity/high sensitivity can look like:

  • anxiety
  • feeling easily frustrated
  • having challenges with change and transitions
  • imagining worst case scenarios or focusing on the negative
  • feeling easily overwhelmed or overstimulated
  • and feeling threatened by change or newness

What high reactivity can look like

I’ll give you some concrete examples of how this can play out. One of my dear children – who is high reactive (um, I don’t know where he got it!) – approaches anything new with, “No.” This could be something he really, really, really enjoys – like an art class, a playdate with a friend, gymnastics, or swimming. But if the idea doesn’t come from his brain – which feels safe to him, as he’s prepared himself for it – he reacts to it as a threat and says, “No.”

Fortunately, I understand what’s going on. So I don’t take his no personally – I know it’s just his sweet brain trying to protect him from what it perceives as danger. I know a part of him does want to try what I’m suggesting – it’s just his lower brain talking to him and saying no.

Here’s another example. A few weeks ago, my family and I were going out to see Despicable Me 2. I’m not sure how I managed this, but somehow I got the wrong theater and(!) the wrong time for our outing. If we wanted to see the movie, we’d have to wait until nearly 10 p.m. – super late for our 6 year old, and find something to do for the next 90 minutes. My brain started going into the worst case scenario – what I call “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” – about how we wouldn’t be able to see the movie after all. Exhibit A of my reactive brain talking.

But it ended up working out fine – we got a snack at Whole Foods and spent some time at REI. We ended up buying a frisbee in REI and playing frisbee in the parking lot, as the lot was empty, and felt silly and connected. What my brain imagined as a terrible night turned out to be just fine – pretty fun, in fact.

How do you relate to your high reactive brain?

So, yes, in my own life, I certainly see all of these tendencies of the highly reactive, and they can be challenging to live with! (And I’m just talking about myself here – not to mention how this may be challenging for those who live with me!)

For many, many years I despised these tendencies in myself. I felt embarrassed and ashamed about what I saw as “character flaws” that felt out of my control. But no matter what I did to change, at some point – usually when I was under chronic stress, tired, overhungry, or in pain – my reactive brain would take over. I’d be overly reactive, anxious, or overly emotional – and then ashamed of my intensity.

Healing the shame of reactivity

When I studied the work of Dr. Gordon Neufeld, I found peace. He taught me that when you have a sensitive nervous system, your brain goes into self protection mode more easily. It is more reactive, and more likely to see new things as threatening or scary. Because a highly sensitive brain processes more sensory information than a non-sensitive brain, it is more easily overwhelmed.

This was incredibly healing for me. It was this huge a ha for me – I’m not a terrible person, I’m simply highly sensitive, and highly reactive!

With this knowledge, I began befriending my dear brain. I accepted:  this is how I’m wired. Instead of fighting against my brain’s tendencies, I accepted them. With this acceptance, I found a space:  a space to work with my brain as a co-partner, as a loving friend, and not as my enemy.

When I deeply understood that my sensitivity is not something I can change, I discovered love – and forgiveness – for myself. I changed because my relationship to my sensitivity changed.

Here’s how that befriending played out.

4 steps to soothe your reactive brain:

1. Name it. When you notice yourself feeling overwhelmed, reactive or threatened, simply notice and name it. I know this may sound silly, but this is how I talk to myself:  “Oh, sweet brain. I hear you. I hear you talking to me.” I’ve found that this tender, light touch creates spaciousness, nurturing, and levity about how I relate to my reactivity.

2. Practice acceptance. Drop any judgment about how you’re feeling. Simply accept your reactivity:  this is how it is right now.

3. Validate and accept the feelings underneath your reactivity. You don’t have to stuff, transmute, ignore your feelings or make them wrong. Instead, validate them. It sounds counterintuitive, but validating your feelings – even those from the reactive brain, like fear, worry, doubt, or anxiety – soothes them.

I like to gently say to myself, “I see you anxiety. I see you fear. It’s okay.” I don’t fight them – I just let them be. This creates a space for them to soften and move.

To go back to the example of my son and the art class, I told him, “It sounds like you’re feeling scared you won’t like it, or you’re feeling nervous about drawing in front of the other kids.” I didn’t make him wrong for feeling scared or try to talk him out of it – “There’s nothing to be scared about.” In validating his feelings, he felt calmed, and ironically, empowered.

4. Practice “and.” This is where we find our realm of power, choice and action. I learned about the power of “and” from Dr. Gordon Neufeld. He calls “and” integrative functioning. This is when you’re able to take all your feelings – your fear, anxiety, doubt – and – move forward into action.

In the case of my son, I told him, “I hear that you’re feeling scared. And I also know that you’re often really excited – and glad you did it! – after trying new things. So let’s just try it and see what happens. You may end up really liking it!”

This is an example of and – honoring our reactivity and finding the deeper pull of our yes – the yes that wants to try something new. I talk more about integrative functioning in The 30 Day Lift, my compassion based audio coaching program on how to eat less sugar.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that “understanding is the foundation of love.” When we understand our reactive brains, we can view ourselves – and our behavior – with softer, gentler eyes. We stop making ourselves – our reactivity, our personality, our humanity itself – wrong. We open our hearts to this part of ourselves, and from this space, we grow:  not only our integrative functioning or our resilience, but also our capacity to love ourselves, unconditionally.

Thriving as a sensitive being

If you’re wanting more support to thrive as a sensitive being, my dear friend Fiona Moore, spiritual teacher and healer, and I are hosting a call in September. The call is free, but you’ll need to register for the call here.

Wanting more hands on help?

Photo credit: *Zephyrance – don’t wake me up. / Foter / CC BY-ND

 

 

How opening to discomfort can set us free

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As I was thinking about recording today’s podcast, I had something entirely different that I was going to share with you, and then life with all its ups and downs brought some sickness for me today. I’ve had an off and on kind of bug all week, and I was going to put off this podcast, but then I thought, ‘no, let’s just go with what is.’ So I wanted to talk today about what my sickness taught me, and that is that if I really want to have a peaceful relationship with life, I need to make room in my heart for things like sickness, things that I don’t want to have.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like being sick and it’s not so much the physical pain that I dislike about being sick. What’s harder for me, and this is just my own experience, is the emotional pain that comes up. For whatever reason, whenever I get sick, it brings up this real tender vulnerability. It’s almost like with being sick my filters are gone.

I have really, really, really vivid, intense dreams, dreams that are often really disturbing and painful. It’s like my psyche just kind of opens up, and all the unprocessed stuff in my life just kind of comes out. I feel kind of separate and alone. I feel really lonely. It’s just a really tough emotional space for me that goes beyond just the physical discomfort, whether I’ve got a sore throat or a stomachache or whatever is going on.

So in being sick this week, I’ve just kind of observed myself and noticed this emotional pain that I’ve been experiencing, and the hardest part hasn’t been the emotional pain itself, it’s been my fight against it. I had a week last week where there were a lot of real breakthroughs for me, and I felt a lot of peace in my life, and I was riding at the crest of one of those waves. It was time of a real high.

So then this week watching myself ebb and go the bottom of this wave in an experience that wasn’t quite as blissful, an experience that wasn’t a high of connection, but rather this place of vulnerability and pain. I noticed how much I was clinging and how much I really wanted to go back to how I was feeling last week.

I wanted to be doing my yoga, and I wanted to be feeling really great, and instead I’m sleeping, and I’m having these intense, vivid, painful dreams, and I’m not going to yoga, and I’m not really doing these things that make me feel really connected and alive. So it’s just not really a joyful ride right now. That’s what the true message for me in being sick was: Can I drop this fight against reality itself, and can I just accept I’m not feeling well and accept how I am feeling, and even open my heart to the vulnerability I’m feeling that I don’t want to feel?

So throughout my day I noticed that I started telling myself when I stop and pause and become aware that there’s this fight going on. I offer a couple different phrases to myself that I found particularly helpful that you might find helpful in your own life when you’re facing things that you don’t want to include inside your circle of compassion and acceptance.

So one of those phrases is from Father Thomas Keating, who is a contemplative monk, and he teaches something called centering prayer. I love how Thomas Keating puts it. It’s a little bow where you just say, “Ah, this, too.” So it’s this reminder of, well, I can accept the vulnerability and emotional pain I’m experiencing right now, and the physical discomfort, I can include that. I can say, “Ah, this, too.” I really love that, because it’s a bowing to life as it is, and it’s a gentle reminder for me that there are some things that are out of control.

I live in a human body, and it is going to get sick at times. At some point, it will die. I’m going to feel the full myriad of the human experience. I’m going to feel joy and pain. I’m going to feel happiness and sorrow. I’m going to feel all those different possibilities.

In the same way that if we look outside and we see that the weather encompasses lots of different permutations. It can be sunny. It can be cloudy. It can be snowing. It can be raining. It can be windy. It can be calm. It can be hot. It can be cold. It can be rainy, and 10,000 different kinds of rain. It can be downpouring. It can be flooding. It can be drizzling. It can be hailing. In the same way that life flows in all those different ways around us, our own lives, they all flow, as well, in many,
many different ways.

The hitch, for many of us, is that while we don’t feel like we should be able to control the weather outside, there are often a lot of “shoulds” about how we should control our own internal weather.I should control how I’m feeling, whether it’s physically, emotionally, spiritually. Or instead, if we look at life not as something to control, but something that is flowing through us, then that subtle bow and that opening to, oh, this is how it is right now, the “this, too” that Father Thomas Keating talks about.

We can bow to the fact that there is something much bigger than our small little minds or our human selves at work here. That in turn, in my experience, brings a peace, because I recognize that I’m held a bigger wave and a bigger ocean than just my small experience. So in this moment, yes, I may not be feeling well, but I am being held by something greater. It’s not my human self that’s controlling that, and so I can let go. I can let go, and I can ride the wave and not look at it as proof that I’m somehow doing life bad or wrong.

The other phrase I love to use and I notice that I’m resisting, a part of my experience, is to just do that gentle bow and name it. I love Dr. Brene Brown’s way of describing that, of that, “Oh, this, too.” In her latest book, “Daring Greatly,” she talks about when she’s feeling super vulnerable, she’ll actually just tell herself, “Vulnerability, vulnerability, vulnerability.”

I love this phrase, to just honor that, yes, we have these tender, tender human hearts. So myself, I can also just say, “Oh, vulnerability,” or I can name it, “Oh, loneliness,” “Sadness,” “Fear,” “Grief,” “Anxiety,” whatever it is, just that naming it and naming it not as an, “Oh, you’re my enemy, go away,” but just naming it with a real compassionate, loving touch, like,
“Oh, there you are fear. Oh, I see you. I see you.” So vulnerability, vulnerability, yes.

Again what this does, when we connect with whatever it is we’re experiencing in this moment, rather than feeling separate and alone in our pain or our discomfort, we find that we can rest in our greater connectedness, to know that every human being feels vulnerable. Everyone knows what it feels like to feel lonely. Everyone knows what it feels like to be in pain. Everyone knows what it feels to feel sorrow.

So rather than becoming something that we feel isolated or separate, we find that, no, this human connectedness is the soil we all share, so rather than feeling alone in our pain and our discomfort, we come home. We come home, and we rest in this greater belonging.

Photo credit: …-Wink-… / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

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