Growing Human(kind)ness by Karly Randolph Pitman

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The alchemy of self acceptance – how acceptance makes change possible

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I often talk about how you can change your relationship with sugar through loving relationship itself:  kindness, compassion, connection, and acceptance. Many people email or ask me, “But how? How does being accepting or kind to myself help me change how I eat?”

It’s a great question! In this post, I’m going to focus on self acceptance, and how self acceptance fuels growth, healing and change.

What acceptance isn’t

When I first learned about “acceptance,” I felt skeptical and resistant. I thought acceptance meant agreement – as in, “I agree with this and I’m okay with it.” So how could I accept/find agreement with things like bingeing, gorging on sugar, overeating, judging myself and more – habits that were obviously leading to tremendous suffering in my life? And if I did accept them as “okay,” then wouldn’t accepting these habits keep me further entrenched in them? Wouldn’t it be a form of resignation – or permission?

After many years of studying and practicing acceptance, I’ve come to see that acceptance isn’t any of these things. Likewise, it’s not a value judgment of good (or bad.)

What acceptance is

Acceptance is merely an acknowledgment of what is – of what you’re experiencing in any given moment.

Let’s make this tangible. Imagine that you find yourself craving food – or following that craving and overeating. In that moment, what are you experiencing? What are the feelings, emotions, needs and sensations that are arising in your body?

Perhaps you’re feeling angry, or sad, or afraid. Perhaps you’re believing things like, “I’m powerless,” “I’m a flawed mess,” or “I should’ve been in more control.” Perhaps you’re telling yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling/reacting/thinking this way.

How acceptance stops the cycle of self punishment

These are all subtle forms of blame and judgment. When you tell yourself I shouldn’t be XYZ, you’re not allowing the truth of your experience to be – which is that you are craving food; that you are feeling angry, sad or afraid. This judgment tends to spiral, proliferate and grow.

Acceptance is what stops the cycle. It’s the doorway out.

Rather than judging ourselves for what’s going on inside, or telling ourselves we shouldn’t be feeling this or wanting that, acceptance is a gentle nod of, “Yes, this is how it is for me right now.” It’s making space for all our feelings, all our emotions, all our longings and needs, all our experiences – for the full width and breadth of the human experience.

“I consent.”

Acceptance is a powerful form of surrender:  an opening to what is and not what we wish were true. To quote The Beatles, acceptance is “letting it be.” Father Thomas Keating describes acceptance as saying, “I consent” or “This, too.” Yes to this, and yes to this, and yes to this….

Whew – it’s radical, isn’t it? It’s a dying to self – dying to all the ways our minds say “But it should be _____!” … dying to all the ways our minds say that we, life or others should be different. (Yes, this can feel like annihilation!)

It can take a while to get to acceptance – it took me a decade of fighting to surrender. At first, all I could see with acceptance was loss – the loss of what I wanted, imagined, or wished were different. I didn’t realize that, yes, while there’s loss in acceptance – the loss of the way we think things should be – there’s also a tremendous gain:  the freedom to feel at peace with what is.

When we practice acceptance, a few things happen:

1. Space opens up. When the heart and mind feel safe – not judged or shamed – they can open. Rather than moving into self protection and shutting down from self judgment, there’s space for curiousity and openness. We can slow down and gently inquire, “What’s really going on here?”

This soft touch of curiosity invites opening:  let’s see what’s here. We develop an understanding for why we’re overeating, or why we’re lashing out at a loved one, or why we’re judging our sadness….

2. We unhook from the idea that we’re a “flawed, bad self.”

Rather than trying so hard to defend ourselves so we look good – or scrambling to hide our “flaws” – we relax into our own imperfection. Our self esteem isn’t dependent on being the best or on being “good” all the time. Ah, the pressure to be perfect softens!

We can look at the truth of our experience and accept it without falling to pieces and thinking we’re a flawed mess. There’s room for the entire width and breadth of our human experience – the “good,” the “bad” and the “ugly.”

Likewise, our identity isn’t caught up with trying to be a “good self who doesn’t make any mistakes.” (Can you feel the tight, cramped ouch of trying to be that person?) Because we accept all our many “selves” and aren’t so identified with them, changing no longer feels like a rejection of the self. We can change and find ways of acting that better meet our needs.

3. We forgive ourselves and others, finding self compassion.

Acceptance naturally leads to compassion – an understanding of our interdependence, and the 10,000 factors that influence our day to day experience, emotions, thoughts and beliefs. Rather than shaming or judging ourselves for our conditioning – those factors that have shaped our personality and development – we move to care for these hurt parts with wise, appropriate action.

And rather than shaming or judging others for the conditioning that shaped their personality – and therefore ours –  we find more levity and space to see that they, too, are doing the best they can.

3. We don’t make ourselves wrong for feeling however we’re feeling. There is tremendous freedom in this. On a physical level, acceptance feels like a giant softening. For me, I experience this softening in my belly, jaw, and neck/shoulders, as these are the places where I hold onto the tension of “This shouldn’t be this way.”

As this tension leaves the body, you may feel a soft, relaxed warmth in the belly – similar to the positive, warm sensations that you may feel after sex/orgasm, while nursing a baby, or during a time of loving, positive connection. (In writing these examples, I’m wondering if acceptance releases endorphins or some of the feel good hormones, like oxytocin (the love hormone), as sex and breastfeeding can.) In a word, it feels really, really good!

4. New options open up. As you move out of this painful, tight, cramped space of judgment – where it’s hard to make any wise decision, as you’re feeling too hooked – and you move into this warm, relaxed field of acceptance, you move into possibility. Suddenly, things don’t feel so rigid, tight or impossible.

So rather than doing the same thing over and over – and getting stuck in the same ruts – you realize there are 10,000 ways to respond….and lo and behold, you do something different.

You put the fork down, you question the impulse for the gallon of ice cream, you leave the room when you would’ve fueled the argument. You pause. You self soothe your anxiety rather than acting on it. You respond, rather than react.

You stop walking into the same pothole. You adapt. You change. You grow. You do one thing different.

You realize that the story of, “I can’t change,” is not true. Baby step by baby step, you grow.

 

 

 

The healing power of loving your overeating self

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What if your “overeating self” had wisdom to share?

In this month and week of love, I’ve been thinking about unconditional love, and what it would mean to love every part of ourselves – including those parts that we most dislike. Yes, this includes the overeating, bingeing, or sugar addicted self.

If you’re anything like me, loving these messy, messy parts may be some of the most healing – and challenging work – that we do. Because loving the parts of us that we think are bad, wrong, or “shouldn’t” be there goes against all human nature. And because of this, it is a powerful act of forgiveness, mercy, and love.

So this Valentine’s Day, this is the question I offer to you:  What would it mean to open your heart to all of you – including your overeating self? I know this sounds painful, but there’s a hidden promise. The mystery of this journey is that in forgiving, loving and understanding your overeating self – the parts of you that feel broken – you find, paradoxically, wholeness.

For more on the how of this, enjoy this excerpt from the new Heal Overeating:  Untangled workbook on loving the overeating self.

The deepest pain of overeating

The deepest pain and suffering is not your eating habits or even your body itself. The deepest pain is the mental anguish – the shame, regret, and anxiety – you feel about how you eat and what you look like. It’s what your body, the food, or your eating habits represent that causes the pain. I love how Irish poet and writer John O’’ Donohue says this: “ “Our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless.””

And yet this is hard to see. We look at our bodies – and if they’’re not the weight we want them to be – we really, truly think they are the problem. Same with habits like overeating – especially if it’’s causing some havoc in our lives. So we focus on eradicating what we believe to be the “source” of our suffering – our eating habits or the body itself. We try to lose weight, change how we eat, and do better. But it doesn’’t work, because the source of suffering is not in the food or the body.

The source of suffering is our minds. We suffer because of how we judge ourselves.

This self attack is a form of war. When I was overeating, I looked at my current, overeating, overweight self as “bad,” and the future me –- the me who finally had all her stuff together in food, weight, and life –- as “good.” I was always trying to move from bad to good, but I never “arrived.” All this did was exhaust me from trying.

I’’d created a battle inside, a giant split, where my good self was fighting against my bad self. My energy was consumed by it. Worse, I’’d cut myself off from love, from the very source of healing itself.

The wisdom of your overeating self

By calling my overeating, bingeing, bulimic, and sugar addicted self wrong, I was telling myself that “who I am can’t be trusted.” I didn’t trust the part of me that wanted to overeat.

But here’’s where it gets really interesting:  this part of me, far from being untrustable, had a lot of wisdom – yes, wisdom. I kept trying to shut this wisdom up by “shutting up” my overeating. But it was like trying to dam a river. This deeper, wiser part of me would not be silenced. Thank God.

When I got quiet and asked my overeating self, “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” this is what she told me:

  • I feel lonely and disconnected. I want friends who know how to listen.
  • I want to play.
  •  I need rest. Why do you push me so hard?
  • Stop trying to make me perfect.
  • Stop minimizing my feelings. Stop making me wrong for feeling what I’m feeling.
  •  I want to say no. If you don’t let me say no with my voice, I’ll say no with a candy bar. I’ll say no by eating a truckload of @*($!^!P#* candy bars.
  • You will never meet everyone’s approval. Stop trying.
  • You will never make people who don’t like you, like you. Stop trying.
  • You will never please the hypercritical people in your life. Stop trying.
  • Feed me when I’m hungry. Please stop trying to eat like a bird. You’re not one. Embrace my appetite. I have a hearty one.
  • It is not my job to feel other people’s feelings for them.
  • I want to love what I love. I want to be my own person.

She’’s not my enemy, she’’s my ally. She points out all my unmet needs, all the ways I don’’t validate my basic needs and feelings and then use food to care for the pain of my void. (And for this, my overeating self plays the “bad guy” in my life, the part of me I’’ve disliked the most…. Hmmm.)

Now I invite you to try this exercise for yourself. If your overeating self had a voice, what would they say?

Wanting more hands on help?

If this article speaks to you, you may be interested in the Heal Overeating: Untangled program, of which it’s a part. Untangled includes a 200 page workbook and 12 audio sessions to help you create a loving, compassionate relationship with yourself so you can softly heal the emotional roots of overeating and gently lose weight.

When being kind to yourself feels like giving up

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I receive a lot of very tender, precious emails from women that all say some version of the same thing – Help! Now that I’m being kinder to myself I’m feeling really *really* unmotivated to:

  • go to the gym
  • to lose the extra weight
  • to set any boundary on food

Most women share that they feel frightened by their lack of motivation. They panic and wonder – should I just go back to forcing myself to just “do it?” Does this kindness thing even work?!?! They worry that the only thing that was keeping them motivated was their harsh inner talk and perfectionism.

First, I want to acknowledge this very vulnerable space. When you seem to be going “backwards” – like not caring, gaining weight, anything goes – it’s easy to feel frightened. It’s easy to want to give up and to go back to familiar patterns, like perfectionism.

I want to be honest with you – if you take an inside out approach to healing – one focused on relationship and healing the roots of the problem, and not just going for the quick fix (healing the symptoms) – it may take longer. It may look messier. It may appear that you’re going backwards. (You’re not and it’s absolutely worth it – while that can be a whole post in itself, I’ll just say that healing the symptoms is what creates real, lasting change. I’ll also say that any change done at the expense of our inner worth and dignity – like the whip – creates suffering.)

When you shift out of old habits and patterns, there’s a bit of lag time where it feels very, very messy – think lots of awkward growth! During this time, you’re not only unlearning old habits but you’re also learning new ones. You feel all over the place. Unmoored. You swing from one extreme to the other – from rigid rules and a whip to “who cares” and “anything goes.”

Dear one, if this scenario describes you, let me reassure you that this is very very normal. In fact, in my experience, everyone goes through it. I would also posit that it’s how we learn. (In my experience, we learn by doing and practicing.)

Your heart and mind is seeking a new level of homeostasis. If we spent a long time at one end of the spectrum – with a lot of self punishment, rigidity and high expectations – then we may veer to the other extreme – no expectations and anything goes – in our attempt to create balance. (True kindness is not anything goes; is not giving up.)

We are living, breathing, dynamic beings. We live our way into balance, and the back and forth is necessary. It’s not proof that there’s anything wrong. It’s proof that you’re learning. The only way you can learn balance is to experiment and to live it. You learn – oh, if I’m too rigid and goal focused and too hard on myself, I feel terrible, no matter how thin I am or what I’m eating. And if I veer too far to the other extreme and let myself do whatever I want I feel all over the place, unmoored, and sick from overindulgence.

Eventually, you’ll find your way to the center – your center – a balance that feels good to you. You find your way by being curious, listening to yourself, laughing at yourself (not taking it too seriously) and by being compassionate with yourself. These tools create the safety you need to grow. Like a child who relies on a parent to be there for them if they fall when they’re learning to walk, your kindness, love and compassion creates the safety you need to try, mess up and try again.

As you walk this path of healing from the inside out, it may help to reflect on the different aspects – and qualities – of love. When we usually think of love, we think about the soft and sweet versions, and not its power or strength. This reminds me of a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. –

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Love can be fierce, like a mother’s protective love, it can be firm, like a sword, it can be authoritative and strong, setting boundaries. It can be tender and soft and sweet. It can be passionate and fiery and intense. Love has many flavors.

You want to include all these aspects of love in your life – a mix that is large enough for every flavor. In the same way that a loving parent can express love in 40 different ways with a beloved child – saying no, offering a hug, wrestling or playing rough, drying tears, fixing a meal, reading a story, and even forcefully grabbing a shoulder when they get to close to the street – you will express your love for yourself in a multitude of forms, shapes and sizes.

Some of these may not look like “love” because there’s structure, discipline, or firmness involved. And yet those too are love.

As you let this idea sink in, I’d like to offer a few gentle suggestions:

  • Trust the process. Rilke says not to look for answers but to live our way into them. I’ve found this to be true in my experience, too. Trust yourself to find the balance that works for you. It’s a process and a practice, something to live, not something to arrive at.
  • Tap into your values. Recognize that something will arise to take the place of fear. When we’re using a whip, self judgment or criticism to motivate ourselves, we’re using fear as our motivation for change. When we soften these approaches and rely instead on kindness as our motivation, we’re tapping into love. This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever feel afraid or anxious if you practice love. On the contrary, in my experience, anything worth doing brings some nervousness or fear. It does mean that your primary reason for doing something good for yourself – whether it’s eating regular meals or exercising – will arise from somewhere deeper, from those aspects of love that are most important to you. This is the kind of motivation that produces results, because it is bone, soul deep.
  • Structure is your friend. When we move away from punishment, we start to think that all goals, all structure, and all discipline is “bad.” We need to balance structure and discipline (what I call loving boundaries) with kindness and self compassion.
  • Add to. You “add to” to soften – it’s not about eliminating something all together. If you’ve historically been too harsh on yourself, you add in compassion to soften it. You still might be more of a type A person, but your drive will be tempered by your compassion and much more balanced – less prone to cause you suffering.

I invite you to play with this idea this week. Here are 3 ideas:

1.  This week, jot down the different ways you love yourself in a journal– you may love yourself with firm boundaries when you want to stay up late and watch your favorite TV show, but your wise self says, “No, it’s time for bed. I need sleep.” You may love yourself with compassion when you make a mistake. You may love yourself by doing something really nice for yourself. Just observe the different ways of showing love.

2. Here’s where it gets really juicy – which forms of love are more comfortable for you?

Which are less comfortable? Which do you resist or even dislike? In my experience, when we’re aversive or uncomfortable with certain forms of love, it’s often because it’s connected to a past wound. So we protect ourselves by relegating that behavior/way of being into the trash heap, something we’ll never do to ourselves. We throw the baby out with the bath water, and veer to the other end of the spectrum….

For example, if you grew up in a very strict house with an excess of discipline and control, you may feel aversive towards any structure – to you it’s like going to the dark side, and has nothing to do with love. So for you, healing may mean integrating some loving structure into your life – healing this belief that says, “All structure causes harm.” (By the way, I see this example over and over in women who deal with binge or overeating…..) We heal these old wounds and tapes so that we can move forward and integrate positive structure into our lives – structure that serves rather than hurts us – without all the attached baggage of, “But it’s so wrong!” It’s how we practice unconditional love – loving all parts of life, all parts of ourselves, all our needs, and all our polarity (our opposing needs or parts.)

3. Start a ritual – a way of expressing love.

One way to turn this into concrete action is to set up rituals. Create a ritual around doing something kind for your body. I do a ritual at the end of yoga class where I bow to myself, kiss my palms and wish myself peace. It’s a gentle reminder to practice kindness towards my physical self – and a reminder that the purpose of my exercise is to care for (and enjoy!) my body, not punish it with a regimen that’s too hard or shaming myself because I lost my balance in tree pose. It brings me back to a place of rest – a warmth in my heart and belly, and a deep relaxation in my heart – every time.

As I close this article, I’m super curious about your experience – which forms of love do or don’t feel like love to you?

Needing some hands-on help?

If you’d like to read more about this topic, try these articles:

If this is an area of challenge for you, I recommend my overeating program, Heal Overeating:  Untangled. This 12 session audio program offers tools to balance structure with softness. You’ll learn how to create loving “food rules,” how to set loving limits, and how to soften self criticism, perfectionism, and all or nothing thinking.

I also work 1 on 1 with a limited number of people as a coach. Learn more here.

Being kind to yourself when negative feelings arise

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I don’t have PMS today. I swear. But everything is rubbing me the wrong way – that irky combination of feeling overstimulated/stressed/tense and exhausted at the same time, like I want to sleep all day and also scream at the sky! In our house, we call this feeling “inside out.”

These feelings are. not. comfortable. If I said I want to make them go away, that would be an understatement.

But I’ve traveled long enough on this road to appreciate that bargaining with my feelings will not make me feel better. I have to feel them. I especially have to feel them if I don’t want to eat them. Even more than that, I don’t want to keep them stuffed in my body, as that hurt, hurt, hurts. I want to take good care of myself.

So that’s where I’m at today:  in a mood that isn’t pleasant – say, the equivalent of being in a blizzard – and wishing for a mood that felt more like San Diego – 70 degrees and sunny.

I know it’s not realistic to think that life is always 70 degrees and sunny, even though the child in me wants to believe that dream state is possible. So this feels like an opportunity to surrender.

How can I surrender to how I’m feeling – irritable and tired – and allow it? How do I show kindness to my hurt parts rather than try and control, suppress, or push them away?

In my case, I went out to my rocking chair on my back porch, wrapped myself in a blanket, and rocked myself back and forth, softening my resistance to my feelings with each rock. “Okay, bitchiness, okay fatigue, okay stressed out and overwhelmed, I see you. It’s okay. You’re allowed to be here.”

By allowing, I felt the tension – that feeling of fighting against myself – ease. I cried. I raged. I let out all my frustration while snot dripped down my face. I said to myself, “Yeah, some things really suck right now.” I put my hand on my heart and said, “I care. I care about this suffering.”

Slowly, slowly, slowly I felt better. I got in touch with some deeper feelings under my frustration – in this case, grief. (I find grief under most feelings.) I realized that several things that had hurt my feelings this week were coming up to be processed, and I let myself cry my tears.

Now it’s several hours later. As I sit and write this post I’m able to see that my feelings have shifted. I still feel tired. I still have some problems to work through. But I don’t feel angry anymore. The frustration has softened.

I feel better because I allowed my feelings. I accepted them. I cared for them with kindness. I even appreciated them – they made perfect sense and had some important messages for me! (“Set boundaries. Get more rest. Get more help,” was one of them.)

I feel better because I opened my heart to all of me.

It’s easy to love ourselves when we feel happy, vibrant, joyful, playful, content, or grateful. But loving ourselves when we feel bitchy and frustrated and inside out? That’s not so easy. At least not for me.

And yet I’m learning that this is where the manna lies. If this healing journey is about reparenting ourselves – relating kindly to all our tender humanity – our bodies, our needs, feelings, moods, hurts and more – then I heal something deep inside whenever I love the bitchy, frustrated, inside out part of me. I allow that part of me to feel safe, to express herself, to feel heard, to even feel appreciated.

And when I allow that part of me to feel heard, a powerful paradox occurs:  she quiets down. She feels soothed. She moves into action – this is what I need from you. (In my case, stronger boundaries and more rest.)

She empowers me to take good, good care of myself. Just writing that makes me fall in love with my frustrated, bitchy self. I get it! You’re trying to help me.

I feel that it’s important to talk about negative feelings – especially in a culture that, in my view, overly focuses on the positive. There’s a line of thought that says:

1. If you focus on anything negative, you’ll attract more of it.

2. Be positive. All the time.

3. Focus on the good.

I appreciate the intentions behind these ideas. I don’t think it’s healthy to get stuck in negative feelings, or any feeling for that matter. (They’re meant to move.) I sure don’t want to remain stuck in anger, bitterness, or despair. And I agree that gratitude is a powerful practice.

But at the same time, I think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. We’ve become so focused on the positive that we attack the negative, including anything “negative” within ourselves. We may feel terribly guilty when we feel anything less then, well 70 degrees and sunny.

Nature has room for all seasons; for all kinds of weather. This gives me hope that there is also room in our hearts for all our weather, for all our feelings. This includes the “negative” ones.

I invite you to try this out for yourself. The next time you’re feeling inside out, don’t fight it. Don’t try to positive talk yourself into feeling different. Don’t perk yourself up with platitudes.

Just feel the inside out feelings. Listen to what they say. Care for them. Allow them to be there. Cry your tears. Feel all your feelings.

Karla McClaren encourages us to practice “conscious complaining” – ritualizing a time when we can consciously vent our frustrations. Linda Popov calls this “emptying our cup.” Imagine a child coming home from school after a very, very bad day. That child doesn’t really want a cookie, or a video game, or someone telling him, “Cheer up.” That precious child wants to empty his cup, to let it all out into kind, loving, open hands.

He needs someone to bear witness.

Bearing witness to our frustration doesn’t attract more frustration. In my experience, it does the very opposite. It’s how we move through our feelings and come to peace. It’s how we embody the beauty of the serenity prayer – grieving what we can’t change and then drying our tears, dusting off our palms, and changing what we can.

Needing some hands-on help?

  • To learn more about befriending emotions, try my overeating program, Heal Overeating:  Untangled, 12 audio sessions to create emotional healing from food.

If you’d like to read more about befriending/allowing our feelings, you may enjoy these posts:

 

 

How softening self judgment soothes overeating

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I recently shared my theory that refuge – a deep rooted feeling of belonging, safety and attachment – is what creates the foundation for growth, maturity, and change with food.

I heard from so many tender men and women who resonated with that theory – and who wondered, Yes, but how?? How do I create that secure attachment? They shared how vulnerable and terrifying it feels to reach out to others when they’re hurting. They feel caught – we need loving interdependence to feel fully alive, and yet that very interdependence brings the risk of being hurt. They wonder, “Will I be judged? Loved? Accepted? Will I be seen for who I am?”

They’re speaking the language of vulnerability. And they’re also speaking the language of shame. They feel ashamed, embarrassed by their pain – which is one reason why they feel vulnerable in sharing it with others.. They feel ashamed that they hurt, as if the pain is their fault; as if the pain is something they should be able to control or eliminate. Something they “should” handle better. They’re in pain and they think it’s all their fault. They think they’re responsible for it. They feel guilty for hurting. They apologize over and over.

They hide. Isolate. They close themselves off from their fellow human beings. If they do reach out to others, it’s often from a place of embarrassment, of deep apology – as if they’re a giant nuisance for hurting in the first place.

It’s the shame of needing. In so many words, this is what they’re saying:  I feel ashamed because I’m in pain and I’m needing human closeness and contact.

I find this so poignant and heartbreaking; how we take our pain as a sign that there’s something wrong with us and, therefore, as something we need to minimize, edit, suppress, eliminate, or hide. And so we close the door, literally and metaphorically, lest anyone see inside our hearts (or see the extra pounds on our bodies) and see how much we’re hurting. In her book Broken Open, Elizabeth Lesser put it this way:

One of the greatest enigmas of human behavior is the way we isolate ourselves from each other. In our misguided perception of separation we assume that others are not sharing a similar experience of life. We imagine that we are unique in our eccentricities or failures or longings. And so we try to appear as happy and consistent as we think others are, and we feel shame when we stumble and fall. When difficulties come our way, we don’t readily seek out help and compassion because we think others might not understand, or they would judge us harshly, or take advantage of our weakness. And so we hide out, and we miss out.

Oh, beloved, I gently invite you to consider two things:

1. Your need for human contact and closeness – especially when you’re in pain! – is normal. Natural. I look at it this way – pain plus powerlessness (a feeling of helplessness, despair, feeling alone, like no one’s there to help) equals panic. (I can’t bear this!) On a very simple level, “I can’t bear this” then becomes “I need to fight, flee, feed, freeze to care for myself.” We become very primitive, like a wounded animal. We are meant to bear pain in connection – to each other, to life, to our own hearts, to the Divine – not in isolation.

This is the attachment variable I wrote about here.

2. It’s not your fault that you’re hurting. Because pain hurts, we naturally resist it and judge it. We think pain = bad, so pain = punishment. We can even twist this into a spiritual/psychological test, as in, “If I’m more recovered/more enlightened/more evolved I won’t hurt so much.” So if we’re hurting, we see our pain as a judgment – as a sign of our lack of health, evolvement, or wholeness. This is spiritual shame and is incredibly wounding! It’s also punishment based thinking – the idea that only the wicked are punished; the faultless remain untouched; so if I’m hurting, that must put me in the wicked camp…..

I don’t believe our pain is a sign of judgment. It’s a sign of our humanity. We will hurt in this life. There’s no way around it. It’s not a sign of wrongness or badness. It just is. There is incredible freedom to be found in not taking our pain personally. There is incredible freedom to be found in being compassionate towards our pain rather than judging it.

Last year I read a beautiful book, Tattoos on the Heart, a collection of stories by Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works with gang members in L.A. While I loved the book – it’s one of my favorites, and I read a lot! – one story in particular stuck with me. He was speaking about the poverty in his borough, and said (I’m paraphrasing here), “Rather than judge how the poor carry their burdens, perhaps we should show compassion for what they carry.”

I found his words profound – and not just for those in poverty. When I read this, I paused and said to myself, “perhaps I should show compassion for what I’ve carried rather than judge how I carry it.” Just saying this out loud brings tears to my eyes.

This is a powerful act – dropping our judgment of our pain. That’s because when we drop the judgment, we also drop the shame. We respond to our hurt honestly – with the connection and closeness we need – rather than shaming ourselves for needing it in the first place. We reach out and receive the salve of other human beings, of the Divine, of our own hearts, when we’re hurting. We stop running and hiding and receive love.

This process starts internally, with ourselves. In my experience, one of the most healing things we can do for ourselves is to feel our pain. To truly feel it, to open to it, and to cry our tears. To bear witness to that which aches in us. I know this feels counterintuitive – Isn’t there an easier way?

While I wish I had an answer that feels good and quick and easy, my honest, heartfelt answer; the answer I’ve found from my own experience is yes, we need to grieve. To cry our tears, to reach the wall of futility – to feel and accept all the things we wish were different; all the things we can not change.

I think everything in us wants to be seen, felt, heard, acknowledged. I think of our pain as small children, very young parts of us that demand an audience. And I do mean demand. In my own life, I’ve humbly seen how I will (usually unconsciously) continue hurtful behaviors – towards myself and/or others – and perpetuate my pain until I turn towards it, grieve it, feel it, and acknowledge it.

I grieve by walking and crying. I feel safe outside, I feel held by nature, and there’s something about the gentle rhythm of walking that allows my emotions to flow. I walk, put my hand on my heart and feel my suffering. Some of the most profound moments I’ve experienced in my life – dare I call them mystical? – are during these walks and cries. I don’t think this is because of the grief itself, but because I am fully present. For once, I’m not running from my pain. I’m feeling. All of it. And in being fully present, I no longer feel detached, separate, small, judged for my pain. I feel fully alive, connected, held, attached.

Grieving is the doorway to maturity, acceptance, growth, healing, forgiveness, letting go, and yes, even attachment. It is a path to peace. It’s how we move forward and adapt. (I’ve long thought about writing a book titled something like, The Hidden Power of Grief, because I feel grief is unacknowledged, feared, undervalued, misunderstood and even despised by our culture. I can’t tell you how many times throughout my daily life I pick up on the subtle message of “Stop crying,” whether it’s directed towards a child or an adult; whether it’s in our spiritual communities, our families, our schools, or our workplaces. If only we had a deeper understanding that grief serves an important purpose!)

We need to grieve. We need to befriend our pain, to bear witness. We need to reach out and connect when we’re hurting. These things are our life blood, the water that nourishes our souls.

As we turn towards our pain in care, as we drop the judgment of our suffering, it also opens the doorway to each other. Instead of feeling like our pain is all about me and what I’ve done, it becomes a bridge to our shared common humanity – where all beings have their 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Instead of feeling alone, we realize, “We’re all in this together.” We feel – live – experience – the truth of Mother Theresa’s words about how “we belong to each other.”

We feel our belonging and we come home.

I will not make war against my own heart

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Do you break your own heart?

On a daily basis, I pause, put my hand on my heart and whisper to myself, “I will not make war against my own heart.”

I have so many opportunities to practice. Every day, I make mistakes. Every day, I want to jump on myself when I make those mistakes. Every day, I have the opportunity to judge – to blame myself; to should all over myself; to make myself wrong – or to let go. To release my judgments, to release my self condemnation, to release my beliefs of “It’s all my fault.”

This is an act of courage for me, for it goes against every ingrained habit I have of beating myself up. It is an opening, an embracing of all of life; an embracing of “what is,” an embracing of all of me. It is unconditional love.

It is not easy.

The mind loves to judge. To label. To should all over us – “You should, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have.”

Our mind loves to go after perfection – and that includes self perfection – because it is trying to get us to a place where we feel like we’re enough. We’ve been taught to believe that this is the key to inner peace and happiness. So if only we are spiritual enough, thin enough, healthy enough, eating disorder free enough, wealthy enough, organized enough, together enough, happy enough, popular enough, pretty enough, fit enough, whole enough….then, then we will have the Holy Grail.

It is false hope. As Danna Faulds writes, “perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.”

To drop perfectionism, to stop the war, we let go. We practice unconditional love – loving ourselves as is. It is a declaration of self – I am enough. Right now. Yes, warts and all. It’s not unconditional love if it’s conditional.

More than healing lifelong eating disorders, this has been my path. Loving myself unconditionally.

For years, I hated, blamed, whipped, chastized, shamed or hid those tender parts of me that don’t fit my mold of perfect. It’s quite a list… a continual up and down weight, the fact that I’ve cared so damn much about that weight, a tendency to get stressed out and panic, irritability with loved ones, people pleasing, perfectionism itself, self doubt, judging others, jealousy; the way I hide and separate myself from others as a form of self protection…. I could go on.

Of course, I’ve most loathed those parts of me that have felt dark and troubled – the parts of me that suffer from depression, anxiety, high sensitivity, eating disorders, ADD…. the parts that make me feel like I don’t belong on planet Earth because I’m often trying to keep my head above water when others seem to be swimming laps around me.

And yet something deeper, something wiser whispers, “Enough.” It is this voice, my true Nature – home – that calls to me.

Here is what it says:

Love your tender humanity. Love your imperfection. Love your tender sensitive soul. No more. No more will I hate you. No more will I blame you.

Beloved, beloved, I will care for you. I will forgive, over and over. I will hold you tenderly. I will love you.

In this space, I can hold loosely onto that list of “faults.” I can care for it, I can honor it, I can revere it. (I’m not talking about denial.) And I can simultaneously detach a bit. It’s not me. It’s not who I am. Why should I feel ashamed for being human? For being imperfect? For needing love and forgiveness and acceptance just like everyone else.

I breathe and let go. I exhale. I feel the space. I come home.

The heart is big enough for all of us.

Bapuji said that each time “we judge ourselves we break our own hearts.” Oh, beloved, join me in this holy refrain – I will break my heart no longer. When the voice of self judgment arises, forgive it. Forgive everything. Stop the war.

Photo credit: aussiegall / Foter.com / CC BY

 

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