If you struggle with overeating – or any other habit that brings up shame – you may feel a strong desire to ‘fix it’ as soon as possible.
The shame of our compulsions can create a lot of anxiety. This anxiety can lead to a lot of internal drivenness that makes us want to hurry or push the healing process.
This anxiety can be heightened if you’re a meditation teacher, therapist, or minister yourself – a teacher or helping professional who thinks, ‘I should know better.’
And if you feel like you’ve just had it with the weight gain and the pain of overeating, the underlying frustration can also create a lot of urgency and drive to be in a different place.
I get it – this makes a lot of sense. I think I fought against and tried to rush and control my healing most of my adult life.
If there’s one takeaway that I hope you receive from our work here at Growing Humankindness, it’s this: that you surrender to the healing journey, to the healing process that’s already holding and unfolding within you.
This includes surrendering to the time it takes to heal.
I appreciate that this is counter intuitive, and it means sitting with a lot of discomfort and anxiety about the anxiety.
But healing takes gentleness, patience, and time.
The more we can face and accept the truth of where we are – rather than the place where we wish we were – the easier our journey becomes. And the more we accept that healing has her own wisdom and pacing that can’t be rushed or forced, then the more we become the ally to this healing process rather than its adversary.
We trust more and worry less.
I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves that surrender is not capitulation. It’s not giving up, subservience, or falling into collapse.
In many ways, it’s aligning ourselves with true power and flow, not against it.
That’s because an acceptance of, ‘this is the stage I’m at right now, this is where I am,’ helps us rest and trust in the healing process. This changes the tenor and tone of the relationship that we have to it.
It also changes how we ‘see.’ If we’re trying to rush or force our healing, we misunderstand and miss the gifts that are already here, that are being born in this exact moment, in the very ground underneath our feet.
As Rumi says, “Keep your eye on the bandaged place. It’s where the light gets in.” For this is where the gift is, where she’s being born.
Acceptance also changes the way we relate to our overeating, our vulnerability, and our pain itself. We ‘come alongside ourselves,’ as my mentor Dr. Neufeld puts it, with humility and love, with vulnerability and courage, as ally and support, rather than coming ‘at ourselves’ as the judge, frightened young one, or frustrated seeker.
Surrendering to your journey is what softens the heart so you are seated as the wise steward, the midwife to your healing, rather than feeling caught in criticism, shame, contempt, or demands.
Each moment of the journey, rather than something to be endured or gotten over with as quickly as possible, becomes something precious, a place of kinship, re-membering, and re-connection. The obstacle becomes the place of birth, the way.
I invite you to bow your head and heart to what is being asked of you in facing your relationship with food, for it is for you, arising from love – from a desire to help you – and not something that is against or being done to you.
There is so much mercy, here, in your relationship with food, right where you stand, and so much understanding for the many threads that wove it into being. And there is also much mercy in the unraveling of these threads, and their reweaving.
As my mentor Mark Silver, a Sufi teacher and business coach, has taught me, “Is love available, even here? Where is the love, right here in this moment?”