On Being Disconnected to Your Body

Here’s a question for you:  On a scale of 1 – 10, with 1 being feeling totally disconnected from your body, perhaps standing outside of it or floating on the ceiling, and 10 being totally present and inhabiting your body 100%, where are you?

Most people I’ve talked to are 5 or below.  

Here’s the thing:  If you’re not totally inhabiting and connected to your body, can you work with it?  Can you collaborate with it to both know what it desires and what it’s going to take to get there?  Not really.

You might ask – “Why does this matter”?  Besides being a source of incredible sensual pleasure – enjoying the rays of the sun, the sounds of beautiful music, and of course the gentle touch of another – your body can be a source of valuable information.  

To begin with, it can tell you exactly what to eat and/or drink what kind of movement it would like as well as who it would like to have sex with.  Many people fail with their diet and exercise programs because they are imposing a program on their bodies, rather than asking the body what would work for it.  Also, the more you are in tune with your body, the happier and more vibrant it is, and the more it doesn’t have to use pain to get your attention.

Your body is also an excellent source of information about the energies of people, places and things.  Have you ever walked in to a room and had your body contract or try to leave?  Or have you ever had your body give you a reaction to a person you just met?  These are warning signs that people who are disconnected from their bodies fail to receive.

So, how do you begin to access all of this information?

One thing you can do is to ask your body and/or pay attention to how your body would like to move.  Does it like to walk or dance or bicycle or perhaps do yoga?  One reason why so many exercise programs fail, is that people rely on “experts” rather than listening to their bodies.  Can you imagine some random “expert” picking your major in college for you?  That’s what you do when you impose “exercise” on your body.

I invite you to my upcoming 6 week Tele-Series:  Eating to Live Or Living to Eat? beginning July 14th.  To find out more and register click here.

Addiction, Eating and the Avoidance of the Greatness of Us

Can food and eating be an addiction?  Does is actually matter?  Is what we call something relevant?  Doesn’t it box people in?  

For me, the answer is yes and no.  What if the word “addiction” could have a totally different meaning than what you’ve been led to believe?  What if it was defined as a place people go to in order to escape this reality and not exist, rather than a compulsion etc.?

When you look at your relationship with food, do you find that you use it to escape someone or something?  Could that someone be you?

The interesting thing about avoiding you by going to a place where you don’t really exist, is that it’s all based on the false idea that there is something wrong with you. What if there was actually nothing wrong with you?  What if that “wrongness” was simply a creation of all of the judgments you have of you?

That has certainly been my experience; let me just keep eating so I don’t have to be aware of all of the judgments I have of myself and my life. Wow!  

The thing I’ve come to realize is that the issue is not just with the food but also with the judgments.  Without the judgments, I wouldn’t be so willing to stuff my face to avoid me.  So…what if all of the judgments you have of you are a lie?  What if they were just someone else’s point of view?  What if you could  actually come out of the judgments, and hence the “wrongness” of you and begin to see who you really are?  

Might that change your relationship with food?  What if you no longer needed to go to that place where you get at least temporary relief from the pain of your judgments that exist in this reality?  Would that change things for you?  You know, you may be surprised to discover that you’re not nearly as wrong as you’ve judged that you are!

I invite you to my upcoming 6 week Tele-Series:  Eating to Live Or Living to Eat? beginning July 14th.  To find out more and register click here.

Food and Experts

Do you believe that there are “good” foods and “bad” foods?

This is a fascinating idea for me.  Is a bad food one that stays out after curfew?  Does it need to be punished and shamed?  Or is that what you do to yourself when you’ve bought some “experts” idea of what you shouldn’t eat? 

One question:  Who made them the expert for your body?  Would you trust an “expert” to tell you where you should live, who you should date or what kind of job you should have?  Of course not – you make your own decisions.  So why would you trust an expert to tell you what you should and shouldn’t eat or how you should exercise or which supplements you should take?

Is it because you have decided that your body is an unconscious object that you are supposed to control and do things to?  What if just the opposite were true?  What if your body was completely conscious and able to make it’s own decisions about what was nourishing and helpful for it and what wasn’t? Guess what – IT IS!!!! 

However, as long as you listen to and believe the “experts” when they tell you things like: “Sugar is bad for you.”  (Really? Isn’t that what they give people in the hospital?  Isn’t glucose straight sugar?) You will not be able to hear what your body has to tell you. 

This is about beginning to trust you and your body, rather than abdicating control to someone who has never even met your body. Does anyone really know better than you?  Could running from one “expert” to another actually the reason why you’ve never gotten the results you and your body desire?  

What if you were willing to become your own “expert”?  What could that shift and change?  Please try it – I think you will be amazed!

I invite you to my upcoming 6 week Tele-Series:  Eating to Live Or Living to Eat? beginning July 14th.  To find out more and register click here. 

Buying Into Other People’s Realities

Have you ever had the experience of realizing that you just gave up your reality for someone else’s?  Do you find yourself either aligning and agreeing or resisting and reacting to what other’s assert is “the truth”? Often people try, consciously or unconsciously, to impose their beliefs, opinions and conclusions as absolute truths that you should accept as valid.  They then expect you to act in accordance with their created realities.

For instance, people may want you to believe that they know what’s right for you, that you’re wrong to leave them or a relationship, that you owe them, that they are really a good person, not actually mean, or that addiction is something you can never get over, and that your addiction is what is causing all of their problems.

If you are not aware of what they are doing, there is a tendency to either decide they are right, and alter your point of view accordingly, or decide they are wrong, in which case you have to go against them and agree with whatever is opposite of what they are saying. Neither  of these responses gives you any freedom, and both of them actually require you to discard you own reality and essentially disappear.  What’s interesting about this is that the disappearing into other people’s realities is very similar to the disappearing into your drug of choice.  I have yet to meet someone with an addiction who hasn’t spent a lot of time in discarding their own reality in favor of other people’s realities.  Essentially, your addiction is just another variation of someone or something else’s reality.  It’s NOT YOU!

Another great drawback of buying other people’s realities as valuable is that you limit what you can be to what they can be.  For instance, if they are color blind, and can only see in black and white, and you buy their POV as real and true, then you have to limit what you can see and accept their point of view that you must be crazy and delusional and a dreamer to talk about seeing things in color. This may seem far fetched, but it’s actually a fairly mild example of what I see happening all of the time. Consider the child who buy’s their parent’s point of view that they (the child) are responsible for all of the family’s unhappiness or financial problems. He or she will go on to create a life where they feel responsible for other people’s choices, yet powerless to do anything about them.  What about the wife who buys that she deserves to be beaten because she didn’t have dinner on the table at exactly 6:00 PM?  Or the man who takes on other’s realities that he’s a wimp and a loser because he’s not interested in sports or is gay?  The world is full of people and situations where individuals give up what they know to be true in favor of what others, including individuals, family and culture, tell them is true. Many of these individuals end up with problems with addiction.

What if, instead of feeling trapped by what others present as true and real, you started asking questions.  Questions are very empowering and can help you gain clarity and get out of almost any situation. One of the questions I use for clarity is: Does this feel heavy or light?  (The truth always makes you feel light). If things feel “heavy” – you can bet there is a lie somewhere.  You can then ask:  What is the lie, spoken or unspoken?

I also ask: What is their reality here?  Is there anything that’s true for me about this? What are they trying to get me to do or buy into?  Are they trying to control me in some way?  The more you realize that other people’s realities are not true and real, they are just what they have created, the more freedom you have.  And… you might just begin to see any areas of your life you have created as real and true that are actually just someone else’s point of view or belief you have adopted. The more clarity you gain, the more you have the possibility of creating your own reality, based on what works for you, not someone else. And, the more you begin to have your own reality, the less you will find yourself pulled to engage in you addiction! Isn’t it time to start claiming what you actually know to be true for you?

Perfectionism

Is “perfect” the only outcome that will satisfy you?  Do you find yourself focusing on the one percent that is not right instead of the 99 percent that is?  Over and over again I work with people who have bought the idea that if something isn’t “perfect” then they have failed.  This seems to be particularly true of people who identify with having some sort of addiction.

What is “perfect” anyway?  I looked it up in dictionary.com and here is what it said: conforming absolutely to the description or definition of an ideal type.  So here’s my question:  Just who decides what the ideal is anyway?  Do you suppose that your ideal mate, or meal or vacation might be just a tad bit different from someone else’s?  Do you get just how much judgment is involved in describing or defining what makes something perfect?  Any idea of what’s “perfect” is actually completely arbitrary which is why trying to make something perfect is so crazy making.  Whatever you do, it’s going to be “imperfect” for someone.

So what are we actually trying to do with our hunt for perfectionism? Some of the things I’ve found are:

• Making sure we are beyond criticism.
• Making up for how wrong and bad we have decided we are.
• Taking our value from what we produce or do.
• Not being willing to just be in the moment and be grateful for what is
• Living our lives through of lens of having to judge everyone and everything.
• Trying to please anyone or everyone else but ourselves.

So how do we get out of this compulsion? (And that’s what I find it is for most people.) One of the first steps is to realize that anything that is perfect has to be fixed and unchangeable which means it cannot be alive and changing.  What would the “perfect” flower look like?  It would have to be plastic.  The “perfect” person?  Barbie or Ken.  The perfect meal?  Maybe a picture in a magazine.  Could you make a wonderful meal? A fantabulous meal?  Absolutely!  But a “perfect” meal couldn’t have one thing out of place and thus couldn’t actually be eaten.

Another difficulty with living for perfectionism is that if you decided that something is perfect – a meal, a day, a movie, a friend etc., than you really can’t appreciate anything that isn’t that.  Everything has to be measured against what you have already decided is perfect.  How much room does that leave for something new to enter your life? What’s happens to diversity?  Can you see how perfectionism leads to a very contracted, rigid and unchanging life?

I love the story of the Zen monastery that was expecting a visit from a famous Zen Master.  For days the monks toiled to make the garden as perfect as they could.  Every stone was carefully placed, every tree and plant trimmed, every leaf picked up.  When the Master arrived at the garden he was horrified. He immediately went out and gathered up leaves and twigs and stones and threw them all around the “perfect” garden.  “Now”, he said, “That is beauty, that if life!”.

The beauty of life is that it is every changing.  Things are born/created and immediately they begin to change.  What if you allowed yourself to be present with what is, just in that moment, without judging you or it? What if everything you have judged as “not perfect” was actually just fine the way it was?  Do you think your life might have a little more ease in it? Perhaps more joy?  More possibility? The trap of perfectionism is that you can never be satisfied with what is, and must always be vigilant for any sign of something that someone might be able to judge as not good enough.  It’s exhausting as well as limiting.

What if you were wiling to let things be “good enough”? Put in what ever effort is fun for you, then let it go.  What if you were willing not to care how others judged you or what you did?  What if you knew that you were just fine the way you are.  Guess what?  You ARE just fine the way you are.  Everything else is just someone else’s idea of what’s “perfect” for them.