Just when you thought you had dealt with an old pattern it rears its ugly head to send you right back in to those old thoughts, feelings, behaviours. They seem to ingrained in us and they cling on to us for dear life.
This week has been challenging for me in many ways, but mainly the surfacing of lots of old body demons, such as I hate my body, I feel fat and ugly and as a nice confirmation I have also broken out in spots. I have had to scale back my yoga practice as I am now breathing properly and find I don’t have much strength to sustain the postures and my long, slow breath, so the breath takes priority. I hadn’t realised that I still had all those old body issues. Clearly it is possible to suspend our reactions to our old patterns by stepping away from the situation that caused them in the first place, but this doesn’t seem to work in the long term. For me, when my yoga practice is strong and my eating habits are spot on (or very minimal food is consumed), I feel great and my old body stuff doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Until I can’t practice (like now) or my eating habits change (far too fond of bread, cake, chocolate and flapjacks these days) for whatever reason the old demons rear their heads again.
The solution? I know that’s what you are all after. Well I am still working on that one and there are multiple bodies I am addressing this on – mental, physical, emotional and on a soul level.
On a physical level, it’s by doing my best on the eating front and also the exercise front, but also watching my reactions when I “fail” by eating seemingly inappropriate food or by not doing a full Ashtanga practice or whatever that means. Self punishment is never helpful and only seeks to embed the patterns further. I work on my mental body by making a conscious decision not to feed these unhelpful thoughts with life energy and saying thank you for sharing. Thoughts only have power should we so choose to give them life. Another fun method I am using is changing the unhelpful thoughts in to an affOrmation, such as “Why is it so easy for me to lose weight?”
This is all great stuff, but I also need to address the root issue. According to lots of the yogic material and speaking with other yogis from their experience, the only way to deal with all those deep-seated issues is to tackle them in the depths of meditation, scorching the seeds of the patterns in the fire of awareness.
One of these wise yogi friends (and fellow body issue image sufferer and former fattie) suggested that I sit in meditation every day for 10 mins and focus on letting my body become completely still and so the mind will follow suit and then that’s when all the crap floats to the surface. What to do with this crap? He advises to disconnect with it by witnessing and asking myself “is this thought useful?” If the answer is yes, then keep it and nurture it. If not gently, tell my mind that I can let that one go and move on. It’s not a quick fix or earth shattering process, but in my experience the consistent application of a simple process yields results. My friend reliably says this process works and it brings about a clearing of the mental processes over time. I shall test this one out.
Is there a quicker and easier way of healing with the explosion of energy and soul clearing work? As of yet I am unable to answer this question, although I intend to find out. In all these healing modalities, awareness is the first step and meditation often gives you the space to observe what is really going on in the unconscious mind. Firstly one must realise, one still has an issue and mine was cleverly hiding from me. It’s useful to work with a therapist as they can see your blind spots.
EFT works on your emotional body and I know can help with emotional eating, cravings etc. Energy clearning work, such as taught by Art Giser certainly makes you feel better and lighter and when you feel better you are much less likely to fall back in to old patterns, emotional over eating etc. There is also soul clearing work such as offered by Sidra Jafri or Michelle Manning-Kogler, I believe would help heal any ancestral issues, past life issues, contacts and traumas that would have triggered body image issues. A deeper exploration of ways to heal body image issues is calling to me…
Eat, Love, Do Yoga 