It's kind of personal. I woke up today feeling kind of low. During my morning journaling, I kept noticing my thoughts returning to food, my go-to comfort/pleasure/numbing instrument.
(I'm going to share a snapshot of my journal with you - yikes! It's from my writing this morning. I'm a little nervous, because I write in total free-flow stream, no censoring, but... I want to show you that this is so real.)
Now, I was rather proud of my awareness of my thoughts and patterns. But do you know what I did next? (Hmm, I still sound frustrated. It seems I haven't fully accepted and forgiven myself yet...) Instead of looking at my "I Love" poem (should I share?) and taking extra-loving care of myself, giving myself the pleasure and comfort I knew I needed, I went right into my morning emails after I finished writing. I don't think I'm alone in this, but when I'm feeling low and I push down my feelings so that I can "get some work done," it doesn't usually help my inner state.
An hour after breakfast, I manifested my own disappointment, my own "permissioning" - the acting out of my "I already know how this goes." While I didn't eat the whole loaf of bread or nearly that much peanut butter, but I did have both, plus some maple syrup and butter, all eaten as quickly as possible, while standing in the kitchen. I checked out. I went for the mouth pleasure, the comfort.
Immediately after, I was furious with myself. The usual flood of guilt ensued - I knew better and I still went to the kitchen and ate it - I even called myself on it this morning! The sinking disappointment, the disgust towards my body, the shame, the isolation (Who was I going to call and tell? I did this to myself and now I had to deal with the consequences myself...)So I had a pity party. I cried. I seethed. I decided to get in the shower where I could let it all out and let the hot water wash some of the puffiness out of my eyes.
I can't say exactly what snapped me into awareness, perhaps it was that I'd read a few pages of Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now earlier in the morning, but suddenly, hot water spraying on my head, a voice inside of me said: Nothing is actually wrong in this moment. You are making yourself feel wrong and nothing else.
I stopped mid-sob and just watched the water run over me. I knew deep down it was true. I was projecting my anger and guilt both backwards and forwards in time, and it was taking me out of the present moment, where nothing was wrong, and, in reality, the water and soap were really quite sensual.
I recognized that this was another pattern of mine. To go down a vortex of negativity about myself when the choice I could have made from the get-go was to accept and process the guilt and anger into the place I arrived at now:
There's no such thing as failure, only feedback. What was I going to choose to learn from this? What was the lesson in this experience? To recognize that I knew what I needed, and that my old habit of prioritizing work and "pushing through" needed to make way over this larger priority of attending to my needs.
I do acknowledge that I am evolving - it took me a lot less time to have my epiphany breakthrough - and the awareness I've been developing about myself have become very astute. Now it's time to enact my response-ability to myself (my ability to respond and care for myself) and next time hope for even earlier intervention. Even breakthrough and evolution happen in baby steps.
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