More deep thoughts.

Hey Guys, I hope everyone is doing well. First of all, I cannot believe I'll be hanging with so many of you in less than two weeks. I'm so excited for Chicago!

Now on to more deep thoughts. I've been struggling with some old demons. The desire to binge is overwhelming sometimes, especially when I'm under stress or feeling sad. I've got a lot going on right now with my kids and my ex husband is being a turd, I don't like to talk to him at all and when I have to, it makes me uneasy. So...here I am battling the desire to overeat and battling the desire to berate myself for wanting to overeat...just the usual vicious circle.

I've been reading "Women Food and God" and have been so struck by some of the passages, it's as if she's talking just to me. I find it so funny, since I've had the book for ages and tried reading it but just couldn't before. I suppose I just wasn't ready. I want to share a couple of things that I read today that really spoke to me, in one section the author is talking about a retreat student who despised her thighs. She spent years obsessing about her thighs, hating them, thinking she could never be happy with her body as long as she had those thighs, so she had liposuction and this is what she said one year later at a retreat:"It is devastating to realize that I paid all that money and no one, not my husband or my sister or me --can tell the difference between my thighs now and my thighs then. They don't seem to care, no less notice, that my thighs have less cellulite. I didn't want to go through life hating my thighs and now we've spent half our savings on the operation and I still can't stand my thighs." The author goes on to say: "I tell her that I have never met anyone for whom years of rejection and hatred suddenly and miraculously turned to love, even after a face-lift, LAP-BAND surgery, liposuction. When you love something you wish it goodness; when you hate something, you wish to annihilate it. Change happens not by hatred but by love. Change happens when you understand what you want to change so deeply that there is no reason to do anything but act in your own best interest. When you begin to inhabit your body from the inside, when you stop looking at it through, as my friend Mary Jane Ryan says, "bank camera eyes," any other option except taking care of it is unthinkable. No matter how much you loathe yourself or believe life would be better if your thighs were thinner or your hips were narrower or your eyes were wider apart, your essence---that which makes you you---needs your body to articulate its vision, its needs, its love. Inhaling your child's baby-powder neck perfume requires flesh, nose, senses. Presence, enlightenment, insight are only possible because there is a body in which they unfold. In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, when the murdered narrator, Susie, wants to kiss her boyfriend, she slips into her friend's body to feel the warmth of lips on lips--as if having a body was heaven itself."

Wow, I needed to read that today. I've spent so much of my life cursing the most precious gift, this body of mine. I've mistreated it, I've mocked it. I want and need to learn how to be one with my body. I need to be less cerebral and more guttural.

I hope you all have a great day...and that I didn't pile it on too heavy.
Big Hugs!
T