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Hello dear Intuitive Eaters…..
As part of the process of transforming into an Intuitive Eater, let’s look at one of the key principles: Reject the Diet Mentality. In order to be in touch with your own intuitive guidance around food and nutrition, it is necessary to make room by releasing yourself from all the external, conflicting, fear-inducing, self-hatred supporting rules that are part of the culture we live in.
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I used to sometimes think how wonderful it was that there was an endless supply of inspirational teachers speaking without pause on the internet, Facebook Live, and You tube. I thought it would help us to find peace faster. Maybe this is true, but for many people, surfing the internet for inspiration has become a new form of distraction, even a new form of entertainment. Both of these things can be helpful at times, but it is important to recognize the difference between being engaged transformational work and being entertained.
There are few things more all-consuming than obsessive thinking about food, health and the weight and appearance of the body. With both women and men this pre-occupation often over-shadows all other goals, enjoyments and experiences in life.
The focus on food and the body fills the same need that alcohol, drugs, gambling and compulsive shopping do: It is a strategy to shut down the inner experience of emptiness, aloneness, disconnection and lack. All of these strategies create in initial feeling of excitement and satisfaction, but this is very short-lived. You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want, so you keep repeating the same behaviour, in progressively more extreme ways, hoping for a different result. "Compulsive eating was a way to distance myself from the way things were when they weren't how I wanted them to be. I didn't want to sit in the centre of my own life. To ask myself what was actually going on when I wanted to eat even when I wasn't hungry. Crazed with self-loathing and shame I vacillated between wanting to destroy myself and wanting to fix myself with the next best promise of losing thirty pounds in thirty days."
- Geneen Roth If you have issues around food and eating, the above experience may be familiar to you. When I teach people about Intuitive Eating, this is one of the key ways in which I see them transform: Moving away from I don't want to sit in the centre of my own life and into: I AM the centre of my own life - right where I've always longed to be. I'm strong, able, joyful and at peace....and here I am, nested right in the centre of my own heart.  I was looking through some quotes the other day and I ran across one that said something like:
Be good to yourself. Forgive yourself. When you treat yourself well life will treat you well. I eyed it dubiously and then moved on to other sources. I was bothered by it, though so I went back to re-read it. It is an idea that I have heard many times over the last I was visiting a friend a couple of months ago and we had a conversation that I am still thinking about. He enthusiastically participates in workshops offered by a large organization and he sometimes assists in presenting them as well.
We were talking about how joyful and liberating it can be to connect with new ideas, realizations and states of awareness. At one point he said to me “Yes, people have these tremendous breakthroughs, but often it doesn’t seem to change much for them…because if you don’t apply what you learned, or align your daily actions with “Resolving your own personal conflicts is the first step to ending global conflict.”
- Joseph Eliezer I appreciate this thought, and would expand it to say that healing the addiction to conflict that lives in my mind is the only thing that will heal the conflict that seems to be going on out in the world. I’ve thought about this often in the last few years. Two things that have brought it into focus for me are recent school shootings and the rise of Donald Trump’s popularity as a political candidate in the States. When I first started hearing about school shootings, they were far from home. I ..."The willingness to trust and follow your heart - not the reactive ego that is often interpreted to be the heart, but the heart that longs to know God - this is a tell-tale sign of whether or not one is reaching maturity".
- The Way of Mastery (Italics and underline are mine.) This quote reminds me of the importance of distinguishing between the guidance of the ego and the guidance of Inner Wisdom. A few years ago it became popular to "Look well then, upon your parents, your siblings, your mates and your friends. Not one of them - not one of them - holds the power to bring love to you. So what are you trying to get from them? Why do you ever insist that another ought to be conformed to what you believe you need? It is futile - one hundred percent, absolutely, positively futile - to seek love in relationship with anything or anyone."
- The Way of Mastery I read this passage this morning with fresh appreciation, and it's a teaching that I Last November I realized how tired I was of my grievance‐filled relationship with Christmas. For many years, feelings of resentment, anger and despair would begin to surface around November 1, right about when Christmas music started playing as I stood in line at Starbucks for my short dark roast.
The approach of Christmas has been a cue for me to find ways of spending as much |
Dawn GreenI love writing, and I find it's a great way to share ideas. I hope you'll enjoy some of my efforts! Archives
September 2018
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