Beginnings of Healing: My Body

When I think of the word “healing” I immediately kind of get a mental picture of a kid who skinned his knee. He cries over it, gets a bandage, maybe a cookie, a kiss on top of the head, and in time there’s no more skinned knee. And he doesn’t remember every time he falls and hurts himself.

That’s one part of healing, I guess - healing from everyday sorts of things, I suppose.Healing from trauma is altogether different. The healing takes place on every level of your being – but the weird part is, sometimes you’re in a very different place on each level: spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically.

For me, healing started in my body. I ate to self-soothe – I ate to assuage my loneliness, to keep the pain just outside of my conscious awareness, to soothe the pain of hating my body, to find respite from feeling dirty and alone and so… outside life.

So I gained weight. I got up to about 210lbs, size 20 jeans at my largest and that was during college (I’m 5’5” and medium framed). I never exercised, I escaped life by hiding in chatrooms and in books.

After I graduated college I found myself utterly clueless as to what I was going to do with my life. I had no idea what I wanted to do as a job or career, I sort of drifted aimlessly for a while taking seasonal jobs and temp work.I don’t remember exactly when it happened – maybe 2002 or 2003 – I simply looked at the body I was in and had my first major epiphany – this wasn’t me anymore. This body wasn’t who I was. It didn’t belong to me. I didn’t identify with it whatsoever. At the time, the decision to change my body felt empowering. With the clarity of hindsight, I see both healthy and unhealthy aspects to this consuming need for physical change. I can see healthy progress in how I wanted to something positive for myself, wanted to cast off the past that hurt so bad and had kept me shut up inside myself for so long. But I also see the self-hatred I had and just how much I utterly despised and rejected my body. How I treated it as an enemy even then, when it really wasn’t my enemy at all.Anyway, at the onset of my weight loss journey I really didn’t know what I was doing at all. I jumped into weight loss with both feet and some blinders on. At first I just started moving more and watching what I ate during the week (weekends were fair game). Made lots of mistakes, learned by trial and error.Then, I developed a compulsion for exercise, working out hard for 90 minutes 6-7 days a week and barely eating during the day. Looking back and knowing myself as I do, I see this as a control issue and me wanting to be “perfect”.

So I severely restricted calories and exercised my fucking brains out.

Except Sunday.

Sunday I quite literally ate until I was ill, cramming myself with sugary, fatty foods and as much junk food as I could afford. I’d go to bed so stuffed with food I couldn’t sleep. I’d get up in the morning full of self-loathing and indigestion.

I weighed and measured every mouthful of food that passed my lips, I could tell you calorie counts in everything I ate, I obsessed over what I was going to eat at every meal and for snacks. I felt shame and guilt for any food that wasn’t on my plan, I felt worthless if I missed a workout.

I lost a lot of weight. I got very fit.

And wasn’t really any healthier emotionally than I had been when I started. In fact, my body image issues were becoming ever-more clear. I didn’t do any of this because I loved myself, loved my body. I did it because I hated myself. I hated my body.

And these obsessive, disordered eating habits created in me a fear of food – because food led to fat unless rigorously controlled.And I guess I figured if I could bring my body to heel, the rest of my life would follow and I’d magically become healthy and happy and confident, right?

So much pain. So much buried under the surface. I made the mistake so many make – I was seeking happiness in something external. I thought fixing my body would fix my real problems.

I finally ended up in Tai Chi classes. The community center near where I lived started offering them, and I had a background in Tae Kwon Do, so it sounded like a great match for me. I had trouble with the patience and slow, meditative pace at first. I was impatient. I was focused on violent action.

This meditative shit brought me way too close to everything that hurt.

But I couldn’t stop – even though I was beginning to butt up against some serious pain, I couldn’t stop going there. I befriended the Tai Chi instructor and his wife. They introduced me to the gorgeous and highly instructive writings of Dr. Wayne W Dyer, and that led to other authors like Osho and Eckhart Tolle and Pema Chodron. Finally, I was softening inside. I was starting to turn toward my spirit.

So I guess you could say that healing on the outside started the healing on the inside – indeed, you can’t heal on one level without it impacting at least one of the other levels. They’re symbiotic and synergistic. They exist intertwined with one another. Changes to the spirit affect the body, changes to the heart affect the body and mind, and so on.My “battle of the bulge” or war against my body wasn’t over, but healing that relationship would, as I would eventually find out, involve healing my heart and soul first as well as addressing my thought processes.

Like everybody else, I started where I was, with what I knew. And I learned and grew from there.