As “emotional eaters”, we can spend an incredible amount of energy trying to avoid our feelings. Eating is not only a way of numbing our feelings but it also denies us the opportunity of learning from, and accommodating the life-affirming validity of, our feelings. Whilst we cling on to the hope that eating will “make it all better”, it won’t. We all know that.

In fact, eating increases our suffering – it’s an act of “resistance” that prevents us from experiencing life as it is. Our eating behaviour is an attempt to bridge the gap between how things really are and how we’d like them to be. It just doesn’t work.

However, we may reach a point where we find the courage and capacity in ourselves to generate sufficient equilibrium to take bold steps. We can step towards acknowledging our feelings; towards offering ourselves and our emotions compassion; towards meeting the deep unmet needs our emotions are expressing in healthy ways ; towards actually feeling our feelings. Yes, actually feeling feelings 🙂 !!

By being in our body  and present to our emotions, by learning to give welcoming refuge to all parts of ourselves, by offering compassion to our own wounds, we begin to heal. It is through such tender, active feeling that we achieve the deepest, most joyful healing. It is through such feeling that we learn to experience the joy of life AS IT ACTUALLY IS.

Feeling leads to healing 🙂 Oh – and in case you are wondering – as we learn to be with our emotions and with the glorious messy nature of life in this way, most of us experience the added bonus of a naturally emerging, healthy body. As we stop resisting, the weight stops persisting.

Keeping it real,

© Jane Talbot 2013