Eating only when you’re hungry is to have trust in abundance, that there will enough of everything for you later. Such a stance calls on a way of being that not many of us learned or experienced as safe as young ones–although it is hard to know of such deficits until you stop using food as something other than physical nourishment.
The challenges people, especially women, have with food are substitutes or masks for other struggles that we don’t have the emotional safety in our lives to confront. We don’t have the social will in our culture to take on.
Being hungry for me is the palpable, lived expression of my emotional vulnerability: it is the wholehearted opening of myself to others, it is the allowing of myself to have needs that require others to fill. That is a leap that feels daunting.
Some of the most destructive covert shame messages that we send our children stem from feminine and masculine norms. – Brené Brown
We need to address shame because shame is what is stopping us from being vulnerable. It is corrosive. It stops us dead in our tracks. It stops us by telling us we are inadequate, flawed or unworthy.
Are you letting your body determine the parameters of your eating experience? Or does that prospect scare you? Your answer is an existential, spiritual litmus test.
Vulnerability is the willingness to keep going knowing there are no guarantees. You try. You fall. You get up. You try again. You may fall again. Then you get up again. And you get up as tall as you did the first time.
Loving ourselves through the process of owning our story is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.
I love myself.
the
quietest.
simplest.
most
powerful.
revolution.
ever.
— Nayyirah Waheed