Spiritual Solution to Food Addiction??

Food Addiction Part II

In part 1 of this article I suggested that if you’ve tried every diet and every logical approach to weight loss and are still battling with food and weight you might want to explore approaching the issue from a spiritual perspective.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Cultivating a relationship with your Authentic Self, looking at yourself through kind and compassionate eyes, being willing to listen to and act on the guidance you receive from your Inner Knowing, and understanding that your true essence is pure love are all part of nurturing your spiritual self. As you mature spiritually, behaviors that no longer serve you fall by the way side.” Louisa Latela

Allow me to expand on what I mean by Spiritual in the context of this article. Spiritual is not religious or connected with any particular dogma, higher power or deity. Spiritual does not require doing, but rather “being.” It is grounded in a knowing that your authentic true self at your core is love. It is about living in the energy of love, it is about being love. When I talk of living a spiritual life I am talking about living from the inside out. In other words connecting with your inner knowing and making decisions based on the guidance you receive from within vs. from what society says you should do.

When you live a spiritual life you shift from living in the energy of fear to living in the energy of awe and acceptance. You relinquish your need for control and approval and relax into a knowing that everything is perfect: that you are perfect in this very moment exactly as you are. You know that whatever you need to know you will know when it is time to do it. You shift from the energy of resisting that which you do not want to allowing your most joy-filled life to manifest.

Anita Moorjani shares the lessons she learned during her 2006 near death experience (NDE) in her book “Dying to be Me”. She had cancer for four years, her body was shutting down. As the doctors were telling her family she would not make it through the night she was having an NDE. She made the decision to come back to this life. Within weeks she was discharged from the hospital cancer free!

To make a long story short she came to know that her cancer was a physical manifestation of fear: ultimately the fear of being her authentic self.

“What was I afraid of? Just about everything, including failing, being disliked, letting people down, and not being good enough. I also feared illness, cancer in particular, as well as the treatment for cancer. I was afraid of living, and I was terrified of dying.” ~~ I’d spent a lifetime judging myself, beating myself up for not meeting these expectations. I always felt inadequate, but following my NDE I understood that these were a false set of socially determined standards, I also used to believe that I wasn’t spiritual enough. Then I discovered that we’re all spiritual regardless of what we do or believe. We can’t be anything else because that is who we are-spiritual beings, we just don’t always realize it. My healing wasn’t so much born from a shift in my state of mind or beliefs as it was from finally allowing my true spirit to shine through."

While Anita’s disconnection from her authentic self manifested as cancer in her body, for others it may manifest as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, anorexia, arthritis, etc.

For anita moorjani her recovery was immediate. Choosing to live a spiritual life and healing your issues with food body and weight can be immediate, but for most it is a process and takes some time. Many people reject the spiritual approach for exactly this reason: because it is not a quick fix. There is not a prescribed amount of time that it will take to have the body you want. It does not come with a guarantee that you will lose 20 pounds in 10 days or your money back.

But what is guaranteed is that if you make a commitment to be willing to love you, and I mean love you unconditionally, to live an “authentic life”, that in time you will make peace with your body and food.

You must know this: the only reason any of us does anything is that on some level we think it will make us feel better. We just want to feel good. At our core what we yearn for is love: but all too often we end up looking for love in all the wrong places. We look to other people places and things to make us feel good; to know love. If we would just be still and connect with our center, our core, we would know that all we yearn for is right inside of us and always has been. We are love and the love we are looking for is our own. We yearn for the freedom that comes from non-judgmental self-acceptance to be our authentic self.

Marianne Williamson writes:

“Spiritually your wanting to lose weight is not a desire to become less of yourself, but rather a desire to become more of your true self… Every moment of unconscious eating is a moment when you are starving from a lack of healthy self-love and struggling to find it elsewhere”

So how do you make that happen you might ask?

Well you must start by making a commitment to living consciously. You notice when you say or do things that are unkind to yourself. You start to pay attention to your feelings. They are the guide that will lead you home to yourself. You make a commitment to say and do only those things that feel right in your heart, in your soul. You set an intention to say only kind and loving things to and about yourself. You seek to release harsh self judgment and embrace a willingness to learn to accept and love yourself unconditionally.

You start to contemplate the idea: What if I really was okay just the way I am? What if it didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me? What if I could really trust myself? How would my life be different if I did love and accept myself unconditionally? What if I allowed myself to relax and just be?

You will know if you are living from your authentic self if your actions are grounded in the energy of joy and happiness. If you take an action and it is motivated by fear, greed, sadness, anger, anxiety, you are not connected to your source. This is not to say that you should deny uncomfortable feelings. Rather than denying or pretending they do not exist, I suggest that you embrace them, breathe into them, do not judge them. Ask what you are meant to learn from them. Ask for the insight to see differently whatever it is that triggered your discomfort. If you hang in there long enough you will have a change of heart; the feelings will pass and you will be able to feel peace where there was once turmoil.

I want to be clear that it is not necessary that you live a spiritual life in order to be at peace with your body and food. I am just suggesting that if you’ve “tried everything else" you might want to give this a shot….

Spend some time contemplating the questions posed in this article. In my next article I will list signs that indicate you are disconnected from your authentic self .

Live in Love,

Louisa