Let's get vulnerable shall we?  My first year of Graduate School to get my Masters in Body Psychotherapy was intense.  The way I like to describe the experience to others, is that the classes are shaped in a way to rip your heart out of your chest, make you look at it, so that you can do the same for others.  Additionally, while going through the program, you also have to be in therapy so that you know what your triggers are and don't project your issues onto other people.

So my first year of Grad School I was mucking around in the deep dark depths of my soul.  I was looking at pains and wounds I hadn't explored probably ever.  There was a lot of crying and a lot of eating.  I had never binged this much on food in my entire life.  I was uncomfortable and it was unsettling.  Here I was still calling myself a nutritional counselor and spending whole days just eating dates.

While being in that period of time felt like forever, I can look back on it now and feel grateful for that experience.  I was using food as a tool to cope with emotions that just felt too big to manage.  I was talking about situations from my past and deep wounds that I wasn't entirely sure how to sort through, process, assimilate, and digest.  My binging was a way to protect myself.  It was a way to feel grounded on earth, that I was still alive, and that these situations didn't eat me and swallow me whole.  It was a way to fill myself up when I was exploring situations that left me feeling so empty.  

The one thing I want to offer you that I could have done without during that time was the judgment.  If you have ever binged or are currently struggling with binging it is not something that is bad, not something to be shamed, or ashamed about.  It is a message from yourself to yourself.  You can learn from these experiences with food and they can teach and reveal to you your own resiliency.  Whatever your binging is trying to help you get through, it is actually a sign of your strength.  You are getting through whatever difficult experiences that are happening.  The situation and the binging will eventually subside (even if it has been years), I promise you. 

Binging is a way to feel connected to yourself, to feel your aliveness.  I recently heard Marc David, founder of IPE, say that binging has a lot of power to it.  So you engaging in the act of binging can just be a misguided attempt to step into how powerful, resilient, and strong you are.

The lesson that my time with bingeing helped me to discover was to reach out and talk.  So I will leave you with this the next time you are feeling the need or desire to binge on food, pick up the phone and talk to someone.  Call your mom, your dad, a sibling, a friend, a significant other, whoever you want and talk about your emotions.  You can talk about the fact that you want to binge but that is skirting the issue that some big emotions are coming up that feel like they have the power and are going to consume you. 

Even if you have the binge, once it is over and you feel yourself coming back in to your body, still pick up the phone and call someone or take out a journal or a piece of paper and start writing.  Find some way to connect back with what is coming up for you because even after the binge is over the emotions will probably still be there.  And remember to send yourself so much loving kindness because you are just trying to do the best job you can taking care of you and, trust me, you are doing a pretty damn good job.

Fear colors a lot of things that I do these days.  The funny thing is I don't exactly fear failure, sadness, mistakes, or abandonment.  These things I know and I know them well.  What I fear is success, unbelievable happiness, love, light, and a feeling of wholeness.  Excuse me for my language, but what the hell would I do with all that?  So often when we have gone through so many hard times for so long and that we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel or the silver lining to the dark clouds that we will actually self sabotage.  I know I am not alone in the fear of actually getting all that we desire.  It is easier to live life with the glass half empty because then there is always something externally we can complain about when we feel down or off in our own life.  Actually believing and then receiving all that we desire and know we deserve is actually a much harder task to live with.  So many of us (myself obviously included) upper limit ourselves and purposefully take action to bring ourselves back to our comfort level of right below utter joy so that we actually feel more comfortable!

This can take the form of binging on food, sabotaging a relationship, picking a fight with anyone, spending too much money on superfluous things, and the list goes on and on.  In our society today there are so many ways to run away and upper limit ourselves.  I'm currently working on allowing myself the abundance I know I deserve and secretly want in my own life.  I have lived a long time narrowing in and stressing over what I didn't have and needed to get by (like money to pay my rent).  And yet as soon as I shifted my focus away from the negative (as even negative thoughts breed more negativity into ones life) and started viewing more of the positive already existing in my life that other things started to shift.  As soon as I started to truly believe that I had and was enough just the way I am that stress and tension left my body, I began to find ways to make money, a relationship entered into my life, and digestive ailments that sometimes flare up "suddenly" disappeared.

This truly demonstrates the power of our own minds and thoughts.  If we live our life in fear then all we are attracting is more fear, worry, and anxiety.  If we keep telling ourselves we don't have what we want in our life then we will continue to have just that because that is what we believe.  Yet just with a simple switch in the brain, one can feel different sensations manifesting in the body and then subsequently your life.  And I am not saying this is an easy task; I struggle with it every day to transform my fearful worries into thoughts of abundance, prosperity, oneness, and fulfillment with the present moment as is.  Yet I work on this every day because I have seen the profound shifts positive thinking makes in the rest of my life.  It propels me to want to make positive healthy actions for myself in my own life.

So lets all try an experiment: for one day every time you feel negativity in your body or fearful thoughts are arising in your brain take immediate action and think about what is going well in your life, what you do have, and how you might be possibly upper limiting yourself because a second earlier you were feeling profound joy that you just didn't know how to handle.