Tag: head

  • Familiar isn’t Good.

    “Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.” ~Henry Miller

    I seem to have an eating person and then a person who sees the affects, but the two haven’t met.

    My eating person calls foods delicious and has cravings for sweets and she lives above my neck. She enjoys the tastes and eats as if the food will fall on the ground after she chews, paying no attention to the body underneath.

    My eating is similar to smoking without inhaling, or so my mind has me believing, but the mirror tells a different tale.

    What is so odd is the body that needs better eating is not in control of the eating and the eating mouth cares less about what happens after it tastes, chews and swallows.

    While some diets look at the food and other people are telling the person to exercise, what I am thinking needs to be changed is the mind.

    It is the town crier calling scrumptious bakery delicious, but who is it delicious for, A thought in the head?

    My thoughts about food and what is the reality of food is a world apart, not even in the same room.

    My awareness is never in both places at the same time, yet my head is attached to my body. My body is not welcome in the boardroom when decisions about it are made.

    It shocking to know that my head lies or fails to acknowledge how the words and food don’t match, that there is a huge contradiction going on.

    Yet my head is the first to complain as I stand in front of the mirror, Like it had nothing to do with the weight upon my thighs!

    It is insane, the one that is craving and eating is now berating or feeling disappointed in the body…when the body is simply a dumping ground or garbage bag for the head.

    I am right in the middle of calling its bluff, and trying to stop reacting to eating choices and instead bring the body to the table and eat for it and not for my head.

    It is a fickle head…for it slurps up food, burps and then turns on its self when it sees the affects, like the traitor it is.

    This lying eating head is the same head that wanted me to stay in bed and not do yoga; it is a part of myself that sucks the living out of me.

    Within my food palate are vestiges of dysfunction, camouflaged in pretty cakes and candy, the pretty sounding names and tastes I have become accustomed to, my way with food.

    My immature food palate will take time to adjust to eating food that the body can use for energy and nutrients instead of pleasing a childish mind set.

    I am finding it odd that I have a iron grip on my sweets and feel less without them in my mail jeep. I like knowing they are there. It is odd to have this ‘value’ in no value items.

    Like clinging to love that is really abuse.

    I am holding on to the food that is keeping me overweight and out of shape, tired and lazy…and pushing away the good.

    This is a repeating cycle in my wellness…holding on to what hurts me…fear of letting go of familiar even if familiar isn’t good.

  • A Life Review of Feelings

    While in yoga yesterday, I wondered if the body could express itself without a head, is there a way to vent your feelings below the neck?

    It seems to me that the head holds all the valves of release.

    Our tears are shed through our eyes, our mouths speak words, our beliefs and thoughts either match our feelings or deny them, but all the expressions are done above the neck, yet the feelings seem to be below.

    We feel deeply with our heart, our gut has instincts and intuitively knows, we feel ‘something’ deeply in our bones, and the truth of our experiences seems to reside in the torso.

    Yet the head is where we can articulate what the body feels.

    It is like the head needs to tune into the body, open a line, and form a connection.

    When the two are joined as one, we can live a life that is steered by feelings and emotions allowing us to express specifically our needs, wants and desires.

    Living totally in the head leaves you separated from feelings and emotions.

    I am not certain you can release emotions with out a head.

    The vents are in the head as far as I can tell.

    If a body is detached from the head, it just fills up with unexpressed emotions, which grows into rage, rage that explodes and subsides all without ever delving into their formation. I believe the root of disease.

    A head that is detached from the body, is a senseless head.

    A head that is making choices based on whims of others, for it has no roots, nothing to anchor it down, it is not grounded in feelings or emotions connected to your life, it floats a few feet ahead of your body.

    Amazing to witness this, live this way and then get the opportunity to experience the rejoining of head to body, to feel feelings that have long been stuffed down, to go back in a life review of feelings.

  • Joined them back together.

    The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

    I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

    It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

    Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

    Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

    I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

    What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

    When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
    cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

    Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

    I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

    What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

    A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

    My father was happy and desiring me.
    And I was happy to please him.

    The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
    And my head seemed detached from my body.

    My body and head separated.
    Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

    I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

    When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

    The mind and the body separated.

    The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

    Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

    In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

    To live as mind body and soul.

    Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.

  • The Voices are Silent

    I finished the Quiet Room by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett. What an inspiring story of girl with a broken mind; a schizophrenia mind.

    She had voices in her head that were finally silenced with the proper medication, treatment and her tenacity to continue working on herself.

    She explains, “I still hear the Voices from time to time. I try to take my own advice. I distract myself, lecture myself, and focus on the outside world. I have taught myself to use a little mantra when they reappear: “These Voices are not real. Don’t be frightened. Don’t get upset. They are not real. Don’t let them overcome you. Try and think of what happened just before you heard them. Is there some emotion you can isolate that will help explain why they are here now? They are not real. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

    “When I hear the Voices, I shake myself back to reality by using all my senses. If I am riding the train to Manhattan for example, I concentrate on the taste of Diet Coke and the smell of the perfume I am wearing. I look out the window at the changing view, and listen carefully to the sound of the conductor collecting tickets. I feel my own ticket flipping back and forth between my fingers.”
    Lori Schiller

    Even though I am not schizophrenic, I can relate to using reality to keep me on the path to wellness, how my voices were alive and walking in reality, voices of the dysfunctional family I left behind.

    Medication was able to reduce the voices mostly and when they returned, she formulated ways to not believe them.

    My experiences of walking out a dysfunctional family had the Voices on the outside in reality that were beckoning me backwards, and there wasn’t medication that would silence them, instead I had to be silent.

    My Voices were sisters, brothers and mother, my father’s voice never appeared.

    Voices and laughter, seemingly vanilla requests urging me to stop being so mental, so frightened, so weird, so odd, so standoffish, so separated, so cold, so heartless, so mean, so unkind…just like her voices in Lori’s head, mine too rose against me.

    The only medication I have to silence their voices is my truth; it seems to keep them far away.

    It is odd that my Voices are real and in living color and they too can threaten my newfound wellness, and perhaps tear little holes in my confidences, eroding newfound peace, as they bounce around like hysterical laughter, wanting me to join in the false hilarity.

    There is a small part of me that longs for the old group, yet a much larger part of me overcomes that, knowing what I would be joining.

    It is almost like I was raised in a Mental Hospital, and that I escaped into normal, and the old patients are beckoning me back.

    And the patients in the Mental Hospital were told that they were living normal, and see me as going into a land of total insanity.

    There are even times that I like Lori, have to concentrate on the smells, sights and sounds around me to keep me with reality, to know that I am okay, I am not the one with mental issues or dysfunctional patterns controlling my life, that I have done the due diligence to get me here.

    Here the voices are silent.