I am browsing through “A Course in Weight Loss” by Marianne Williamson, some parts I gloss over, and others parts catch my attention.
This book and Geneen Roth’s “Woman, Food, and God” both are searching beneath the food and looking at the root cause, understanding that the food is a cover-up.
We all know less food equals weight loss, but it also is removing the cotton between feelings and us.
We fear feelings.
We fear feeling feelings.
Marianne writes,
“ With any spiritual journey – and the journey to conscious weight loss is a spiritual journey – things often seem to get worse before they get better. Love’s light is being shined on many places heretofore not visible to your conscious mind, revealing toxic feelings that were there already but cleverly hidden.
It’s all right if this part of your journey is not pleasant. Parts of your repatterning is learning to be with unpleasantness in a healthy way. The mature and sober person knows that on some days things simply feel rotten, and that is okay. You are learning to move through distress by simply being with it, without the need to overeat or to act out in any other way.
How could it not be unpleasant, having to refeel feelings that you’ve been eating for years? Now having to confront them, deal with them, and ultimately accept them feels like a fever within your soul.
But a spiritual fever, like a physical fever, actually has a productive function: it burns disease. Think of your pain as a feverish burning up of fear. As you heal physically, extreme fever can lead to delirium. And as you know heal spiritually, your fever can lead to delirium as well – a quiet delirium of the soul. This too shall pass.
This lesson concerns itself with the human despair and the consistency of the body’s cells. Man has looked beneath the surface of the skin for centuries, probing the internal workings of the human body. During the last century, science has developed the ability to view even the tiniest of cells that make up our physical tissue. Yet science has not yet discovered an explanation for how emotional change produces physical change, and it is particularly blind to the malleability of fat.
In fact, there are many levels of understanding – even of our physical selves – that science has not yet penetrated. An electron microscope reveals the entire picture of our cellular system, but within the cells themselves, there are storehouses of information not yet understood.
For instance, there are tears and then there are tears. Some varieties are toxic to the body, while others healing. The distinction between the two is not just an emotional difference but a physical one as well. Even materially, there are aspects to tears – including functions that affect the workings of the brain – that have not yet been scientifically identified.
Sometimes it’s only through crying tears that need to be shed that we dissolve the unhappiness that caused them. That is why suppressing unhappiness doesn’t tend to end it. How many times have we said that someone ‘needs a good cry.” Indeed. Toxicity is often released through tear ducts as part of the body’s natural genius of flushing itself out. Casual use of antidepressants is unwise for just this reason- feeling the full extent of your sadness is sometimes the only way to heal it. In the absence of the feeling, you miss out on the healing. The body does not make distinctions among physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual stresses. It is equipped with the natural intelligence to address them all.
You are mistaken if you think that you can fundamentally and permanently change bodily symptoms by physical means alone. Problems must leave through the same door they came in. If mistaken thoughts have created a problem, then righting those thoughts is essential for healing it. And if toxic feelings created a problem, they can only leave through a detox process by which they come up again in order to be released.
Fat is not just inert cellular tissue. It is a repository of twisted, distorted thoughts and feelings that didn’t have anywhere else to go. If you remove the fat tissue but do not remove the psychic cause, the fat might go but the causal imprint remains. And the imprint, in time, will attract more substance with which to materially express itself.
It’s not enough to just “lose the weight.” You must lose the emotional weight that lurks behind it. This you have already begun to do. Remember that your food compulsion is a way to cope with painful feelings. As you begin to heal from those feelings –removing their “imprint” from your consciousness – they are necessarily refelt on their way out.
Problems that seem to have nothing to do with your weight issues might rise up and in particularly challenging forms. You might doubt yourself in ways you have not done before, or have not done for a very long time. But this part of the process is not a bad period; it is actually a good one, for it is necessary. There is no spiritual rehabilitation without this kind of detoxification.
When any pain, difficulty, frustration, or challenge emerges, try to see it, honor it, bear witness to it and receive it as part of your healing. The situation carries within it important information for you. It is not just randomly happening at this time. It presents the opportunity to examine critically important issues in your life. Looking at your pain, feeling the feelings, learning whatever lessons are being brought up for review – these are ultimately the only ways to get the pain to burn away.
The Universe will never leave you alone at such a time as this. Angels are all around you, as they gather without fail whenever a soul is seeking its wholeness. This absolutely not the time to isolate; rather despite whatever resistance you feel, allow yourself to join with at least one other human being who might possibly be able to help you. You will learn the serious value of sacred friendship and/or professional counseling.
Sometimes you just need to make space for sadness. You do not need an excuse for why you feel sad; you do not need to ‘fix’ it; and, most important, you do not need to run from it. What you need is to let it come up and simply be with it.
Your task with this lesson is to make space in your life, just as you make space in your heart, for any sadness you need to honor. Perhaps take a walk each evening, or a stroll on the beach each morning. Allow yourself to grieve.
You will learn in time to be with the void, addressing it with a bubble bath rather than with a sandwich, and with prayer time rather than a candy bar. Your task is to inhabit the emptiness, breathe through it, learn its lessons, and hear the message it conveys. There is no hole for you to try and fill with food or anything else; there is only the primal void within every human being when we feel we cannot find God.
Marianne
I M Perfect lady 