How many times have you experienced something that upset you and immediately found yourself eating out of control as a result of not knowing how to handle the stress?
Do you have situations in your life where you feel like you are a victim and can’t get out of a role that you fear has been carved out for you by others? I’d like to share something that I learned yesterday.
Recently a friend and colleague of mine offered me an opportunity to read Jack Canfield’s book, “The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.” She invited me to be her buddy and to go through the book, chapter by chapter and do all of the exercises one by one and check in with her periodically and share and support each other in completing each task. I was excited and jumped at the chance for this unique opportunity to be accountable and uplevel my life.
Yesterday I started really reading the book and the first of Jack’s principles is this:
Take 100% responsibility for everything that happens in your life. He went on to explain how we all avoid doing this and if we take responsibility for everything that happens, by doing that we also take responsibility for changing anything that we don’t like about our life.
I’m sure that you can relate and think about certain situations in your own life where you feel that you had no say in the matter, no choices, no voice. Let’s just set aside the whole argument about reincarnation, and just consider taking responsibility for everything that has happened throughout your adulthood.
What would change if you believed that you had said or done or allowed yourself to be put in the position that you now face? What would you do to extricate yourself from that situation so that you could enjoy new freedom, have more choices, be more powerful?
Here’s what I learned from this. As soon as I woke up this morning I felt slimmer than I ever have in the past 18 months. For the past few months, despite living under loads of stress, I’ve been tootling along eating intuitively, listening to my hunger, and feeling very good about taking a slow and steady approach to losing weight without dieting. Now I’m really starting to see the changes in my body as a result of my new way of thinking.
After I acknowledged how good I felt this morning, I walked into my office and read an an email from a family member with whom I have been engaged for years in a real power struggle. It’s been a love/hate relationship between the two of us since I’ve been a small child. In the email, he asked me a question that after reading it disturbed me so profoundly but I couldn’t put it into perspective. It made my stomach feel all wiggly and threw me off balance.
I decided to sit down and start reading, really reading Jack’s book and allowed his words to wash over me and bathe me in the idea that I could and must take 100% responsibility for my adult life, my choices, my issues, my fears, my relationships, everything. After I read the first chapter, I decided that I wanted to process it so I sat in quiet meditation with my hands clasped in my lap, fingertips touching.
I noticed that as I sat and watched my thoughts process, I was suddenly able to see things from my father’s perspective. For the first time in 22 years I felt a wall of blame and anger and resentment inside of me collapsing under the weight of the idea that I had something to do with the situation that I was in. I noticed that I couldn’t stop yawning as I was sitting and watching my thoughts floating by me. I also noticed that I went through many moments of real peace, almost feeling completely detached from my old role.
After I opened my eyes I was astonished at all the changes of perspective and leaps that I made in my thinking. Yet I hadn’t really processed it fully.
I skipped breakfast because I wasn’t hungry then right before coaching with my buddy today I grabbed a late lunch. I noticed that I was eating more and wanting heavier food than usual, I even grabbed some chocolate before I went upstairs to speak with her. Mmmm
That was curious I thought. Then we began our buddy coaching. When it was my turn, I shared with her what I had learned from the book and told her about what my colleague and I were doing and shared the insight that came to me this morning. We talked about that for about ½ an hour and I realized that I wanted to really take 100% responsibility and we proceeded to tap on that.
What followed from the tapping that we did together was that I was able to see 100% clearly how I had been unfair to all the men in my life, including my father because of experiences that had occurred with other men when I was a young child. Somewhere down deep I reasoned that because I was hurt, I was going to hurt others before they could hurt me, so I’d been doing a lot of unintentional hurting of many people because they were triggering things in me that reminded me of being a victim.
I know I’m rambling with these thoughts, but give me a chance I just woke up and had to share my insights.
Here’s the deal. How many times in your life do you find yourself eating automatically without thinking and instantly you jump to judge your actions and say, “I’m a pig and I have no self control.” I’ll never stop this pattern because I’ll always be fat.” That is the part of you that is wanting to hold onto the blaming and resentment. You’ve been hurt by others and in trying to deal with that hurt, you’re keeping quiet and using food as your voice. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Please learn from my struggles. You can go from having a great ‘slim’ day to a miserable ‘fat’ day in a jiffy if you allow your mind to accept that kind of burden of self hatred. If you notice those days when you’re hungrier than usual and you are eating more and differently, don’t leap to judge your actions. Listen to what your body is saying. Sit quietly and listen to the whispers so that you won’t have to hear the screams.
Consider taking that 100% responsibility that Jack encourages, but be certain that you get your tapping fingers ready because you’re going to need to forgive yourself and others for a lot of pain that comes from that understanding.
After tapping and crying for nearly an hour with my buddy, I had arrived at the place where I no longer blame Dad for my weaknesses, but I’m still working on forgiving myself for them. I’ll tell you truthfully, I don’t know where I’d be in my life, if I didn’t have EFT to get me over these kinds of humps.
How about you? Are you using EFT for what it’s meant to do, heal you? I encourage you to check out Gary Craig’s DVD library and really learn how to use Emotional Freedom Technique so that you can take back your life and reclaim your power over food one bite at a time.