Dropping History, Dropping Pounds

Ahhh history....

Everyone's got history...lots of it in many cases.

We feel trapped by our histories, burdened down by what has happened to us...  
and by what we have done to ourselves as a result of stress and traumas. 

All the events that upset our lives and put us on less than glorious paths in life...
and in the less than glorious ways we care for our bodies.
 
We feel like we are wading through an ugly endless swamp
and we are getting tired of dealing with it all.

While history matters...it is real...and powerful at times,
it is less helpful when it comes to getting better. 

Sometimes, when I see that something is not working like it should, I take a different tack.

People spend so much time and energy trying to understand what has happened to them.
And that can be a good thing.   But there is a season for everything.

When all that effort isn't giving you the results you need, it may be time for a new approach.

One approach that can really help is 'dropping history'.

So what would happen if we found a way to drop some of that history.

So much of our history is filled with defeat, self blame, unpleasant triggers and the like.
We go round and round and round....looping endlessly
until we have worn deep ruts in our minds and in our habits.
That gets discouraging!  It goes nowhere!

Here is how I learned to drop history and free myself.

It started with a friendship that had faltered. 
A certain person had offended and hurt me to no end. 
I would not retaliate in kind, but I would tally up all the terrible things she did or said. 
As time went by I began to seethe with resentment and hurt.
Many were the times when I self medicated with food or drink as a result.
Eventually the whole mess was taking up way too much room in my head.
I was stuck.  The load just got heavier and more hurtful.

One day an image floated before my mind's eye. 
I saw a large chalkboard and on it was written all the grievances that I had against her. 
It was a very long list.  I felt my anger and spitefulness arise once more.  Pretty toxic stuff.
    
Then I saw a big eraser on the ledge of the chalkboard.
I had the thought of just simply erasing the whole tiresome list.
Making it clean...

'Who cares!?'  a part of me cried.   'Who cares!?'
Some of that junk was 10 years old....Who cares!?
Wouldn't it just feel better to wash the slate clean?

In my mind's eye, I did just that!  I wiped the board that day...
Over the next days and weeks when the memories returned to haunt me,
I wiped the board clean again and again and again.  Day by day.
"Who cares about all that junk?!  Not me!"

I learned to live without that history and all the misery that came with it.
I found myself feeling lighter and happier... Why hadn't I thought of this before?!

Had I forgiven her?  Well, I suppose so... 
I just wasn't interested in carting all that around anymore.  It wasn't healthy...for me or her.

It soon occurred to me to drop history with other parts of my past...
"Who cares?!" became a kind of anthem.

In the end, I even learned to forgive myself!  The greatest gift!

I honestly don't care what mistakes were made yesterday or last month or last year.
All that weighs me down and gets me no closer to my goals. 
When you learn to drop history, your own good energy returns to you.
It is suddenly easy to change your life for the better.
Let the past go...
Living without history can be incredibly liberating!  
Today is a good day....that is enough. 
Why poison today with thoughts of yesterday?

You will be amazed at how much history can be dropped...
Take a chance...pick a starting point and try it for yourself!

I leave you with a quote from Marcus Aurelius:
"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

Anatomy of an eating disorder 

The year I turned 50, I had a dream experience that put a final end to a decades-long eating addiction...

In this dream I was visited by a figure from the past... someone that I had rarely thought of in 35 years.

The visitor was my first boss, a fearsome Catholic nun.   She was also the first person in my life to die.

Let’s start at the beginning  of this story…

When I was 16,  I found a job at a local Catholic hospital.  I worked in the kitchen, serving food

and delivering it to the patients.

My boss was, as I said, a fearsome  Catholic nun.  She was always in a bitter,sour, angry mood.  
The feeling around her was almost evil...but I wouldn't allow such an idea...
After all,  she was a nun...a holy person...and I was supposed to be a good Catholic girl. 
I couldn't allow such a wicked thought, for heaven's sake!

She was also the first morbidly obese person I had ever seen.

She was literally bigger around than she was tall. 

On the pretense of tasting the food before it was served, she was always sampling each dish.

She was constantly eating.   I never saw her without a plate of food in her chubby hands.

When I arrived for work each day she was seated in her customary corner eating and glaring at us kids. 

When I left for the day she was still there…still eating. 

She seemed to stare at me, in particular, the only girl on staff.
We stayed out of her way as best we could, though we found her strangely fascinating.

One day I came to work and sister was gone.  She had died suddenly. 
We were a bit shaken.  She was not very old.

But life went on after her passing.  We all felt a sense of relief as her angry presence dissipated.
 

Then, suddenly, things took an ugly turn for me. 
Just 72 hrs after her passing, I woke up with a full blown eating disorder. 
Literally....It happened in my sleep.

From that morning on, ALL I could think about was food.  My mind was completely invaded. 
It was as if I had been taken over by something horrible and unyielding.  
Suddenly, I found that I couldn't concentrate on my studies, my job, friends and family. 

Only food.    It had such an overpowering quality that everything else was blocked from my mind.

I fought the compulsion in every way I could think of, but I could never win.

This was 1967, long before anyone spoke of such things. 
I felt sure that I was the only one in the world experiencing this.

It was a terrifying experience and it impacted my life in many ways... 
For example...relationships were out of the question unless they allowed for a lot of secret time.
I found that I had to have a stash of food with me at all times.  I was frantic.
I acted like a starving person. 
This secretive aspect made no sense in the context of my life, but that knowledge did not make
any difference.  There seemed to be no way to reason my way out of this!
I was afraid to be around people for fear they would discover my problem.

I would eat with friends, only to go home, purge and eat again.  The vicious cycle escalated.
Nothing made sense anymore.

What made this even stranger was that prior to this, I was always thin, as was everyone in my family.  
I didn't have a lot of time for food...I was active in my studies, volunteer work, physical activities. 
Food was just a necessary interruption to keep me going. 
I even had to go on a diet now and then in an effort to GAIN weight.
So this state of affairs was incomprehensible to me!

Eating became more frenzied as I lost ground.  I would resist with all my strength, but my will
seemed to be disabled.  This was not like me...but there was little I could do about it.
In one terrifying moment, I remember my tongue writhing uncontrollably in my mouth as I tried
to resist the compulsion.

I felt possessed.  But no one believed in such things anymore. 

There was no place to turn for help.   No books, no people, no support groups. 
It was a solitary and bitterly cruel and confusing experience.

Years were ‘lost’ to eating.  Thousands of dollars spent on binges. 
No amount of chiding myself helped. 

I wracked my brain for years wondering what could have triggered this. 
There were many possibilities…going hungry for a time as a child, molestation attempts growing up, extreme anxiety in an unhappy, stressed family...many of the markers that affect all of us who struggle with such things.

They all made sense…but none of them felt like a ‘fit’. 

More importantly, none of that information and reasoning effected any change in my behavior.
Even though those things might have been contributing factors, the information just seemed to tangle things up further. It seemed to dig the hole deeper until it became a pit from which I would never emerge.

My life was soon to become completely organized around eating, dieting and exercise….

Sound familiar?

Now this is not to say that you are 'possessed'  or troubled in the sense that I was, but DO read on... 

There are many reasons for interference and many degrees of struggle. 
This is one piece of the puzzle....
  
People can be interfered with on a family level, a cultural level (work, church, the culture at large), emotional levels and others.  Each story is unique. 

But the clues are what is important here...