Finding your clues...

Several readers have asked for more information about how these ‘hungry ghost’ problems occur…

How to know if that is a piece of their puzzle…

What to do if you suspect  'hungry ghost' involvement.  

First… take note of when your problem started... 

was it in childhood, young adulthood or later in life? 

Try not to over-analyze at this stage.  It is just fact-finding for now. 

You will, no doubt, have various explanations in mind just the same.  

So go ahead and note them.

For the moment, let's say that those are the stories we tell ourselves.  

Note them, but don't engage them for now.

As much as you are able, leave any blame and self-recrimination on the side.  

It just confuses things.

Make a list of the foods you struggle with.  Notice your patterns. 

Is there a time of day or night when you feel more vulnerable?

What might those foods be symbolic of?  A certain person?  

Something shared?  A need for comfort?

As you assemble the information you will start to have clues to your mystery.

Notice your emotions around your over-eating, bingeing or lack of eating.

Are you experiencing sadness, melancholy, anger, frustration, pity for one's self?   

Are you missing someone?

Do you find yourself eating like a starving person, or eating like a man 

if you are a woman?  Is there a special food or cuisine?

Take time to consider all the subtle aspects that you experience. 

Is there a sense of being pushed from behind or above?  

A sense of something bearing down or overshadowing you?

Is something interfering with your will?  

If so, do you experience it as creeping up on you or suddenly overpowering you? 

Or do you have a sense of something gnawing or craving from inside?  

If so, where?  In  your belly, throat, etc.?

Try to stay calm and objective.  There is no need for fear or shame.  

We are just gathering information.

Keep assembling your clues. 

Is the food or drink characteristic of you and your taste or is it outside 

your habitual food or drink?  

Let's take a look at your personality...  

Are you deeply sympathetic?  A caregiver?  A sensitive?  An introvert? 

Empathetic?  Spiritually inclined?  

Do you often feel responsible for others’ wellbeing and/or happiness?  

Do people seek you out as someone they can confide in or share their problems with?

Would someone describe you as a bleeding heart sort of person?  

Does a loved one or family member linger in your mind?  

For that matter, does someone that you have had difficulties with 

or unfinished business linger or attach?

You might add to this list...

Do you experience several of the above?  

If so, you may be too open and vulnerable for your own good.

We are the easiest targets for a needy one…on either side of life.

We often are not aware enough of who and what is in our energy field 

and how that impacts us, sometimes against our will.

A little awareness will go a long way here…  

Here is an example…  On a trip to England and Wales some years ago, 

I found myself fascinated by the charming old churches that dotted the countryside.  

I like anything old and I wandered through many of the adjacent graveyards, as well. 

I saw people making grave rubbings and I gave it a try myself, thinking nothing of it.

When I returned home to the states, a friend invited me along to visit an old woman 

who she described as gifted.

The old woman took one look at me and exclaimed “Oh my!  You have been visiting graveyards!

You must never do that!”

She was quite vehement about it.  I was a bit shocked and I must admit I did not understand 

her concern.

She went on to tell me that I was much too open and sympathetic by nature 

and that that sort of venture was off limits to me.

Her observation was that a whole group of the deceased spirits had followed me 

back to the states.  

They sensed that I was a tenderhearted person and they attached themselves to me. 

It never occurred to me that such a thing would happen.   

I knew that I had been feeling unusually tired and a bit weepy since my return…

not my usual self.   What she said made sense... 

I gave myself a bit of a shaking, got back into life and made it a point to resist 

all such influences and I was soon back to normal.

Thinking back on it, it’s easy to see how we experience other people’s ‘stuff’ 

without realizing it.  

Their sadness, their stories, their shifting emotions…even their illnesses.  

It is simply their energies moving through us….much like a weather system. 

In the very same way that spending time with a negative person can drag us down 

for awhile, we can experience the heaviness or infirmity of an energy floating 

in our vicinity.

It just happens quite naturally. 

Women and children often have quite porous boundaries…too open, too soft, too yielding.  

Too unaware.

These are boundary issues that we were never taught.  

In fact, if anything, our boundaries have not been recognized or respected

and that has become the norm for us.  

We can get tangled up in all sorts of unpleasantness.

As we learn to erect those fences and put our boundaries back in place, 

we gain control of our lives, sometimes for the first time.

You begin to experience that it is normal and necessary that you have control 

of your body, your life…even your energy field and that nothing interferes inappropriately. 

You learn eventually to keep all interference to a minimum. 

Your life becomes peaceful, especially in your stomach…your emotional brain. 

Hungry Ghosts....how things work

A long time ago, I was graced to meet and work with a wonderful older woman . 

I still regard her as one of my wisest teachers.   

The one core lesson she taught was that "Everything is energy....  

As soon as you learn this one thing, you will understand everything easily."   

Over the years, this has proven to be true..  Remarkably simple.

That idea is very helpful for our discussion and  it will help to clear up a lot of confusion.. 

Let's talk about this story in the light of that understanding... 

I have a friend who lost her mother at a particularly vulnerable age.  

"Lost" her mother is a phrase we take for granted.  

Words have the power to guide our minds.  

In our culture we believe that loved ones that pass out of life are lost to us.  

People suffer terribly because of their belief in those words. 

What if we were given too simple-minded an understanding of things?  

What if everything and everyone is simply energy?  

What if what we experience in the passing of a person is simply a shift in energy?

Energy vibrates...and it vibrates at different rates.  

Take water, for instance. Depending on its vibration, it can go from ice to slush to water

and then to steam.  More widely dispersed, it is simply humid air...invisible...but present.

A human body is largely comprised of water vibrating at a certain rate, along with 

a certain percentage of other matter vibrating slowly enough to become visible to the eye.

Rock, for instance, is vibrating very slowly.  It is dense and heavy.  

Much in the same way that a heavy, muscle-bound weight lifter is dense in comparison

to a ballet dancer who is light and airy in their body, seemingly weightless at times.

We each have our own energy vibration, our own signature that is distinct from all others.  

We are similar, yet distinct.  

I once knew a man who was born into a family of psychics....which is simply another way

of saying that one has finely tuned perception.   

He took a group of blind children and began to teach them how to perceive with their other senses. 

The 1st exercise was to teach these children how to perceive color by means of perception of vibration.

He chose various colors of felt squares and taught the kids how to feel the different vibrations of each color

by passing their hands a few inches above the felt.  They did surprisingly well. 

If this seems implausible to you, try this little exercise: turn your TV off and pass your hand 

across the screen from several inches away.  You will feel a crackle of electrical energy.  

Experiment with how far out you can hold your hand and still feel the energy. 

We are surrounded by unseen energy in the form of electricity, sound waves, solar, microwave

and many others.  We deal with energy constantly without understanding everything about it.  

So...back to the blind children...

Another exercise was to learn how to perceive the energy of their classmates.

Everyone has a certain 'feel', a certain vibration.  The kids readily picked up the skill! 

It was a successful exercise. As he continued to expand their capabilities they were eventually 

able to perceive space... and then to perceive finer vibrations within space.  

These children were eventually able to run laps in a gym without bumping into the walls 

and then without bumping into walls or their classmates!

We all have these abilities.  It is just a matter of focus and practice.

So...going back to the so-called loss of a loved one...

What if the spirit of a person simply shifts vibration? Think about it...

When we are free of the heaviness of a body, our vibration would be faster...and intensely alive.

We feel something similar if we are heavy, sleepy and dull after a huge meal 

as compared to the lightness and rapidity of life when we set food aside for a fast, for instance.

   

In the same way that you can feel the approach of a loved one or that you can sense danger 

or feel an impending storm system, you can feel anyone who has passed out of their body.  

Many  people have caught the scent of an old fashioned perfume that is associated with a grandmother long since passed, for instance...a visitation...   

Or you hear a song playing in your mind that is connected to a time, a place, a person.  

Many times that is a sign or a clue of a visiting energy.   

You may experience an emotion or seemingly random memory.  

What if it is not random or haphazard?  

What if all of these....were comforting evidence of their presence?

Going back to the woman who lost her mother as a child...

Her mother had been a pastry chef.  She loved to make wedding cakes and fancy french pastries. 

Her expression of love was to prepare special sweets for them after school. 

That was always their special together time.

She died an early death of cancer, leaving 3 small girls behind.  

Their mourning was not handled well.  

Their mother was quickly replaced with a stern, uncaring stepmother.  

Their grief was ignored and the new situation confused things enormously for the stricken children.

  

The spirit of their mother hovers near her children, but because of their erroneous teaching about death

both from the overculture and reinforced by the church, they grieved her loss.

Many children innately know that death is a bit of an illusion.  Many children can still see or otherwise

perceive other vibrations or what we call 'worlds'.   

Unfortunately, adults dismiss these things...simply because they do not see or perceive them

They teach children to shut out a whole realm of what is there..

This is much needed information.  We were born with it!.

So children come to rely increasingly on the guidance they receive from the adults around them.

They learn to fear and suffer and grieve and steel themselves against the change that is called death.

They cannot receive or communicate normally.  

They are cut off from their former larger real experience of life.  Their world shrinks to fit.

They lose their vision.  Whatever is not concrete now is labeled fantasy.

They grow into adults and are now steeped in their grief and loss.  

So their mother signals them in the ways that she knows that they will recognize...symbolic language!

The symbolic language of luscious, comforting pastries!    

Now that she has passed, the daughters unthinkingly go and load up on sweet junk food and desserts 

on their way home from work, much to the detriment of their health, unfortunately.  

When they are feeling especially vulnerable, they go into a kind of food trance and eat soul-numbing 

amounts of gooey desserts to assuage their loneliness.  

What they have now created or drawn to themselves is a hungry ghost...a familiar spirit!

But not the spirit of their mother necessarily... They are stuck in a loop of painful unreality.

Like a deeply worn groove in a record.  A deeply worn groove in the brain....

What should be a positive signal becomes a negative, self-destructive and painful response!

What they cannot see is that their mother has either drawn near or that they are calling her in 

via the vibration that matches their closest and happiest memories of her.  

They are evoking her...but in an unaware state.

Better to have a cup of tea and a small sweet cake with her in spirit than to gorge on love lost.

If they could grasp what is really happening...the signal of her very real nearness...

they could experience her loving presence. 

They could exchange a very real and current experience with her.  

Their relationship is alive...it is just very much skewed.  It is half-hidden in the behavior...

This is another experience of a 'hungry ghost'.   

Once we are able to make the leap and catch the clues that they are sending us, 

we can dispense with the clue, whether it is eating or drinking or acting in various other ways.

We can then recover and  resume our relationships with them.   

It is only a matter of getting the information.  Then the clue is no longer needed. 

In the case of these daughters, if they could recognize the approach of their mother 

in their quiet moments, they would be able to recognize the clue and receive her love.  

We re-enact many behaviors until we 'get the information'... until we 'get' the clues.

It is remarkable the way our lives will shift as we decipher these clues.  

It is dramatic, total and seemingly miraculous.  

It becomes a great game of understanding and discovery once we begin to perceive the world 

a little differently...a  little more accurately...energetically!.

Instead of heaviness, despair and self recrimination...instead of being stuck in a downward spiral,  

there is a lifting and re-orienting of all things in life. 

An aha moment that relieves all suffering...

It is needless suffering.  In an energetic world you cannot lose anybody...ever. 

It is just a shifting of energies. Life goes on, spirit goes on..

'Spirit is just a way of saying  'unseen by fleshly eyes' that perceive less.

Think of an eagle or a dog.... their senses are keener than ours. 

We can sometimes lean on them for information that is not ordinarily available to us.  

So, too, some people have ability to perceive beyond the norm...much like other people 

who have musical or math abilities.  

We should value their contributions to our lives and learn from them, so that we can experience 

more of our own latent potentials....

Imagine this from the other side of material life...

Can you imagine the effort and distress of those that have passed out of body trying to reach us 

to comfort, help, love and guide us through life?  

What if you went to your mother's house all day long and tried to get her to answer her door or phone

and she sat inside, unresponsive, somehow sure she was just imagining your knock or the ringing of the phone?   What if she had been told that you were gone away...a phantom?

Or that you now lived in a distant place or that you are lost to her?

If we could but relax into the knowledge that we are all experiencing life still...just a little differently.  

It is not much different than living life in Paris or Bangkok or on a midwestern farm.  

It's not like you can give them a hug daily if they live in a faraway place, but you find other ways 

to communicate your love.

It is sometimes hard to relate to or imagine their very different life, but it is just as real.and meaningful... 

If you can, take your eyes off the behavior of over-eating or drinking, etc. for a while.

Stand back and see if it has another meaning or message for you...

Go behind....

Go underneath...

Your answers are many times right there...just under the mind...

Hungry Ghosts continued...

Hungry Ghosts continued...

Since the last post, I have been urged to expand on the subject of the hungry ghosts.

Meg writes: "At the end of that post my response was....Wait!  I want to know more! 
More about that hungry ghost!! Hungry ghosts in general. 
What they do, how they are drawn, how to get rid of them.

You are the very first person (and only so far) who ever told me about such a thing

and it is such important information...."

It is an important piece of the puzzle in many situations...   So much can be said...

Here is another story that will help to shed some light on the subject...

Some years ago a woman came to me for healing sessions. She had just moved to our town.

She and her husband found a lovely older home in a tree lined neighborhood.

They liked the quiet ambience of their place compared to the hectic noisy city they had left behind.

All went well for the first few months.

But soon after, she started to complain about a change in her husband's behavior.

He had become withdrawn and unhappy in recent weeks... he was just not his old self. 

As time went on he became morose and argumentative.

Strangely, he had started to drink... daily.

Prior to that, it was normal for them to have a glass of wine on social occasions. 

The problem escalated and soon, her husband was drinking to excess most nights.

Their marriage started to suffer. 

Whenever she tried to talk to him, it always sparked a bitter argument.

He had not been unreasonable before.  She felt increasingly alienated from him.

After a couple of months of watching their situation deteriorate, I wondered if we needed
to seek an answer in a less obvious direction. 

It occurred to me to ask her about what he was drinking.
Was he drinking anything out of the ordinary? 
Her answer was very interesting. 
His choice of drinks was very uncharacteristic for him...gin rickeys, manhattans, vodka gimlets... 
drinks that belonged to an earlier era.

Bingo!  I thought.  Hungry ghost...
 

I asked her for further details....where and when he drank....what were his patterns?

She observed that he was becoming increasingly secretive about his drinking... 

and that he was drinking in the laundry room .  
When he came home from work each evening, his new habit was to down a few stiff drinks
before dinner, eat dinner in sullen silence, after which he proceeded to drink himself
into a stupor each night before stumbling into bed.

He was obviously losing control as time went on.

In my mind, I felt sure that he was taking on the personality of the former owner of the house.

I asked his wife to get to know her neighbors and find out everything she could
about the previous occupants...

It wasn't long before she got the sad story of the family that had lived there... 

The house had belonged to a Doctor, his wife and their son. 
For the most part, they seemed like an ordinary family.

All went well until later in life when their son fell into depression as a young adult. 
He moved back in with his parents after college, unable to succeed in life. 

The young man spiraled downward into drug and alcohol addiction, despite the family's best efforts to get treatment for him. 
The young man eventually committed suicide in the basement of the home. 
His parents were devastated...Their only child...dead.

His father soon took to drinking to deal with his pain and loss.  He became increasingly withdrawn
and depressed.   And then he eventually died from the effects of alcoholism....in that house.

I arranged to visit the house with his wife.  When I walked toward the laundry room I felt an angry, heavy presence trying to block my entrance.  The laundry room was ice cold. 
(We later found out that the laundry room was the former location of the old doctor's large liquor cabinet)
I had engaged the former owner.    It took some work to dislodge him from the husband and to remove him from the house, but he did finally move on.  He was reluctant to leave...there was much unfinished business there.  I made it emphatically clear that he had no right to cross the boundaries
into any other person's life.
. 

When we all talked afterward, the new owners were able to see the progression of events and make the connections.  They understood the gradual encroachment of the unhappy spirit into the husband's energy field and mind.  Armed with that knowledge, they were able to turn things around.  They cleared themselves and were able to keep their house clear. Soon,the husband was back to his old self, unencumbered, and his wife felt like she was back together with the man she'd married.

In the next post, we'll talk about how to distinguish between ordinary personal problems and addictions and those that might involve a hungry ghost or harmful energy...

The Dream..the final piece of the puzzle

And then came the dream....

A few months later, I had a night visitation in the form of a dream and all was made clear. 

Dreams of this sort are incredibly clarifying and dense with meaning.  There is a vividness which makes the dream quite real and unforgettable... a dream with great impact. 

My 1st boss was a fearsome Catholic nun. She ran the kitchen at the Catholic hospital. She was the 1st morbidly obese person I had ever seen.  From the moment when she came through the doors on 2 special canes and fell into a huge chair that had been custom-built to hold her girth, plates of food were handed to her.  I never saw Sister without a fork in hand.  She ate non-stop.  She was always in a sour mood and we did our best to avoid her.   One day, we came to work and Sister was gone.  We found that she had died.  She was not old. We knew that things would be easier with her passing and breathed a sigh of relief.  But 72 hrs. later, I woke up a different person. For much of the next 20 years, ALL I could think about was my next morsel of food. I was in a hell on earth...so fully taken over as I slept innocently at the age of 16, that it never occurred to me that her death was the trigger... 
So now to the dream...

In the dream 'Sister' came to me after all those years.  It was completely unexpected.  I had not once thought of her in decades.  But she was here now to show me what had taken place. 

You will notice a shift of tone and 'voice'.  These are her words and understanding...

'Sister' conveyed to me that she herself had been in the murderous grip of an entity with a raging lust for food. 

It had tried ...and eventually succeeded in taking her life.  

When she died, the parasitic  thing that took her out of life...the murderous entity...required a new host to feed off of....a new body.

Sister showed me that she had inadvertently created an emotional bridge between us and that the entity was able to use this 'bridge' to make the leap to its new victim...me.

She had created this bridge simply in the act of sitting in her familiar corner and staring at my perfect little 16 year old body with envy and lust.  She sat in her food trance and her eyes bore into me.  Day after day, she envied me and was resentful.  

The emotional and energetic connection was built in this way.  

Though she knew it was wrong, she did not understand how things really worked in the unseen realms and because of this, the damage was done.  She had not intended it. 

She made her appearance in order to explain things to me and to ask for my forgiveness.  

I was instantly struck by the truth of what she showed me.

It was as if my eyes were suddenly opened and I saw things clearly for the very first time. 

There was another layer of existence to be considered....that of the unseen...spirits! 

The mechanism of what had happened to me was quite hidden from me all those terrible years.  

It was no wonder that none of the answers I had come up with through all the years had ever quite fit.  It was all just fumbling in the dark...

In the dream experience, I was given a span of time in which to think things over and make my decision...to forgive her...  or not. 

I briefly re-experienced the whole panorama of events. I felt everything associated with it.

The resentment, the pain of those years, the shame and self recrimination, the terror as I lost control, the unfairness of it all...for me...and also for her. 

She had been as ignorant and deeply disturbed by something beyond her control as I was.

And her religious instruction was just as wanting as mine.       It was, tragically, of no help...

But at this stage, she had to make amends and seek my forgiveness. 

I considered all of this in my heart and I knew that I must forgive her. 

She also had suffered horribly in many ways.  I could feel her deep remorse and sorrow

I said from my heart, ‘Yes...I forgive you.            
You didn't understand how things worked.  I didn't either. 
Of course I forgive you!"
It was the truth.  

I felt so unburdened.  There was no need for anger or punishment.  It was just simple in the light of what had happened.   

Moments later she was gone.  Her mission completed.  
Her warfare ended. 

The dream ended peacefully and I slept a bit longer.

When morning dawned,  I awoke with the experience of a final shattering of the obsession.  As if a tiny grenade had exploded in my stomach, I felt shards of metal fly away from me in all directions.  And I heard a hideous shriek as the demon flew away.

The final remnants...

From that time up to the present day,  it feels so completely gone as if it had never existed.

Like a total erasure of history.  I could not recover the feeling if I tried.

In the next post, I will share some insights in retrospect and will show what I have learned about this layer of reality.  I'll talk about how these things happen and how to recover...

If any of you would like to post comments, ask questions or share your experiences privately, please add your comments or write to me @ skydancer.net   

blessings...

Anatomy of an Eating Disorder continued... Hungry Ghosts

I happened to attend a lecture given by a Tibetan Buddhist abbot.   In recounting the history and culture of his people, he mentioned a particular feast day that he call the Feast for the Hungry Ghosts.  Suddenly something inside me leapt to attention.  I had to know more!  It happened so fast...faster than thought.  It was urgent that I learn everything possible about this!

I had an opportunity to ask the abbot about this festival and this is the explanation that was given:

We are all here to learn and experience life and to grow as souls.  We must learn to develop and master our minds and bodies as well as our spiritual potential.  We work to overcome weaknesses and failings.  

Sometimes people neglect to clear their faults in this life.  They leave this life with unfinished business.    Let’s say someone is addicted…  A person can be addicted to many things....  

Gambling, drugs, alcohol, sex…any number of things.  These are some of the obvious addictions. 

In another post we’ll look into some of the less obvious problems…

When a person dies with these active lusts or addictions, their soul leaves the body.  In this state, their cravings are felt even more keenly.  For some, the desire is experienced as a kind of burning. 

The problem arises because the person no longer has a body with which to fulfil their desires or lusts.

This is the hungry ghost...

Their suffering can be intense and they will do anything to lessen their craving.

So the  hungry  ghost  will seek out a vulnerable person and attach themselves...

much like a hitchhiker... to share the vehicle of that person’s body. 

He went on to explain that in their culture if a person is approaching death, families take care to protect anyone who might be vulnerable to the hungry ghost.  Pregnant women, babies and young children, the elderly, and anyone who is otherwise weak from illness, trauma or grief is kept away for their safety.

 

Likewise, in recognition of the fact that the hungry ghosts are suffering and hovering near the earth, they continue to pray for them and they try to assuage their suffering by means of the Feast for The Hungry Ghosts.  The whole community comes together to spread a banquet table with miniature tokens of all that they might need in their present state. 

Tiny gambling tokens, small  glasses of  alcohol, sweets, miniature replicas of money… anything that souls get attached to are offered to the hungry ghosts so that they will partake of them and leave the people alone. 

They understand that the ghosts or spirits can exist on the essence of a thing and thus relieve their cravings for a time.  They know that they are acknowledged and prayed for and they will not cause suffering for those who still live on earth.

I was so fascinated by these ideas.  Here was a culture where such things could be talked about and dealt with openly.  Even my skeptical mind could sense the rightness of their ideas.

I sat with the story for several days, mulling it over.  It started to dawn on me that perhaps there was a connection with my odd behavior as I came to the end of each item that I had been addicted to. 

I remembered that as time went on, I even bought smaller amounts…  one donut, not a dozen. Finally… just a representative sample of each thing  with the sense that I did not have to take it into my body, but just leave it on the table.  And with that final move, I had relief.  And then very soon after… it was gone.

Finally, some small clarity was coming to me…

Anatomy of an Eating Disorder continued...

One of the turning points in the struggle with the problem came from an unexpected direction...
By this time, I had tried so many things in an effort to understand and heal myself from the addiction.  Everything from affirmations, religion, myriad diets, exercise, fasting, journalling...but I still wasn't getting better.

Then, a novel approach came to me by way of a book written by a Chinese Christian mystic named Watchman Nee.  It was suggested that I quit struggling and simply forgive myself and turn the job over to Christ.  It was terrifying to think of letting go.  If I stopped fighting, I would surely disappear into the black hole of the addiction.  The idea of forgiving myself for the awful behavior that I was likely to continue repeating made no sense to me.  I hated myself for my weakness and gluttony. I knew I would be a repeat offender. I was filled with self-loathing and shame.  So what was the sense of forgiving myself and giving up the struggle?
It seemed so hypocritical...even nonsensical.   But eventually, I realized that I had tried everything else...
and none of it had worked.
There wasn't much more to lose.  I had run out of ideas.  I was giving up on myself anyway.
By this time, I was desperately tired of the struggle.
I started to apply the advice...   I 'forgave myself'.  At first, it was a kind of make believe statement.
The best I could do was to just mouth the words "I forgive myself for eating the pie" or whatever.
It was hollow and without conviction.  But I kept on doing it.  Each and every time.  I was, in effect, turning my back on my negative behavior. Trying to love myself a little.  It still made no sense to me, but i practiced it anyway.  
The strangest thing happened as I continued to forgive myself over the next weeks and months.
The compulsions to eat began to diminish.  I didn't understand it, but I could feel it. I could observe a change in my behavior.  It took an unfamiliar form.  Whereas I might have felt compelled to buy and eat a box of doughnuts, I watched my behavior shift.  I would buy the doughnuts, but I would leave them on the kitchen counter instead.  There was strangely no compulsion to eat them.  After a few days, i would discard them. 
The compulsions were coming less often and with less strength.  That pattern was experienced with each and every binging food.  After discarding them 2 or 3 times, that particular food had very little meaning to me.  I began to realize that once I reached that stage,  I was near the end.  Just having it in the house was somehow enough.  I did not need to eat it for some reason.  In the past, just having the food in the house was enough to trigger an eating binge.
This was a strange new experience.  Over the course of about a year, I could see that I was emerging from the pit.  It was as if the forgiveness had put some traction underfoot and I was able to climb a little higher most days.   Finally, I found that I was largely free of temptation and compulsion.  I reached a stage where I was eating normally for the 1st time in many years. 
There was a little holdover from the past that I could never quite eradicate, however...  3 or 4 times a year, I was inexplicably 'seized' for a day or so and I found myself back in that precarious state.
But each time, I was reminded to forgive myself, the same as before, and to put it behind me.  And that continued to help.  I thought to myself that I could live with the remnant.  I still puzzled over how this had happened to me, but I was happy to have distanced myself from the worst of it.
I continued like that for several years....a small struggle now, but manageable. 

Then another piece of the puzzle came to me...

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...