I was a fat kid. Kind friends and adults would say I was chubby. The other kids at school called it like it was: fat.
I didn't start out fat, but moving to a new city or neighborhood every three years or less took its toll on my psyche. By my count I attended twelve different schools between kindergarten and twelfth grade — not one every year, but sometimes two in a year. Such was the life of a girl with a career-military father. Instead of going outside to play and meet new friends (again) or having to integrate into a new social group (again), I'd stay inside, read, and eat bread. Shadowy family stuff also prompted me to unconsciously pad myself with pudgy protection. It's crude, but it works.
I didn't start out fat, but moving to a new city or neighborhood every three years or less took its toll on my psyche. By my count I attended twelve different schools between kindergarten and twelfth grade — not one every year, but sometimes two in a year. Such was the life of a girl with a career-military father. Instead of going outside to play and meet new friends (again) or having to integrate into a new social group (again), I'd stay inside, read, and eat bread. Shadowy family stuff also prompted me to unconsciously pad myself with pudgy protection. It's crude, but it works.
For a few years, after I noticed my body had changed its proportions in ways my peers' bodies hadn't, I tried to lose weight. Half-heartedly, I would try to change my eating habits. It was a dreary, impotent effort. Inside (and outside) I was whining: Nobody loves me. I have no friends. And the reason is because I'm fat.
My child-self had the reasoning backward. It was not the case that I had no friends because I was fat. It was that I was fat because I had no friends. My internal dialog perpetuated the problem. I would look in the mirror and like myself less and less. I would look in the mirror and think that if only I were thin I would be loved.
When I was fourteen, something shifted. Perhaps it was the fire of natural teenage rebellion or the rising force of hormones that gave me power to break free of fatty inertia. Reflection tells me it had more to do with my new environment. I lived in a neighborhood with kids my own age. I had attended the same school for two full years and was certain to be there for at least one more. My PE teacher had taken a shine to me because I had soccer skills, and now I was on the team. Because my social network extended beyond my nuclear family, the family's dysfunctions exerted less pressure on me.
Losing weight was not the result of reducing caloric intake. In fact, my mother noticed my eating habits didn't change at all. Observing my weight loss and discerning no hint of a diet, mom approached me with worried questions: "Are you bulimic? Are you making yourself throw up after you eat?" In her mind, fat and food were on opposite sides of a simple equation. If I was losing weight without eating less, then obviously I was discharging the food somehow.
But, no, I was not barfing off the excess. My equation was more complex than food equals fat. It included other variables, like fitness and friends and a sense of place.
Losing weight was not an effort of will, but an effect of restoring balance to my life's ecosystem. I was living in an environment in which I could experience more love for myself. My attention moved away from the symptom of being fat toward the experience of being engaged with my world, connected, valued. I dropped the pounds of protection, because I could, not because I forced myself to.
To use the language of today's economic obsession, my body performed a "market correction." It responded to a host of interconnected variables and right-sized itself to match the desires and demands of my new reality. It expressed a soul-adjustment.
The memory of my teenage transformation popped into my mind this morning as I sipped my coffee and watched my partner's cats stalk insects in our garden full of hip-high dandelion weeds. I was ruminating on what it was that finally caused the misery of childhood chubbiness to give way.
The theme of misery has been on my mind. Clients come to me seeking relief from all sorts of sufferings. And I have had my own heaping helping of personal miseries over the past year and a half — divorce, miscarriage, debilitating illness and incapacitating injury. After what feels like eons under the thumb of some great shadowy oppression, I am finally beginning to feel free. Perhaps it's the burst of spring energy, the hope inspired by our new president, or a shift in my soul's ecosystem.
I pause as I type this and take a few drops of a flower essence formula I started taking a few days ago. It's automatic, a reflex. I'm not making a conscious connection between my reflection and my flower remedy. Then I realize what's in my hand. I laugh! The drops I've been taking are a vibrational healing blend called "Karma Clear." The label spells it out clearly: "releasing emotional pain and suffering."
A smile spreads across my face in appreciation for the subtle insistence of the subconscious. My soul is unraveling some knots. I imagine yours is, too, in your own life. This is my offering to you today: Look past the symptoms. Don't look for a "cure" to whatever ails you. Look at your ailment as a natural expression of the combination of factors in your life. Experience your predicament as an illustration of the condition of your ecosystem. And recognize that your ecosystem extends beyond your small personal world.
The conditions that gave rise to my overweight as a child extended beyond my own or even my family's personal pains. My family's circumstances were driven by my parents' career choices, which were guided by ancestral urges, social conventions of their generation and economic imperatives.
As a youngster, I couldn't fix or change any of those things. As a teenager, I experienced a moment of grace in our change of circumstances — I had no direct control over the changes, but I had influence. And as I matured, I took with me the self-awareness that enjoying my body weight comes with regular exercise, close connections and a sense of autonomy.
Resting on the other side of my much more recent personal difficulties, I have the space to reflect on what pulled me through these traumas. I count grief counseling, bodywork, intensive transformational practices, process art, time spent in nature and the listening of good friends as my remedies. I didn't reach for Karma Clear months ago in the middle of suffering. I reached for it when I was ready to release suffering. And the memories it brought me to reached much further back into my history than I'd imagined.
Suffering, it turns out, is the label on one drawer of my psychic filing cabinet in which many memories are stored. Releasing suffering doesn't mean the filing cabinet disappears. It means two things: 1) I'm not chained to the filing cabinet. 2) I have the power to open and close the drawer at will with a sense of neutrality. I can pull out the memory of my fat childhood and the memory of last year's miscarriage, for instance, and say, "Yes." And then I can put them back in the drawer. I can even put them in another drawer labeled with the word "Body" or any other theme in common between them.
Practices and remedies can facilitate the process of releasing suffering. But they can't force it or rush it. When the conditions are right, the ailment releases on its own. This is what is meant by the idea that all healing is self-healing. A practitioner may use a skill to facilitate the self in its natural healing process. But it is the self that heals.
