One Year & A Healthy Dose Of Cupcakes Later
“Need time, give time. Need space, give space.
When you keep forcing what you think needs to happen, stress and anxiety will only intensify. If you let go of what you think should be by surrendering that thought or desire, you open space for the solution to any of your problems. ”
Wow. I can’t believe it. It has been almost one year since I published something last time. I’ve been having such a strong impulse and desire to reawaken my Blog and starting to “refurnish” my website because a lot has happened in the past 12 months that I really felt like sharing. There have been people following my Emotional Eating recovery journey, one or the other who also seemed to have struggled with something similar and some who I could inspire with my experiences, good and bad choices. :)
I was in a chaotic time of my life because now in the aftermath I realize and understand that everything I unconsciously avoided, somehow started showing itself more clearly. I was in an intense process of figuring myself out and getting to know myself on a much deeper level. I struggled so much with my image of self-worth and tried to compensate feelings such as not feeling enough, shame and guilt with being harder & stricter on myself thinking this was the way to achieve my future goals & a better, easier life. Well, that was obviously not the solution to change things for the better. I only rode myself deeper in this abyss of disconnection of the self. So I decided to put 100% focus on myself and figure out what was failing that my emotions and behavior kept fluctuating so much. I started to understand that unless I have not healed my own wound, I could not help other people. And so I knew I couldn’t pursue a coaching career without fully and relentlessly working on myself first.
I also connected with other projects apart from my food journey where the same patterns started coming up again, meaning, forcing things to happen by implementing a lot of self-discipline and not understanding that I was not self-disciplining myself, I was self-sabbotaging & mistreating myself. I entirely disconnected from my intuition and from the impulses my body kept sending me to take the right decisions for myself & my life. I did not trust myself and my instincts and ended up accepting ideas and opinions of others as the truth. I was wrong. And I needed that painful learning to understand that I myself without being aware, created a division within myself that resulted in many self-created conflicts and many months of internal struggles.
These daily questions have helped me a lot in my healing journey to create more self-awareness in my life:
Do I connect enough with what I do and why I do certain things? Do I reflect enough on it or do I push it away from me?
Do I show myself on a daily basis that I love myself in the way I go through the day and the way I talk to myself?
Do I truly slow down, step back and ask myself: Is this really what I want? Or would I do better to adjust my approach?
I remember Einstein’s quote: “Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Do I pause enough in this frenetic world and ask myself: Does this thought in my head belong to me? Is this my truth of things or is it just a belief that I picked up somewhere along the way I can change to see things through different and more beneficial lenses?
Today where I ‘m writing this, snuggled up on the couch with my beautiful dog on a somehow strange November day and the beginning of a new week, I look back and see the necessity of doing a full inventory work and learn to surrender to life. I never understood how this would work even though I read it numerous of times in books and on social media. Surrendering to life always sounds so mysterious and at times incomprehensible and has a different meaning for every person. I can only speak from my personal view and how I lived it. I would describe it this way:
Surrendering to the process of life and what it entails is being ready to enter the parts of you that you don’t like about yourself. It’s all the ideas and beliefs you picked up somewhere between your childhood and now that hold you a prisoner of your own mind. It’s all the years of repressing your pain and the fears in hope to not feel them ever again by turning a blind eye to the emotions that so desperately want and need to be felt and seen but instead rejected again and again. Surrendering means to accept it all, to accept the good and bad, the darkness and the light in you. You don’t have to love it, you only have to accept it. It’s discovering that through surrendering and accepting, you give the universe permission to act & heal what needs to be healed in you. Letting life do what it knows best: Showing you the way with its wisdom because it knows better than you think you do. Surrendering control, going from “I do” to “I am”.
This connected me again with my intuitive side, knowing I have my answers already within me and let time to the rest. This new insight allowed me to find my way out, in the first place, of controlling my food habits. Every rule I put up for myself, every time I forbid myself to eat something labeling it as good and bad, all the beliefs that kept me imprisoned with stress and anxiety, finally started to lose its power over me. I was so tired of controlling and self-disciplining myself that I took a whole summer of a deep rest from it all. It wasn’t easy to surrender to a mind that kept pushing me back into my old habits.
So finally, I took a new and frightening decision and went on a new discovery journey, which was allowing me to feel again and do whatever I felt in every moment under one condition: Observing my thoughts and noticing when I was judging, and labeling my actions and reactions as “good and bad”. Every time I fell back into my old patterns I focused on what I needed to feel good without self-sabbotaging myself back into suffering. When I knew I had a craving for sweets or any unholy foods, I recognized it, accepted the fact that it was solely emotional and allowed myself to eat it anyway. I stopped depriving myself of what I was craving, instead I started to observe and learn what was happening in these moments. Being honest and clear to myself helped me to reduce anxiety and self-judgment and brought me back to enjoying life again with a lot less judgment.
And how we all know by now: How you do one thing is how you do everything.
Today after many weeks and months of fights and arguments with myself, I spend my days eating what I feel like having. And you know the funny part of it all? I enjoy eating again, I love it, because there are no rules anymore. There is no tension anymore. Sometimes I tend to eat too much sugar, then there are days where I eat no sugar and only plant-based because I feel drawn to vegetable, I eat meat once in a blue moon because I actually really crave it, I enjoy a Coca Cola because I love it with a Dürüum or a Pizza, I eat a pack of cookies and don’t think of cookies for months until I have the next one. I listen to myself and do what feels good in every moment while leaving the world and social media do its own thing.
Today I understand the importance of experiences and why we need to live through them: It’s to remember that you are not me, that I am not you, they are not you and you are not them.
You are you and you do you.
Honor and accept it because it’s the greatest gift on earth you can give yourself.
Be good to yourself.
❤
