Sitting at the Centre - Building A New Relationship with Food

"Compulsive eating was a way to distance myself from the way things were when they weren't how I wanted them to be. I didn't want to sit in the centre of my own life. To ask myself what was actually going on when I wanted to eat even when I wasn't hungry. Crazed with self-loathing and shame I vacillated between wanting to destroy myself and wanting to fix myself with the next best promise of losing thirty pounds in thirty days." - Geneen Roth

If you have issues around food and eating, the above may be resonate with you. You may even feel that compulsive eating is taking up all the space at the centre of your life, and that you are relegated to the outskirts!
 
How would it feel to know that you can move from “I don't want to sit in the centre of my life and into: I AM the centre of my own life” - right where you’ve always longed to be?  To live in certainty of your strength - joyful and at peace? Nested right in the centre of your own heart, where you’ve always longed to be.

Living in the centre of your own life means being willing to be in touch with what you are thinking and feeling as you move through your day. Learning to accept all thoughts and feelings, as part of your here and now experience. But no longer being driven to act on them. Simply allowing. Investigating thoughts and feelings that seem to have the power to disturb and draw you into old patterns of behaviour. Looking at the root of them and then releasing them. (The Choose Again 6 Step Process is an excellent tool to use in this process of forgiveness). Returning to the calm and steady core of your own life.
 
I've also noticed that those who tend to sit on the outskirts of their own life often have a great deal of resentment towards others that they feel are keeping them on the outskirts. What I learned for myself, was that no matter how much others seemed to reject me, to minimize my gifts and talents, that by refusing to live in the centre of my life, I was rejecting myself more than anyone else ever had.  I found this to be the source of my pain.

This was the good news for me!  As I looked more closely, I saw that the habit of sitting on the edge of my life WAS just a habit and could be transformed at a speed that I was comfortable with.

And there was no-one to blame, including me.
 
Here's to sitting in the centre!
 
Next time we will look at the purpose that compulsive eating serves and three steps you can take to start to find your way back to the centre.
 
Love,
Dawn

Dawn is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, and you can contact her for private sessions and workshops at dawn@dawngreen.org, or read more on her website.