I know that meditation and mindfulness practices are not panaceas, but I can say that they are incredible tools to help us heal.
I felt inspired to share my own journey with disordered eating and poor body image and how the tools of meditation and mindfulness were key factors in my own healing.
Unhealthy relationships with food and our bodies run rampant in our society, and I believe there are a lot of people who suffer silently.
Maybe there is shame involved in it, or maybe it’s too scary to open up and face the deeper pain that underlies the unhealthy patterns. I hope that by sharing my own story, others feel safe to share theirs and, if needed, seek help.
There is no shame is struggling with one’s body and/or with food. It reminds me of some very wise words that I heard listening to a talk with meditation teachers Toni Bernhard and Sylvia Boorstein. Toni lives with chronic fatigue, the same illness I struggle with, and Sylvia said everyone can relate on some level because “life is a chronic illness”. Now maybe that sounds pessimistic, but it made me laugh because it lightens the expectation that life needs to be perfect and that we need to be perfect within it. No. Life is hard. There are definitely wonderful and marvelous things about it, and there are also deeply painful and difficult things.
Disordered eating and body image issues definitely fall within the latter category of deep pain and difficulty.
But as Desmond Tutu says, “There’s no question about the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering, but at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love. That you and I and all of us are incredible. I mean, we really are remarkable things. That we are, as a matter of fact, made for goodness.”
He reminds us that suffering isn’t the end of the story. There is a path to healing, and in this video I share one practice called “Metta”, or loving-kindness, practice that can move us beyond the conditioned ways of judgment and self-criticism to a more open, accepting, and loving relationship with ourselves.
We have to remember that we weren’t born into the world hating our bodies. We fully inhabited our bodies without any ideas of how they should be. We learned how to judge, criticize and not feel like we’re enough. So, just as we may have learned painful patterns, we can learn helpful patterns.
It’s not an overnight fix. As I say in my video, I was encouraged to engage in loving-kindness practice daily for a year. So it’s not going to be a miracle cure the first time you try these practices, but, as the Buddha says, “Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise the wise man gathering it little by little fills himself with good.”