A Journey from Wounding to Joy Our hunger is a powerful force when used and managed properly and constructively. Our hunger is a sign, a symptom — both the source and solution. It manifests as food and weight disorders and in all symptoms caused by our split from wholeness: addictions, codependency, and disease. This hunger is at the center of our humanness and must be felt, for at the core, it is alive with passion, and when embraced, our hunger yields what I call the Divine Magical Child, that state of pure innocence, beauty, and peace we all crave. I was pitifully wounded. I was depressed, scared, unable to live like "the rest of them." I was locked in my ongoing war with food obsession, compulsivity, and despair. I felt hopeless, but I never gave up. I worked at fixing the parts of me that were broken. I worked at healing myself with God’s radiant light. I kept pressing forward. I was searching, crying out for mercy. I was seeking God’s love in the here and now of my life. I refused to believe that this was all there was. And then one day I realized I had found the light. I was free. Who did I become? As I dropped out of the pathology of my own self-sedation and dared to enter the shadow of my unhealed self, I moved more and more deeply into the core of my being, and discovered a self I never knew existed: my sacred self, my Divine Magical Child. I remember how, as a child, I played for hours lost in the universal flow of time. I trusted and played, creating my own time. Then came the wounding, and I became scared. Suddenly, it wasn’t safe to abandon myself in the flow of play anymore. The healing journey took me backwards through the wound — through the fear, grief, and rage — to reconnect with the innocent child within. My sacred self lives in utter creative joy, and now, at fifty, I have found her again. This is my philosophy: that women who struggle with food and weight issues are aliveness itself waiting to be born. Why? Because our "impulsiveness" is actually spontaneity. Our "craving" is actually desire not satiated, and our "sadness" is actually sweet compassion. Our pain is a cry, a wail, a moan and a groan for depth, passion, and fierce connection with others. We don’t want to settle for less, but we’ve been conditioned to believe we must. When I work with women with food and weight issues, there are three areas (I call them tracks) that must be addressed: Track 1 is the biochemical or physiological imbalances. Track 2 is the underlying issues, which I like to reframe as stifled creativity or blocked expression, and Track 3 is the relationship to food itself. In my experience, when one unleashes one’s creative, authentic, alive self, one’s suffering ends. To befriend our suffering is to call for our truth, passion, and joy to burst forth from our very guts and bones. To do this, we must 1) honor our unique biochemistry, 2) heal our wounds, and 3) learn to eat with love. We also must address this within a context that goes beyond fixing and healing into the exciting realm of recreating, for it is within this realm that the Divine Magical Child lives. As I remember back on the twenty years I spent bingeing and overeating, I view that time as a very special time of learning. I was learning what didn’t work. I learned what not to do. I was in the hard-knocks school of experiencing my own shame. I was learning how shame debilitates and handicaps people. I was also learning that I had the capacity to grow myself out of this handicap. And, most of all, I was gaining the satisfaction of eventually transcending that debilitating life pattern and acquiring the ability to continue transcending whatever challenges I confront. Because of my eating disorder, I learned how to use the behaviors, the shame, my rage and terror, to discover how to achieve true fulfillment. Healing my past was a necessary aspect of becoming whole, only to the extent that I believed my present was the result of my past, and only to the extent that I believed I was lacking (which most of us do). I did the "healing" work until I began to get it: I am not, in fact, the result of my past, but the result of the beliefs I hold about my past. I could then begin the re-creation process. Healing occurred as I 1) allowed the "illusion" of wounding to flood my psyche and 2) embraced the wounded experience with love and inner light. If one of these is absent, the healing cannot occur. If I allow the hurt to emerge but don’t embrace it with love and light, I risk becoming stuck in the wound or wallowing in it. If I embrace myself with love and light, but don’t allow myself to experience the hurt of the wound, I run the risk of practicing what I call superficial or idealized spirituality. We all know people who are trapped by their positive thinking, affirmations, and spiritual concepts, but who are unable to embrace the so-called dark sides of themselves. These people often appear "spiritual," but we sense that there is something dishonest, manipulative, or fake about them, and, often, their "dark sides" come out unconsciously as passive aggression, an inability to be present with another’s hurt, or spiritual arrogance. While fixing is a mechanical process of restoring to wholeness what was once broken and healing is the process of embracing the illusion of the broken parts with love, re-creating is about infusing the already whole self (which was never broken to begin with) with creative focus so that the self begins a process of co-creating with the sacred flow, the miraculous unlimited potential of itself. Re-creating is a process of moving through the unknown. There is no restoration. The whole object we are becoming as we create is totally and unpredictably unknown. It is mystery. My experience of this evolutionary process is that it begins with the illusion that I must fix myself because I am broken. It transforms into a healing process in which I embrace what is "broken" so that the love within me can pierce the illusion of my brokenness. This allows those broken pieces to dissolve and evolve themselves into a whole new never-before-experienced entity. That entity — the one that emerges out of the healing — is my truth, my sacredness, and my joy. The process itself begets joy, and out of that joy emerges a co-creative process aligned Spirit, whereby the already whole self now utilizes its creative intention in such a way as to evolve itself to a whole new level. It was from the death of my broken self, the death of my illusion of broken self (and the life I had built on that illusion), that the Divine Magical Child was born. She is voluptuous, luscious, mysterious, and unpredictable. Once I realized this, my suffering ceased. I was limitless in my capacity to experience my own vastness. Then, the unpredictability of creative living became my reality. Jane, the author of Beyond the Food Game, Eat with Love, and The Pathway of the Divine Magical Child, will be presenting at the Women of Wisdom Conference Sunday, February 18, 1:30-5:30 p.m. She is also leading a five-night Sacred Hunger Retreat at Marsh House on Whidbey Island from February 22-27. For more information about both events, call (800) 765-1319. |