Honoring My Body

I often wake in the morning with some type of ephiphany, perhaps resulting from soul journeys into other dimensions of consciousness, undertaken to weave together bits of information that haven't connected during waking hours.

Before jumping into what now seems ridiculously obvious, and yet still unresolved, I have to give a bit of background on how I relate to my body. For as long as I can remember I have struggled with weight issues, although I have had reprieves for periods of time when I would get everything just right in my diet and exercise routine. I was never one of those people who could maintain a stable weight for years with relatively little attention to the matter. While I gave up on ever having the "idealized female form" a long time ago, paying attention to my body for health reasons is very important.

As of the first of December I moved out of the house I was in when I began this blog. I had another temporary place to go to but not until the first of the year. I knew I was going to Colorado for Christmas and so I decided to camp in my office until I left. The combination of non-routine situations got me into some non-optimal eating habits and exercise went out the window as well. On top of that was the challenge of "holiday eating" . . . need I say more? So I'm back to square one on balancing my body and dropping the resulting weight. This part of the routine I am very familiar with, and also the fact that once I have spiraled down there seems to be a magnetic force that wants to suck me deeper into that hole. Combined with the physical weight and lethargy comes an emotional heaviness. No big surprise there either. What does amaze me is how I can still be surprised by how easy it is to change the emotional heaviness just by putting my body in motion again. Energy gets stuck and if I don't actively make a point to move it, well I stagnate . . . just like the water in a pond that doesn't circulate in some way. Okay, so far none of this is earthshaking news.

So, yesterday I was giving myself a biofeedback treatment and what popped up to be addressed was to reduce self-destructive behavior. It was a bit of a shock, but only momentarily, because I had to quickly acknowledge that despite how well I thought I was handling all of the instability I was neither exercising nor making good food choices. Hey, depression doesn't just happen, it creeps up on people slowly because we don't want to cop to the little self-destructive things that are laying a solid foundation. The biofeedback wake-up was the first bit of information that played into this morning's awareness.

The second thing that happened was when I returned "home" to the house I will be in until the spring, I had an email from the lovely folks who own the house and live upstairs telling me how much they appreciated that I respected and cared for their home more than anyone else that had ever lived here. I emailed back to say that they had invested so much of their love into the house that it would feel awful not to take care of it.

The third piece is that I have been reading The Disapperance of the Universe, which is connected to The Course in Miracles. I have spent many years engaged in spiritual dialogue that reminds us we are really spirit and not to be so identified with the body, but this book really hammers home that we are not bodies and this is all an illusion. Bear with me now as I try and quickly tie this all together.

This morning I woke feeling an emotional heaviness and I recognized the connection to the sluggishness in my body. I also saw the lack of care of my body being connected with the "self-destructive" urge to be free of the small self, or ego identity, because so much of my energy has gone into focusing on my physical reality. Perhaps all along my weight struggle has been an ego-identity battle. One part of me wanting to validate my physical existence and the other wanting to break free of what tethers me to this world. The crazy thing is that neither of these parts represents spirit, for spirit is already free.

Whether being here in this body is an illusion or not, I am having this experience and I recognize the love that is in every cell of this body that keeps it working in such a miraculous way in spite of me. I'm so sorry that for one moment, on any level of my being, I wished to be free of this, and when I return to the ultimate home I have a sense that whoever is upstairs will be grateful for how well I took care of my physical homes--both body and Earth.