“Standing Knee-Deep in a River and Dying of Thirst”

+This post is from the first edition of my blog entitled You Are Here+

I’ve long given up making a list of resolutions for me to procrastinate on/completely ignore, but when this New Year came around, I knew it would be the year I finally got to the bottom of something I have always had a difficult relationship with: FOOD.

When I bring up how unhealthy my relationship with food is, the most common reaction I get often sounds like, “But you’re not fat!?”.  There’s genuine confusion, sometimes accompanied by a hint of resentment.  The truth is, however, that it’s not about being overweight.  It’s about no matter how much I eat and how full my body is, emotionally, it’s not enough.  It’s about how I sometimes stop breathing when I eat, transforming physical nourishment and pleasure to a mechanical process devoid of connection.  Until I have gone so far that my brain can finally register shame and guilt (or when I was younger, until I made myself physically sick), only then does this boundary with “enough” exist for me.  Something here’s definitely amiss.

My first inkling was that I clearly use food to fill some sort of emotional void.  My parents, who are not able to express their love in words or hugs, express it by providing – one of these main staples being food.  Growing up in Montreal and experiencing a clash of cultures (Hakka Chinese and Canadian), it seems logical that not receiving love in the forms so commonly expressed on TV and in the movies, I would find solace in one of the only ways I knew – through food.

Then, about a year ago, I read about psychogenealogy and how we are inextricably connected to our ancestors through our unconscious minds.  My parents and ancestors, after generations of living in poverty*, must have feared constantly that their current meal might be their last.  Although my parents immigrated to Canada and made sure that my brother, sister, and I would never have to experience such scarcity, it’s certainly possible that at the cellular level, this fear and anxiety persists. 

Either way, while both of these theories make sense, I haven’t yet found a way around putting these particular traumas to rest. 

This brings me to this early morning.  I awoke angry and upset at what I felt has been a complete lack of progress on my journey living my authentic truth.  After unsuccessfully trying to meditate (way too restless),  something nudged me to pick up Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance, which has been lying on the shelf for months, “How many of us go through our days parched and empty, thirsting after happiness, when we’re really standing knee-deep in the river of abundance?” (in her January 6 entry).  This is the moment I realized that perhaps my relationship with food is a mirror reflection of how I choose to see my world: through a lens of abundance or a lack thereof. 

No matter how much I have in my life, I continue to feel shame and guilt for not having enough.  When I eat, perhaps I’ve been projecting this vision onto my food through this very lens.  And until I can change my perspective on how much abundance there really is in my life, my relationship to food is not likely to change.  Conversely, if I can begin to see food with the perspective that I have all that I need (I’m still lucky to have that privilege), perhaps my physical body will have an easier time acknowledging that I indeed have enough; and only then will my world actually open up to receive the abundance that the Universe has to offer.

I’m willing to give it a try.  Heck, I’m already knee-deep.

 

 

*What I don’t know for sure is how far back my ancestors may have lived in these conditions..