feeling heavy

one of my teachers said to me: 'you eat because you can´t take your own lightness. you´re so awake you´re trying to put yourself to sleep.' of course he is right. whenever I want to escape the intensity of life, whether good or bad, I find myself eating or at least craving for food even before I realize what is going wrong. Over the matter of years I have learned to not fall for the cravings totally but to see and sense the emotions lying underneath. sometimes as a prevention, sometime as a rehabilitation, sometimes as a lousy crutch at the end of a horrible period of seemingly never-ending addiction.
During my phase of letting go of my previous life as an overly correct and dutiful yoga teacher, i couldn´t help but give in to the cravings for food. There just simply wasn´t a chance. so all I could do was watch how I ate, gained weight, became more uncomfortable in my own skin from day to day, with a slowly rising fear that it could never end and I might be even heavier than I ever was in my worst days. with a little bit of a difference. i realized at some stage that yes, I disliked the physical change I had made having put on at least 5 kilos, but I feel different. I caught myself feeling good inside my body. oops, how could that happen? I gained weight, for any sake, I should be punishing myself and feeling guilty and horrible until I at least lost a good part of what I gained! What´s wrong with the program? Is it broke??
I guess it is. I guess I broke it. good, isn´t it? hmm, yeah, but scary. I could actually be happy. just like that. no physical strings attached. come on, being happy is always connected with some amount of weight loss, isn´t that a natural thing? How did that change?? What went wrong??

I must have learned to love myself a little bit more. As simple as that. I would still like to lose some weight ( and I guess it´ll just happen when my eating habits relax again, that´s what happened over the last years) but I just don´t beat myself up about it anymore so much (only a little sometimes for a trip down memory lane). I must have understood on some deep level that in the end it doesn´t matter AT ALL how I look or how much I weigh. I am allowed to be happy, love myself and be loved, no matter hoe I look. after long years of fighting against that demon, I am finally preparing to say goodbye and let go of it. And as I posted last time, letting go always involves some pain. even if you let go of an addiction that once wanted to kill you.

but I was going to write something about the heaviness. without the negative connotation that we give to that word and feeling, it is also a word for being earth-bound, secure, nurtured. and for me it still symbolizes a lot of that. when you have been anorexic and felt the power of that disease that can actually put you to death and lets you only survive in the biggest deprivation bearable, you know how it feels to NOT be on earth but slowly drifting, insecure whether you going to live or die and deprived of food, love and life. So in order to rebalance that experience, I sometimes feel I have to live with that 'a little too much' for a while to also have that experience and then settle back to the golden middle. or at least that´s what I hope for.
and as long as it takes i try to relax into my heaviness, see he good part of it, let me feel the contenment inside me (despite the non-approved outer appearance) and just live. That feels very good for a start.