one step forward and two back...?

i guess it´s time to post. its weird with these blogs. you don´t even know whether anyone bothers to read what you put on it, and still you feel obliged to post something.
i am exhausted. i am pretending i am getting better. but fact is I overeat on a daily basis, enough to keep putting on weight, little enough to not make me sick. my mind thinks all i wanna do is lose 15 kg, my body thinks all i need to do is eat. my heart feels like having a life. and right now i don´t feel mine. i watch stupid tv-series on the internet. i sit alone in my teacher´s office cause I can´t bear to sit with his family on the couch feeling uneasy and unwelcome. not that i am. but i want to get out. i need to leave. i keep forgetting it´s only 2 days to go. wow, now that i see it in writing it strikes me. only 2 days. it sounds so short, it feels like forever. but then, what is awaiting me? a massage appointment and a haircut. that´s what I arranged for myself before I fly back to Germany. to my so called home. and i don´t know whether it is.
so i have to keep up the hope that i will be able to stand somebody touching me in 2 1/2 days´time. and that i´ll be able to see myself in a mirror for 1 hour or longer the day after. modern women´s rituals for a new phase of life. normally that should mean you leave something behind. or you start something new. right now i can´t betray myselfagain with thinking i´d start a new life without overeating. because i still do it and it´s cruel and i have even stopped surfing because i can´t bear myself in a (too small) bikini anymore. so what´s coming up for me? i have absolutely no idea.
there´s no job to go back to. no home i look forward to. a relationship that has yet to be newly defined. a few good friends that might be there to lean on for a while. but they have their own lives to carry on and i have to find my own. but right now, all i realize over and over is: I have absolutely no idea what my life is. scary shit, that is. and the only idea my mind keeps producing is: lose weight, feel great. right.
so at the same time, nothing and everything has changed. i am still fighting the same old demons (or rather not fighting them right now as i´ve lost my willpower to, but i am afraid i will take up the fight again...) and still have no plan whatsoever. everything is out in the open.
"that just means endless possibilities!", my surf teacher said to me the other day."Life is wonderful, isn´t it!" I am just shit-scared.

40 days

the yogic tradition i feel connected to says that you need 40 days to break a habit. I think I have done that. I have broken the habit of believing that this life is not mine to live. I realized I want to live this life for me. I don´t want to live anyone else´s life. I don´t want to adjust (too much) to other people´s rhythms. I want to have my own things, my own days, my own life. And funnily enough i have fully realized this after I have been here for exactly 40 days.

Unfortunately that makes me struggle now to keep up working in this ashram. I feel tied down, unnerved by having to carry out little tasks that seem to bore me now. I don´t want to cook anymore. (Luckily the cook is due to return tomorrow). I don´t want to be available all the time, always ready ro help and serve and jump in when neccessary. I know that´s what I am here for but I feel like I was here for finding out I don´t want to do this. I don´t want to serve all day. I just want to be free. Wasn´t I looking for freedom? Yes I was, and I somehow discovered that I deserve to be free. Therefore I need to have freedom in my days. I have 2 ½ weeks more to spend here. And right now I am not sure how I will manage that.

one day later.

i feel thrown back. or not. i enjoy being in this house again. i do my work without being angry. I feel good belonging somewhere. still i know it´s time to go. but i have setlled here more than i am aware of probably...

living - learning

first heard as a quote from 'Sex and the City', I have always liked these words. And yes, you can learn somethign from TV series, as these words are so true – living means learning. Or in order to be alive, you need to learn constantly. Every day.

I have learned something. And it feels great. I have understood that I am not a child anymore. That I don´t have to be afraid of anyone telling me what to do. I don´t even need to ask for permission to do anything. I am free to decide and DO myself. Terhefore, I have decided that I will act as an adult from now. I will see myself as being one. I will NOT let my inner scared child restrict me. I will just DO what I need to do. I am 30 years old, for any sake, what am I waiting for???

So instead of hoping I might get the chance to go surfing this week, I just said to my teacher´s wife, I want to take one day off during the week, which one would be best? She said Thursday, I had thought so, too, so that´s done. I hired a car from end of next week on to be able to get around here and pick up my very dear friends from the aiport who will come here to stay for a week. I have rebooked my flight home so I will have a whole week before going back to Germany and I can just travel or lie on the beach or surf or shop in Lisbon. Because I am grown-up and I can just decide what I want to do, right? I have already booked my next trip, as I only want to be home for a few days and then head on to London. Two weeks in the big city ahead. Will be quite a shock after having lived here. But I am craving for some urban adventures ;-))

It might all be small things but it was such an act of freeing myself from all that restrictions that I felt. Hiring that car, getting my needs met by asking for a free day. Things that I used to never dare. Because I always thought I will complicate the life of others so I better not ask for anything. Turns out the only reaction I ever get IF I ask for something is: 'Great!' I should really have tried earlier...

I will be here for four more weeks and it feels like time is flying by. It feels like I have only just got here. But yet, I have a good feeling about leaving again. Because I have already understood my lesson here for now. And I am working towards it. I am still really confused and lost when it comes to how my life could settle down eventually in the future and I am no further in any planning of that. But this is only the beginning. There will be much more learning ahead, difficult and easy lessons. And a lot of life to live. Happily.

paddling back

I don´t know what had come over me when I wrote that 'breakthrough'-entry last week. Thank God I wrote the maybe in the end.
I have been addicted to eiter starving myself or overeating constantly for the last 16 years (this is a number I can hardly bear, it´s more than half my life). Let´s substract the good time, which might add up to a year or so, in which I didn´t feel so addicted and actually attained a healthy weight only through eating 'normal' somehow. It´s still 15 years then.
In the last weeks and months, it has been worse than ever. I have these days where I get up and I unconsciously start to put food in my mouth from the first minute standing up. I can tell you, to overeat ( feeling guilty and miserable and disgusting all along) even BEFORE breakfast, that´s no start into a new day at all. That´s a desaster.
So as i have been doing this for a while now, of course I have gained weight. I don´t know how much, I don´t have a scale (maybe that´s a good thing??) . Sometimes I want to know to estimate the damage done. After all, there is a very sure way to happiness: Achieving my dream weight again.
Of yourse I know that´s bull****. Who doesn´t? I know the key to letting go of the addiction is loving myself, allowing myself to feel good about me no matter what. and that´s the crucial point. The 'no-matter-what' part. I suck at that.
I can easily fell great about me when I have hardly eaten one day. Or when i really worked hard without pausing. Or when someone else is happy with what I have done. Or when I achieve soemthing I really wanted. But only until I enter the next kitchen. I will destroy my good feelings before I notice myself by overeating- maybe because I know it´s not the happiness I am looking for in the end. But it´s part of my happiness to feel good about my body and I still (unconsciously or even consciously) prevent that from happening.
Sometimes it seems the addiction is just never going to end. How can I stop when I can´t? When will I be able to not binge anymore at all? When can I allow myself to be independet from the drug 'food' that is killing me?
I have decided to take an extreme measure. I will join my teacher´s wife for a 10-day-liver-detox-cleansing-diet from tomorrow. To get me detached for once. i hope it´ll work. I know that the liver has job to digest feelings, and that´s what it´s about isn´t it? I am hoping for some release and relief. And for a break from constant eating. Since sometimes it helps to have strict rules and to share them with somebody. That´s what they do in rehab programmes, too, right?

Of course I am dreaming about losing enormous amounts of weight in those 10 days, to get over my disorder for good and live happily ( and slim) ever after. I guess I need it to get me motivated in the first place. I will let you know how I do. And my liver.

Falling down and standing up again

It´s so easy to fall into dull comparisons between surfing and life. You try, it´s hard, you keep up, it gives you a little in return sometimes, it can be frustrating, it can be pure joy. After only 5 lessons I can say, I had any nice little parallel existing in my head and thought, it really is good material for writing about it, but only if there hadn´t been so many before me who have done it already.

Since Sunday I can officially say I know how to stand up on a surfboard. Wow. I still fall down a lot, maybe even more often than I keep standing, but my body got used to the movement, internalised it and I got the very much longed for appreciation of my surf teacher. So there is hope. And, yes, I have been dreaming of surfing a pipe. From the first lesson on. I guess it will be a long way to get there. Often enough I cannot yet estimate enough, how hard a wave´s gonna brake or what is the exact moment to press up and jump up standing. But with the ever so slight progress I made in those last two sessions I have the unbreakable plan to be good at this someday. Not like in competitions. But confident to go out there by myself, go with the waves instead of fighting against them and simply enjoy it. Because another maybe much wiser surf teacher said to me: 'You can say you surf when you start having fun doing it.' I might get there evetually, not there quite yet but I can see it, the light at the horizon. And here we are again. The greasy comparisons. All you can say about surfing, you can pretty much also say about life. Because I want to learn to go more with the flow instead of against it. And one thing the surfing really showed me already. You just have to keep trying, doing it, focussing while you do it (otherwise you swallow even more saltwater), and no matter whether you fell or made it to the beach standing up – you just go right back in. And it made me realize again that I have that capacity in me. It re-vived my fighting spirit.

I think my surf teacher smiled at me yesterday for the first time instead of pulling a face and going 'Come on, girl!'. And I really feared he could see me as one of those chubby english or german tourists, who look so uncoordinated as if they had never done any sports in their life. The boys are really pale and always look a bit dumb but are willing to try anything, go out for the big waves way to soon and always have this hectic facial expression when trying to catch a wave. They catch it, then they fall, and they don´t look good doing it. They probably never will. The girls have a different approach. They don´t even get up in the first place. They look like stranded little whales on their boards, helplessly trying to move some water around them, and even when the teacher holds their boards, gives them a starting signal and pushes them into a wave, shouting 'Up!' they hardly manage to press up thier torso without falling. Their bodies look very limp and heavy and useless. But they seem to have fun anyways.Thank God I know now he doesn´t see me as one of them. I was even allowed to go behind the surf (the so called outside) for the first time yesterday. I didn´t catch a wave but it caught me. Fair enough. As I said there´s hope.

the break through... maybe

so I had another consultation with my teacher. I had my first one with him in June, I was petrified then and so anxious he would tear me apart I actually was sick to my stomach the whole day. Until I met him. He was the nicest fatherly loving teacher you could imagine. Confronting, yes. But gentle. And uplifting. Since I arrived here at his house I realized I am constantly expecting him to shout at me or critizise me or be unhappy with how I work. Of course he has never done anything like that to me. And he probably never will because he feels that I am beating up myself enough as it is. I don´t need anyone else on top of me joining that team.

But at some point this fear and anxiety changed, I could integrate the knowledge that he is only the screen on which I project the fear of my father I lived through in my childhood. Very basic psychology. But very effective. Because this seems to be the surrounding in which I can understand, reflect and observe the patterns in which I react internally, not even try to surpress or change them, but just let them work within, relax, lean back and learn that THIS man is nice, and most others will be as well, and that whatever I lived through with my own father has ended. This in now, this is new, this is MY life.

When I got my appointment for my consultation, I wrote down some notes about what topics I want to mention to him. At first I thought I wanted to talk about these family issues. And I told him openly what I had been projecting on him but that I started to let it fall away from me and I feel it changes to the good. It surprised him a little, how much I had feared him, but he appreciated the honesty and I was so happy I could just sit there and tell him my fears without being fearful in that moment. I am not afraid of him anymore. He used to be the embodiement of my deepest fears of being rejected, unwanted, not loved. And I have lost that fear towards him.

So then I thought I wanted to talk to him about my marriage and my eating disorder. Of course I knew he wouldn´t discuss with me whether I should break up or not or what wheight would be healthy for me. But he took it even on a more abstract and metaphoric, yet even deeper level than that.

In way, we continued the talk we had in June and it astonished me a lot how he was able to bring me more to the core. In that first session with him I was so weak inside I had nothing to put against him or myself, I couldn´t even sit upright, or look him into the eyes. But yesterday it was different. I was not afraid to say what I think and feel, I didn´t feel uncomfortable with him being direct, whenever I was ashamed of what I wanted to say I just told him and he encouraged me to still say it and it was such a relief. He/we boiled everything down again to the core issue: I don´t allow myself to be happy, I believe it is fobidden for me to be happy. But there is more. While I am keeping myself away from happiness, I also surpress my greatness. And apparently, my teacher sees a lot of that in me. He thinks that when I was young, I probably had a glimpse of of that greatness, that one day I could be a leader, a spiritual teacher, a healer, a radiant yogini, whatever. Or I could misuse this inherent power and become a 'rockstar', become manipulative and egoistic in my greatness. His impression is my soul wanted to prevent that from happening so it buried my awareness of my own greatness underneath guilt, shame, fears and complexes. It hurt so much to hear him say that to me by that time already sitting so close to me our knees were touching, staring right into my eyes. And I stared right back into his. I wasn´t even looking at him as a person. He was some kind of a medium then, he had put himself and me into a deep meditative state by then and I was able to feel that greatness inside. It sits in my chest, maybe in my heart. But it´s sealed. It´s like an egg with an almost unbreakable shell. Which needs to be broken from the outside (my teacher offered me to punch me just to give it a try, laughing, but we postponed it, after I had a laugh, too) or rather unlocked from the inside, where there is the key. I need to dare and risk to take that key, turn it, unlock it. Open up.Be happy, be great, be inspiring and uplifitng to others and myself.

So again, for a moment, I could feel that egg-shaped thing inside me and I somehow touched it. And that hurt so much. The thought, the image, the knowledge maybe of my greatness hurts. But it also feels so honest, so truthful. And the truth is: I need help with this. I closed all of my inner beauty away so carfeully I will not be able to handle this on my own. I need support and I need help. And this honesty about MY need of hep is the first step. Because I need to let go of the need to be needed, and instead recieve help. Let myself be weak, needy, childish, but let me be me. And if ME needs help, that´s what it is. It hurts but it´s honest. And it feels amazingly good in a way. I am here to be helped with this. I have to choose how I want this help to be. But it is there, available to me, I just need to say thank you and take it.

This feels (again) like a turn-around-point, a break-through, a new start, something is shifting.

I even did an early sadhana this morning, read Japji, did NOT go back to sleep afterwards, but I am awake now. I will have more consultations here, i will work on this, with it, towards me, my greatness, whatever greatness lives within me.

But for now I will put on my bikini (internally repeating the mantra 'unconditional love') and go surfing, embrace this day and smile again. Finally.

the romantic idea of how it´s gonna be vs. reality

So I am here.
It´s a peaceful place. I am in contact with myself.
But is that always nice? No. Does that alone make me happy? No. Do I still have to fight for having a good day? Yes. A lot. Too much.

I go surfing. I meet interesting people. Nice people. But does it help me be a different person? No. I am still me. I still have to fight to change my patterns.

Being here is pretty much all I ever hoped for. And I DO feel good. In a way. This is where I need to be. But it´s not pleasant. I took myself on this journey. I WANTED this. I NEED this. But it´s still a struggle.
I struggle with food a lot right now. That´s the front row of the enemy, my mind. I don´t particularly overeat, but I think I do. Constantly. I feel I am bloated and wobbly and huge. I know I am not. But I have to fight the urge to become really desperate when I look into the mirror. I don´t want to live in this body when it looks like this. I don´t want to hate my body either. It´s 16 years of eating disorder and there is the frequent occasional days of not knowing how to work this out. My body feels best when I eat little with big breaks in between. But that happens to be the exact opposite to what my addiction wants me to do.
So where do I go? Extreme control and self-discipline? Can only work for so long and then I´ll catch up. On the calories. Letting go and just eat? I will die of panic, I get so insecure I tend to overeat to cause me then to be more rigid with myself again. Just not think about it? Great idea. Don´t think about lemons. Now.

Behind these first lines of my inner war there is the thoughts. About being not enough, wrong, ugly, fat, a burden, only good when I bend myself so much I almost break. I can think that in ANY occasion. I can spend days only thinking these thoughts. I have done so. It makes me extremely frustrated to know that I have.

Then there comes the guilt. That I haven´t saved my parents´marriage. Our family, That I wasn´t strong enough to fix it all, to hold it all together. That I haven´t done everything right, meaning perfect and flawless. With the true belief that THAT would have made the difference.

When I made it through all of these lines, there is the big monster. My self-hatred. Which is the seal on that immense big tub of self-love. It has become so strong over the years, the seal has almost grown in.

But it hasn´t, I know that, I have already broken it. Very shortly. But nevertheless impressive. It was the last day of last year´s Yoga Festival in France. During a meditation, I literally opened my heart. I could see it. From the inside. The immense love that is there. For myself, for the world, for everything. So strong it took me days to recover, it was such a shock to see and feel it. It shook me to the core to see in this little instant that I DO love myself. That I CAN be happy. That I CAN enjoy this life. That I can LIVE after all that zombie-like vegetating as an anorexic, then as a depressed overeater. That I love myself. This miniature moment of complete insight into my core (at least that it what it felt like) changed my life forever. Ever since then I have been searching for a way to cultivate it. My self-love and my being connected to my soul. Because as my spiritual name tells me, that´s my potential. So I want to live up to that.

I pray that someday I will. For today I will have to accept defeat once again.