ENLIGHTENED Weight Loss
Chapter 8: Supportive Resources
“Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger
and continue to uplift others long after your sharing.”
— Rumi
Chapter 8: Supportive Resources
“Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger
and continue to uplift others long after your sharing.”
— Rumi
Resources to Support You with Your Newly Freed-Up Energy to Go Forward in Lightness of Body, Spirit, Mind, and Emotions
Congratulations! You are now well on your way toward dissolving the impacts your inner limiting tales have been having on your body image and on your weight-loss and dieting goals. You will also find that other patterns of your life will be positively affected by the self-awareness work you do around your weight-loss goals, as you’ll be uncovering many of the places within you that up until now had not had even the tiniest glimmer of light or love shone upon them. What you will be exposing are all of those parts of you that you thought were unlovable and shameful. The parts you’ve now come to see (and will continue to see whenever you engage the ENLIGHTEN Process) were your loving, protective strategies to stay safe in whatever scary world your Little You had learned how to survive in.
The good news is you now have a way to empower yourself to re-write the scary monster-shadow stories of your past by looking on them with simple loving attention, awareness, presence, empathy, and kind understanding. And make no mistake about it – doing this work has a powerful positive impact on you at the cellular level. In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton explains it this way: “Beliefs and thoughts alter cells in your body. […] People need to realize that their thoughts are more primary than their genes, because the environment, which is influenced by our thoughts, controls the genes.” So when you get to expose and dissolve these inner negative thoughts and see them for what they are, you are dissolving them at the cellular level into the bright flame of your loving heart.
In this chapter, I’m going to share some additional tools with you, along with some ways of being that I’ve seen work to bring more of this cell-changing, healing light into your body. You will be using your loving attention to effect positive changes to your mental state, your weight, your eating health, your stress levels, your metabolism, and your overall health. Being able to gain new loving perspectives of yourself and your life, particularly around your dietary habits and eating patterns, is going to go a long way toward helping you live a happy and healthy life in a body that is exactly the right size for you.
As you’ve experienced so far within the ENLIGHTEN Process, the simple act of looking upon your inner dynamics with loving kindness can be enough to help lift you out of the constant stress and damaging effects of your harsh Inner Bully’s berating and abusive energy. That freedom from perpetual stress is one of the key reasons for doing this work, as that alone will have such a profound influence not only on your energy levels and your ability to love yourself, but also on your overall health.
This puts you in the most empowered space to find and utilize other tools that can reduce your inner stress levels and add to these health benefits. One such tool I want to remind you about, from earlier in this book, is one that is simple enough that you can easily use it day-in and day-out to maintain a reduced level of stress. It is something you can easily work into your day any time you are eating. Ideally you will set this up as a simple ritual you are able to start every meal with, because of how quick and easy it is to work in.
You have hopefully already practiced this while reading this book – taking three conscious breaths between stopping one activity and starting another one. This simple ritual is one you can bring to your life any time you are about to eat something. Before you put that first bite of food into your mouth, you can simply pause, close your eyes, and take one to three deep and conscious breaths. When you’re done, open your eyes, really look at the new piece of delicious food you are about to eat, and as you take that first bite, give it your full attention. Notice the smell, the taste, the texture, and the nourishing life-giving energy the Universe is blessing you with in the moment with this morsel of food.
Note that by acknowledging the nourishing deliciousness of your food, it brings you into the present moment, and potentially into the space of gratitude, which also brings you into a higher vibration within your body. This acknowledgment of the goodness of the food you are about to eat can be done at any time, for any food you are eating – whether it is a piece of chocolate, a piece of fruit, a piece of lettuce, a steak, a doughnut, or a bite of ice cream. All food, when eaten with enjoyment, minus the attacking beliefs associated with you telling yourself you shouldn’t be eating it, will bring you into the power of gratitude, light, ease, and love to the moment, which in turn will have a powerful positive impact to how your cells respond to your eating and to the food you are eating.
It’s been my experience that what is as important, if not more so, than what you are eating, is the quality of being you bring to your experience of eating. How loving, full of gratitude, and stress-free you can be at the very moment you are eating anything will directly determine the health-benefits it will have for your body. The energy you bring to your eating also plays a big role in determining the energy that the food you eat will bring to your body, your psyche, and your life. By practicing this simple act of slowing down, and grounding yourself within yourself with your conscious breaths as you begin to eat, you will be gifting yourself with the full light and energy of the food you are eating, making every food you eat more of a super-food for your cells. Bringing your presence and conscious awareness to what you are putting into your body is a simple yet profound tool you can use to gain mastery over your eating health.
I recommend setting a goal for yourself to do this for three days in a row to start with. Make a conscious decision that every time you switch from a non-eating activity into an eating activity, you will first take 1-3 deep breaths. If you catch yourself chowing down on something and then realize you forgot to take some conscious breaths, don’t worry! Beating yourself up is not allowed in this practice. Instead, simply notice, and choose at that moment instead to take your three conscious breaths. And if you find you’ve just finished gobbling down your food in a habitual manner at any time throughout the day, without having remembered to consciously breathe, again, no worries. Simply notice that, and then think back on the amazing food you’ve just eaten, breathing as you do so, and bring all of your love and gratitude to yourself and to the delicious food you just ate.
In his excellent book The Slow Down Diet, author Marc David writes: “We need to work less to achieve more. We need to stop fighting food and start embracing it. We need to stop punishing our bodies and start providing for them. We need to slow down and enjoy and then we’ll get the results we’ve been looking for – and sooner than we expect.” Simply slowing down and being with yourself and your food as you are eating it is key. Notice any thoughts that arise, and notice if your Inner Guard Dog is kicking in. If he or she is, simply take note, and know you can write down any thoughts that come up and set up a time for yourself to work through another ENLIGHTEN Process at some point in the future with those new limiting thoughts you’re witnessing. The feelings and thoughts could be about anything – from irritation (with the ritual or with yourself), to boredom, frustration, anger, curiosity, or humor. Simply note the feeling, and breathe into it, knowing there must be a dynamic at play within that you simply haven’t yet gained a new perspective on. See your little Inner Innocent within you, and simply acknowledge her, however she is feeling – and breathe. This simple act of loving awareness and kindness towards yourself will go a long way to resetting your stressful eating and self-sabotaging behaviors. Go easy on yourself!
Do not underestimate how healing this work is for your body and how much positive impact it will have for you and your weight-loss goals. Turning your inner self- and body-hatred around directly relates to improving your health profoundly from the inside out. A research study published January 26, 2017 in the Obesity journal found that fat- and self-shaming (and not obesity itself) is what directly increases a person’s risk for metabolic syndrome and its subsequent health issues. Researchers in the study found that participants who internalized stress from weight-related stigma were over 40 percent more likely to have metabolic syndrome than participants who did not internalize that stigma. This finding is significant! The conclusion of the study is that if the stress of being overweight can be reduced, the disease burden on the body will also be reduced. This is why the ENLIGHTEN Process, and other work you do to be present and grateful for your body and your food as you are eating it, is so very important and powerful.
Until you do the inner work to tame your Inner Bully and re-parent your stressed and beaten up Inner Innocent, the belief patterns inside of you that keep telling you how fat, lazy, and worthless you are because of your weight or body shape are taken as “truths” and are the real culprits keeping you unhealthy – more so than your food choices or your inner character or make-up. Every time you look lovingly on the old rules-for-safety – instead of thinking there is something wrong with you – you are literally changing your health at the metabolic and cellular levels, which is where the change has to take place for you to succeed at life-long weight and body freedom.
If you also think about where all of these attacks and the fat shaming on our overweight bodies have come from, you will see that the media and our culture play no small role. Our inner image is in constant comparison to the media images of what “health” and “beauty” should be. We’re also up against a diet industry whose main job in order to stay in business is to convince us we are not the weight we should be, and we are in need of a product or service they are selling. In creating this book, I had to fight against feeling a bit like I was becoming a part of that industry. In the end, however, I came to see my book instead as a Trojan horse – as a light shining out from within the dieting industry world that is going to cast out the shadows that have been alive in too many of us for far too long.
Healing the idea that there is something inherently wrong with us – if we don’t look a certain way or can’t maintain a certain weight – is what this book, my process, and my work on this planet is about. The very thought that there is something wrong with us, whether it be with our bodies, our weight, how we look, or some other aspect of how we think we must be to please others “out there,” is such a big stressor on the body, that these thoughts alone are the actual cause of dis-ease and weight-gain in our bodies, keeping us on this downward spiral of related health issues.
Something else that the weight-loss and dieting industry continually bombards us with is the idea that you have to get control over yourself, and muster up the willpower, strength, and inner fortitude to perfectly follow this diet plan, or that exercise plan, or ideally as many of their tips that you can at a time! While there is of course something to be said for the positive health benefits that so many of the diet and exercise plans out there can have for us, if we try to follow them before first doing this inner work, we are doomed to fail, because our inner saboteur is going to do its job to make sure we instead stay safely within our comfort zones of learned unconscious rules about who we need to be and what we need to do before it will let us change ourselves into a “new person.”
It’s important to remember that when something is enjoyable, you will continue doing it. When it is work, and done with the mentality of it being “hard work,” it will be the first thing you drop when you get stressed, ill, or tired. When something has to be forced and you see it as hard work that requires willpower to maintain, you won’t be able to retain it as a routine in your life, because your soul’s impulse is always to go toward joy – the Joy of Being – which is the celebration of life and your inherent right to enjoy your ride on this planet.
While there is something to be said for “tough-love” and boot-camp-type programs to help kick-start you into a new routine of healthier exercising and eating choices, if these are done in a way that simply mirrors the limiting patterns of abuse you’re already used to from your Inner Bully, they won’t be bringing anything new to you and your weight-loss drama. Instead, they will simply be another powerful way to activate and keep alive the very saboteurs within you that have convinced you this “pushing” and drill-sergeant mentality from outside is what you deserve and need. They will reinforce your childhood wound that you need to “fix your broken self.”
There is nothing to fix when you are living a life free from your inner demons and the lies which tell you there is something wrong with you. Your body will naturally go toward health, love, and longevity when it is freed up from the constant stress of inner self-abuse, inner and outer fat-shaming, and the weight of having to hold up all of the inner conflicting rules, beliefs, activities, and limitations that have been keeping your Inner Innocent in protection and hiding mode.
It is time to get off of this never-ending fat-shaming cycle, one beautiful body and soul at a time. Working with the ENLIGHTEN Process, slowing down, reframing your relationship with yourself and with the food you are eating, taking one conscious step at a time after another, is the most powerful, simple, loving, and kind path you can follow to take you there.
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