Eating disorder as a journey to the soul

I turned 45 today. I’d been preparing for a while, because it felt like it might be a momentous occasion, a real mid-life moment, something that needed to be acknowledged in some way. I had initially thought we might go to Glastonbury on pilgrimage and swim in the white spring, then I decided I’d go and watch the sunrise at Stonehenge on the solstice and celebrate on my own, early.

 But then Covid arrived and we have come to Sark instead, which has started to feel a little bit like a second home, a spiritual home at that. There is something about the energy here, the combination of the ancient rocks and the wild sea, the space, the peace, the fact that it hasn’t been ruined by modern civilisation or mass tourism that I find uplifting, grounding and profoundly healing.

It allows deep knowing to surface, space between thoughts, a re-prioritising of life and a consideration and rejig of what might be important. It also offers wonderful walking and scrambling, and swimming and cycling, all my favourite things and with my favourite people too. It is a place that touches deep into the heart’s core and transforms things. You cannot help but be changed by time spent here.

I needed this time if truth be told, to step away from the maelstrom of Guernsey, the pressure of the schooling debacle, and the routine, to say nothing of the building repairs being carried out on the cottage, this after the flood right before the beginning of lockdown; how I have missed my bath! Here I get to lay in a bath. I cannot tell you the joy. It is like nothing else. If bathing was a subject, then I’d be giving it my effort for a grade A. 

Life always feels better after a bath. Like sea swimming. I have never once regretted a swim. I’ve never once regretted a trip to Sark either. Although there was a drunken work event back in my twenties, when I ended up staying the night at the last minute, and drinking even more wine than was needed and paying for that the next day, not least with an invoice for the hotel room, but with a sore head. Those days are long gone thankfully. 

However, this has definitely been a year of reflection. When I turned 44, I was aware there were still aspects of my past that needed resolving and I thought that if I don’t do something about this soon, then when will I? My mum had highlighted this to me when she had read the first draft of a manuscript I had written and commented that I wasn’t really in a position to write about how one recovers from an eating disorder, for example, when I clearly hadn’t, not totally. She had a point. But the question is, do you ever truly recover? 

It’s a question that made me curious, and it began a process that has found me exploring how this might still show up in my life.  I developed an eating disorder when I was 17 yet I had never taken professional help to understand the nature of it. It was something I skirted around, the elephant in the room, it went unspoken, and yet I could write about it, which is strange isn’t it, that we can sometimes write publicly about the things we can’t talk about intimately.

Yet it is tied up in intimacy, as is so much of the life that we live in our heads, because intimacy is tricky, as anyone will know, who has tried to explore this. The  process took me into intimacy and into harm, and it shook me around, as I tried to make sense of when and why it had all began, and I started to see themes and patterns in my life even now, so that while, these days, I might eat ‘normally’ (whatever this means), an eating disorder is so much more than food. It’s about our thoughts and our relationship with self and about our mind and our heart, our body, our soul and how we relate to the world.

I did find it depressing when a lady told me, a beautiful lady incidentally, who has some experience of working with people with eating disorders, that it is just something you come to live with. I don’t know about that, it doesn’t settle easily with me. I pull weeds out of my veggie patch so that the veggie plants can thrive. Isn’t it the same with us too, can’t we pull out the weeds from their roots and make our internal earth richer, our inner landscape clearer. The sea goes in and the sea goes out. The moon rises and it sets. Are we so very different? 

 Sure the clouds come and obscure the moon, and the winds whip into a bay, disturbing the calmness of the sea, but their very nature stays the same. Is it not the same with us too? I believe it is and I wondered then, whether it may be a matter of making peace with our own nature, living in harmony with ourselves, with our true self. This I have explored too. You can lose your mind in the process. Some people might think you mad, but I think it makes you feel very alive.

What is life if we do not lose our minds? There’s nothing worse than a fixed mind, believing this or that as if it was a truth, when really a truth is only a perception captured in time, your perception, and this can chop and change, like the sea, like the moon, if you catch it from a dodgy angle, or when you’ve drunk too much wine (which I haven’t done for a long time now, I’m so pleased about that), or you think you see something and yet it’s not really what you thought it was when your eyes focus properly.

So where was I going with this, as we’re going out to see a fat pig, on the farm here on Sark, owned by friends, and the boys love pigs, which always amuses me as they love to eat sausages. They understand the connection too, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. I’m more bothered and I’m not even eating the dead pig, ingesting it’s energy – if you buy into that sort of thing, which I do btw, because we are all energy…

Picking up the thread, OK so I think I thought that my mission might be, by the time I am 45 to have explored and understood more around the subject of harm, because this really is the crux of an eating disorder. I mean let’s face it, you can’t harm yourself much more than depriving yourself of the very thing that might nourish you, namely food, or stuffing your face to the extent that you tax your digestive system and counter any potential for nourishment.

It’s a really cruel and nasty state of mind to find yourself in. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s very difficult to be satisfied by life when you don’t allow yourself to be satisfied by food, when the very thing that night nourish you is turned into a weapon by your mind. It’s very difficult to suddenly switch the mind away from that, especially if it has become an ingrained pattern over a long time, and it often is with an eating disorder because it is very difficult to treat – even the ‘experts’ don’t really know how to treat it, at best they might help you manage it.

But I didn’t just want to manage it. I tried that for years and it was a daily consideration, because every day you have to eat. Not that it’s even about the eating, it’s about everything else, and I suppose this is the point that I have been trying to make. It is about allowing yourself to be satisfied by life, of feeling that you deserve to be nourished and loved and cared for by yourself as much as by anyone else, by life then! It is about all these wonderful things, but ultimately it is about love and it is about intimacy, and it is about being deeply honest and truly forgiving and compassionate. 

I have learned a lot this year and I’m proud of myself actually, I congratulate myself, because it has not been easy. There have been dark nights of the soul, as you know, and not because I’m losing my mind, going mad, oh cripes is there something wrong with her sort of thing, but because I don’t want to be continuously limited by my past, and by the patterns I have developed to help me feel safe, that are actually no longer – and never were if truth be told, but you’ll have to wait for the book to read more about that – useful or helpful, that are anything but that.

Accepting and loving the self is not something that happens over-night, you’ll know that if you are reading this. You’ll know because we all have moments of questioning our worth, when we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror and wish we hadn’t and then quickly find something to distract us from ourselves so that we don’t need to go any deeper, get busy, busier, drink more wine, do more yoga, always doing, rushing, being somewhere other than exactly here right now looking at ourselves honestly in that mirror.

Those of you with eating disorders will know this more than most. It is not easy to recover, to find your feet again, to mend your heart (for it is the greatest wounding to the heart, to harm yourself in this manner), to be able to look at your reflection and love what you see, to be compassionate to yourself, respect, love, cherish your body (so conditioned are you to push it, starve it, abuse it, try to change it, control it), to nourish, care for and be at peace, to put yourself and your needs first, to listen and be heard.

But it is possible, bit by bit. I know this because I have had to face my demons. I had a choice. Last year, the year before and every year before that too. My birthdays came and highlighted to me my ongoing issues and neuroses. Birthdays do this. It is as if a portal opens for us so that we may see more clearly. What used to happen though, was I’d ignore it, because it was too painful to acknowledge that another year had passed and I was still carrying this burden. I’d drink wine. At birthdays you drink wine. It was the perfect excuse to pop my head in the sand and just hope that things might change by the next year.

The trouble is that we don’t change unless we do the changing. Unless something shifts. Unless we look honestly at ourselves and do what is needed, lose our mind usually, because it is only in losing our mind that we can find a new way to be, in the unknown that is not fixed by what has happened previously. The mind is a terribly powerful thing. Ask anyone who has experienced an eating disorder. They will tell you. The mind is truly fascinating, ingenious and beautiful and yet at times extremely disconcerting. Thank god for the heart! The heart keeps me sane. So does faith. 

Two years ago all my birthday cards seemed to be about yoga and drinking wine. The yoga was fab but the drinking wine made me uncomfortable, and I was aware that I wanted this to change. It’s a silly thing to notice, but do notice the birthday cards that you are sent, they speak volumes about where you are at in your life. I was stuck and I needed to go a bit deeper, to stop skirting on the edges, not really getting into the centre. Yet I didn’t know then what to do or where to turn, because on the surface life was great, I was writing books, teaching yoga, living the dream. 

Last year, my birthday was uneventful to the extent that I don’t remember it, I had to look at photos to remind myself, and yet I knew that I liked turning 44, that there was something about the number, and 4 my lucky number, so double luck and I suppose there was a sense that I had to get on with it now. You get moments like that, where you’ve been coasting along, you know there’s stuff there in the background, but you can ignore it, you’ve gotten used to ignoring it. But then all of a sudden you just think no. There’s a line in the sand. 

You can keep on keeping on, pretending that everything is OK, or you can dive right in. In moments like that, when I suddenly become aware of something that needs healing, there is no choice. I don’t want to live a half lived life, denying my potential, too fearful to make the changes that might need to be made, too scared to feel what needs to be felt. I’ve spent too many birthdays in tears, a combination of overwhelm and just because they’ve never felt quite right, a reminder that I still hadn’t quite found that place inside me where I might feel satisfied, deserving, and OK with everything. The inner critic was always just a little bit too loud. 

Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion”, and she is right. This year I have been attentive. Really attentive. The Scaravelli-inspired yoga has helped this, it is all about being attentive, and about devotion. It is through attention that we come to notice all that we had previously ignored, because there is nowhere else to turn, not when we have taken the step inwards, towards the heart. We are all heart, we know this.

Some will argue that we are the breath, because the breath gives life, yet without the heart, there is no breath. IVF allowed me to see this. At six weeks gestation, both my boys were visible on the screen as beating hearts. Beating hearts! They were alive and yet there was no breath. Not directly. This would follow when the heart was ready for expression in the outer world. Did they choose? I still don’t know about that. There is always mystery, this is what feeds our soul. 

I didn’t know how it might be today either. I found myself in tears on my mat yesterday, they seemed to come from nowhere but I wonder if it might have been apprehension, ahead of the big day. I bumped into someone I know from back home, not well, but we had this intimate conversation about home schooling in a very short period of time, on our bikes, along a grass track, our respective partner’s chatting, our children remarkably quiet, and she confessed to crying that day too, in the Avenue. Albeit she is five months pregnant so has an excuse!

But today was the most wonderful day. I felt I deserved it and I felt satisfied by it. I allowed myself to receive all that was offered. I did not get overwhelmed or upset and I didn’t drink wine or in any way numb out. I awoke with Eben’s head pressed to mine and when I reminded him it was by birthday (given he is three, I didn’t expect him to remember!), he excitedly told me of the gifts that were waiting, “the most beautiful Buddha, beautiful crystals and gardening gloves”. I couldn’t help but laugh. He opened my presents anyway and yes, there they were, all chosen by him.

I got to meditate, to drink tea, open my cards, take it easy, before we scrambled across rocks and swam naked in the Venus Pool, a first! We visited the Sark dolmen and Eben learned how to use my pendulum. We cycled and walked, and we swam some more at La Grande Greve, also a first. We ate fresh Sark eggs, homemade chips, and local salad with roasted pumpkin seeds, we drank tea and ate Caragh’s amazing dark praline chocolate, and we got wet in the rain. 

I wrote until my heart was content and I didn’t feel guilty one bit. We visited our friends and their huge pig and I sat in a tractor. I went to a yoga class, I can’t tell you the joy, and I lay in a bath and read my book. I did all these wonderful things that nourished and satisfied me and it felt great. The inner critic was quiet. I cannot tell you the relief.

That part of me that doesn’t self-congratulate easily, that holds back for fear of being judged for being egotistical or big headed, well that part of me is coming out of the shadows, because it is needed, it is so very much needed. I congratulate myself, because it has not been easy, but I know now that it is OK to feel satisfied and deserving. 

It is OK to express our needs and allow ourselves to receive what is needed. It is OK to damage our hearts as long as you find ways to heal it. Then it is OK to let go of the need to keep fixing, because we can get lost here too, playing out the old themes about not being good enough or worthy enough and forgetting that we’ve moved on and all we’re doing is keeping ourselves stuck in the past. Heal and move on. I know that now too. 

It is OK to feel proud of ourselves, to accept ourselves, to love ourselves. And I do, honestly I do. I couldn’t have told you that before. I would have cared too much about what you might have thought and not enough about me, packaging my poor little heart away in a box, whispering, “maybe next year you can come out and shine”. But now is the time. I hear you beautiful heart. And I rejoice in me and my life and my soul. And I hope you rejoice in all that is yours too. 

Stuff happens to us in our lives. We harm ourselves in many ways. I harmed myself with an eating disorder for many years and it would be foolish to pretend that that life is ever the same after an eating disorder comes in, but in many respects it can be reframed as a blessing, as something positive, as it might take you on a journey to the deepest parts of yourself, that you might never have otherwise known. It’s like depression, but more on that another time.

Losing our mind is only the very beginning, and it’s worth beginning, because a mind lost is a heart gained, and really, it can only ever be about love. It is a pilgrimage all of its own, to our soul, to the deepest part of ourselves that can spend a lifetime being unknown, yet with devotion to the self, we can find a depth that we didn’t know possible. This is a continuous exploration, one that I truly believe, is worth making; an act of devotion.

xxx

P.S. My cards this year were about the moon and flowers, goddesses and living your dreams…