Emotional Spelunking and Well-Digging

I read somewhere that if you are an emotional eater, once you start losing weight you will hit certain weights that will be emotional watersheds. The idea behind this is that when you eat for emotional reasons, you’re stuffing your feelings deeper into your psyche instead of releasing them. So when you start losing the weight, you uncover those feelings again, and NOW you have to release them or you won’t lose any more weight. So if you weighed 150 and something traumatic happened, and you dealt with it by eating your way to 175, when you get back down to 150, you’ll have to actually deal with what happened before you’ll get down to 145. (I know it sounds weird. Chalk it up to my cereal-state, energy-medicine philosophy. LOL)

So. I lost 9.3 pounds a while back. I gained about a pound back almost right away, but then stopped. And I haven’t been eating very well, either. So I’m sitting at this weight, and I know there’s something emotional going on. Not only because my weight has stalled – and I mean really stalled: it doesn’t go up when I eat crap, it doesn’t go down when I eat well – but because my head is just constantly buzzing. I feel anxious, I don’t want to sleep even though I’m exhausted, I want to drink myself stupid, I want to eat chips and red vines until I’m sick to my stomach. And God forbid I do anything productive when I DO have time. :P I feel like I don’t have time to exercise and I’m too tired, but why am I too tired? From staying up late, gorging and drinking and reading trashy suspense novels. I could GO TO BED, for God’s sake. But I don’t. I don’t want to.

So I’m trying to figure out what it is that I’m supposed to be learning here. I’m wondering if I’m just in serious hand-to-hand, take-no-prisoners, fight-dirty, kick-‘em-in-the-balls combat with my inner saboteur. And I know that part of me comes out when I’m making changes that are good for me. It’s afraid of succeeding, you know. It’s the part of me that thinks, “If I don’t try, I’ll never fail” is a BRILLIANT life strategy! :P And then I eat too much and drink too much and stay up too late so that the next day I’m tired and sick and unable to accomplish anything. Even meditating seems too hard, and all that’s required of me for that is to SIT STILL!!! SITTING STILL SHOULD NOT BE TOO HARD!!!! What sense does THAT make? “I’m too tired to sit still.” WTF??? ::::rolls eyes::::

But last night I had the last 2 glasses of an expensive bottle of wine and the last of my baked chips. I’m now officially out of all the substances that I use to medicate myself, and I’m also conveniently broke for the next two weeks. I never thought I’d be glad to be broke, but in this case, I’m thanking God, lemme tell ya! Enforced discipline! LOL

So now I’m getting ready to gut it out for at least the next week or so, because that's about how long it will take to go through the REALLY insane period. The second week should get a little easier. I hope. I know from old experience that I’m about to become a crazy person, though; my mind is trying to run from itself, and I have nothing to medicate with, so I’ll be totally insane for a while here. I’m going to live in the “well.”

I heard someone speak once who was talking about wells in the Bible as metaphors for dark times. She pointed out several different types of wells, but the one that sticks with me right now is the dug well. Meaning a well you dug yourself into. And the thing that’s so complex and really wonderful about a dug well is that the very behaviors you used to dig your well are the things you are going to have to heal in order to get out of the well.

I wish I could say that I’m just sitting here in my well, but frankly at the moment, I’m just trying to stop digging deeper! I don’t think I’ve gotten to the sitting still part yet. LOL

I heard something else from that same speaker. She was talking about something that equated the shedding of a snake’s skin, the transformation of the snake, to our own transformation. And the interesting thing is that when a snake sheds its skin, it goes through a period where it’s not only raw, but it’s blind. It can’t see. And she was saying that we go through a period like that, too. And we get so scared that instead of sitting still and being willing to go through the blindness, we run around trying to “look cute. Instead of sitting in our well, getting our nourishment from the water, we’re out there selling lemonade! Giving away the very thing we need to heal!” Because we’re afraid to be blind. We don’t want to be alone in the dark of the well. But that’s the very thing we need to be doing in order to heal.

::::sigh::::

Well . . . this post was longer than I intended originally, and it probably meanders like nobody’s business. But it helped me clarify some of my own thoughts and that was kind of what I needed. So be advised that the next few posts may be the rantings of a crazy person, sitting in a well. Blind.

(I HATE this part. Can’t I just have my lesson NOW? Isn’t there an online course for this? LOL)