Thank you all for looking at the introduction to my story. I'm sharing the first chapter here. Love to hear what you all think! Thanks again for reading.
First thoughts
“If you get the inside right the outside will fall into place” Echart Tolle posted on Instagram by Sam Smith.
When I first started writing this I wasn’t sure I had enough of a story to tell. But then again I also thought I would solve things much more quickly than I did. I thought I was just writing a little story of how hypnotherapy helped me lose weight and maybe my sharing my story could help others.
As I went along my story more importantly became about the ability we have to change in more ways than just the loss of weight. I’ve often heard it said that people don’t change or that we lack the capacity for real and lasting change. As I began I’d only pictured the ways my life would change by being a thinner person. But as I continued I noticed the many changes from within changing the type of person I was.
The weight and my ability to lose it were simply guiding lights leading the way towards the insight I needed to break free, never actually the most important part of my journey. If we had the ability to see the things that give us difficulty as the true indicators they are and embrace them instead of letting them block us we’d have the ability to excel greatly both physically and mentally. The worst things that happen are the best lessons.
The problem is that we don’t want to hear this; we are not receptive; we are too comfortable in our lives filled with distraction that allow avoidance and denial. It’s easier to not change anything we are doing. But at some point we almost always realize we just don’t enjoy suffering the consequences of our lifestyle choices.
Change works both ways; we have to be open to accept those moments, experience them and then let them go; if you allow yourself to get stuck in that moment nothing will ever change. If things can change for the worst the opposite is true as well, but only if you open yourself up to the possibilities of better things.
People can change; anyone can change. But we have to be willing to look at the reasons we are resisting change to begin with. We have to be willing to actually hear what we are listening to. We have to be open to look inside ourselves and be ok asking ourselves questions then answering them honestly. You have to do the work. And not the work someone else wants us to do. Not the trainer at the gym who makes us sweat. Not the weight watchers coach who spits into the phone lines telling us not to eat a cookie, like it’s the last one on the planet. We have to do the work our bodies are giving us indicators that is needed. We generally want something superficial when we want to lose weight; but weight loss has nothing to do with these superficial things. Painting the car doesn’t fix the problems with the engine. People trade addictions all the time; because they are not solving the original problem. We have to recognize what’s going on below the superficial need. No matter how much or how often we tell ourselves we deserve better there may be something deep down falsely telling us we don’t; something we can’t understand because we don’t have access to it; no amount of self-worth can’t overcome shame when it’s hidden so deeply. It leads us to live in a state of perpetual confusion.
Sorting all this out is its own kind of confusion. There is probably someone you feel you want to blame but feel you shouldn’t. Then you might want to be responsible for yourself so it then becomes hard not to blame yourself. It’s pretty hard to take responsibility for something if you can’t understand why it’s happening to you. Taking responsivity for yourself equals power. It is confusing.
Maybe it seems easier to ignore all this confusing stuff than figure it out. But you have a right to know what’s really going on. You have a right to be able to untangle all of this. If you want to assert these rights you’ll need to be open to taking a look at how you’ve been doing things. And just for a minute think of how powerful it would be to start making some changes. That’s it; just start thinking, that’s right where I started.
When I started thinking I came up with a lot. We eat because we can’t handle any more than we are handling but suddenly feel we must. We eat because we feel inadequate about not being able to handle more. We eat for all kinds of reasons that has nothing to do with nutrition. But I promise, if you can just get out of your way long enough to start a new way of thinking you can change your life.
We’ve lived the way we have like it’s all we know because it has been. It’s been engrained. Feelings ran under your life like a subterranean river. So much doubt had been put in our heads and placed on our lives while the things we needed to thrive were left unspoken. We were taught to have a bundle of insecurities without being aware. A lot of this happened before we even knew how to ask why. But if we challenge the way we think, start asking ask why we really can get to the bottom of this now. If there’s nothing you want to change in your life than this isn’t for you; but if you struggle it is all about you.
I wish I could have read something like this myself a few years ago when I began this journey. I had to use so many sources to put all this together. It’s not the way of the culture we live in. We learned anxiety is something we take a pill for, not something to root out and resolve. It’s not consciously that we choose things that go against our own well-being. There is a difference between self-acceptance and sticking ourselves with a burden we weren’t meant to keep for a lifetime. Self-mastery only happens when you give yourself the proper tools.
We box ourselves into a smaller world, one more manageable because we simply can’t handle anymore. This allows us to count ourselves out of things other people are doing so we can avoid the pressure and the fear. Only things we feel safest with can be tolerated. We can even be too fearful to ask why. Others have let us down in the most fundamental ways so trust has not become a strength of ours.
These same people may be questioning your actions right now because they care about your well-being. They push us to do things we are simply ill equipped to do, that we don’t even consciously know we are unequipped to do. This makes us angry and even more confused. We are simply trying to limit our exposure and protect ourselves from further damage. So we turn to food or another addiction.
But here’s the thing; hiding out from life is the reverse of coping; we do it because we never had the chance to learn good coping skills. We do it because there are things that bother us that we can’t pinpoint or locate in our conscious thoughts.
We live with so many hidden feelings. We feel so badly for being out of control but we don’t understand why we are out of control. We feel cheated for the life we are missing out on but can only blame ourselves, not even realizing we never had a chance and we are the very last people we should blame. We should have been entitled to gain certain life skills when we were kids. We feel robbed that we didn’t. We have been forced to live with these problems that no one seems to be able to help with. We slip back or stay stagnant because we’ve not removed all the road blocks to change. Uncertainty was the cause of ever anxious moment for me. Self-worth equals feeling you are worth belonging and being loved; when you doubt that you doubt yourself. The majority of your happiness should not be about avoiding unhappiness.
“Because we are sentenced to the consequences of our accumulated thoughts, it is important that we learn to observe and elevate them.” Sue Patton Thoele
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