Binge eating contains 5 potent key spiritual teachings that when skillfully utilized take you on a path to embodying more of your authenticity and subsequently a rhythm with food that feels more authentic, your authentic food rhythm.
If you struggle with binge eating you may often ask yourself, “why is this happening to me?”. “Why can’t I stop?”. This essay is intended to help shift your consciousness so that you can start asking more sovereign questions like “how is this serving me?”. “What is this showing me?”. “How can I love myself through?”
Binge eating is a survival strategy fueled by shame, self-disgust, social and cultural programming/conditioning. AND it’s also an opportunity to heal not only the behavior of binge eating but also all the survival strategies that fuel it.
Your authentic food rhythm if fueled by thriving strategies like self-compassion, self-intimacy, personal liberation, and unconditional love.
5 spiritual teachings you can learn from binge eating.
1. Honor the present moment to feel satiated by life so that you know how to feel satiated by food. Binge eating is a reaction to not fully savoring life. When we’re constantly creating stories of the future or reliving the past we are not able to honor and savor the present moment. The ability to savor life creates a solid foundation for savoring and feeling satiated by food. Rather than looking ahead or to the past for a high sensation experience, the focus is on the present and fully honoring the sensations present in the body as a result of this now moment. Radical presence creates a body that can hold pleasure in all moments of life from the most chaotic and painful to the most blissful.
2. End the binge cycle by learning to let go. While it’s often not the root of most binge eating behaviors, restriction creates a pendulum swing response of overindulgence that inevitably swings back to binge eating. This happens because we only have a finite amount of energy each day to exert control over the body. And we can either use that energy to create a secure attachment to the body (blog on this soon) or we can waste it on oppressing the body through restrictive behaviors that lead to compensatory binge behaviors. Letting go is an art that is fueled by the infinite resource of pleasure, it’s built on a foundation of self-trust, self-compassion, and self-commitment. By doing so you work with the body rather than against it to heal. At the start, clients will put their trust in The Pleasure Eating Process itself and as they progress through the program they start to have experiences that lead to self-trust being placed onto their body.
3. Respond rather than react to food triggers. Many binge behaviors feel like an impulsive even unconscious response to experiencing a trigger. The trigger is a situation or experience that brings up the same feelings/ emotions of past trauma. Trauma can be as severe as sexual abuse or as subtle as not being told to “clean your plate” as a kid. When it comes to healing binge eating you want to move away from numbing the sensations that are present in the body when you are triggered and learn to stay with them instead. It may sound counterintuitive, but the sensations that are present in the body as a result of feelings/emotions are actually calling you to respond rather than react to them. Often times the response they want is simply your presence. This practice of non-reactivity creates a safe container within the body that is best described as a secure attachment to the body/Self.
4. Bing eating is often used as an avoidance strategy used to bypasses difficult emotions that arise as a result of life’s challenging circumstances and experiences. It not only avoids difficult emotions it also avoids the development of a knowing of what your needs, wants and desires are. Feelings often hold the key to what you genuinely want and if you’re not tuned into them enough to know, it creates a low-level background pain of avoided and unmet needs and desires. For example, if you have a deep longing for connection, but you constantly eat when you feel the sensations in your body that are the result of not getting this need met you’ll be left with the pain of the unmet need for connection and the pain of the binge. Over time this behavior becomes a low-level background pain that is assumed to be a “normal” part of life.
5. When you are intimate enough with your body it’s impossible to binge eat. When you’re operating from a deep knowing of what your unique body needs to experience pleasure emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually abandoning the body with food loses its pull because it simply does not feel as pleasurable as touching life directly.
