What a powerful piece that provokes me to take a deeper look at my own thoughts around food and body. I hadn’t connected them to power and control, but all of that makes complete sense as I look back over the weekend and all the ways we spoke about trying to “stay small”…WOW. So grateful to be with you and to now be reading your incredible insights! This is so very inspiring.
Cynthia.. I love your connecting the dots as to how eating is often connected to our feelings of powerlessness.. and an attempt to control what is impossible to control! Given our present global crisis, I am sure many are turning to food to try to control the uncontrollable. Thanks for making that connection! I especially liked how you connected the expenditure of energy around controlling the body, could be looked at as being wasteful while calling us to consider in what other ways we could USE the energy freed from stopping body shaming (with our body-bullies) and the culturally programmed and obsessive concerns about the shape and weight of our bodies. Having spent an entire lifetime with this obsessive focus, I needed to hear this re-frame of the cultural mental illness of the obsessive focus on the "perfection" and control of the body! And, I like you, am committing to offering more kindness to my body and in that, to better listening to its actual needs instead of what "I" deem it needs to be!! Thank you again for the lucid look at this important inquiry! Ariel Spilsbury
Thank you, Cynthia. I really appreciate your thoughtful approach here. The idea that when we feel powerless, we turn to the areas where we can exercise power, of a sort, is itself powerful. If we would learn to exercise that power wisely, it might make a huge difference in those other areas where we simply do not have the ability to control the outcomes.
Just a side note. My fixation on language and thought says that it's not "My body," but me. I'm not buying that mind/body distinction anymore. There's no owner of "my" body, it's all me. Does that help with the issue you mentioned? idk, I just know that it's a more accurate way to perceiving who we are, and that ought to be beneficial.
Language is tricky, isn't it. For me, since I've suppressed, ignored, and trying to control that part of me that is body, I kind of need to consider it as an entity with value in order to integrate into it. I agree, that for wholeness, all that I experience is one being, me.
What a powerful piece that provokes me to take a deeper look at my own thoughts around food and body. I hadn’t connected them to power and control, but all of that makes complete sense as I look back over the weekend and all the ways we spoke about trying to “stay small”…WOW. So grateful to be with you and to now be reading your incredible insights! This is so very inspiring.
With love & appreciation,
Greyson
Cynthia.. I love your connecting the dots as to how eating is often connected to our feelings of powerlessness.. and an attempt to control what is impossible to control! Given our present global crisis, I am sure many are turning to food to try to control the uncontrollable. Thanks for making that connection! I especially liked how you connected the expenditure of energy around controlling the body, could be looked at as being wasteful while calling us to consider in what other ways we could USE the energy freed from stopping body shaming (with our body-bullies) and the culturally programmed and obsessive concerns about the shape and weight of our bodies. Having spent an entire lifetime with this obsessive focus, I needed to hear this re-frame of the cultural mental illness of the obsessive focus on the "perfection" and control of the body! And, I like you, am committing to offering more kindness to my body and in that, to better listening to its actual needs instead of what "I" deem it needs to be!! Thank you again for the lucid look at this important inquiry! Ariel Spilsbury
Thank you, Cynthia. I really appreciate your thoughtful approach here. The idea that when we feel powerless, we turn to the areas where we can exercise power, of a sort, is itself powerful. If we would learn to exercise that power wisely, it might make a huge difference in those other areas where we simply do not have the ability to control the outcomes.
Just a side note. My fixation on language and thought says that it's not "My body," but me. I'm not buying that mind/body distinction anymore. There's no owner of "my" body, it's all me. Does that help with the issue you mentioned? idk, I just know that it's a more accurate way to perceiving who we are, and that ought to be beneficial.
Language is tricky, isn't it. For me, since I've suppressed, ignored, and trying to control that part of me that is body, I kind of need to consider it as an entity with value in order to integrate into it. I agree, that for wholeness, all that I experience is one being, me.