I came back here and found your response to my comment and just wanted to thank you for it. Lovely, as always.

I know what you mean about fitting in. I have found myself doing it a little bit even in the blog world lately, and your recent posts have reminded me to check in with myself and make sure I was writing in accordance with my own truth and not for how I want to be accepted in a community – virtual or ‘real.’

I also wanted to say that I loved Miss Blue’s question and look forward to reading your response to it. I think that sharing your own challenges, doubts, and insecurities can help us greatly and makes you even more approachable and loveable. (Not that you really could be any more loveable than you already are!!)

And, Miss Blue, I can relate to the fear of success you are describing and the commitments associated with it. Very much so.

with much love for both of you,

Em

I’m really glad you asked because how we find ourselves in and out of alignment is often a matter of taking our eye off the ball…not staying in complete awareness. I’ll be happy to share the cycles I’ve noticed in my own life in my next post…hopefully I can write it tomorrow!

Love,
Heather

Thank heavens for the depression, bingey thoughts and all the behaviors that come back ONLY when I’m out of alignment. Only when I’m in autopilot working too hard, doing work I hate, being with people I don’t feel aligned with. Being less than I am becuase I start to fear the money, the approval, the advancement of my career

You share that you still have some challenging thoughts from time to time, when you’re out of alignment. Being so aware, and much more practiced than most of us in how to tune into yourself, could you tell us how it is that you find yourself doing work that you realize you hate doing? You’ve mentioned this before, and it makes me feel so bad. You work so hard, bringing us so much information, always learning, always inspiring…Is it that you spread yourself too thin with a lot of different things you like to do, or is that every good job still involves aspects of it you hate? Or is there something you’re doing, that you must keep doing, that you hate? In other words, is this a matter of simply divesting from a particular type of work you’re doing right now, or a matter of recognizing that there may always be aspects of some work you hate, and we all have to learn to take it easy during those times?
And do you really find yourself still fearing success at times? Could you write more about that too? I feel sometimes that money, and success are scary because they connote commitments that may get me in over my head.. I’m wondering what you would have to say about that.

Take your time-I know I put a lot out there. But you always make me think, so I hope you don’t mind!

With love, Miss Blue

And you know what? The best guidance we can give others is to develop their own intution. Intuition comes from our body. I’ll share more about what John Holland (the psychic) says about this. But the more we teach people to listen to their gut reactions and help them learn about energy, the more they can pick the foods that support them.

Marion Woodman talks a lot about her own struggles with eating disorders. She’s an author and also was interviewed by Eve Ensler in The Good Body. She says that now, she can just hold a food and know if it works for her. That’s her intuition talking!

What if we all taught our kids to do that?

What if we taught each other to trust our own intution so that we’d know. And what if we stopped fearing food and learned this harmony with it, so that our bodies would guide us to the kind of energy we needed at that moment?

What if we knew we had nothing to fear in life and that all we needed to do was allow our energy to be balanced and at peace?

I think that’s all we can do. Teach each other to embrace our power and learn to understand our true nature…and follow our intution.

It sounds like your mom tried that as best she knew how. Mine did too — we went through phases when I was younger…no sugar in the house, vegetarian, etc. Until she started her business when I was around 9 years old. Then it was hit or miss. But she tried. And she did the best she knew how.

I still had to live in the mainstream. I still watched TV, went to friend’s houses, ate for convenience as anyone would because that’s what we know. And I also got caught up in all the stuff I thought I needed to do to fit in. Gossip, negative thoughts, cynicism (because it wasn’t cool to be Pollyanna).

To fit in, I walked away from myself, thinking I had to in order to fit in.

I think that’s where I went wrong, but I was doing the best I knew how and it was all perfect.

Thanks for sharing and I always love your point of view!!!!!

Love,
Heather

All that didn’t keep me from having food issues, though. In my case, it was much more noticeable when I didn’t partake in family dinner, and my family gave me a hard time for it.

In retrospect, I think my diet contained way too many refined carbohydrates (even if they were foods prepared with love, like all the homemade cakes and pastries, as well as pastas, breads, etc.) and not enough protein. Partly, I think I would have done better if I knew about food and my body then what I know now. But partly, I also think that raging hormones played a huge role in my body’s unsatiable hunger and cravings, and those can be very challenging to override.

I’d like to think that, knowing what I know now, if I had a teenage daughter, I’d be able to help her avert all the food issues I had. But would I really? Would she be able to benefit from the lessons I’ve learned? When I went through all this, my mom relayed to me that she’d gone through a very similar period of time at my age. She reassured me that it would get better, and I can appreciate her advice retrospectively, but I wasn’t able to apply it to my life then.

That brings me to a whole other issue of how much can we really help others, and how much do they need to help themselves? Of course, we can help them help themselves. But, ultimately, they have to do the work. We can never do it for anyone else. On the flipside, noone else can do the work for us…

I’m digressing, though.

I wholeheartedly agree with you on the importance of eating organic and whole foods. J and I were laughing last night when he pointed out we were eating like a typical American family. Our dinner consisted of all frozen foods: steemed frozen broccoli, frozen fish (and J had frozen french fries). That’s so unsual for us. (Though since I have discovered the organic broccoli florets at Trader Joe’s, I have been eating those quite often. They are so convenient and you can always keep them around. I would say it’s the next best choice to fresh vegetables.)

Have you seen the movie Fast Food Nation? We saw it a few weeks ago, and I highly recommend it. J read the book several years ago and, though I didn’t read it myself, I feel like I did, because he told me all about it as he went along.

On that note, Supersize Me was another excellent film. I would guess you’ve seen them both, but, if you haven’t, I’m sure you would appreciate them.

Thanks for providing your space for my reflections today.

with love,

Emily