Healing Food Addiction: Less Crystals and More Crying

It’s not more meditation and crystals and bubble baths that you need, it’s more feeling messy emotions that you need.

You don't need more meditation, you need more crying.

You don't need more crystals, you need more screaming into and punching pillows.

You don't need more bubble baths, you need more space to shake and tremble your fear out of your body.

You don't need to calm your emotions down, you need messy emotional expression.

Healing overeating is not achieved through traditional "self-care" practices. It can never be healed if you're always trying to "rise above" or "observe" your emotions.

The only way to process, move through, and release emotions is by feeling them. And unless we look like 2-year old kids feeling big emotions, we are not feeling our emotions. We might be thinking about them, we might be living in them without experiencing them, we might be aware of them. But we are not feeling them.

We can learn everything we need to know about feeling emotions from small children. They don't meditate and use crystals and try to rise above their emotions. They embody and experience them fully.

I'm all for a good bath or some yoga, and there are even ways you can use meditation to help you get into your tough emotions (a good thing) rather than using it to get out of your emotions (a bad thing).

I understand how scary it can feel to go into the dark emotions. It makes sense based on how our environment responded to our feelings when we were children, that now we desperately want to believe that there is a way to process emotions without experiencing them.

But these are fears and false beliefs. The truth is that it is allowing ourselves to be emotionally messy, and experiencing our emotions the way a small child does, that heals food addiction.

Photo by Jakob Rosen via Unsplash