On Self-Love: A sermon by Rev. Carolyn DeVito

When I first heard that Whitney Houston died, the song “Greatest Love of All” immediately came to mind. I decided to listen to it, and it was haunting, and uncomfortable. Listening to the words, after her death, felt like something terribly exposing, painfully vulnerable and, somewhat damning.

  “The greatest love of all is happening to me, I found the greatest love of all inside of me, the greatest love of all is easy to achieve, learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.” So here we are, reviewing the headline, the last line of her story- “Whitney Houston's life of glorious song and unnerving self-destruction apparently ended in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel…” reads the first line of the story in Huffington Post that announces her death.  It continues, “There were no indications of foul play and no obvious signs of trauma on Houston's body, but officials were not ruling out any causes of death until they have toxicology results.”  And as I read, pieces of her song play in my head, in between the sentences, in between the phrases:

I read, “unnerving self-destruction” 

And I hear, “I found the greatest love of all inside of me”

I read, “toxicology results”

And I hear, “learning to love yourself- it is the greatest love of all.”

And I am struggling to make sense of this. I am struggling to consider these phrases side by side. I am struggling to understand how the woman who belted out hymns to her own awakening to self love seems to have died for lack of it. 

Without self love, we cannot survive.  And as it turns out, this “greatest love of all,” isn’t “easy to achieve” at all.  It wasn’t easy for her, and it’s not for me either.

This is not a sermon mapping out an effortless route to self love, and it is certainly not a written celebration of my coming into this “greatest love of all.” This is a conversation between my self-love and my self-hate.

Many of you know about my recent commitment to weight loss which involved a kind of emotional excavation of my associations with food and a real confrontation with my feelings about my own self worth. The conversation between my self love and self hate has been on-going in my mind. And lately, (and I hope you will honor my vulnerability), self hate is winning. But I am lucky enough to be able to witness this, and have compassion for it. I listen in to my inner conversation and I hear the arguments against my worth that my self-hatred makes, and the arguments are compelling.

And no matter who you are, I truly believe we all carry a somehow sacred kernel of self hate. Why or from where, I do not know, but I firmly believe no one was born without it.  It is the closest thing I can imagine to our being born with “original sin,” the original sin, or ingrained missed mark, is that we are born with a little itch to hate the unquestionable beauty of what we are. And somehow, this little endless, subtle irritation needs to live, side by side, without disturbing it’s equal and opposite part of self love, which (I pray) is equally ingrained.

A seed for everything lies beneath the fertile soil of our spirit. There are little roots everywhere and things coming to the surface every day; new things, old things, new old things, every day.  Today, self hate. And somehow, I need to make space for it, somehow it has a place in the sacred earth of my body; it must, because it’s there.

For me, my relationship to food represents my yearning to connect to life in a way that feels safe.  Eating feels safe.  It feels like a safe way of receiving love, and offering food feels like a safe way of giving love. When food is involved I feel alive, and supported, and nurtured and unchallenged.  I eat to feel full, full of life energy, full of love.  And I eat to not feel empty.  I don’t want to experience the feeling of emptiness, or “not-enough-ness,” which feels like disconnection, or aloneness.  And sometimes I eat so much to ensure that I don’t come anywhere close to those latter feelings.  Sometimes, I binge, or, to be optimistic, in the past, I have binged, even to the point of feeling pain, and becoming ill.

The cruelly paradoxical thing about it is that, the avoidance of the feelings actually makes you feel them, worse. So my active avoidance of feeling empty and alone, ultimately leaves me feeling overfull, physically uncomfortable, sometimes ill, and, you guessed it, spiritually empty and alone.  And so it goes. In an effort to not feel certain feelings, I repeat the same pattern and end up feeling the feelings, on and on, without ever just facing and allowing the full feelings to come and resolve themselves. I’ve spent years fighting feelings and feeling them painfully and endlessly as a result.

 I stand and witness. Sometimes you have to play out a pattern for years before you are ready to be done with it. I witness myself making the same choices, and I wait and hope I am getting closer to making a different choice. I hope that each time I make the old choice and feel the same resulting negative experience that I am moving a step closer to being done with it. A step closer to feeling willing to feel and really face every emotional seed that grows, even and especially the less pleasant seeds; the feelings of connection, along with the feelings of disconnection, the feelings of fullness along with the feelings of emptiness, the feelings of abundance and of lack, and the feelings of self love and the impulses to nurture, along with the feeling of self hate and the impulses to self punish.

The experience of life isn’t just about the bright side of things, we can’t reasonably expect to live feeling wholly connected and perfect all of the time. But that seems to be my commitment. I have found that as I constrain and try to block out so called negative feelings that I become numb to all feelings. I become numb to the experience of living, I become numb to life itself. 

I want to believe that I don’t have to hold my breath and brace myself against the experiences of life that might make me feel something unpleasant. I want to believe I will survive the unpleasant feeling. I want to trust that feelings are just feelings that will come and go and I will still be here, to watch them going. I want the courage to feel more, because I want to feel more alive. The experience of life is the movement of feelings. To live is to feel.  

 Until I have the courage to trust in life, and the harmlessness of feelings, I eat, to feel positive feelings, and not to feel negative feelings, I eat to control what I feel, and some days I eat A LOT.

I have watched myself make self punishing choices, like the choice to overeat to pain and illness, then I hear myself judging myself for it. I keep hearing myself tell myself that my expanded belly makes me unlovable, that my lifelong fatness is incurable and that this skinny stint won’t last because at my very core, I am broken and wrong.  So I eat until everything is gone, I eat to make it all go away, the feelings that lead to the overeating, the food and my shame at having eaten it, but the feelings aren’t gone, and there I am, alone, and so full of shame I wish I could just disappear.

Watching myself eat and eat, and listening to that self-hating voice say its unloving things, feels so scary.  It feels so dramatic and overwhelming like the place that holds all of my self destructive impulses has been opened and the impulses have been awakened and unleashed, and my soft, gentle sacred spirit is being threatened and there is no where to hide because it all lives within the same skin.  The reality is less dramatic. I, Carolyn DeVito, am actually just eating a rather large pile of baked goods and experiencing and trying not to experience emotions that I am uncomfortable with, and I am scared, but there is no real danger, I sit here, safely, face covered in powdered sugar, and feel aware of feelings. I am safe, it is just feelings.  

But am I really safe? Is it really safe to allow feelings of unworthiness, not good enough-ness, self hate, all the things I am eating to avoid. Is it really safe for them to be there, to be a part of me, and can I actually stop fighting against them? I don’t know and I am afraid, I am afraid that feelings of self hate, or self doubt, or worthlessness ultimately led one to be found unresponsive in a tepid bathtub in a Beverly Hills Hotel, as others recall your songs about self love which evidently eluded you, despite it’s being “so easy to achieve.”  These feelings are scary ones, ones at the root of self destruction.  But I truly believe it is not feeling them, but the avoidance of feeling them, that leads to these kinds of tragedy.

If some substance was taken, as has been suggested, I speculate that the substance, like the food I administer to myself, is taken in an effort to not feel certain feelings and to amplify other feelings.  And the more we do to not feel, the more substance we take to numb out, the more cut off from life we get.  Life is feeling. Life is experiencing.  Life is not about clamping down and controlling what seeds grow and which must be actively and violently uprooted from one’s own spirit.  It is about letting everything grow, witnessing, watching, feeling, letting it all be, not being in control, but being in charge of what shows up and meeting it, the way the sun meets us every morning.  The way it beams down on the dark earth.   And the way the rain moistens the earth and nourishes whatever grows.  Life speaks growing.  Life speaks changing and movement.  Our feelings are us, changing, and moving in the moment. To try to stop the flow of life through us, to stop it from changing or moving us, would mean that we block life out, we cut off, we numb out. And numbing out, blocking life out, is the beginning of death.

We connect to life and feel and experience living to the degree that we trust in life, to the degree that we trust that we will be safe through the feelings, through the experience. Feelings are just feelings, feeling them won’t hurt you.  Not feeling them, actively distancing yourself from them is actively distancing yourself from life itself. Life is feeling. Life is experiencing. To feel is to live. To actively not feel is to be in some state of not living. So it seems we are called to ultimately be open to whatever grows, whatever arises, and to feel firm in the knowledge that it is safe, you are not in danger.  

So here we are, little precious bundles of feelings like self hate, aloneness, disconnection, lack, and emptiness. And somehow, letting ourselves feel all of this is living and allowing ourselves to live is, of course, self loving.  Somehow, letting myself feel self hate connects me more to life and is a form of self love.  

Acceptance, even and especially, of the parts and feelings we don’t like, is self-love.  Self-love is us letting us be us. Broken or whole, ugly or beautiful, skinny or fat, enough or not enough, capable or incapable, we need to be loved, as we are; whatever we are, in this moment, with whatever impulses and feelings we hold, in this moment.

And having compassion when we are unable to feel self-love, is also self loving. I can have compassion when my soft spirit needs to fill my aching body with still more food, because I am still afraid of feeling, still distrusting of life. I can love myself, even as I hurt myself, even as I hate myself. I can make a safe loving place in my heart for me to feel self hate, and have compassion for my self-hatred.

And sometimes, I can’t.  Sometimes, it is just self-hate and shame piled high and that is ok too. There is no requirement to get “there.”  There is no requirement to meet the “ideal” and be wells of self love and compassion right now, and feel everything, now, and open to life completely, right now.  No. It is about being where you are. No matter where you are, it is ok. No matter what you are feeling, it is ok. You are safe to feel it, and it is ok if you are too afraid to feel it. 

Self love is allowing. Self love is about giving yourself slack, and just letting you be you, however you are in this moment.  Self love is the trust that no matter what grows in you, it is sacred, it is good, it is lovable.  

You are perfectly lovable exactly as you are.

I just wanted you to know.

Taking Charge

I finally realize that there is a difference between being in control and being in charge. And I am learning, but this is where I am now-

I have spent a great deal of my life trying to be in control, forcing things into place, keeping things in order, sometimes keeping people in order, and failing, or even worse, succeeding for a time, then failing.  It is not the nature of the world to be in control.  You cannot keep a moving thing still. You cannot force a changing thing to make only the changes you would like it to make. We don't have control, it's not for us to have.  The Universe, God Itself doesn't even have control.  God is the movement of things moving of their own accord in accordance with some aspect of the whole. It does not determine the movement, it just allows for it.  It opens space in any direction.  It makes room for growth and it is the growing, but we have choices and the direction of the growth and the seeds we plant are not determined. They are for us to determine.

It is for us to take charge, not of the world, but of ourselves, of our own choices, of the seeds we have planted and the seeds we nurture, of the movements we make, of the manifesting of ourselves as we are now. We can look around at our lives and see what is here, we can breath inside ourselves and notices some things and know that those things are not to be constricted or controlled, but that we can show up and make choices about what needs attention, what needs nurturing, what needs support and how to get that support.

It is showing up for ourselves and being responsive to ourselves. It is the difference between being an attentive parent, one who listens and responds, and being a controlling parent, one who maps out ideals on living things and shames them for not matching up. You can be an attentive parent to yourself.  You can show up and make choices in this moment, without silencing any bit of you but being in conversation with your self and making a choice about how you want to be. Taking responsibility for what is there, who you are now, and planting the seeds of who you want to be, intention by affirmed intention, then choice by self-loving choice; this is taking charge. And it is gentle as water.  It is not fixed and harsh, it is patient and movable and attentive. It is built on a commitment of self love, instead of fear and self hate. Be easy friend. Always be easy with yourself. Be soft and open and allowing like the Universe. Always expanding, always making space for you to be as large as you please, and to move intentionfully, wherever you will.

On Receiving & Gratitude, and the avoidance of feeling both

Reader, it has been a while. Perhaps because I am not one who forces herself to do a thing that is not ripened and ready to be done, or perhaps because my gift for avoidance outweighed my gift for expression. I intend to reach you monthly, if not more frequently. With that said, I want to tell you, Happy Thanksgiving.  You’ll notice that Thanksgiving inspired my title for this post, and it seems to be a favored thought in my mind lately.  It is a lovely idea for a holiday.  It seems so rich with meaning and such a guide post in the right direction, just a clear moment of refocusing our lives. It is hopeful really.  It is hopeful that we as a society got together and agreed on something good for ourselves, at least in idea, the practice of Thanksgiving we know is a little less healthful.  It starts well intended enough, sometimes with opening prayers of gratitude or just a clear focus on the present moment and on feeling abundance, but then, the food is passed and each dish feels like a challenge, and the overindulgent and frequently painful eating binge follows. I can’t help but feel that the overindulgence and the extremeness of receiving food into our bodies is just a way to avoid the feel of receiving at all, and ultimately a way to avoid feeling grateful for the abundance.  Consider, were you ever grateful for the food on the table once your belly swelled snuggly against your waistband and you felt distinctly uncomfortable?   What I am saying is, I think we may be uncomfortable, as a culture, with both receiving and feeling grateful and I think we have adapted to avoid the feeling of both.  And if that rings true, then I think it is important to just be aware of that.

                I think it is true for myself. I have had a long negotiation with receiving, and even the idea of receiving anything brings up fears about expectations, motivations, and intentions of the giver. Or even the idea of, if I have this, who won’t have it- the starving child in Africa scenario, in which I feel constantly guilty for everything I am offered, because it is not offered equally to every member of the world. And I just want to say clearly, to myself, and you reader, your piece of pecan pie, if placed in more desperate hands, would not fix the broken system that made them desperate. Sure there are things that can be done to help others, and there will be time enough to do them, if you chose, but your guilt over enjoying anything is more about you than the starving people of the world, it is just another way to avoid the feeling of enjoyment, and another expression of the learned perception of not being worthy enough to partake of the literal and metaphorical feast.

                This Thanksgiving, I am setting the intention to really give it to myself, and let myself have it. Anything on my plate, I am worth of having. It is mine, and I am deserving of it.  And I can enjoy it! I am free to just enjoy it.  I don’t need to clear the serving plate, I don’t need to worry about the leftovers and what will happen to them.  No, I don’t have to.  I am free to just enjoy what is in front of me. I am free to eat until I am satiated, until I have had exactly enough, and I can leave the rest, and let it go. Maybe it will go to waste, maybe not. But I will have enjoyed this meal and this moment. And I will end the meal with the intention of gratitude I set at its beginning.  I don’t have to feel uncomfortable and groan and regret. I can enjoy. I am free to enjoy. I am worthy of enjoyment. I am worthy. And you are too. Happy Thanksgiving. I send love and hope every fork-full is a blessing.

On Death

Tomorrow, I will offer a memorial service for someone I had wished would never die.  For a kind of person that doesn't happen twice on this earth.  And here I am, admitting that I lost something that cannot be found, not whole, not in the way I have known it.  And tomorrow, I will be called to tell my family something comforting.  But some parts of death cannot be smoothed over the way we smoothed a loved one's arm in the hospital. Periods at the ends of sentences are non-negotiable.  I cannot rewind. Not for anyone.  Not even for myself, with all my strength.  Not even for a moment.

Tomorrow, I will tell my family that he is not all gone, he is here, in us, in the wind, in the trees, in spirit. But I need to admit that he is not here. Not in his body, not at our dining room tables, not in our arms anymore.  And no matter how much he swirls around us in the breezes or falls around us in the leaves or the rain, his arms aren't around us, and I cannot find words pretty enough to make that seem ok. Or even to make that seem reasonable.

I believe there are large parts of us that are children who are confused and scared by the cosmic peak-a-boo game of death. If I cannot see you, you must not be there.  And I don't know where you could have gone, where so much of something could go, so quickly.  Where a part of my heart went.  And the word death offers no kind of explanation.  It is just a word we agreed upon, just so we could call it something, so we can pretend we understand it at all.

And tomorrow, I stand up at his grave, and I say, I don't know where he went but let's all look for him together. Let us check by the fig tree in his Brooklyn yard, let's look in the restaurants by the hot pepper shakers, let's all go to Atlantic City and listen for his shouts, and check the kitchens in his sons' houses, and every boardwalk, and every orchard and warehouse, and then in the evenings, we will listen to our own hearts beating and see if we can make out his heartbeat alongside.

And he may not be in any one place. We may have to gather him up.  Like little gifts hidden in between things. Gifts we can't take or hold or keep or put together.  Just the kind you see in passing, the way you see a lightening bug, then immediately question if you saw it at all. Just a little flash of light, here, and now there. A thing that shines for a moment, then disappears into the dark.

Owning Our Darkness, A Sermon

Thich Nhat Hanh, a very gentle Buddhist monk can find within himself a mix of both darkness and light as it occurs in the world. In his poem, “Call me by my True Names,” he identifies with such beautiful images of spring but he does not stop there.  He does not decline to see the darkness in himself, he also identifies as a rape victim and a rapist, as both the predator and prey. He knows that darkness is a part of him, as much as light, ugliness as much as beauty, and he acknowledges all of himself with compassion.

Can we look upon our own darkness with that same compassion? Can we find the murderer and rapist within ourselves and still love ourselves?  If not to that extreme, can we own our anger, our violent speech and desires, our moments of dehumanizing others?  Can we find the seed of the horrible things of this world within ourselves?  And can we have compassion for those cold, loveless, aching parts?

Lately I have been angry.  Just filled with anger. No reason for the anger that I can find. Just anger. Someone who I respect very much once said, emotions don’t have to make sense, they don’t need a reason. I don’t need to prove that I have a right to feel this anger. I feel it. That’s it. Anger was something I wasn’t allowing myself to feel for a long time. Anger was something I wasn’t supposed to feel.  I was supposed to be a well of understanding and forgiveness. And so for a long time I buried my anger and loved and forgave and understood until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I am not asking you to only feel a narrow range of emotion, just the opposite, I am asking you to allow yourself to feel everything you feel. Allowing is a form of loving. You don’t need to explain yourself, you don’t need to justify yourself. You don’t need to paint yourself holy. You just need to allow yourself to be you. It’s the only way to be peaceful. Let everything that is there, be there. It won’t hurt you. It won’t overtake you.  You always have a choice about how you want to act in this world, being more honest about how you are feeling or what you are thinking doesn’t take away that choice.

We have imaged that everything we are ashamed of is like a powerful demon that we must always resist, deny, and never say the name of. I will tell you, I have met this demon within myself. I would like to share a somewhat disturbing experience with you. In meditation, I saw a horrific figure, a demonic being, actually eating the remains of a human body.  And I knew that this being was a part of me. Just that, just that alone, horrified me. That my mind held this inside of it. But I would not open my eyes. I stayed with the meditation. And I felt myself as the demon now, I was hiding in a clothing trunk, eating human remains in the dark. I felt my teeth ripping and tearing at the flesh of a severed leg and I felt the dirty shame of eating it. But I was also the person I knew myself to be, standing at a distance, aware of the demon, and trying to have courage, not just to face this terrible thing, but to face the fact that this terrible thing was a part of me. Myself as the demon knew that it had been found and began to panic and opened the trunk and waved a knife at the self I knew, and warned it to stay back, promising violence, promising death. “I’ll kill you, I’ll f-ing kill you.” I screamed to my human self, desperate to be left alone to my shame, in the safe space of my dark box. As the demon, I felt such panic, and such anger. As the human, I gathered my courage and said, “I am not here to hurt you, I just want to get to know you better. I just want to understand what you mean.” And the demon was screaming, “look what you have made me become to survive, look at what I have had to do.” And then the demon became a child, a hurt angry child, now crying and screaming, a child who had to find a way to live without love for so long. I stayed with her a while until she trusted me enough to take my hand and I took her by the seashore and told her that the world doesn’t have to be like the one she had known, I wouldn’t keep her in a dark room in a box anymore.  I wanted her to know the light, I wanted her to see how beautiful the world could be. I told her I was sorry. And she cried the soft cry that comes when you’ve grown weak with crying. And I took her to a room full of windows, with a view of the water, and I tucked her into bed, and told her to rest. I think she is still recovering in some room inside of me.

This was my demon, a hurt unloved child who had to find a way to survive. I believe this demon represented what I created when I did not offer myself self care. When I would give and give to others and pay no attention to myself I became like a cannibal, eating away at myself. I needed to nourish myself somehow. When I was so giving, I was also very manipulative. I had to get my needs met without claiming them, because I was taught that having needs was selfish. So I took when I could in shady ways, to survive, and then felt even more shame. Either I make better choices about how to nourish myself or I go into hiding and get my needs met in any ugly way I could in the dark. When we have the courage to face the most horrible parts of ourselves, we see that it is still ourselves, asking for attention, still in need of kindness.

In a course in miracles, we are told that everything that is done is either an act of love or a call for love.

When parts of us are raging, violent, and ugly, can we answer their call for love?  Can we have compassion for the parts of us that are hurting and now seek to hurt others? I think we need to, if we don’t want their call for love to grow louder and more desperate I think we need to listen, understand the aching, and have some compassion.

It is time to call the homeless parts of ourselves back home.  The parts we are ashamed of, the parts that we are sure need to stay hidden if we want to be loved in this world. There is no way around it, we have got to love it all, every aching ugly part of our complicated spirit.  We have got to allow the space in our mind/bodies for every insistent part. What we resist, persists. Denying it doesn’t change it, pushing it out won’t work, trying to kill it makes it stronger, you have got to learn to love the ugly parts of you.

The thing about wanting to feel whole is that wholeness means everything, everything.  We want unity; we want an undivided self and world. Unity means everything and everyone. It means living with contradictions, it means allowing both sides. Stop frantically rooting out your weeds, weeds and grass will grow in you and will keep growing. You are what you are. Everything you are God/Goddess has enfolded in you. So love your darkness as you would the most lovable part of you. Every part of you needs love. Every part of you needs a place to come to rest. No way around it. And the ugly parts are just hurting and they need even more love and acceptance than the rest.

Every feeling ever felt by anyone, all those murderous, ugly, hateful feelings: you are capable of feeling every one of them. Every horrible act ever done by a human being, you are capable of doing yourself.  You aren’t above or separate from anyone who has ever lived in this world. Every dark thing you see outside of you is inside you as well. Until we face our own darkness, our own angry, seething, destructive instinct, we are going to keep acting it out thoughtlessly. Know what you are, know what you are capable of being, then make your choices.

Awareness of our darkness will empower us to make choices, instead of acting out of subconscious motivation. It seems to me, we can’t authentically shine our light unless we are willing to begin to embrace our darkness. If we don’t own that we are capable of magnificent ugliness, we will go around judging people and pretending ugly isn’t our nature. Everything is our nature. We are capable of so much, don’t sell yourself short in any direction. You can descend as far as you can ascend. As above so below. It is all there within you, but you have a choice about what you want to act out, so make your choices.

That is not to say, it is easy. We may find ourselves screaming at a loved one and feeling shameful.  All a call for love. There is a saying in Italian,

“Amami quando lo merito meno,
perché sará quando ne ho piú bisogno."

Translation: "Love me when I deserve it the least,
because that is when I will need it the most.”

See if you can offer yourself some understanding, and forgiveness, no matter how many times you do a thing you are ashamed of. No matter what you do, you are deserving of understanding, love, and forgiveness. I was raised Catholic, and I was told that no matter how many times I go to confession for the same issues, I would be forgiven. The Quran speaks about a merciful and forgiving God. Many religions attribute these qualities to God. Friends, every atom of ourselves is made of God. Allow the God of ourselves to forgive the aching God within us. Everything is God. We are creating God as much as God is creating us. Let the God that you are, be merciful and loving and forgiving to the parts that need it the most.  Manifest a kind and gentle God to yourself, to all parts of you that are calling for love in the dark.

We can’t love and accept outside, what we can’t love and accept inside. When I see a homeless person, I feel aversion and fear and I fill my mind with judgments about him, trying to convince myself that somehow he deserved it, and that is if I consider him at all.  I am not proud of it, but there it is. The aversion is me trying to protect myself from what I am, from the reality that I am vulnerable to the same things which put the homeless person in that position.  There isn’t much stopping me from curling up beside him tonight. That scares me. That aversion was me trying to create distance, trying to cut off my connection to that person by arguing that there is something substantially different between him and me, but there isn’t. We are so similar and I am afraid. A part of my shadow is homeless and cold and hungry, and by speaking its name to you I am trying to give it a little warmth, a little food, a little comfort that it has a place to come home to now within me. And when I really welcome that part home, maybe then I can really give some comfort and warmth to someone outside of me. Metaphorically all of my shadow is homeless.

It’s time to put the porch light on in our hearts and say, “come back, it’s safe now, you have a home here,” to every part of us we thought couldn’t be loved.  “Get out of the shadows and come warm yourself by the fire.”  Let’s say that to ourselves first, and maybe in some distant time, we can show that kindness to someone outside of ourselves, without looking down on the person, without a feeling of difference. Just another part of the whole that needs some love.

For many of us even our light is a part of our shadow.  We have learned to be ashamed of our goodness, our innocence, our loving, our brilliance, all of the gifts that we were given in order to make a difference in this life.  Anything we were taught to be ashamed of is in the darkness, not just our dark seething desires, but also our magnificence, our beauty, our power. When we were young, maybe we said something that was a little too wise for our time, maybe we offered the answer to a question a little quicker than we should have, maybe we loved someone we were supposed to be disgusted by, and we were “corrected.” We were corrected for shining too brightly in a world that convinced itself that being a little dim always is the only way to survive.

We were meant to do more than just survive. We need to wiggle the lamp shades off of our spirit. We need to come alive.  Howard Thurman wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  Coming alive means allowing every part of yourself to receive blood, to be nourished. And when you give yourself permission to be everything you are, you give that permission to others, you allow others to be less afraid of themselves, less ashamed, you allow others to come home to themselves. Everything in you is acceptable and understandable and lovable.

Let us pray:

Mother,

Please guide and protect us as we seek reconciliation with all of the parts of ourselves. A part of us yearns for the experience of wholeness. Remind us that wholeness means everything. It means viewing everything inside of us as acceptable and loveable.

Please give us grace to forgive ourselves when we fall short of what we think is acceptable and remind us that we are just calling out for love. Give us the grace to love what we have learned is unlovable. We know everything is of one substance, and everything is divine, even the darkness in us and in our world. Remind us to consider loving when the call for love is made in any form and to forgive ourselves when we cannot answer the call.

Please help us to accept and heal our divided self so that we may be empowered in time to help heal our divided world.

Let it be. Amen.

On Weightloss and Being Human- A road map

As many of you know, I've lost 70+ lbs in about 7 months. When asked how I did it, I could simply say that I used this fabulous free website, www.sparkpeople.com , and that would be true but not the whole truth.  Weight loss is about more than counting calories, and working out consistently, it is about having the courage to feel.  Feel the emotions you've actively avoided with food and feel the dimensions of your body as it is. And it takes faith, faith that a change is happening that may still remain unseen, faith that this seemingly impossible vision can be a possibility for you.

The thing about weight loss is that losing weight isn't enough to keep you at it.  Frequently there are stretches of time during which no weight is lost, so what kept me there? I fell in love with the energy of activity. I fell in love with the movement, with the internal stirring of life that comes from exercise, and the feeling of self love which comes from doing the thing that is good for you, and the pride and sense of accomplishment that comes from doing a difficult thing, and most wonderful, the freedom and openness that comes from doing the thing you thought wasn't meant for you, that was impossible for you to do.

But friend, there are days when none of that is enough, I call them eatin' days.  These are days when these wonderful feelings, even all the weight I lost is simply not what I want. Some days I need to rest in the quiet comfortable place of old patterns.. and I overeat to the point of pain, like the old days.  And sister, brother, it is good!  It is good to allow that slack.  A friend and teacher once said, the God of Compassion is a God of Slack. I want to be a God of compassion for myself. And I allow myself the old choice, but this time I feel it differently.  I experience the crazy feeling of eating until you are in pain and all the enjoyment is lost, I experience the feeling of sleepiness and not wanting to move, and the shame of a food addiction, and the highs when food is brought to the table and the lows when the food is gone, and the moment is gone and I've done it again. But glory to the old choice. Because immediately, I remember what made me make a different choice. I feel the old feelings, I remember that the pain of overeating was my reality, and I get re-affirmed in the choice to not have that be my reality again, but maybe only a passing reminder of how far I have come.

I frequently have eatin' days when the reality of my success becomes clear.  When I started this process, I weighed 237 lbs, and I set a goal of 160 lbs.  As of yesterday I weighed 161 lbs, and shortly after stepping off the scale I felt the fear of success and yesterday became an eatin' day.  I cannot describe to you the fear that comes when your vision becomes reality, when the feeling of your body is different from the body you have known most of your life, when your concept of yourself meets fewer limits and more becomes possible to you than you allowed to be possible before.  I got scared because the walls which felt like my shelter from the world fell away, and all I had was open air and space to grow, and I needed to feel the walls again. I needed to know myself in an old way again. I needed the old comfort of a familiar thing, even if it hurt. And I ate until it hurt yesterday, to hold back the reality that I could be anything I want to be and life can be more than I have know.

It is a process, mixed with resistance and excitement and fear of failure and success.  It is a negotiation of feeling and unwillingness to feel.  And it is good.  It is not about being perfect, being the model of wellness. I do not get it "right" all the time.  And no one needs to.  First, it is just about being conscious that you have a choice and you are making one, and seeing if you can be compassionate with your choice, no matter what you choose to do.  See if you can see what the choice feels like, what are you feeling as you play out that choice. If it doesn't feel good, consider that there is a different choice, and that is where www.sparkpeople.com comes in.  You need information and support. Check it out. Just learn what is also an option. And just keep making your choices, meal by meal, day by day. And allow the old choice with compassion if you are able.  This process involves a lot of fear, and sometimes you just need the old security blanket, and it is ok. You are still lovable.

You don't have to get it perfect to lose weight, you just have to make the new choice more often than the old one. More frequently than you have made it before. And see if you can enjoy the process.  See if you can feel your energy changing.  Your energy feels different almost immediately, it's the new energy that shapes the body.  Notice it. Notice if you feel different to yourself. And allow the fear that comes, it's ok, and allow the excitement that comes, it is wonderful. And slowly, the body changes. And you see muscles and bones you've never seen before, and your clothes start to sag around your hips, and you live in between for a time, you live between a past and future experience of your body, not fully landing anywhere, just moving through. Just keep riding the new energy you make with the new choice, with the exercise, with the food choices.  Focus on your experience in the moment, and have compassion.

On exercise:
- The wonderful thing about it is that at best, it is exciting and energizing and you feel your energy changing in the moment, at worst, it is only horrible for as long as it lasts. The rest of the day will feel so good, physically and spiritually and emotionally. Set little goals and take great pride in them.

-No extremes, don't be a one hour warrior who wears herself out so much that she cannot/ will not work out again for a week.  Try 5 min first.  It is a success.

-See if you can really feel what you are feeling through the work out.  Go into the discomfort of it, instead of pushing it aside and zoning out, or zone out.. it's all ok.

-The hardest part is starting, just stepping onto the treadmill is a success.


Yesterday I came too close to success and I needed to stop, so I stopped. I needed a break, and I took a break.  And today I get to make a choice. Every day I get to make a choice anew.  And I get to love myself through it, whatever I choose. I get to love myself anyway. Whatever my body looks like, whatever experience I have, I am lovable.

I was afraid of losing myself with the weight.  I was afraid of loss.  I can tell you, I did not lose any part of me.  I became clearer.  The ME of me became less muddled and bulky. I am here. Clearer and more defined. I am not lost. I am here and I have more energy and more willingness and less fear of life. I know the weight was a barrier to life, I was afraid of the world, and I felt that I needed a buffer.  When I committed to making boundaries, expressing my needs and my limits and honoring them, I felt safer to let my physical boundary go.  I showed up as an adult for myself, with more willingness to be clear about my needs and more willingness to feel knowing that feelings are just feelings and cannot hurt. The point is, we need to feel safe in the world, and anything we can do to support ourselves in feeling safe will help us to let go of our physical guard of excess weight. It is safe to feel and you have the right to boundaries, speak up, and tell people when things aren't ok, you will still be loved if you do.

The process of losing weight happens long before the first pound is lost.  It is a negotiation with trust in yourself and in the world. Be gentle with yourself. It can be done and the reality of that statement is a scary and wonderful thing.  Have courage and have faith in yourself and your process and have compassion and self love. You are lovable no matter what.

On the Judgment Day, A Poem

Despite everything,

I believe that in the end,

when we show god what we made,

she will accept it like a gift and put it on the refrigerator.

And she will tell us to stand tall

and she will mark our growth on the door frame

and pretend not to notice when we stand on our toes.

Because she knows that by inches we ascend.

Mother, I wear your pencil marks

like crowns I am forever outgrowing and growing into.

And if one day I reach your height,

I’ll watch over my brothers and sisters while you rest

and at your bedside I will kiss your forehead

and hold your hand and pray

“world without end, world without end, world without end…”

 Amen.