I am a firm believer in the “metaphysical” cause of physical ailments. I absolutely believe there’s a deep, underlying spiritual cause of physical symptoms, including overeating.
Before I explain how overeating is correlated with our spirituality (oh boy!) I need to explain something about eyesight. (It will seem off topic at first, but it’ll all tie together beautifully in a minute, promise!)
Like many people, I am nearsighted and I require glasses to see objects clearly at distance. From a Western perspective, my poor eyesight is caused by genetics. And also according to Western medicine, my eyes will only get worse over time. Great.
But let’s look at it from a metaphysical perspective. Many people (with the most important person being Louise Hay) believe that the metaphysical cause of myopia (nearsightedness) is an unwillingness to see.
What, what?
They say that if you go back to the age that someone started wearing glasses, there was a traumatic event that happened that they didn’t want to “see.” (I am no expert in trauma by any means, but I wish to point out that as young children, even things that may not “seem” traumatic can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re a highly sensitive person.)
Of course, as young people, we don’t consciously choose to have blurry vision. But we were either too afraid or too vulnerable to fully feel and process what happened.
(There’s a great book on how trauma impacts our physical bodies called The Body Keeps the Score. It’s in my roundup of best books on eating psychology.)
Once I discovered this, I took steps towards natural vision improvement and slashed my prescription in half over the course of a year. It blew my mind! My optometrist tried to rationalize it away, but I could tell he was deeply unsettled by it, because Western medicine firmly believes that the only way to fix myopia is through surgery.
Although I had successfully slashed my prescription in half, I plateaued after that, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t improve more. This was almost 5 years ago.
Then, just the other day I decided, “Screw it. Why not just get Lasik? I know how to take better care of my eyes now that I’ve done the natural improvement stuff, so I can maintain the progress once I get back to 20/20…”
Deep down, it didn’t feel right. Deep down, I knew there was still deep spiritual work that I needed to do, and getting Lasik would shut me off from that communication. (I’ll let you call that communication whatever you want: God, the universe, intuition. Yes.)
My nearsightedness is here to tell me something: that there’s something that I’m still not willing to “see.” That I am still blocked somewhere. That I am still in denial of something, somewhere… and it’s my job to find it. It means I need to pull my healers in closer. (Side note: all therapists should be considered healers.)
If I was to get Lasik, I would lose touch with this precious form of communication. Right now, I have the ability to communicate directly with [God, Universe, intuition] by paying excruciating attention to my body. Where things go wrong, there is a deep spiritual lesson waiting to be cracked open.
Can you see where I’m going with this in regards to the spiritual root of the weight struggle?
Our issues with food – no matter how much they drive us absolutely bat sh*t crazy – are here to tell us something. And there will be a day where we want to just flip a table and get surgery to bring us straight to our goal weight – and we’ll tell ourselves that once we get there, we would be able to maintain it.
But we wouldn’t. Because we haven’t addressed the deeper psycho-spiritual cause that got us there in the first place.
Getting to your natural weight the psycho-spiritual way means that you need to live your life wide open; heart open; guns blazing. There is no hiding, no people pleasing, no appeasing.
There is no shame when I humbly admit that I must be hiding from something, and my myopia is simply letting me know.
And as much as we don’t want it to be true, food is another great place to hide. But the good news is that, once we know we are hiding, we have the opportunity to step outside and show up.
I know how hard it is. I know how edgy it can be. And I know it’s the absolute last thing that many of us want to do when life is throwing way too many curveballs at us…
But showing up instead of hiding is how we live a brave life. And a brave life is how we find the courage to get to the bottom of these “metaphysical” (aka, psycho-spiritual!) causes of overeating.
(My workbook Why We Do the Things We Do is perfect for this part of the journey, by the way. If you already have a copy, crack that puppy open!)
