Are You Hungry For Wholeness?
Eating disorders indicate that the soul is hungry for wholeness. Recovery is the process of discovering what “foods” helps us feel whole.
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What I have learnt from my psychedelic journeys is that eating disorders are not just a starvation from food, but a spiritual starvation, emotional, connection , and love starvation.
Whilst we need to address the food and find ways to nourish ourselves from a nutritional standpoint, we also need to look deeper. We need to ask the question of why does food - something that gives nourishment, vitality, energy, and life – become something that is feared and used to dim one’s energy and life force?
Psychedelics can help us understand this very complex, delicate question by looking at both the symptoms and beyond to the causes that led to them.
What I have discovered for myself and what I hear from my clients, is that psychedelics can restore our sense of belonging into the web of life. There is an embodied remembering that we are part of this creation too, and that our bodies are part of this greater body of the Earth.
From this place, we feel spiritually full.
When we feel spiritually full, there is a sense of wholeness and embodied connection towards our own bodies and with the bodies of those around us.
We learn that we can trust our internal cues rather than following hollow external rules.
There is a feeling of purpose, clear values, and an inner compass that guides us.
When we reside in this place, a deep contentment arises from within - like how a good, wholesome meal feels after eating.
Satisfied. Satiated. Nourished. Whole.
On the flip side, what keeps us spiritually starved and hungry for wholeness are the life-sucking paradigms of diet culture that many of us are swimming in.
We need to address these greater societal issues that are perpetuated by diet culture and that lead to a sense of our disembodiment, discombobulation, and disconnection from our values, passions, and purpose.
In the world of diet culture, we land up disconnected from the Earth, in a frenzied pursuit of the thin ideal, in a state of hyper-vigilance around food (especially those foods that have become demonized and shamed), and feeling broken or experiencing oppression and discrimination if our bodies don’t fit within the narrow box.
These societal issues that emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically starve us need to be addressed.
The normalization of oppressive diet culture norms that sever us from the body - and its magic - must be challenged.
And at the same time, it is vital that we do our inner work that fills up our cup and brings a sense of fullness and wholeness from the inside out.
This is where, for me personally, the support of psychedelics and plant medicine have brought inspiration, encouragement, clarity, resolve, and a deep remembering of my full, whole, authentic truth.
Working on this restoring this wholeness over and over again, in the quiet temple of our own hearts, means that we feel more free, empowered, and capable to be with the many ebbs and flows and challenges of this world.
This results in each one of us having more space, strength, resolve, and resiliency to shift the restrictive external rules diet culture, thus changing the dominant cultural norms that leave us disembodied, exhausted, dysregulated, off our center, and far from our internal cues.
It is time from oppressive top-down societal conditionings to dismantle that have resulted in generational trauma, and disconnection from nature, from the wisdom of the body, and from the ineffable human spirit.
Eating disorder recovery is an individual and collective undertaking. Imagine a world without eating disorders…
What would have to change?
What systems would transform or fall away?
What institutions would cease to exist?
How would we relate to each other, the Earth and our bodies?
What would happen if we were living from a place of spiritual fullness and wholeness?
Imagine. And then embody it.
Photo by Erika Osberg on Unsplash