warning.

This except is from a bigger piece that I have been working on forever and it may be triggering if you struggle with body negativity and/or food related negativity. The moment I am describing below is from over 26 years ago and yet it still elicits shame for me when I read it. And yet I believe so fully in the power of sharing our worst moments to help each other find our best ones.

…Hunched over another toilet, shame coursing through my body for the millionth time, I stuck my finger down my throat. I felt the familiar relief of the purge as the partially digested food came up the back of my throat, left my body and landed in the toilet. Disgust rose from my feet and squeezed me with its’ ugly fingers. I reached for the toilet paper to clean my face off. As I stared at myself in the mirror with bloodshot eyes, a pale face and traces of vomit in my hair, I blinked as the years of my addiction blinded me for a moment. I stood there paralyzed with dizziness, waiting to remember myself. I desperately wanted to remember who I was beyond the binging and purging. It was then, in a state of profound loneliness, that I heard a new, yet strangely familiar voice from within, plead with me. It wasn’t the voice that drove me into the bathroom. It was a voice speaking to me gently through my beating heart. It was my body whispering to me. The message was simply, “listen to me”. What I heard was the beginning of a new conversation. I heard my body chanting slowly “stop hurting me, I love you.” I could feel the cold sink under my hands and my squished feet in the uncomfortable shoes I was wearing. I could feel, possibly for the first time since I was a child, that warm embrace of my body loving me in spite of, because of and even though, I had abused it so callously for 15 years. Suddenly it became clear. The breathing and moving on a rectangle sticky mat that I had just started practicing, had changed something inside of me. The concentration on my breath and the bending, twisting, balancing of the asanas, had made a friendly dialog with my body possible. In the closing of my eyes and feeling the blood circulating through my veins as I laid down to rest after each yoga practice, I had found a little tenderness towards myself…

All these years later, through yoga, body listening and tons of inner work, I have respect, love and loads of appreciation for this body I get to live in - so grateful it didn’t give up on me 💛