Taking time to eat well means a whole new way of life for most of us in the industrialized world where rent control and stabilization has become obsolete. How do we live with the rapidly rising cost of living and take time for ourselves? How do we ignore media saturation enticing us with rich, fast and fatty foods and having it “our way” at such a low price?
Obesity, bulimia and eating disorders plague as much as sixty percept of the population in industrialized countries. Countries where many people have to work two jobs and consider it normal to put in ten to fifteen hour work days to make ends meet. In fact, due to the large number of Americans who are seriously overweight scientist, advocacy groups, federal agencies and insurance companies are seriously debating about whether obesity should be declared a “disease.”
Classifying obesity as an official disease will eliminate some of the stigmatism that accompanies getting help to resolve physical and emotional issues around overeating, much as the classification of alcoholism as a disease made it easier for many alcoholics to get help.
We are always at choice. Take your life into your hands, turn off the television, read labels on packaged foods, recognize your self worth and creative gifts and give yourself permission to create your own life based on your choices. Decide that you do not want to ingest something whose ingredients belong in a science project and have zero nutritive value. Decide that you deserve to take the time to visit the local Farmer’s Market for produce that isn’t tampered with or covered in pesticides that can cause serious effects to your health. Give yourself the chance to ingest the whole foods that the earth offers us, taste the difference for yourself.
How do you give yourself permission to make these changes and stop addictive food habits like convenience foods, sugar, caffeine and msg? Perhaps by recognizing that the hunger that exists in you may be a void in your energetic or soul’s body that food cannot fill no matter how hard one tries.
When trauma, injury or illness occurs in our lives, and it can begin in the womb, we lose a part of our essence, our energy and life force is thus depleted and food will not help to bring it back.
From time immemorial our ancestors, Shamans, medicine men and women, understood that soul loss, soul theft, giving away part of the soul occurs for human beings. The need for Soul Retrieval is more strongly evident today with our fast paced, stress filled life styles than it was 30,000 years ago. Dealing with physical imbalance, a sign of soul loss, through Soul retrieval is as much a part of indigenous culture health care as yearly check ups with the doctor is part of our culture.
Getting back the energy or essence of the part of our soul lost to trauma will induce a feeling of fullness and contentment that food cannot. Retrieving the part of our soul which remains in times of trauma has been known to miraculously heal the body and the mind. Consider that our physical body is a reflection of our spirit body, it is our gage that tells us when we need to look deeper. Consider that the hunger gene would not exist if the soul lived in a state of wholeness.
Unfortunately, psychology doesn’t ask where parts of a person’s consciousness go when they dissociate. So instead of moving on with their lives, some patients stay stuck for a long time in their therapists office trying to find out. Others who cannot afford psycho-therapist, or don’t consider the need, look for ways to fill their spirit in the physical realm with food, drugs or alcohol. And still others can become so familiar with the void in energy that soul loss creates that they maintain that void by under nourishing themselves, sub consciously believing that they do not deserve to be fed and nourished.
I have seen several women with eating disorders heal with Soul Retrieval and change their lives for the better, they are no longer prisoners of a dependency. One situation found a young woman who looked and seemed normal, not at all over or under weight yet she complained of an eating disorder. I did a soul retrieval for her and brought back a part of her essence that had remained connected to a trauma in childhood.
Soon after her Soul Retrieval she reported an improvement in her condition. During her integration work we looked at a past-life, this journey showed that she needed to make a clear choice to accept back the part of her essence from childhood that was given to her and take care of that part of herself consciously.
During her guided past-life journey she saw herself carrying out a task that she resented, it was for her father. On behalf of her father, who was a land owner, she was forced to collect rent from the tenant farmers on his land. She continuously showed resistance as she was in conflict, she loved her father yet did not like what was happening with him in this past-lifetime. Some of the ‘poor” tenant farmers gave money, others gave valuables and good home grown foods for rent. When she brought these items back to her father they were stashed in his locked safe, there they rotted. She was incredulous, “He didn’t even notice these things.” Everyday she resentfully continued to take these precious gifts from the happily willing farmers to bring to her father. One day she was amazed to find that one farmer gave her a child. This child was very dirty and undernourished, she didn’t want to accept her. When I asked her to take the child home to her room and clean and feed her she discovered that the child was in fact her. I asked who the farmer was that gave her the child and she said it was me. She stopped giving her energy to her father and focused on the creative gifts she discovered through Soul Retrieval work, from that time her eating disorder no longer existed.
Kathleen Downey is a Shamanic Counselor and Past-Life Therapist working out of Encinitas, CA 858 646-9808 and Boulder, Co 303 449-1349 She will be giving a workshop in Soul Retrieval training, Past-Life Journeywork and Dream Interpretation in the Spring of 2004. Please see her website www.corelevelhealing.com for more info. look for her upcoming book, “Map of The Soul: Journey to the Soul Mate” in the summer of 2004.
Copyright 2003, Kathleen Downey