Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Mission:  Physical Manifestation Overhaul:  Intro
• PMO:  Week 2
• PMO: Week 3
• PMO: Week 4
• PMO: Week 5
• PMO: Week 8
• PMO: Make healthy who you ARE
• PMO: Consistency Creates Results

Intro

In May of 2007, I began exploring a new way to develop my health:  spiritual work.  That is, instead of reading up on nutrition, exercise, carbohydrates and fat and protein ratios, the latest articles from the New Engliand Journal of Medicine, and all the rest…  I would work on the connection between mind and body; I would listen harder to my body’s signals; I would meditate and cast Tarot cards and activate my chakras.  In short, I would work on my spirit, and — according to the theory — the body would reflect it.

I was inspired to do this by a fantastic article on the spirit-body connection by Kara-Leah Grant.  From Kara-Leah’s perspective — in which we are spiritual beings having a physical experience — the Body is a reflection of the Spirit; it’s the form that the spirit has chosen; it is a reflection of spiritual health. If the body is unhealthy somehow, that’s a mirror of your spiritual state; it’s an indicator of your spirit’s relationship with physical reality.

Kara-Leah gives a magnificent example:

My entire life I had six-pack abs contrasted with well-padded hips and thighs. The percentage of fat on my body would be low (sometimes even around 15!) and still I would have larger hips. It didn’t matter what I ate, or what exercise I did, the hips stayed. Of course, friends and strangers were envious of my abs… and dying to have them, but as I didn’t do sit-ups, I couldn’t explain it.

Lately, as a result of my yoga practice and personal development I have begun to understand that this physical manifestation of my body (which started at around age 12 - prior to that I was skinny all over and my abs were ‘normal’) represented the way that I processed and dealt with emotions and feelings.

I prided myself on being in control and this meant suppressing all emotions - literally stuffing them down into my hips and holding on tight with my abs to keep them there. I was a control freak, and it manifested in the way I energetically held myself, holding the torso tight. This death grip on my emotions eventually led to a herniated disc at L4/5. The doctors couldn’t explain this physically as there was no reason for it… but I understand now that my grip on my emotions was creating constant pressure on my lower back…

I’ve worked through this in my yoga practice recently with backbends. Fear of lack of support (money issue right there) and not trusting my spine to hold me up meant that when I went into a back bend, I gripped with all my might on the front side of my body. But when you bend back, you soften the front of your body and allow your spine to support and lift you, grounding down through the hips and lifting up through the sternum. (Which also means opening the heart.)

Changing how I bent back created changes in my body. My abs are softening now, while still maintaining strength. My back is growing stronger by the week.

Now, I realise this is a long example, but the point is - to REALLY understand how you manifest physically you have to come to understand yourself inside out - literally! No one else can do this work for you. Yoga really helps. So does meditation. And so does just BEING CONSCIOUS.

When I read this, I realized I had a monumental task in front of me. I’d been overweight since puberty, bouncing around between 200 and 230 pounds, frequently flirting with obesity. While I loved exercise — particularly yoga and jogging — my relationship with food was very unhealthy. I had almost no control over it. Wrapped around this problem was a heavy layer of guilt and desperation: heart disease and obesity both run in my family, and I knew the older I got, the harder it would be to change my habits.

After reading Kara-Leah’s articles, I began to realize why my attempts to control my weight had been failing. I’d been trying to use my raw willpower to effect change; but if my physical manifestation is a reflection of my inner self, willpower just wouldn’t cut it. The inner self had to change first. The body would follow after, effortlessly.

It was clear I had a huge task in front of me, and my instinct was to blog about it.  However, for various reasons, I didn’t think that frequent posts about my health would be a good fit for Druid Journal.  So I asked Kara-Leah if she’d be interested in doing some co-blogging on the topic. At that time she had a fantastic blog, and she posted very frequently; and one post a week about spiritual weight loss wouldn’t overburden her site. She graciously accepted, thereby earning my eternal gratitude! And we started hammering out the details.

Things went well for a few months, until — for unrelated reasons — Kara-Leah decided to bring her blog to an end.  At that time she took down all of her articles, but she graciously sent me copies of them so that I could re-publish them at some point.  I have reproduced them below.

Mission:  Physical Manifestation Overhaul:  Intro

May 14, 2007

Welcome to a new collaborative weekly blog post from myself and Jeff Lilly of Druid’s Journal.

Jeff sent me an email after I posted How to Heal your Relationship with Food. His email touched a chord with me.

Jeff’s first email:

Ever  since puberty I’ve been struggling with my weight — with my relationship with food.  I read your article on that, and it made my mouth metaphorically water — that is the relationship I want to have with food!

My BMI right now is about 29 — not yet technically obese, but way too close for comfort.  My BMI hasn’t been below 26 since high school, even when I used to run an hour a day, every day (in graduate school, when I should have been studying).

I think I suffer from some kind of fundamental disconnect between my brain and my stomach — half the time I can’t tell what I should eat, or how much; and even when I do know I’m eating too much, I have awful cravings that seem to get worse the more I try to control them.

Anyway — consider this a heartfelt plea for you to say more about how to have a healthy relationship with food.  In your article, you described what it’s like; but I would dearly love to know about more concrete steps to take towards that state.  Should I bite the bullet and take a regular yoga class, in order to connect with my body more fully?  Are there meditations you can recommend?  Books?

On one level, I feel bad about asking you to help me with this, since I really have no right to ask for your expertise for free.  :-)  I suspect, though, that there are many others like me, who could benefit from a blog post from you on this!

Thank you!!

***

And Jeff was right - many people might benefit from more concrete details on how to heal your relationship with food, so Part II was born. I also took the time to respond to Jeff privately. I believe that each of us KNOWS what to do at all times, but has often buried that little voice so deep inside that we can’t hear it anymore.

My approach was to ask questions, getting Jeff to look inside himself for the answers just waiting to see the light of day.

My response:

Things for you to think about re. your relationship with food:

What changed for you at puberty? On all levels - physically, mentally, emotionally?

Why do you eat?

And when you eat for different reasons, how do those different motivators make you feel? (So if you eat because you’ve got a craving you can’t ‘control’, how to do feel - on all levels - afterward?)

Why does it serve you at this time to have a BMI of 29? What does it give you/ provide you with? Why do you need it?

Meditate on this issue - visual yourself as your ideal healthy body and see what has to change in your life to get you there.

But remember, it’s important to separate out culture bias toward particular body shapes/sizes too. We’re not all meant to be one shape and size, it would be bloody boring otherwise! So focus on what’s ideal for YOU without bending to cultural bias…

As our flesh and blood bodies are the physical manifestation of our spiritual selves… you are perfect right now as you are. This represents you.

In order to change your body, you must change your underlying energetic self… So why have you manifested like this? What does it say about who you are?

***

Jeff wasted no time in replying…

Wow…

In all my years of struggling with my weight, these questions have never occurred to me.  I mean, yes, I’ve wondered why I eat when I’m not hungry, and why I binge — but asking myself how I feel before and after eating is an entirely new way of looking at it.  And it seems so obvious in retrospect…

Here are some answers…

What changed at puberty?

* My growth slowed; I was a fast grower, and I ate a lot of food to maintain that growth.  When the growth slowed down, I didn’t cut back on the food.
* I had more access to junk food.
* I could eat whatever I wanted — with and without being observed.
* Sex:  physical appearance mattered more (ironically enough).

How do you feel before you eat?

* During a craving, I want to reward myself.  I always lose any internal arguments I have about eating, because one side will say, “We already decided we weren’t going to do this!  It’s bad for us!  We’ll regret it later!”  and the other side will say “But we deserve this reward/happiness…”  And I eat.
* I want a physical, visceral reward.  Reading, sitting down, etc., doesn’t do it.
* I want to relax.  I have come to a point where I am alone, or I’ve finished a big project, or something.  I can mentally let go.  I want to assist that process with a physical, visceral trigger.
* When I binge, there’s a sense of wanting to lose myself — that I have worked really hard and I want to disappear from myself for a while.  Doesn’t that sound crazy?
* Frequently, the desire to eat doesn’t go away until I’m actually feeling quite full, almost to discomfort.

How do you feel after you eat?

* Relaxed.
* Disappointed that it is over :-).
* Ready for the next thing:  Mentally alert and ready…unless I’ve really binged.  Then I still feel relaxed, but there’s also physical discomfort and mental sluggishness.

Why does it serve you to have BMI 29?

I don’t know — unless it is simply to entice me to deal with this problem.  If there were no physical consequences to my binging behavior, I’m quite sure I would feel no reason to do anything about it!

***

So we’ve decided that we are going to investigate thoroughly Jeff’s current physical manifestation of Self and work on changing it from the inside out to truly reflect who he is.

We’re going to share this journey with our readers, so that you may also undertake the same journey if you like. You’ll see the questions I ask Jeff, and you can answer those same questions for yourself. I’ll also be asking Jeff to DO things every week, and finding out how the experience was for him.

Each article will start with an intro, followed by an email from Jeff outlining how the last week went for him, a response from me with recommendations for the next week, and a short reply from Jeff before he goes away and gets stuck into his tasks for the week.

PMO: Week 2

May 15, 2007

Welcome to the second week in this collaborative blog post between Jeff Lilly and I. You can read Week 1 here.

Jeff’s mission is to overhaul his body from the inside out. Call it weight loss from a spiritual perspective if you like, but it is much more than that.

Last week his assignments were:

* Meditate on his ideal healthy body
* Be conscious of why he’s eating
* Be conscious of how he feels before and after eating

The extraordinary thing about last week’s post was the amount of dialogue it generated, with 17 comments added to the post. Anticipating that this desire for dialogue will continue, and that more people may want to join in, I’ve added a forum to this website.

While I may be leading Jeff through this process of overhaul, I have no specific background in health or nutrition. I have however worked with my own body on an emotional, mental, energetic and physical level. My belief is that when we connect to our bodies and become aware of what we need, we can make choices that support our health.

You don’t have to be told by someone else what to do, you don’t have to read a book, you don’t have to ‘control’ yourself.

Instead, you understand your needs and make choices because you WANT to.

In this way, each of us can connect with our internal body awareness and become empowered to create the body that best represents us from the inside out.

On to this week’s dialogue between Jeff and I.

Jeff’s response to his first week’s assignments:

Something I’ve tried to do this week (in addition to my tasks) is release the sense of disgust and guilt I have when I indulge myself in a binge.  It’s frankly been very difficult, especially when I feel over-full and rotten afterwards, and the numbers on the scale creep up.  But more on this later.

Meditating on my ideal healthy body.

My meditations tend to be very visual, with a lot of colorful imagery, and so it was easy for me to develop a strong image.  In fact, I found that if I simply turned my attention to my body, I could see immediately that it was a much more healthy version than the one I’ve manifested.  It was the same height, but much stronger and thinner.

I found my attention drawn particularly to the abdominal area, which was absolutely washboard…  In fact, I would say that the image that jumped to mind was so ripped, and so devoid of fat at all, that it was almost certainly unreasonable and maybe even unhealthy.  I didn’t do this on purpose — as I said, this is the image that I simply looked down and saw.  So I guess I need to work on imagining something less extreme!

During the meditation, I met with one of my guides (who has identified herself in the past as my Anima).  I work with her a lot.

By way of background:  when I first encountered her in meditation, she was living in a tiny ramshackle house that looked as though it was constructed from cast-off pieces of wood and sheet metal, and was cramped and hot inside.  After I found out who she was, I carefully visualized a much nicer place for her to live.

When I met her this time, we were sitting on the porch of her new place at first, but then she led me back to the old house.  “There’s still a few things left in here we’ll need to deal with,” she said.

We went in and she dug through a pile of dusty albums and keepsakes.  She pulled out one photo album and opened it up for me.  There were a lot of pictures of my family in it; most of them from my mother’s side of the family, which is the side that never has any problems with weight gain.

Then she unloaded a bunch of information directly — no imagery, no sybolism, just straight talk.

Psychologically, she said, there are several layers of “issues” underlying my weight problem.

“How many?” I asked.  “At least three,” she said, “depending on how you count.”

She said she would tell me about the bottommost layer in this meditation, and we could talk about the others in later meditations.

When I was seven years old, our family — my mother and younger sister and I — moved out of a house in the country into a small apartment in the suburbs.  Instead of having a big yard with a garden and blackberry bushes practically all to myself, I had the grounds of the apartment complex, which were just grass, and I had to share them with lots of adults and other children I didn’t know.

“You felt cramped,” my Anima said. “Your home was small, and you felt like you couldn’t go outside safely.  At a very visceral level, you wanted to escape — you didn’t want to be there.”

I subconsciously tried to get away from my situation:  I withdrew into books.  No matter how beautiful the day was outside, I would much rather be indoors with a book.  My mind could go anywhere, and I was always safe.  I tried to distance myself from the unsafe outdoors and the cramped indoors.

In the process, I also distanced myself from my own body, right at the time when I should have been engaging with it fully to prepare for the major growth and upheaval of puberty.

My mother had no idea about any of this; all she knew was that I was staying indoors when any normal child would want to be outside playing with the other kids from dawn till dusk.  She tried to encourage me to go outside, but the only effect was to make me defensive and to add a layer of guilt to the whole affair.

As a result, I lost some vital connections with my body, including reliable intuitions about what to eat and when and how much.

That was the first layer.  My Anima said that was enough for this session, and she’d tell me more later.

While finding this out certainly hasn’t made my cravings stop, or given me any information on how to stop them, I’ve found that it has dampened them somewhat.  Another dampening effect has come from my trying to not feel guilty or angry at myself for my weakness in wanting to binge.  While I haven’t been entirely successful, I have made some progress; and to my surprise, just making this small mental shift has helped reduce the intensity of the cravings.  Woo-hoo!

Being conscious of why I’m eating.

I’ve seen more of the pattern of wanting to eat right after I’ve finished some stressful mental activity, or sometimes when I’m anticipating a stressful mental activity — driving to or from work, or right after we manage to get the kids to bed, or something like that.

I’ve begun to feel that eating helps to return me to my body in some way.  If I’m mentally very engaged or stressed, in a very real sense I have left my body and I’m not really present in it, being with it.  When I’m ready to “come back”, eating helps me re-establish that connection, to return to being there in it.  I’ve wondered if I could re-establish that connection some other way.  I have tried doing a series of semi-intense yoga poses, such as bridge pose, when I feel a craving, and this has helped somewhat!

Being conscious of how I feel before and after eating.

I’ve found that by focusing and watching consistently, I can tell when I’m really hungry, and when I’m eating for some other reason (though what the “other reason” is isn’t always clear).  I’m also beginning to get a better idea of the “point of fullness” when I’m eating.

I’ve found there are a whole series of signals from my stomach while I’m eating — not just “hungry” vs. “full”.  If I’m eating from real hunger, it starts out with “feed me now please!” Then I get something that probably means “you can stop now if you want” — it’s like a sense of satisfaction that shows up, even though the “hungry” signal is still coming as well. Then a little later, “I’m full!”; and finally “That’s it, no more!”

When I’m binging, I can’t hear my stomach at all… until I finally hear that last message coming in. 

So that’s my report for this week.  I’m eager to hear what you think!

Thank you!!

Jeff

My response to Jeff’s first week of work:

Meditations and your guides are such a valuable source of information for you - and via these you’ve straight away pinpointed when the shift out of your body awareness began. You also bring up a really important point here - safety. When we take up more space, we are also ensconced  (how’s that for a wonderful word!) within the body, our true Selves protected by layers of fat.

Do you feel safe now? You’ve mentioned before that you live in a less-safe part of town. Does your size and weight make you feel more comfortable, secure and safe moving around in your world?

The use of books to fully engage the mind and disconnect with the body is likely an inherent escape route for many children. I used exactly the same technique to deal with emotional pain when I was a child - that same unexpressed pain which later manifested in my back issues. When my parents told me they were separating, I responded by going to my bedroom and reading a book I’d won at school that day. No tears, no emotions, no feelings, nothing. Living completely in the mind…

So now that this meditation has established when, why and how you disconnected from your body, you can start to address the issues it raises.

Where do you live now? Do you want to be there? How is your access to the great out doors? How can you work with what you have and INCREASE your access?

You’ve already mentioned you have great affinity for landscapes. This is a good time to think about movement, as part of the process is about giving your body what it loves and needs, which is EXPRESSION.

Is there somewhere you can get out to and walk once a week? Maybe somewhere you can take your family as no doubt your kids would love to run about too. Take yourself back to that space you were in before you shifted to an apartment, and BE a kid in the great outdoors again.

It’s great that the cravings are already shifting. The first movement is the hardest, but once we understand that NOTHING is static, and that something is always either strengthening or weakening, we can just focus on the direction we want to go in.

Understanding WHY you do what you do is the key to this process, because then you can make changes that still fulfill your NEEDS.

So, exactly as you’ve discovered, after intense mental activity, you need to reconnect with your body. You had been eating to do this, but doing some yoga postures is another way to meet your need, yet with a positive effect on the body. Keep experimenting with this.

What happens if you go for a short, sharp walk while focusing on your breathing? Do you ever do pranayama (breath work) with your yoga? Perhaps doing some pranayama would also help. The body does love routine, so come up with a set ten minute practice of yoga and breath work and do that every time you feel the need to connect with your body.

Do whatever works for you, as there is no right or wrong way to approach this.

Congratulations on starting to HEAR what the body is telling you too. It sounds like you are starting to develop a relationship with your body all over again - because a relationships means communication and it means listening.

When your stomach says, ‘I’ve had enough’, and you don’t listen and keep eating… it’s like when a woman says ‘no’ and a man keeps going because he wants to… Yes, that’s an extreme example. But it resonates doesn’t it?

In summary, this week try doing the following:

1. Find some way to reconnect with the great outdoors once a week. How you do this doesn’t matter. Go for a walk with your kids, a dog, by yourself… Meditate outside… do yoga outside… run, dance, kick a ball around… whatever resonates and works for you. But find a place of natural beauty you enjoy and then go for it.

2. Develop a set routine of movement/yoga/pranayama to do after/before mental activity. Make it short and enjoyable, and do it often.

3. Start talking to your body more. Pay attention to your breath as much as you can. When you drive, focus on your breathing, when you walk, when you type, when you LIVE. At first, you’ll last a breath or two and then forget. But keep coming back to it. This will strengthen your awareness of being inside your body.

Continue to be conscious of why you eat, and how you feel before and after. This will be on going, and help you to track changes as they appear.

Finally, remember this. Your body is the vehicle for your soul. In essence, it is the temple of the divine. Each one of us is a part of God, a part of the divine. So God lives inside us, inside our bodies. How would you treat a temple for the divine?

Great work by the way! You are so dedicated and motivated, and this is what is going to give you the great results and shifts.

Jeff’s reply:

*  Do you feel safe now? Does your size and weight make you feel more comfortable, secure and safe moving around in your world?

No, I have to admit I don’t really feel all that safe walking down a city street.  And honestly I can’t say whether my size and weight make me feel more or less secure — sometimes I think it just calls attention to myself.  If I were shorter, or thinner, I don’t know how I would feel, because I haven’t been short or thin in a very long time!  Maybe I should include public scenes in my visualizations?

*  Where do you live now? Do you want to be there? How is your access to the great out doors? How can you work with what you have and INCREASE your access?

We live next to a public park on the edge of a river in the middle of a small city, and the park isn’t very clean or secure.  None of us in the family are keen to stay here, no.  But just outside the city are any number of parks and natural areas, perfectly safe and clean and beautiful; there are even two short mountain ranges nearby.  We go sometimes, but not all that often, because it is time- and gas-consuming to go.  But then, it consumes our sanity to stay cooped up in our apartment… :-)  We will have to think about this.

*  Do you ever do pranayama (breath work) with your yoga? Perhaps doing some pranayama would also help.

What a wonderful idea!  One problem with the idea of doing yoga when I have a craving is that it’s a little awkward to do it at work, or at other public times and places…  But I can focus on my breathing anywhere, anytime!  Do you have specific breathing exercises you can suggest?  Pranayama — am I right in remembering that that is the practice where you breathe through one nostil at a time…? [Note: Pranayama means breath exercises, or working with the breath, and covers many different ways to breathe.]

*  “When your stomach says, ‘I’ve had enough’, and you don’t listen and keep eating… it’s like when a woman says ‘no’ and a man keeps going because he wants to… Yes, that’s an extreme example. But it resonates doesn’t it?”

Whoa…  it sure does.  It sure does.

Ok, I have my assignments.  I will also do more meditation and visualization, since my anima said that she had more to tell me!

So Jeff will be concentrating on the following tasks this week:

* Being active in the outdoors
* Regularly doing a short yoga practice before/after mental exertion
* Putting his awareness on his breathing as much as possible
*Plus continuing with his meditation and visualization

Next week, we’ll find out how he went!

PMO: Week 3

May 25, 2007
(If you’re new to this series, you can find Week One here.)

Welcome to Week 3 of Jeff’s mission to overhaul his body from the inside out. It’s great to see the discussion happening in the forum, and hear about how other people have shifted their weight after realising that weight is a spiritual issue.

In fact, changing the way we physically manifest is exactly the same as changing the material wealth we manifest. The Secret applies here too. Just like our wealth is not a simply matter of increasing income and reducing bills… so too weight is not a simple matter of reducing calories and increasing exercise. You have to understand the underlying beliefs and fears that are creating your current reality so you can change them and manifest the reality - and the BODY you WANT.

This is a COMPLETELY new way to understand and change our bodies. Jeff said it best in a reply to a comment on his blog:

“One of the things I find most intriguing about the approach I’m trying is the fact that absolutely no will-power is engaged at all.  Yes you have to work at it — but the work is all internal, spiritual work, inner exploration.  There are no epic struggles in the convenience store.  There’s no need to consciously make sure you don’t keep chips in the house.  There’s no need to force yourself to eat when you don’t want to.  There’s no need to exercise when you don’t want to.

Instead, you work with your spirit until you want to exercise, you want to eat reguarly; you don’t want chips…  You see?  You’ll end up doing all these great things for your body, but because you want to do them, because you’ll have healed the schism between spirit and matter.

So for example:  last week I did a serious meditation and dug out some of the roots of my problems with my weight.  Ever since I did that, my desire to binge has been edging lower day by day.  I’m sitting here at the computer, and I could be having three heaping spoonfuls of peanut butter, like I have indulged in on occasion.  But I don’t want it.  (I did have a banana.)

Bottom line:  you do the right thing because you want to.  Then there’s no struggle. It’s so backwards from everything I thought I knew about dieting…”

And that’s what it’s all about. There is NO struggle. You change from the inside out and make different choices because you WANT to - and this means you are coming from a place of joy and happiness. The Secret makes it abundantly clear that we attract what we vibrate. When we constantly think about what we’re NOT allowed to eat… what happens? We crave, attract and then EAT the very things we’re trying to avoid…

We haven’t mentioned yet what Jeff’s weight is, as this process is not about focusing on the weight to lose (um… what do you think THAT might attract…) but on the internal changes that need making. But, eventually there will be change in the external physical self, so in the interests of having a benchmark to start against… Jeff is 1.87 meters tall (six feet, two inches) and about 104 kg (228 lb).  His stomach at its widest point is 117 cm (46 inches). This will be the last time we mention numbers for at least a month or two.

FIrst the internal shift, then the external shift. It’s hard work, it takes time… but it’s REAL, and the changes will endure because they happen at a cellular level.

On to this week’s email work between Jeff and I.

It’s so backwards from everything I thought I knew about dieting…

Jeff:

It’s been a mixed week, results-wise.  In some areas I’ve made progress; in others I haven’t, mostly because I haven’t had the presence of mind to focus on them.  In these latter instances, it seems likely that there is some inner resistance that I’ve got to dig out.  I’m trying to remember that finding resistance is good — it’s much better than not finding the resistance and letting it fester or something! 

Being Active in the Outdoors.  Here, I’ve made some progress!  This past week I went jogging a couple of times on a beautiful bike path that runs through the town near my kids’ school.  One day it was sunny, the other day it rained — whatever!  I had a great time.  In this part of the world, summertime weather has finally arrived in earnest — the trees have finished leafing out, the first blush of their blooms has past, but the leaves are still that bright young green, and the air is warm and heavy.  It’s heavenly to be outside… Not only that, but I found some woods in a lot behind the office building where I work, and just wandered in them for half an hour one morning, just after dawn.  It was absolutely magical.  And just yesterday, my wife and I took the kids for a walk around the neighborhood and picked up trash.  (It sounds like such a simple thing… but we just haven’t made time for it before.  The kids were saying, “You mean we’re not getting into the car?”  What a wake-up call!)

Some Progress, Some Not-Progress

Being outside more definitely has an effect on my cravings.  On the day I walked in the woods, I was still feeling so good nine hours later, when I left work to drive home, that I had no desire at all to eat anything.  You have to understand — I drive two hours to Boston to work twice a week, and by the end of the workday, I’m ready to dive into a bag of chips or a big cup of ice cream.  I am almost never able to resist stopping somewhere for junk food as soon as I get in the car.  But on this day the desire, the craving, simply wasn’t there!

Now, full disclosure — an hour and a half later, the traffic had been so much worse than usual  (it was the beginning of a holiday weekend) that I was still nowhere near home; I was totally stressed out, and the craving came back.  I was in no position to fight it, so I did last week’s exercise:  I observed the craving, I acknowledged it, I watched my feelings as I stopped and got ice cream and ate it.  As always, the stress eased, and my stomach was quite uncomfortable.  It’s been a real struggle not to feel guilty about this incident, as you can imagine, but I know it’s important not to pile guilt on top of everything else.

Yoga Practice.  This has been very hard to do.  I exert myself mentally all the time at work, whether it’s in my cubicle or in the coffeeshop where I telecommute; and caring for four small children (aged 2-8) is also serious mental exertion lots of the time.  There are plenty of situations, it appears, where stopping to do some poses is impractical or would draw stares, and on top of that, I’m usually wearing clothes that make yoga uncomfortable.  I admit all these factors have kept me from doing this assignment.  But I also know that these barriers are erected somehow by myself; if I were really, deeply committed to this practice, on all levels, the barriers would evaporate or seem unimportant.  So I’ve got to figure out why they’re there and allow them to disappear….!

Breath Awareness.  This has also been hard.  Amazing how difficult such a simple thing can be!  I have made some time just after dawn to go out on the patio and do a simple yoga routine and focus on breathing, and it has a tremendous calming effect.  But as for remembering to focus on breathing when I’m working, driving, playing with the kids…  well, I have some work to do. 

Meditation.  Remarkably, I’ve found it hard to make time for meditation this week, too.  But I did manage to re-engage with my anima and get some messages from her.

Last week, she described to me how it was that I initially lost contact with my body — I subconsciously drew away from it, because I felt trapped and constricted in it.  This week she showed me myself at puberty, which is when I first really began to pile on the weight.  She said that at that time, when my hormones kicked in, I was very eager to re-engage with my body and get back in tune with it; but I had no idea how.  All I could really do to feel some kind of connection was feed myself, and so that’s exactly what I did.

It was also at this time that my father remarried, and I started having regular interaction with his new wife.  I found her to be very stressful to be around — being in her house for a weekend or an evening was mentally and emotionally nerve-wracking.  At the end of that time, again, I felt a need to calm down and re-connect with my body; but the only way I knew how to do that was to eat.

By the time I went off to college, I was the same weight I am now — borderline obese.

There is one more layer of psychological confusion on top of these issues, and that’s guilt.  My mother and sister have always been thin and beautiful, and when I was in high school, neither of them had any sympathy for my issues with weight.  (Of course, at that time I didn’t have any sympathy for their smoking addictions, either.)  I was sure that my weight problem was happening because I simply wasn’t exercising enough, and I was indulging too much in soda and hamburgers — true enough, on one level — and so I always felt guilty for my weakness.  And here, of course, is the classic feedback loop:  I felt guilty, which created stress, which caused me to relieve the stress — by eating…

And it’s that last layer which I chip away at every time I’m able to stop myself from feeling guilt and disgust with myself when I reach for the junk food.  This is why internalizing the very simple idea — that the body is a reflection of the spirit — has been such a profound one for me, and has reduced my cravings already.  By letting go of the guilt, while still acknowledging that my situation isn’t what I want, I break away that top layer — that feedback loop — entirely.  This project has been amazingly eye-opening for me!

My response:

Great work on getting outside, it’s the perfect time to do it over there in North America. New life reminds us how everything is always changing and starting anew… and that’s wonderful too you were able to include your family in your outdoor time. You’re building experiences and new patterns not just for yourself, but for your kids and wife too.

It’s a huge step forward seeing that by connecting to your body out in nature, you releasing the food cravings. It’s undoing the patterning from the inside out. I don’t know how many plants you already have in your house… but have you thought about bringing the outdoors IN. In my small study, I have four plants on my desks, three succulents (one going into full bloom right now) and a spider plant. Energetically, space feels different when it’s got life in it. If you don’t already have plants, get some! Plants that are easy to propogate (like spider plants) are great, because you’ll buy one (get a big one) and then they keep having ‘babies’. I have about 20 of them scattered through my home right now and I’m always giving them away.

A two hour drive is a wonderful opportunity to listen - whether it’s to your favourite music, or to motivational tapes, or guided meditaions… I don’t know what you do in the car right now, but consider USING this time. Then, when traffic is worse than normal, you’re happy because it gives you longer to enjoy your car experience. Again, it’s about accepting what it and turning it around to make it pleasurable and therefore not stressful.

Guilt is one of the most insidious, undermining emotions we feel. But like all emotions, once it arises, you can’t NOT feel it - that leads to supression. All you can do is ask WHY am I feeling it? And then change the underlying belief that gives rise to the emotion. Thoughts create emotions, which then build more thoughts. You’ve already identified that beautifully in examing your family dynamics around food, continue to build on it. Ask yourself WHY? All the time, whenever you have an emotion you are ready to move on from, once and for all.

Let’s simplify the yoga for you. At your desk, when you need a moment, place your feet flat on the floor, arms at your side, pelvis in a slight forward tilt and spine growing tall. Take a deep belly inhale and stretch your arms above your head (hey - people often stretch their arms up, even in an office. Wearing suits. It’s OK.) Exhale and release your arms down and place them one on each thigh and take 2 or 3 deep belly breaths pressing into your feet and growing your spine tall on the inhale, and visualising releasing the exhale from the crown of your head. Super easy. Do an many breaths as you feel comfortable doing. Stretch your arms up and down and much as possible.

Then, when you are standing, just get used to the idea of tuning into your body and your breath. Feel both feet flat on the floor, feel your spine lengthen skyward on the inhale, and feel your hips legs and feet ground into the floor on the exhale. No one will notice. You’re just standing there. But what makes it yoga is your awareness on your full belly breaths, and your awareness on your alignment. Simple. Easy. Effective.

You’re doing great work with your meditation still, getting into the core of your issues. Note the beliefs that surround these issues. Write them down if you need to, and then change them to beliefs that serve you now. Example: I’m weak for eating junk food. Change it to: I make the best choice I can in the moment for my needs. (or whatever works for you…)

And stick to the breath awareness - driving is a great time to do it…

So in summary for this week:

*Maintain the outdoor pursuits
*Explore bringing more plants into your home/office
*Find ways to exploit your driving experience
*Identify the underlying beliefs that cause your guilt
*Change this belief to one that serves you
*Try the simplified yoga for public
*Keep working on the breathe

Jeff’s immediate response to this week’s task:

*  Plants in the house.  We do have a few here and there, but not as many as we’d like.  Great idea!

*  Stress while driving.  I used to meditate while driving, but Emily begged me to stop, since she was sure it was taking my mind off the road too much.  I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t a problem, but I couldn’t convince her…  Now I listen to music or podcasts or even write (I have a dictation program).  I do enjoy driving — in fact, I enjoy it a lot, as you can probably tell from articles of mine like The Purpose of the Universe — but it is still an intense mental activity that takes me away from my physical self, you know?  I think the issue here is that after an hour or two, especially in traffic, I’m disconnected from my body again and the cravings return…  So maybe the breath work will be helpful.  And maybe I should take more breaks while driving?  Get out and do some yoga?  Or simply do some of the “sitting yoga” you describe?

*  “Ask yourself WHY? All the time, whenever you have an emotion you are ready to move on from, once and for all.”  Wonderful!

*  The sitting and standing simple yoga exercises are great!  I can’t wait to try them!!

PMO: Week 4

June 4, 2007

Progress this week overall has been spotty, partly because I have been concerned about work commitments.  But our family will be going to the beach at the end of this week, and I am going to grab that opportunity to really focus on this effort, and take it to the next level!

Here’s how I did with this week’s tasks:

*Maintain the outdoor pursuits

This is one of the things that I would like to have done more of.  I feel like the outdoors are waiting for me, ready for me to jump in… And when we go to the beach, we’ll be camping outside for five nights. It will be ideal!

*Explore bringing more plants into your home/office

I am putting this off until after we come back from vacation.

*Find ways to exploit your driving experience

I think that this Physical Manifestation Overhaul is spilling into other parts of my physical environment — i.e. outside my own body.

My IBM laptop, which I’ve had since 2001, and is huge and heavy and slow, used a lot of power, and is so frequently with me that it may as well be a detachable part of myself, began acting up a week ago — its hard drive started slowly giving up the ghost.  This first happened during one of my drives, right when I was working hardest on my cravings.

It’s still limping along, but since it was my birthday, I felt justified to preemptively go and buy a MacBook.  It’s new, small, light, and fast, low energy consumption…  A perfect symbol!

Since Monday was a holiday, and I only do the long drives Mondays and Thursdays, I didn’t drive as much this week.  But I’ll be driving again tomorrow, and I’ve got iTunes powered up!

*Identify the underlying beliefs that cause your guilt
*Change this belief to one that serves you

I am having some trouble with this one.  I wonder if you could clarify something you said last time — an affirmation you suggested:

“I make the best choice I can in the moment for my needs.”  What does this mean?  Is it something I should aspire to?  Or am I telling myself, “I should not feel guilty because I really have made the best
choice for me right now?”

*Try the simplified yoga for public
*Keep working on the breath

These are working extremely well!  Just the simple act of focusing on my breathing can sweep away everything else that’s going on around me, and I feel as if I’m floating effortlessly through life…  Even if the children are arguing about bedtime or cleaning up their toys, or I’m in the middle of a corporate meeting.

I do a yoga routine in the early morning and at other times during the day when I have ten minutes to myself.

This has been very effective at locking me into my body when I wake up, and later in the day after intense mental efforts or stress, and reducing cravings.  It works very well in stopping cravings before they start.  However, if I haven’t done it in a while, and a craving sneaks up on me, it’s hard to decide to try the yoga instead of reaching for the spoonful of peanut butter…

Overall, though, my cravings have drastically reduced!  There is still no evidence of weight loss — but I know I’m on the right path, and I just need to be patient.

I am also finding it easier not to overeat at meals.  It’s like I can “hear” my stomach better.

I think I mentioned to you before that I’m beginning to hear my stomach give a sequence of signals as I eat, first to the point of satisfaction, and then beyond…

But the cumulative effect of the yoga, the meditation, and being outside just a little more often has allowed me to hear these signals better and increase my desire to LISTEN to them.  Just this morning, my wife made a fantastic coffee cake for breakfast (made of barley flour instead of white flour, because she’s an angel!).

Normally I would have wolfed down two pieices and then struggled with all my will not to have a third and fourth piece.  I might have snuck one later on.  Today?  I had two pieces, and I heard my stomach say “That’s plenty, thanks”, and I WANTED TO STOP.  And I did. 

It was fantastic!

My response:

It’s great that you are conscious of wanting to get outside more - it’s the first step in making it happen. When being outside becomes a priotiy, then you automatically snatch any opportunity you can to fulfill that desire.

And this is what shifting your physical manifestation is about - changing your internal priorities and desires so you automatically want to make different choices.

While you are working at getting more outdoor living into your life - here’s another aspect to be conscious of: How do you move?

By that, I mean, how to you walk, run, go up stairs, find a seat on a train, stand? Because your day to day movements are the sum total of who you are. If you normally meander along in hallways and streets - experiment with walking purposefully. If you always use the elevator, set an intention to walk the stairs when it’s less than 10 floors. Or 5. The idea here is to find ways to change your underlying base pattern of movement that surreptitiously ups the amount of energy you consume…

Go the MacBook!!! I’m a PowerBook user and they ARE lighter than PCs - not just physically, but somehow energetically. I’m sure that iTunes will be great for you when driving, and you can probably also play motivational CDs if you like. Great way to use your driving time.

It might be worth paying attention to the vibrational feel of all your other belongings too. As you change from the inside out, some possessions may not reflect the new you. Plus some possessions, like your old computer, might in effect be reinforcing that heavy, stagnant feelings.

I’m not suggesting that go go out and buy a bunch of new stuff… just that you become conscious of the energetic feel of everything that is in your house, and be open to changes when they are presented.

The first meditation we did focused on seeing your ideal body… how about doing a meditation that looks at how this body is dressed and what it’s surrounded by? There may be little change, or there might be great change. In order to make a permanent shift, it’s important that your whole universe supports your NEW you.

Changing your underlying beliefs is a big step, and it’s not so much about saying an affirmation that you aspire to… but changing the beliefs that support your version of reality.

If you believe that ‘I should be able to control my cravings’, this creates feeling of guilt when you don’t control a craving because you’ve let yourself down. This guilt makes you feel bad, adds stress… and it’s a downhill slide. You can’t supress how you feel, nor can you override your feelings with positive thinking. The work has to be deeper than that - you have to change the belief that causes the feeling.

To do this, first identify the current belief. Ask if this belief serves you. If it doesn’t, ask what belief your ideal Self would instead have in place. And then BELIEVE that. This process is different for everyone, and you need to find a way of changing your beliefs that work for you. It’s like overwriting an old program file. Best to first do an uninstall, and then install the new version.

It’s not so much that you are telling yourself this new belief - which is the ego self, or mind, speaking down to the authentic self, or heart. But that you are KNOWING the new belief - which is the heart speaking up to the mind.

So, if you indulge in a craving, and then feel guilty… You notice the guilt, and then you FEEL in your heart a knowing that you are NOT guilty anymore and release it. As you feel in your heart you speak the new belief… and release the guilt.

I hope this clarifies the process of changing old beliefs. Part of it is finding the process that works for you.

That’s a great yoga practice that you’ve put together for yourself, and it’s great to to hear that focusing on your breath is having such a wonderful result in your day to day life.

I have a saying from my yoga practice, ‘When you breathe on auto-pilot, you live on auto-pilot.’ To
be aware of your breath is be present in the now, and it’s such a powerful step in life.

Yeah! The stomach talks and you listen! Fantastic. Here’s a meditation exercise to strengthen this - have fun with it.

Prepare a favourite meal - perhaps an indulgent meal you would once have felt guilty about eating. (It’s important you make it yourself) As you prepare the meal, pay attention to each individual ingredient. Hold each ingredient in your hand for a moment and muse about where it comes from, and how it made it into your kitchen today. Note the colour, texture, small, weight and feel of each ingrediant. As you chop and dice… give thanks to the ingrediants for the joy and nutrience they are about to give to your life. As everything cooks and bakes… feel love toward the dishes you are about to enjoy (because why not!) Sit down (maybe with your family) and before you take a bite… gives thanks for the ingrediants, the food, and everyone that helped bring this food to your table today.

Look at your plate and really SEE the food - the colours, the shapes, the smells…
And then begin to eat.
Take your time, putting down your knife and fork between each bite and SAVOUR the food.
Put all your awareness and attention on each and every bite. Feel it in your mouth, going down your throat, and in your stomach.
Stick with this for the entire meal.
Notice how the feel and energy of your body changes through out the meal.
Once you are finished, kick back at the table and chill out for at least ten minutes - maybe talk to your family, or just be in the moment.

In essence this dinner meditation makes eating a sacred event, and it completely changes the way we usually interact with our food! Enjoy the meditation.

In summary:
*Observe your movement patterns and identify any changes in energy you could make
*Meditate on the clothing and possessions that surround the New You
*Be open to changing any items that no longer resonate with you
*Find a process for changing your underlying beliefs that works for you - and then do it
*Continue with the breath work, and the yoga practice
*Do the dinner meditation

Enjoy!!!

Jeff’s immediate response:

You have so much awesome stuff in your email this week, Kara-Leah.

How do I move?

It’s funny you should ask that, because just in the last day or two I’ve realized something fundamentally strange about how I walk.  For some reason, I habitually sort of hold my waist rigid when I take a step; I sort of throw my legs out from below the waist, holding the waist steady instead of allowing it to twist a little from step to step.  I have no idea why.  Some kind of psychological holding-something-in tension?  But if I relax my waist, allowing it to move as I step, I can feel all sorts of muscles relaxing up my sides and back, and my steps are longer and easier.  I still have to remind myself to do it, but I’m remembering more often.

The more frequent yoga is also helping me remember to sit up properly, take deeper breaths, and the like.  All of this uses more energy.

The idea of meditating on other things in my physical environment is a great idea!

Something else that has happened in the last week or so — we’re starting to think much more seriously about moving out of this apartment, which as I’ve said before is not in the safest place in town, and so we don’t go outside much.

Just last week we suddenly saw an advertisement for a cottage up in the hills a ways — the same size as our current apartment, but with less storage space (so the family would have to lighten-up clutter-wise), and lots of yard and forest and playground space for us to be outside in, which has a smaller carbon / energy footprint, for a smaller monthly rate.

Isn’t that amazing?!  It’s like a complete reflection of what’s going on inside me, internally!  When you say “Physical Manifestation Overhaul”, you mean it — it’s not just my body, its every physical thing I’m intimate with…

Emily went and saw the place just this morning — she loved it.  (One issue:  there’s no room for a washer or dryer…  Is the universe telling me to shower less?…)

What you’ve said about changing beliefs clears things up a lot.  I look forward to getting started on that!

And I can’t wait to try the food meditation!!!

PMO: Week 5
June 5, 2007

It’s been six weeks now Jeff Lilly of Druid Journal embarked on a mission to overhaul his body from the inside out - to use a completely different method of weight loss - no self-control, no restrictions, just digging deep into the WHYS. (Why is he the way he is? Why does he move and eat the way he does?)

This week’s article takes on a different structure. No longer just a transcript of Jeff’s emails and my emails, from here on in, the weekly installment of PMO will draw on the experience Jeff is having (and others undertaking the process with me) but take an approach more focused on how you the reader can apply this process to your own life.

Last week Jeff was away at Cape Cod, camping with the family, and it was during this week he had his first weight shift. Normally if it took someone four weeks to lose the first pounds… they’d have given up their weight loss method in disgust. Fortunately for me, and for my readers, Jeff understands that we’re taking a long term approach here and he’s sticking with the process every week.

This is what makes this process at once more difficult, and more powerful. There are NO easy fixes, You have to do the HARD WORK. And it will take time. BUT, because you do the hard work, and it takes time, once you begin to change your body (either putting on weight or taking it off), the changes will be far more permanent. We’re changing lifetime habits of behaviour here. We’re talking digging into the depths of your psyche to understand who you really are.

Although Jeff doesn’t feel like he’s doing hard work, I see the energy and enthusiasm he brings to the process. ” I don’t feel like I’m getting assignments,” says Jeff. “I feel like I’m being offered presents! Would you like to do activity A, which you love? How about activity B, which you also love?”

He’s right though - there is no point in doing stuff you hate. Why make someone run if they are going to drag their feet the whole time? Movement is about connecting with joy - I do yoga because I love it, I walk because I love it, I dance because I love it… and I do it all when I feel like it. Which is often!

While camping, Jeff was able to do one activity which every single one of us would benefit from doing daily. And we ALL would love it.

“There were long periods of time when I was simply BEING — sitting at the campsite listening to the birds, walking the trails, and so forth. Somewhere in the midst of this I reconnected with a part of myself that had been buried for a very long time,” says Jeff. “Up to when I was in sixth grade, if you’d asked anyone who knew me what I would be when I grew up, they would certainly have answered: an artist. I loved to draw, and during school free play time, I would usually have half a dozen children gathered around my desk watching me draw and listening as I explained the stories I was illustrating. ”

Reminds me of all us readers gathering around Jeff’s blog watching his incredibly visual meditations unfold in his latest article…

There are very few of us who take the time to BE every day - not DO (and that even includes meditation, not doing meditation). When we just sit in the Now, and notice what is happening around us, contemplating what is… we come in contact with our buried selves. For some of us, there are too many layers of pain to allow that to happen, and we become those people who race around doing stuff all the time and can never sit still. (You know who you are!)

Jeff’s camping trip provided him with a vital reconnection with his artist self. Anyone familiar with the artwork he creates for his site (like the image on this article, made by Jeff) will already know he’s an artist. Now he’s starting to see himself as an artist, so I’ve instructed him to explore this side of him by taking time to play artist with his four kids. (Once again, at a table with kids gathered round, explaining what he’s doing… our childhoods often hold the biggest clues to our true selves. Be a child again!)

The major eating issue facing Jeff when he began this process was his craving and binging cycle. We’ve focused on getting to the core of WHY he craves, why he binges. The body has innate wisdom, and when it directs us to do something, even if it’s seems ‘unhealthy’, there is a real reason for it. After six weeks, we’ve got to the bottom of it and Jeff has BROKEN the cycle.

“Last week, I found that I had been constantly walking around with my hips and lower back in a tensed position, and I took your suggestion of doing walking meditations — I would do nothing but walk and focus on my lower back and hips and remember to keep them relaxed. This kept my attention focused down there in my lower back, which had the effect of grounding me significantly; when I get myself grounded into this mode, the cravings, the binging, and the desire to overeat simply disappear.

In fact, I’ve gotten to the point where I can see a craving as a signal from my body that I’m insufficiently grounded, and simply take a five-minute break to reconnect, and everything is cool. For the first time, I have something that can stop a craving in its tracks; and I’ve grown to appreciate a craving as a signal that I’ve gotten off the path. I’m thankful for them now, because they show me where I’m at!”

Such a simple turn around - instead of hating the craving and feeling weak and guilty for giving into it - Jeff has recognised it for what it is - his body communicating to him what he needs. Now he listens, and responds in a healthy way.

The result?

“My physical manifestation has finally started to change,” says Jeff. “I’ve begun to actually lose weight. 3.5 pounds this week, in fact.”

But even as his weight shifts, Jeff is discovering that the PMO Process is not just about how our bodies manifest, but also about how our very existence manifests. He’s seeing his house in a completely new light.

” We have a major problem when it comes to clutter in our homes. The basement of the apartment is a stockpile of unopened boxes of STUFF that we just don’t need, but haven’t been able to get rid of,” says Jeff. “A couple of weeks ago, we bought ‘It’s All Too Much’, by Peter Walsh, which deals with the psychological aspects of de-cluttering, as well as the practical side. Last week, before the vacation, we did a first-pass through the kitchen; and yesterday, invigorated by the beach, we started overhauling the upstairs — we moved all four kids into one bedroom (they LOVE it!) and converted the other into an office, so that our bedroom can be a BEDROOM instead of 50% bedroom, 50% office, 50% hobbyist storage and 50% Laundry Central. Our very house is starting to lose weight!”

Our homes reflect us, as much as our bodies reflect US. Change one and it’s likely the other will change.

As Jeff says, ” This is a far cry from simple weight loss, or a simple diet. It’s more profound than I could have imagined. The cravings are gone, the guilt is gone, and I’m losing weight, all without using an ounce of willpower. And the changes resonating in other areas of my life are amazing to see — and I’m sure this is only the beginning!”

And Jeff is right, it is only the beginning. His tasks for next week include:

* A daily yoga class from Anmol Mehta’s online courses
* Walking meditation whenever possible
* Doing the dinner meditation from last week’s PMO
* Meditation with his guides
* Continuing to clear the clutter
* Dedicating time every day (even ten minutes!) to just BEING
* Playing art with his kids
* Having his own artistic medium available and easy to access

PMO: Week 8

July 4, 2007

Welcome to the fortnightly update on Jeff’s Physical Manifestation Overhaul. If you’re new to the series, you can start right at the beginning with Mission PMO: Intro.

This approach to weight management looks primarily at the underlying energetic reasons for the way we manifest our bodies. To date, Jeff and I haven’t even talked about what he actually eats. My theory is that when you address the underlying issues, and have a genuine commitment to health, you will naturally follow the rhythms and needs of the body. Weight loss (or gain) will be automatic.

That said, I discovered this very regimented way of losing weight at Debra Moorhead’s site. I was intrigued with her approach, as she seemed to have no trouble in following it at all. She found out what the recommended calorie intake was for a woman her weighed her target weight and who the level of exercise she did (sedentary) - and then she religiously ate that number of calories every day.

The weight melted off.

This approach is diametrically opposed to what we’ve been doing, but none-the-less I suggested to Jeff (and a couple of my other clients) that they read the article.

Here’s Jeff response to it: “This is something that we’ve tried before, with reasonably good results, but I always bounced back later, because I hadn’t dealt with the underlying issues, of course,” says Jeff. “But doing it now would be hard, unless we figure out a way to do it such that Emily doesn’t have to do all the work of measuring and counting. Deborah did it by eating tv dinners and stuff for a month; while I might be willing to do that for a month, just to get the weight off, I don’t think it would be setting a good example for the kids.

There are other issues as well, such as:

Will my body respond properly? I’ve been on and off diets for twenty years, and my body may well freak out and hold on to all its fat if it thinks another famine is coming. This happened to Emily’s mother. (She was able to finally lose weight with a version of the Atkins Diet, but it was a hellish two-year process.) Emily thinks my body might be doing the same thing, since she is losing weight faster than I am, and I have been eating less than her for the past month or so. It seems like a gentler approach might be better.

Is it really healthy to lose so much weight so quickly? Most doctors say not. But they could certainly be wrong.

Is this really in the spirit of what we’re doing here? Shouldn’t we allow my body to assume the shape it wants by choosing the foods it wants to eat, instead of trying to get it to fit into an average caloric intake statistic?”

These are all great points, and they are at the heart of why weight loss and diet is such a tricky issue for most people.

A) It’s bloody hard work to learn and count all the calories you’re eating, and this is completely off-putting for most people
B) Eating a reduced number of calories can make the body think it’s going into famine and it automatically holds on to as much weight as possible to prepare (bless the body for looking after us so well!).
C) Losing weight super-fast by eating a diet that one can not sustain for life is totally pointless, because as soon as you start eating your ‘normal’ diet - the weight all comes back on.
D) Calorie control is using the will and dictates of the ego to try and force the body into a proscribed shape.

Despite all this… Debra’s approach MAY work for some people. It worked for her. Plus I believe there IS great value in getting a rough idea of the calories you normally eat and how many you are “supposed to” eat.

So that’s more what I’m asking my clients to do. Use the article for interest, and to calculate what you eat on a regular day. If what you’re eating is double or triple what you are supposed to be eating… then you can start asking your body to make different choices. If however, it’s not a huge amount over… I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Jeff has lost another 2 pounds, which puts total weight loss at 5.5 pounds. It’s steady, and hopefully sustainable, weight loss brought about by changing his response to his body’s food cravings (which we’ve identified signal a need for him to ground himself.)

Coming back from his week-long vacation was the hardest part - Jeff had reconnected with is artists-way of seeing the world and totally slowed down into the moment. His first week back in ‘real life’, he found himself swept away again and struggling to retain that relaxed manner of being in the world. But having attained it once, and seeing the result it had on his weight, Jeff persevered.

“Last week I got back on track again. I slowed down, I spent more time outside, I got better sleep, and I managed to do some art. The result? I lost another two pounds,” says Jeff. “Even more important, I’m manifesting some regular, daily time to exercise. Today I went jogging for the first time in two months! It was just marvelous. For me, it really feels like the closest I’ve ever been to flying. And since I do interval training (walk/jog/run), it’s a great opportunity to mix in the walking meditation.”

This is awesome - getting in regular, daily, enjoyable exercise is the BEST thing you can do for your body. Our bodies LOVE to move - that’s what they were designed for! It’s like owning a nifty little sports car and keeping it up on blocks in the garage - it’s criminal!

If you want to lose weight, get moving. Anyway you can. And if you hate exercise, then you need to shift your mindset (which you CAN) and start LOVING exercise. Fortunately for Jeff, he already does love exercise, even running. (I always notice too that when I am exercising regularly, my body craves healthy, nutritious foods and I have no appetite for junk.)

He’s also been doing 45 minutes of Kundalini yoga every day, using one of Anmol Mehta’s free on-line courses. Kundalini yoga focuses on moving energy in the body, and unblocking any energetic issues. It’s more about movement and breath than holding static postures for a length of time. It also focuses on pranayama and meditation. For less active people, or people who feel too big to move - Kundalini can be a great way to start getting into exercise, with a energy component.

Finally, one of Jeff’s tasks this week was to do a dinner meditation. I asked him to prepare dinner completely mindfully, with full attention on every bit of the process. Appreciation of the preparation of a meal is a profound and simple way to experience the now - and it reminds us of the bounty of the Earth in providing us fuel for our bodies. Jeff and his family got right into the spirit of it - and as a result, really felt the benefit.

“My wife helped me make spaghetti with homemade sauce and homemade noodles! We made the noodles from whole wheat Durham flour, and used a pasta machine to crank it out,” says Jeff. “The kids loved to watch us churn the noodles out of the machine, and they liked to eat the noodles that didn’t pass inspection. Working with the flour felt wonderful; after an hour, I didn’t want to stop! Overall it was so relaxing and fulfilling.”

Now, I’m not suggesting that you need to do this every meal, but just having one special meal a week with your family, where everyone gets involved in the kitchen and enjoys the process of cooking and then eating, reconnects us with the love and joy of cooking. Many cultures’ social get togethers have always revolved around food and cooking. There’s a reason for this!!!

For this next two weeks, Jeff is continuing with his daily exercise routine, and I’ve put him on Kundalini Yoga on-line course #103. He’s going to do a dinner meditation every week, and use Debra’s article to get an idea of how many calories he’s eating in a day. I had suggested growing some herbs or veges as it’s spring time in America - but Jeff and his family already have a vegetable garden. (And again, he mentioned it’s something his kids LOVE.) I’ve also given him a new yoga breathing technique to learn.

If you’ve been following along and doing your own PMO at home, please feel free to add a comment and let us know what has worked, or not worked for you. As I mentioned to one of my clients this week, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Shifting your body from one state into another is always going to be personal to YOU. But that doesn’t mean we can’t all learn from, and support, each other!

PMO: Make healthy who you ARE, not just what you do

July 17, 2007

Welcome to the fortnightly update on Jeff’s Physical Manifestation Overhaul. If you’re new to the series, you can start right at the beginning with Mission PMO: Intro. This approach to weight management looks primarily at the underlying energetic reasons for the way we manifest our bodies.

One of the key differences in this approach is the goal - the goal is not to lose weight per se, but to overhaul one’s relationship to food and exercise completely. The power in this differentiation is that when there is no weight loss one week, or two weeks in a row (as for Jeff this time), the goal itself is still being fulfilled, in that the work is still progressing.

It’s easy to get discouraged when the numbers on the scale don’t move, and that’s when people are likely to think, “Screw this, it ain’t working, might as well eat that Krispy Kreme Supersize Doughnut with all the toppings.” And they go right back to the patterns and behaviours which created their body in the first place.

But weight is not the issue here. Plus, muscle weighs MORE than fat, so sometimes we can be losing fat, gaining muscle and not shifting a pound - yet our body is in FAR better shape.

No, keep the focus on the life-long lifestyle changes taking place, and forget about the weekly fluctuations. In fact, it’s not even necessary to weigh yourself at all. Your clothes will do a fine job of letting you know when things are shifting. Watching the numbers go down can be thrilling, but getting attached to this little game means buying into the flipside depression when the numbers hit a plateau.

Health is not about numbers on a scale. It’s about how you feel, how you look (i.e. HEALTHY), and how you are able to move through your day.

One of Jeff’s greatest challenges lately has been something which most people can relate to - finding the time to exercise.

“It just seems like there’s always something more important to be doing than working out. Maybe I’m 4 or 5 hours behind on my job. Or maybe my daughter is begging me to play a game with her. Or maybe I’ve been trying for two weeks to put up my new meditation site, and if I make a big push this morning, I can get it done…”

I had the same discussion with a friend today - no time to keep healthy.

There are a couple of ways to work around this. One is to realise that when you are changing your lifestyle, exercise and movement is not something that you DO but something that you ARE. That is, to NOT do yoga, run or workout is like NOT breathing. When you LIVE your movement, you find ways to fit it in - walking at lunchtime, getting up 45 minutes early to do yoga, taking the baby & stroller running, buying a big dog that requires exercise…

Whether he realises it or not, Jeff has attained this mindset. “I believe I really have to DO it, to get it into my heart and head and gut that almost NOTHING is more important than taking care of my body properly. Case in point: the older girls have swimming lessons in the morning at the local pool, and the plan last Friday was that I would take them to lessons, and while they were swimming I would go jogging. Well, for the first half of their lessons, I was so tired I had to take a nap; and in the second half, my oldest daughter begged me to play a game with her, and I just couldn’t say no… I figured it would last just five minutes, and then she could shower off and I’d jog. Well, it lasted fifteen minutes, so I ended up having just ten minutes to run!”

Notice how he thought about this situation - he didn’t use the girls’ swimming lesson as an excuse to get out of exercise, instead he squeezed in as much as he could. And ten minutes is better than zero minutes! Ten minutes extra a day is 70 minutes a week, 5 hours a month or 60 hours a year. Do you think your body might change if you did an extra 60 hours a year of movement?

The other way to work in exercise is time management - what do you spend your time doing, and what is your priority? Priorities come down to values, and values define who we are - in every way, including physically. When you value movement as highly as your job, then it easily becomes a part of your life. When movement comes 7th after watching Lost and Desperate Housewives… you show you value entertainment more and your body will reflect that.

So, how Do you spend your time? Can you get up earlier? Watch less TV? Commute via exercise (nothing like walking or biking to work to get the brain firing)? Meet your girlfriends for a walk ‘n’ talk rather than a coffee, or a wine?

Jeff and I have also addressed portion size this week. The beauty of doing yoga regularly (as Jeff is - he’s doing Anmol Mehta’s Kundalini Yoga for weight loss daily) is that the body becomes more efficient at extracting nutrients from food. This means you need to eat less to stay healthy. Meals should never be so large that you finish with a full stomach - for easy digestion, half fill the stomach with solids (about two cupped hands full) and a quarter fill it with liquids (one hand cup). Leave the last quarter empty for easy digestion.

The nature of restaurant eating has led to over-sized portions and expectations of how much we should be eating. Better to eat smaller, more often, and keep the metabolism cranking.

Focusing on portion size and exercise is the natural progression of this process. First Jeff dealt with the underlying issues of why he was craving, and binging. And once he got a handle on that, we’ve shifted more to focus on exercise and food. When you only focus on the food and exercise part of this process, those underlying issues can sabotage your best efforts, and you end up working at odds to yourself.

As Jeff reported this week, “My binging is basically gone, even though I definitely had some stressful days this past week.”

Despite starting his weekly report back feeling discouraged about not losing anymore numbers on the scale, he finished by saying: “Just writing this out has been therapeutic for me — writing these emails is kind of like journaling. It feels like I need to do some more surrendering, some more going with the flow. Let myself get behind on work or blogging — I’ll catch up somehow — I’ll work better if I’m rested and exercised properly anyway!”

And of course he’s right - when we are healthy, well-rested and exercising daily, we feel better and get far more done. It becomes a positive feedback loop. Ultimately, each of us KNOWS what we need to do to treat ourselves in the best possible way - we KNOW what to eat, and how much to exercise. The only questions is whether we value our health enough to take those actions.

PMO: Want to change your body shape? Consistency creates results

August 1, 2007

It’s been a few months now since Jeff Lilly of Druid Journal asked for my assistance in his plan to lose weight. Borderline obese, he decided that enough was enough, and he needed to make permanent changes. Intrigued by my article How to heal your relationship with food, he fired off an email to me about his situation.

Since that time, Jeff has consistently worked hard every week to address the underlying causes of his weight, while increasing his regular exercise program and becoming more aware of what it is he eats.

He’s had weeks where there has been no weight lose, and weeks like the past two, where he’s lost 1.5 pounds. But most of all, he’s stuck with the program - he recognises that this is a long-term lifestyle change. Losing a pound a week is sustainable, and likely to STAY off. Jeff is right where he needs to be.

But consistency applied to this process is not the only consistency that affects our bodies. I have a regular private yoga student who carries tension in her shoulders and neck. Every time she lies down on the floor in savasana, I have to remind her to relax through the shoulders. She habitually holds her shoulders scrunched and forward. Over a lifetime, this creates a certain type of body.

It’s something I’ve become very aware of as a yoga teacher - how do people stand? How do they walk? How do they sit? These habitual movements are created by who we are, physically, mentally and emotionally. AND they also CREATE who we are, physically, emotionally and mentally.

If you want to overhaul your body, you need to get conscious about HOW you move - in every way. Notice how you stand at the grocery store line-up. Notice how you sit at the movies. Notice how you stand up and how you walk.

We tend to take our body type for granted, assuming that the way we’re built is ‘just the way we are’. But, when you change fundamental emotional or mental processes, you can change your body. There is a certain body type that I see associated with people with an excess of nervous energy - they can’t sit still and live almost entirely in the mind. These kind of people tend to have trouble keeping weight on, and often have stomach issues. I am certain that if they diligently practiced meditation and pranayama and reconnected with their bodies, they would lose the angular, anxious look and become softer, more rounded, and more grounded.

I’ve seen this type of change with my body. I was a pear-shaped athletic woman - lean and mean upstairs, and rounder and muscled downstairs. No matter what I did, my legs and butt just didn’t have the form and definition of my upper body. Sometimes I felt like two different people, and I took two different sizes for tops and bottoms. Finding a pair of jeans that fit was a nightmare, because they’d always be huge around my waist and tight around my hips.

My mother has the same type of body, although she’s a bit shorter than me. Looking at us, you’d assume it was genetic. But as I’ve confronted my way of avoiding emotions (stuffing them down into my hips and holding them tight with my stomach - the solar plexus, seat of the Will and Ego.), and as I’ve practiced yoga regularly, my body has completely changed. I look like a different person. Even my ankles have changed shape! And what a joy to buy jeans now, as they all fit - perfectly!

In making this shift, I’ve noticed that my normal way of standing was with my pelvis tilted forward slightly. Shifting into a proper stance I could feel my butt and back thigh muscles engaging and holding me strong. Those very muscles I used to work so very hard at the gym to try and create some definition in are now working 24 hours a day and there IS definition there.

After all - how many minutes a week do you spend at the gym?

How many minutes a week do you spend consciously IN your body?

Because this is when the REAL physical manifestation work takes place. Every single time I stand up is an opportunity for me to change the habitual muscular and skeletal holding patterns of my body. By consciously bring myself into correct alignment, ALWAYS, I’ve changed my body.

This consciousness extends to mediation to. Jeff has had great success with talking to his guides about his weight issues. This week he got in touch with Archangel Raphael who is in charge of healing.

“I did a meditation this evening, trying to connect with him, and I got a strong sense that he was working on my back, especially my lower back, and the nerves and connections there with the “spare tire” that circles above my waist — where almost all of my excess fat collects. Something is going on there, for sure… ”

So sure of this is Jeff, that’s he reincorporated the lower back Kundalini yoga exercises back into his daily yoga routine, adding them to the weight loss yoga he’s already doing. This is the process of conscious physical manifestation overhaul - paying attention to what your body tells you about your experience and then listening to the promptings as to what you need to do to shift it.

So if you REALLY want to change your body, realise that consistency creates results. Not consistency in getting to the gym three times a week (although that certainly helps), but consistently noticing how you are inside your body and bringing your consciousness to EVERY moment.

When you slump at your desk, you are engaging the aging, decaying process.

When you actively and energetically sit up, you are engaging and opening your body.

Every moment, of every day you have this choice. To be slack, or to be engaged. To be dull, or to be conscious.

This is when the real power, and the real magic of the overhaul takes place.

In every single moment.

Right here.

Right

NOW.

This concluded Kara-Leah’s series on physical manifestation overhaul. But I did not stop my personal efforts. You can read about the next part of my journey here: