I talk all the time about how your relationship with good food goes in cycles. You eat well, then some thing happens and you get derailed for a while, eating crap. That eventually gets really old and you clean it up again, and so it goes. On and on. For years.

Sometimes, when you “bottom out” in the cycle, it seems to have an extra gravity, doesn’t it? Like you got caught in a tar pit, when self-care is just a hypothetical concept you laugh scornfully at.

“Yeah, yeah, exercise and a bowl of broccoli sound LOVELY for someone who has TIME! My life is so far from achieving the whole ’self-care package’ of eating well, exercising and sleeping, that there’s no point in even starting. I’m going to Dunkin Donuts. Want anything?”

Sometimes it’s regular old disorganization, other times it’s self-defeating thinking.

But sometimes we are on the threshold into a new stage of development in our lives and it’s SCARY. Sometimes our life invites us to step UP, to inhabit a larger, more spectacular version of ourselves that feels…too… good.

Boy THAT, my friends, is when my self-care goes to hell.

That’s when I can’t find time to exercise and stay up late to finish things and get into the caffeine routine in the morning. I eat chips. I eat sweet stuff. Without even noticing it, my inner conversation goes from “What am I drawn to that will make me feel awesome?” to “What can I get away with?”

After a while– weeks? days? My body starts sending me emails. Certain familiar old pains come back. Left foot. Lower back. Headache. Stomach cramp. They will waltz on stage for a few moments, then retreat. If I don’t listen, they come back. They get louder. They refuse to retreat.

My healer told me “The universe doesn’t mind throwing bricks rather than pebbles.”

So I listen. With each cycle of self-care, I try to get the memo as soon as I am brave enough to. I try not to press the mute button with pills that will make my pain go away.

But there’s this extra stickiness that the bottom of a cycle when I have to cross a threshold to crawl out of it. When I have to pull something off that I’ve never done before or faced something in myself that I’d rather not face.

Are you feeling me?

I knew a woman who got into Little Debbie Snack Cakes in order to avoid the loud cry of the universe for her to step onto a path she didn’t feel ready for (or rather her family didn’t feel ready for.) Others will pick up smoking again. It’s like tying some sand bags onto your hot air balloon so that it doesn’t fly off into the sky before you are ready.

Seeing it for what it is– a purposeful gesture of self-sabotage to slow down the pace of growth– allows me to have compassion around it.

We are all coursing with the same life force that the plants and flowers are bursting with this spring. That in all of us. It can feel like a careening maelstrom at times and a mellow unfolding at other times.

What seems clear is that we all use food as a sort of “throttle” to regulate the speed of our growth. If you want it to speed up, eating food that’s full of life force works REALLY well.

But if you want it to slow down, you want to not see or feel so clearly, then junk food serves us for that purpose.

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