Before and Afters

Yoyo-ing our way to enlightenment

What IS it about a before and after picture that we all LOVE so much?

Maybe it’s seeing the possibility for ourselves in another person’s transformation.

It’s pictorial proof that change is possible.

Today let’s dive deeper into the topic of manifesting and dig up what is just beneath the surface of our desires this week and take a bird’s eye view of our bodies, our health, beauty, our desires, and our weight.

Would you like to know how to make your “before and after” photo so spectacular that it gets seen by 100 million people and leads to an eventual documentary called “Embrace”?

For 39-year-old Australian mother of three Taryn Brumfitt, the answer was to blow apart the toxic stereotype of what women are “supposed” to look like by having the “after” photo be larger and heavier than the leaner “before.” But not just a bigger woman, a happier one.

I love that this picture got so much press and reaction. Taryn struck a chord with women everywhere and I’m incredulous looking back that I didn’t see this sooner for myself, but I guess what they say about hindsight is true.

Interesting that A Course In Miracles describes our bodies as “teaching devices” because for me the single GREATEST teacher of my life has been my body. Who knew we could find our own awakening in beauty culture or in the insanity of gaining and losing the same weight over and over and over again?

Of course! Our bodies are the central place where we experience life.

They are how we love one another. In fact, what it actually means to BE human is to inhabit a body.

Our bodies are how we take up space and how we manifest what we experience.

And yet, don’t you find it curious that there are workbook lessons repeated in a Course In Miracles that repeat the saying over and over and over to drill into our brains: “I am not a body, I am free, for I am still as God created me” which aligns with so many spiritual teachings in many different religions.

For example, in the Bible, in Corinthians there is some reference comparing you to a Holy Temple but it’s also in Corinthians that separtes the body from spirit “there is a natural body but there is also a spiritual body”. Two very different things.

In the Gospel of John it instructs us not to identify with our bodies and seems a bit more blunt about it: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” In a nutshell we’re being instructed clearly not to ultimately identify with “worldly” things which includes our bodies because they are temporary.

Did you know this? I never got that memo from school, our society, my family. That my body and even my ego were NOT of God. Not of the source of my being, but rather our ego’s are man-made.

I get that now but I confess I have definitely been body identified most of my life.

If we’re being honest it would be safe to say that few of us here ever really took this advice to heart. In fact, it woudn’t be an exaggeration to say in our secular society that we relate to the natural, wordly body almost exclusively.

In fact, we identify so much with our bodies that we idolize them, adorned them, work them out every day, stare at them in mirrors, weigh and measure them, study them, compare them to other bodies, worship each other’s bodies and we are especially reverent of beautiful famous bodies or athletic bodies.

So basically we’ve TOTALLY ignored the wisdom of Budhism, Christianity, Hinduism and pretty much every sacred teaching available to us.

If I had to summarize them all in one sentence that the utility of the body is simply an aide in the development of insight. A teaching device.

Probably a bad idea for us to be so invested in them, but how can we resist?

And yet, it’s my own body worship that has caused me the most suffering in my life. To be clear, it’s not that I have ever really loved my own body, I’ve been very hard on it.

Our selfie culture would even make Narcissus proud, the poor guy only had a puddle to admire his own reflection in, in we have taken things to a whole new level.

Do you ever look back at old photos when you were younger and wonder why on earth you never liked them or your body the way it was for that matter? And why it didn’t even feel safe to let others see them as they were?

Before digital photos when we had our film developed I confess that I would even go through the stack and get rid of anything that I considered “hideous”. There was so much fear and judgment going on inside of my head.

Here is a perfectly lovely digital picture of my husband Scott and me that I specifically remember not wanting to share on social media because I didn’t measure up to some imagined illusory standard. I can remember feeling insecure - I thought that my arms looked a bit too muscular. We were in Paris watching the Tour de France and celebrating my 40th birthday and our anniversary.

I never posted it.

What the? I was SURE I was doing the right thing.

Hmmmmm. That was a clue I missed.

Over my lifetime I can remember countless times I’ve even avoided going out, coming up with excuses not wanting to go to something like a pool party, or on a trip where I would be in a bathing suit, cycling or horseback riding, or to a school reunion because of how I perceived myself and my fear of how others would perceive me.

Hmmmmmm. Another clue I missed.

We don’t even realize that it’s our false egos, feeling like we’re not enough, not loveable or worthy that drives nearly all our human desires. Our egos keep compelling us to set and achiving goals, wanting more and more. Control, status, power and left unchecked we can innocently get us caught up in their web spending our entire lives, all our time and money trying to achieve them or perfecting and preserving our bodies. It’s embedded so deeply into our culture that we don’t even notice the insanity of it, it’s really no wonder we all fall prey to it despite these spiritual warnings.

It’s like we’re asleep to it.

If I asked what you would like to manifest, I would probably hear something about making money, maybe a healthier or improved body, a nice sustainable home on the water, an electric car, maybe even another body to be beside you to love. The problem with manifesting the way we’ve been doing it from our egos is that most of our surface desires are so soaked in fear and delusion without our knowledge. We want things that will never truly fulfill or satisfy us and maybe it’s only in the getting them and being left unsatiated or happy that we eventually see this for ourselves.

I think it’s amazing that we have free will and we get to decide for ourselves.

I guess the problem is that we could spend our whole lives pining for nicer arms or breasts or flat tummies. We probably can’t even define physical beauty because. it’s a moving target. Especially now that the lines are blurring between our sexes and our sexual identities, but body shapes and sizes or the perception of “beauty” has changed not just over time but geographically as well.

This century in the West for males being bigger, taller more muscular, with 6-pack abs to show their strength and take up more space and for anyone identifying as a woman it’s been the opposite. Taking up less space or being thinner although it has trended back from the 1960s or twiggy era has moved to softening curves more recently back to a Marylin Monroe ideal image with a small tapered waist, larger behinds and larger chests. You can actually trace our human definitions of what we consider to be beautiful with our consumption patterns of plastic surgery.

Shocker, this is changing for 2023. I just scrolled a bit online and word on the street is that social media influencers are looking slimmer, reversing their Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) in favor of smaller hips and buttocks: "People now want to be moderately breasted and to have these curvy but very fit and muscular bodies," a quote from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

Whatever the cultural trends, this desire to be something other than we are is at the root of our obesity epidemic. Even deeper down is our separation from the source of our being or our vertical dimention and totally identified with our horzizonal or doing dimension.

Our denial of the divine or our true nature has sent us out seeking in the world for something that can’t be found there in the first place.

But the good news is that how we perceive ourselves is a problem BOTH created and solved BY us.

Some of you may have seen this post with the picture on top and thought to yourself…oh good, a physical transformation! Did you lose 40 lbs in 3 months? How did you do it? or “OH good for you Nona, you look so MUCH better!” And of course that would seem like a natural reaction, because THAT would be what’s been baked into our cultural crust.

Our insecurities and desire to transform our bodies even fuel our economy because it’s big business for us to fix ourselves. If we want to try to look younger than our “real age” of course we’ll gladly contribute to the FIVE TRILLION dollar a year health and wellness fund.

And not just our weight loss, it’s a measure of potential in run-down places in real estate and the surge in property flipping. If you leave your keys with Chip and Joanna Gaines for a few weeks, you may even come home to this kind of home transformation….

I even love seeing the before and afters at dinnertime of the sand bunkers that our son comes home from work after weeding at our local golf course…

Doesn’t it just make you think…TADAAAAA! It feels magical.

What’s not to love??

It’s visual evidence of possibility.

If the Home Edit girls come calling your closets and bookshelves are in for a treat!

It can even feel good to clean our clutter. No matter how bad things seem, we can get ourselves organized and IT DOES feel better to see our books color coded on the shelves and to open our snack drawers to see this!

Funny the food police inside of me has already identified and judged the candy bars and candy on the right.

I’m showing these because they speak to my soul. How can it be so wrong to be so focused on our physical bodies and environments? Where is the harm?

We’ll get to that but I guess today I’m not judging anyone because I’m the poster child for this behaviour but I don’t think it’s even our own fault because it really IS in the water we’re swimming in.

This is the possibility we’re marketed to over and over.

The reason for this post though is to poke a hole through the illusion that once our homes are perfectly tidy, once our bodies are at our goal weight and admired, once our homes are perfectly renovated we have convinced ourselves that THEN we’ll finally feel fulfilled and happy. Then we’ll have time to enjoy our lives, once that work is all done. Life will be good. We’ll feel like we’re enough. We’ll also be healthier and look younger than we did a decade ago and others will even ask us our secrets. It NEVER gets accomplished because it can’t, that is all our ego and that is ALL religion is trying to save us from.

So yes, let’s love and respect our bodies. We all want to feel good in our bodies, with our homes, and to do well in our work. To be fulfilled, healthy, energized, and alive. Of course, we do!!

But let’s hold our ego desires loosely with the knowing that achieving our after-photos can take up an entire lifetimes and is NOT ultimate.

Being connected to our inner or depth dimension, the eternal part of us that feels like the same person when we’re 9 as 90 is.

The problem with our body worship and even these idealized before and after images or the comparisons we make left in the ego’s hands can make us feel PERPETUALLY anxious, unhappy and dissatisfied with our lives as they are. With our partners, with our children, with our homes and bodies.

We can spend our ENTIRE lives chasing becuase the ego’s mandate is to seek and never find. It sadly leads us to behave in ways that harm us.

Always wanting something new, more, better, faster, bigger and never considering that it’s INSIDE the one doing the seeking that fulfillment and happiness comes from.

What I do know for sure now is that the behavior that has caused much of my own obesity comes from “binge eating”, which I’ve since learned is simply a body’s natural reaction to deprivation around food. It is the effect of the cause of restriction. It’s not personal and it’s not about willpower it comes from our mind. Like a contestant on “Survivor” or “Alone” or even “The Biggest Loser”. When the show is over, the weight is quickly put back on and then some to keep the body alive.

In fact, it’s a brilliant mechanism in our brains. It’s an equal and opposite reaction to keep us alive that if we don’t understand can have us swinging from one diet to the next our whole lives.

We get caught up in this yo-yoing of our body weight by trying to “improve” our bodies consciously restricting our food.

I’ve relived this insanity over and over. I’ve come to learn that ALL of my eventual binges were a natural biological response to countless years of dieting and feeling deprived of food as a result of innumerable attempts at weight control throughout my life.

I’m sadly a diet statistic, how did this happen?

None of us are stupid, but after decades of trying it’s no wonder so many of us give up. We feel powerless over it. If 90% of diets fail, this is the reason why.

We’d never send our children to a school if only 10% would successfully graduate, so it’s hard to understand why most of us don’t see this sooner and stop dieting for good.

Even knowing this, or why we turn to food doesn’t make it easy. Quitting harmful behaviors like dieting can be challenging. It’s been the single most difficult thing I’ve ever done, I can see now that dieting and losing weight was my real addiction, not food.

And I’m so grateful to my bodyfat and my chronic pain now, it has been hands down THE greatest spiritual teacher of my life and the catalyst that has given me a kind of freedom that I never really imagined was possible.

It must be so hard for our loved ones that want to help us. Their well-intentioned body commentaries, pointing out our gains or losses or commenting on our children’s bodies and weight. They mean well, but they do not realize that they are actually making things worse by doing that, just feeding the lack and fear that created the problem in the first place.

All we need is to be loved, not judged for things to turn around on their own.

In the same way that experts like Gabor Maté say that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s love and connection. Long-term peace and freedom with our food or permanent weight loss isn’t about judgment and discipline, it’s about love and acceptance. Working with our bodies, not fighting against them. Certainly not judging them or other people’s bodies. And sure, there may be healthier habits or even some structure that comes from us that can be helpfu, but it’s never extreme or punitive in nature. It aligns with our true nature and helps us build trust in our own instincts.

It’s our MIND that is manifesting the way our body looks and it’s only by changing our minds and our perceptions that our bodies will change.

Simply put, manifestation is about influencing your external circumstances by changing your thinking and your state of consciousness.

Deep down after so many failed attempts, I think I had just given up, it all seemed so futile and my body was trying to tell me something but I wasn’t listening so Monday morning I’d begin restricting my food once again. For nearly 5 decades. Sigh.

It’s like the baby circus elephant being trained not to run away. When it’s a calf, it’s chained up to a big pole with a strong chain and tries SO hard to escape but sadly it rubs its legs raw until it bleeds. It will do anything it can including harm itself to get free. Until it doesn’t, so it eventually gives up.

As full-blown adults trainers put tiny thin ropes or just a cuff on giant full-sized elephants and they don’t even attempt to get free even if the cuff’s rope is dandling free because they stop believing that they can. They could walk out of the big top any time just like we can walk away from diet culture. At SOME point, usually in mid-life we just stop trying.

The good news is that if we can use our minds with our fears to limit our personal possibilities, we can use the same minds and power to create something new.

There is a catch, we need to shift our perception of ourselves and what is possible.

We can still hold our aspirations for a healthy body, but this new after image is held loosely because we know we’re not just a body, we’re FREE. We feel peace around food, we are not dieting and we love what is. We take our focus off the before photo ALL together and just love ourselves as we are now and enjoy the ride in the present, no matter what the outcome.

The other hard earned lesson for me is that it’s only IF WE BELIEVE it’s possible and we work with our true nature, we listen to our bodies and intuitively respond to them when they ask for anything.

My girlfriend and her husband are traveling in Africa right now and her updates reminded me of something profound that happened when I was there. I later learned that it is a phenomenon common in many orphanages around the world, but I experienced its haunting effects firsthand in Uganda.

When babies are first brought into the orphanages, they cry. But because there are more babies than arms to hold and hands to care for them, many of their calls and cries often go unanswered, especially at night. At first, they cry and cry and cry. But eventually, they see it as fruitless because their needs are not being met so they stop crying altogether. These orphanages filled with babies are eerily quiet.

It affected me deeply.

If we stop answering the calls or hearing the cries of our own bodies and we keep numbing ourselves and trudging forward as “doers” our bodies will intelligently shut down.

We may begin to experience pain or symptoms from everything from a migraine to in my own case my mobility in a way we can no longer ignore because we’re being shown that we’re out of alignment. It may not seem like it at the time, but the fires are for our own good. It happened to me with my hips and their eventual replacements. I ignored the pain until it got so bad I couldn't walk.

Our minds and bodies serve our higher intelligence. They look to us for help and guidance and receive it from us not from what we say or even what we do, but from the images we hold in our minds. We fuel their priority with our attention and conviction.

They trust EVERYTHING and can only do what we order them to do and they don’t understand or speak in what we say we want or pray for with our words, only images and what is focused on with our divine minds.

This applies to every “area” of our lives.

There’s a widely misunderstood verse in the Bible around the idea of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Matthew 25:29: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”

We have trouble with this one because, from a dual mindset or the thinking of the world and ego, it doesn’t seem fair. It’s unjust and historically we’ve judged the rich for taking from the poor or having the means to invest more and earn more.

Jesus is simply showing us how life works from God’s or nature’s perspective.

When we have an abundance mentality we will grow in abundance, but if we have a lack mentality we will even lose what we have because we are the ones doing it. If we are depressed when we focus on our depression we will get more depressed, and this I know because I experienced this in very painful ways.

Our minds can lift us up or take us out because WE ARE DIVINE THINKERS (“Hu-man”) and we create what we see and focus on.

The underlying premise of manifestation is that there is a field of intelligence that, although invisible to the eye sources all of creation on the level of form. Aligning consciously with this universal intelligence is in our best interest. The eventual realization is that there IS no “you” apart from the Universe. We are one with it. With source, with God. We are all swimming in the same quantum soup whether we are aware of it or not.

And because of this, whatever we are convinced and convicted of in our imagination, is what we’ll eventually see manifest in “reality”. Again, Jesus who understood spent pretty much his entire adult life trying to help us see this for ourselves.

We are manifesting 24/7 whether we realize it or not.

This world is a reflection of what we think and believe it is. What we ALL think it is.

In a sense, we are so overly body-identified that we forget we have both density AND dimensionality.

We’re not just a body. We have a body and it’s an amazing tool to LIVE and experience all life has to offer.

We’re in a dialectic with the world around us and our physicality and sensory development are affected by what culture says is good or valuable.

Letting go of dieting and diet culture and seeing ourselves in a new light (with loving eyes) is my own new personal objective.

To FREE myself and anyone else that wants off this ride and to make peace with food and our bodies.

To move in ways that feel good to us and find our own inner strength no matter what challenges we face with our bodies now or in the future.

To embody deeply that it’s safe to be us precisely as we are whether it’s a female body, a gay man’s body, a trans body, a disabled body, or a brown or black body. We no longer need to force our bodies to do something they don’t want to do or to be something they are not.

ALL JUDGEMENT of ourselves or others are based on a foundation of fear and they come from our ego.

In fact, ALL THINKING AND BODY IDENTIFICATION is ego.

I also realize that while I can’t change other people’s perceptions of my body or convince them to love their own, once we become aware of ourselves and see this greater truth in a social context, it will impact ALL of our bodies and our health globally.

Simply losing the weight temporarily with dieting as I have proven time and time again does not help solve the problem of obesity or even why our bodies have accumulated more body fat in the first place.

I can remember reading Naomi Wolfe’s “The Beauty Myth” and scratching my head. Up until that point I had never really questioned any of it. I never imagined how this young Yale University graduate and Rhodes scholar at Oxford University could pick apart everything I thought I knew about beauty and being a woman in the world today.

Is beauty a purely social construct that we all agree upon? Who decides? Is there an Anna Wintour in the ethers? Or is it our collective consciousness that decides?

There ARE no powers that be, it’s ALL of us that gets to decide. We get a vote by what we focus our attention and energy (and money) on.

It disturbed me to think of my looks being used to uphold a patriarchal society and generate profits for cosmetics companies. It felt like she was on to something but I just wasn’t ready to let go of wearing my mascara. And in case you’re wondering, I still do wear it sometimes, but i just don’t need to anymore.

Naomi successfully disturbed me, but at the time I didn’t really want to see it yet or was ready to agree to it, I was still too focused on my daily skincare routines, self-optimization, and strict diet to loosen my grip or change my ways.

There were other signs I began to notice.

One day bra shopping I went in Victoria’s Secret and it was difficult to find a decent bra WITHOUT padding or any push-up mechanisms and I found that a bit frustrating. I left the store empty-handed. It began to dawn on me that our ideas and concepts of beauty appeared more to do with false advertising and illusions than anything real.

Thankfully, we all get to choose to live with our own perception of beauty, but whatever that is, a giant THANK YOU, to Naomi and Gloria and every woman or man that has come before and helped us swim back up against the popular current supported by our economy to guide us back inside ourselves like salmon spawning a new generation back towards our true nature and what true beauty really means.

“All women are Bunnies.”

Gloria Steinem, an American feminist, journalist, and activist

We have a long way to go in shifting our perceptions away from all the dieting and beauty industry insanity, and I know I won’t be single-handedly solving this problem for us today, but thankfully the world is beginning to change because it’s this toxic view of our femininity that causes disordered eating, lost lives, risky surgeries, debt, pain, and suffering.

Our media may resist the change because loving ourselves probably won’t ever sell many tabloid magazines, we’ll need to see this for ourselves when we’re ready.

I guess the most recent public example I can think of is Martha Stewart. I read this article in the New York Times and cringed: Welcome to Generation Ageless. When her Sports Illustrated cover came out I was thinking what many of us probably did, airbrushed or not. “WOW, she looks great for her age!” Several girlfriends even texted it to me and I shared it with my Mom.

It was my honest first reaction.

But something felt a bit off as I read on.

Stewart “looks like she did 30 years ago,” the article gushes. It praises the former model for giving “women half her age a run for their money.” It holds up her “smooth, glowing, wrinkle-free face” as “a new vision of vital old age,” as if this is some groundbreaking display of age positivity.

Wrong.

It may be a lot of things, but it’s definitely NOT that.

Praising older celebrities for looking young is nothing more than an equal-but-opposite glorification of youth. It’s the same anti-aging bullshit women have been force-fed for centuries but it’s time for us to see past the illusion and the fear to something more real.

As beautiful as Martha looks, it doesn't count as “celebrating an aging woman” if you're celebrating her for still looking young and “desirable”. When we keep trying to mold our faces and bodies to meet the Western beauty ideal, a process that siphons our time, money, energy, and headspace; poses a significant risk to our physical bodies; and contributes to appearance-related anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, disordered eating, self-harm, and we keep feeding our fear and it’s growing every year.

Just the fact that anorexia is the number ONE cause of death for our daughters should be setting off alarms BECAUSE of how we see beauty. It has the HIGHEST death rate of all mental illnesses. This is a major cultural issue we need to solve and we can start with ourselves because the action of fear is to create more fear.

This is not about self-care or love.

That’s the illusion.

This is about control and our EGO.

Our separation from our nature or essential self and not listening to our bodies is the origin of our weight gain and pretty much every preventable disease known to man.

This kind of beauty concept has us hoping on our digital scales first thing in the morning, buying expensive supplements and detoxes, creams, and teas, and has us writing down and measuring every bite of organic food we put into our mouths. Of course, we’re doing that out of love, right?

To take care of our bodies? To be healthy?

What does healthy even mean? Our bodies don’t last and we’re made that way ON purpose. We’re not mistakes.

We’ve been warned not to attach to them, to identify or worship them.

So why do we do it?

If we look to nature, animals live out their life cycles and listen to their bodies. Eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full. There is no fear, no manipulation, no judgment, no shame, no measuring tape, and no problem.

And YES I know what you’re thinking…our bodies are the only paintbrushes we have to express ourselves in the world, to paint our own life triptychs so yes, let’s take good care of them. But the love and taking care that I’m talking about doesn’t try to make you look a decade younger than you’re “real age” nor is it about a before and after.

That is motivated by fear.

It’s about accepting yourself AS IS and living fully in the present moment.

FULLY and to have fun, to experience joy.

To love and be loved without your makeup on.

To move away from scales and deprivation or forcing yourself to slog on the treadmill in your basement if you really don’t like doing it. If you do then YEEEEEES level up to 10 on an incline, get sweaty and rock ON with your bad self!!

You can be the judge of how to move your body in a way that lights you up and makes you feel good so you can tap into your power and raise your vibration. That might be doing a marathon, an Ironman or a figure competition, or even some hot power yoga. There is nothing really wrong with doing any of it if that is what gives us great pleasure and we’re guided to do it. Not as a slave to our ego or fear or to prove our worthiness to others or ourselves it will only cause us stress and disease.

We can begin eating food that makes us feel amazing and loves us back based on our OWN internal feedback system. To give us the energy we need to create a life we love and serve humanity with our gifts.

My own battle with my weight and fear kept me paralyzed on the sidelines most of my life. It even prevented me from starting my own business or I’d avoid social situations if I “felt fat” or the food was going to be “unhealthy” because I couln’t be trusted and it wasn’t until I allowed myself to explore this “depth dimension” or my own true nature that I began to see beyond the whole dog and pony show or illusion behind it all.

FEAR.

It’s why Buddha and Jesus teach us not to worry about what to eat or wear. It’s not as important as egos would have us believe it to be.

Budha said to be weary of your desires. What does that mean? It means that we may not be drawn to the home in that exclusive neighborhood or are even driving our Teslas for the reasons we think.

To be clear, this is not about judgment today, just a compassionate inquiry with forgiving eyes for us to see beneath the surface of things or to take a closer look at our behaviors from farther away.

I think that glamour and high fashion are certainly art forms to be appreciated. I love looking at Vogue. I can certainly appreciate the stunning beauty of the female body or of a cover model or the latest fashion trends just as much as anyone, but here’s the truth I’ve gleaned the hard way….

We’ve confused glamour with beauty.

They are two very different things and if we equate the two we end up comparing and judging ourselves and feeling powerless and stuck in sticky self-help traps like mice and sadly some of us never find our way out of our mental prisons.

Our social discourse about weight and age is ego based.

Fear in drag.

Positively embodying our bodies and age as we are, is how we heal and even trust or allow our bodies to find a comfortable or natural weight on their own.

What we have to face is not the ugliness and elimination of fat, not a body to be hated and judged for any reason like looking its real age, but the OBJECTIFICATION itself. For ALL of our bodies are treasured as valuable, beautiful vessels scars, warts, and all. When we are connected and we can take cues from it, our bodies work beautifully. They are self-healing dreams.

That is what healthy means.

We’ve confused the word health as well. It simply means to be free from injury or illness.

And I’m sorry to tell you this, despite what the marketing and researchers say that want you to buy their supplements and products, we can’t stop the aging train. Our bodies are also very temporary, they don’t last no matter how hard we try or how expensive our supplements are, and once we embrace that, we can free ourselves from all of the torment.

Our bodies are made beautifully to cycle through birth and death like a leaf on a tree does. This is all so close to us, it’s hard to see so it’s no wonder we resist it.

We have unknowingly collectively shaped the discourse about our bodies throughout history with theology, and philosophy from Plato to Descartes we can trace when we began to objectify ourselves. The time when we began to use and sell our bodies as a way of selling products with the female body in particular and when the disconnect began.

Even as young children, we’re told when and what we can eat, we need to lift our hands to ask permission to go to the washroom and we stopped trusting our own nature or intuition. I can remember when my kids were under 7 they ate when they were hungry and stopped when they were full whether it was 2 bites of vegetables or 2 bites of chocolate cake. They weren’t making their food an emotional or moral choice, just listening to their bodies.

It seems to be the currency of being connected in our culture today.

We innocently crave to be safe relationally. We know the truth about what we need but we turn away and stop trusting our knowledge about how to be in connection with ourselves.

We give away our personal authority so we can be in personal relationships with others who approve of us and meet our own needs to survive.

I can remember leaving notes for my mom when I was very young when she was out about what I had eaten “Only ate a few carrot sticks for dinner tonight!” I was so proud of my ability to restrict in my desperation to be loved. My mom valued being trim and fit so we dieted together since before I remember. To me it was fun and how we bonded.

We get the signs early on in life from being praised for restricting or having set controls and not doing the things our body is telling us to do. Praise might be withheld, comments on how we look are given when we are thin, and none are given when we’re not or maybe we get bullied at school. We stop using our intuition and guiding ourselves because we see it works out better for us.

It’s all quite innocent and this is not our parents’ fault or anyone’s we all have care and concern for one another even culturally and in our healthcare system, but what we don’t see is that our current judgemental behaviors only seem to be contributing to making things worse, not better.

Shame and guilt disempower.

Love empowers.

If we dieted on and off our whole lives we get to the point as adults when we don’t feel like we can even TRUST ourselves or our bodies. We’re convinced that if we had free reign and could do anything we wanted that we’d eat the entire bakery section of the grocery store and sleep for 3 years, but that’s simply not true.

We fear that if we follow the wisdom of our bodies we’ll implode and fall off that scary cliff.

God forbid, we’ll even GET FAT which our egos equate with social extinction.

I have news for you, we’ve been trying it that way for decades and getting fatter.

It’s not working.

How do we find our way back inside our own highly intelligent bodies fully present in this moment? To get out of the mind over matter water we’re swimming in and to begin to notice the sensations in our bodies that are guiding us in every moment.

To soften and to return back to wholeness, back to our true nature where we can trust our bodies can regulate themselves and stop interfering.

This may seem like an odd story to tell with the nature of this post, but I’d like to share the story of my “Before and After” because it illustrates the power of how when we’re aligned, how we manifest and it’s not so much from us needing to DO all the work like the Biblical story of Martha AND Mary, it’s more about being in our Mary. I’ll explain more after the story to give a bit more perspective….

Here’s the story:

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(This is a copy of the check that I mentioned in the story… as a postscript, I decided not to publish the official company photos from the side of the product box because even though they are not still in business, I did sign something agreeing that I would not use their images publically so the one on this post will have to do;)

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This whole manifesting incident was another head-scratcher. What had just transpired?

A direct experience for me, showing me the power that we have to create our own experience.

The way it seems to work is that we feel an impulse to help another. It crosses our minds as any idea comes to us, the way Sue did for me the moment it was out of my mind into the Universe.  She was at home waking up and getting ready to go to the gym when I “crossed her mind” because all minds are shared.

SHE ACTED on the impulse to help me and that is why I got the opportunity, if she had ignored it, I would have missed this particular chance but there would have been another eventually if I stayed focused on the three desires I wanted to manifest and I was very convicted of their possibility although I had no idea how it could be.

TODAY’s lesson on manifesting is about learning to listen when we feel an impulse to serve a neighbor, a friend, or even a TOTAL stranger that is our job.

And TO LISTEN TO OUR OWN bodies. To give them what they need.

In case you’re wondering, I kept most of the weight off for about 10 years but it was an internal struggle or MY own acceptance of the cultural thinking that I had unknowingly ascribed to at the time. I was telling myself over and over in my mind that I would gain it back and that it would be hard to keep the weight off because the statistics demonstrated that, so I believed that, and it was so.

I became a statistic. I regained the weight because it was coming from me, the only place I could be affected from.

Maybe it’s true that my body did react eventually to the deprivation the way I said that diets do.

Do they?

Or do we just BELIEVE they do when someone convicted tells us they do?

It’s what a binge expert Isabelle Foxen Duke told me in an online course that I took with her so that is what I learned.

Is it true?

This is a VERY important universal truth for us to see:

IT IS IF WE BELIEVE IT.

Are you seeing how this works now?

The truth I have discovered is that diets DO work in the short term as you can see proof from my pictures. And in the long run too, but that is dependent ON our view of ourselves and the world.

In fact, it is possible to be one of the 10% of people that do keep the weight off for good as easily as it isn’t.

I’ve done some digging and do you know that those people that keep the weight off all have in common?

They’ve experienced a SHIFT in their identity. They are CONVICTED of something else. They see themselves as the exception because THEY believe it’s possible.

It may be for religious reasons or a higher power.

They may have become vegan because of their love for animals.

They may have been diagnosed with cancer and want to do all they can to not just heal and survive but thrive for whatever precious time they have left.

THEY STICK TO IT EFFORTLESSLY as I did during the few months I manifested a path because the guidance is coming from the vertical or depth dimension, not ego, fear, or the horizontal. The RIGHT or perfect “diet” or program, teacher, or person drops into our laps, crosses our path, or approaches us at the gym on a spin bike.

It’s our job to be more like Mary than Martha. We have BOTH in us and we love both parts, but let’s slow down and listen to what’s being said from a more ultimate source than our human ego and stop rushing through life on the surface of things.

Because we can lose weight and keep it off if that is what is aligned for us to do in love, not fear. If your weight is adversely affecting your health it can be healed and shifted. Cancer CAN be healed. Anything is possible, but our bodies do have limits too. It’s so important to know that our bodies are just reflections of our thinking and they can only do what we believe they can.

They CAN change despite what anyone says or if like me you’ve become a diet “statistic” and we can play with this on our own to see what’s even possible for us and have fun doing it.

The key thing I’ve learned is that if we are forcing ourselves to stick with it by efforting it will feel like we’re trying to live our lives holding a volleyball underwater. We don’t trust ourselves so we’re not free to let go. We may fear we will gain the weight back because that’s what we’re told so we perpetually restrict and that becomes our new norm forever and ever.

This may not be your experience and I honor that.

This is not to convince you of anything. I’m still figuring things out every day and I’m very much a student of metaphysics because I LOVE seeking universal Truth.

It’s taken me 5 decades to see this for myself and even having seen it I can still easily get swept away in the part of me that still relates to the thinking of the world.

Especially if I don’t connect to nature or what I call God in the morning in some way to go inside and remind myself how the world really works and not just evaluate things from my senses or circumstances. It’s like I NEED to turn away from the evidence of lack to really be able to create something new.

Even with food if I’ve disconnected from my body and let my ego and mind run the show by 9 am I will be forcing my body in some way. To work when it wants to rest. To drink 8 glasses of water when I’m not even thirsty because someone said. Or by controlling my food. To eat plants and beans when my body wants a burger or to say no to avocado toast because my brain has judged that’s too many carbs or too much fat. What’s good or bad is on a loop in my mind and that is what I needed to work hard to remind myself to let go of and trust my body to tell me what IT wants.

To listen.

We have a foot in both worlds both physical and spiritual always if we are here, but what the spiritual teachings are showing us is that our bodies are temporary, but what’s deepest in you is eternal.

We don’t need to believe that or agree to anything. It’s just being offered up and you get to choose for yourself what’s true.

I felt compelled to write this today because it feels to me like the Saints and Sages are right. It feels like we are here to experience ourselves as creative energetic beings not to try to fit into someone else’s ideas or constructs of beauty so they can sell us something that will be profitable to them personally and not for the good of ALL of us since we’re ALL connected.

I think Krishnamurti was on to something when he said…

I realized that up until just before my 50th birthday I totally misunderstood what made my life good or what made me “healthy”.  I confess I was especially caught up in the $100 billion dollar health and wellness industry that keeps trying to sell us the promise of a BEST LIFE now. 

I never could have imagined on my own that NOT optimizing and falling into those sticky self-help traps or stopping behaviors like dieting,  trying to look younger, or living longer would be the catalyst that would help awaken me to my own true nature. 

Moving forward with grace means forgiving it all.

Once we see evidence of this for ourselves we may feel differently about our daily routines and even what we read, the news we are entertained by, or what we choose to believe. What I’m pointing to TODAY is not something I made up it’s what saints and sages have been trying to share in unique ways with since the beginning of time.

We desire and do these things simply because we yearn to be loved, and what we begin to discover on this path is the recognition that we ARE LOVE and have been all along, its presence has just been covered over or blocked from our conscious awareness with a thick layer of man-made fear.

And YES that still means I asked for new runners for my birthday and I love my gravel bike. I have even a gym membership because I LOVE lifting heavy weights and getting sweaty and how it makes me feel. I want to keep meeting my girlfriends to go swimming every Monday morning and walk our dog at sunset with my husband not to burn calories or manipulate my body but because I LOVE feeling alive and being out in nature.

If we do want to transform our physical bodies WE CAN too.

I love the feeling of being fit and to be honest I have not been really fit since before my surgeries. I have a feeling in mind that I’m focused on but holding loosely. To be lean and powerful, strong and energized. Radiant or glowing with joy and life.

I’m re-learning how to do this with love and not fear.

If my body releases weight naturally, then that is what it will do but the extra weight is a symbol of my past fearful thinking and even the fearful thinking of others projected onto me and my believing them, and that is all.

With my mindset now, if my body doesn’t release any weight I will still love it as it is. I feel free now and I’ve made peace with food and my body. I’M EXCITED to see what’s possible for me now in my life and work now that I know that I’m so much more than my body or how I look.

Besides that old saying feels true to me, that it’s what inside of us that counts.

In my experience, glamour and aesthetic perfection can always turn our heads at first, but it’s our authentic inner radiance, love, and generosity that is so irresistibly attractive to others that makes them want to stay in our company or see us again.

That’s been my experience even at 210 lbs. or more. I’m living proof that the worst HAS happened. I got fat and I’m still here! I’m happy. I’m loved.

When we begin to look at ourselves and each other the way our children and animals do, with unconditional love then things will shift for all of us.

Nature is silently showing us what true beauty is. It can even have lots of bristly hair, bad breath, and salivate in public. A grey face and sagging skin.

If our aging dogs or cats could speak would they ask for implants or for us to cover up their gray?

“No way, you’re perfect!”, We’d say.

This reminds me of my favorite passage in The Velveteen Rabbit on becoming real:

I can see now that our true beauty is in our becoming who we REALLY are.

Maybe Gloria Steinem is right and we ARE all bunnies - but instead of Playboy bunnies, we can choose instead to see each other as Velveteen rabbits.

As artists, we can’t change the colors on our existing life paintings by praying for them to change, WE do that. We can beg on our knees for hours, but the painting will look the same because it’s simply the effect, the CAUSE is our conscious awareness, and the paintbrush is our body. We do the painting from inside our own minds.

Our lives ARE our masterpieces.

This is not just an androcentric patriarchal, white Western European problem of understanding ourselves. We can now begin to see past pointing fingers to something more true.

Speaking of bunnies, do you know what dirty pink bunnies are?

Glennon Doyle brilliantly used the term in the first Chapter of her book “ Untamed”. She explained that they are all the things that women are taught to chase.  She tells the story of going to a zoo with her daughter, and a zookeeper came out with a lab called Minnie. In a cage close by was a cheetah by the name of Tabitha. Tabitha the cheetah was brought up with Minnie the lab and was taught how to behave like a tamed animal. 

As part of the Zoo’s presentation they attached a dirty pink bunny to a jeep, and Minnie the lab started chasing it. When they opened the cage, then Tabitha did the same thing. Glennon Doyle said that she was struck with the thought of how a wild animal like a cheetah can be tamed to forget her wild, certainly a woman can too.

Glennon referenced how the dirty pink bunnies are the things that women are taught to believe and to chase after, in order to be deemed an ideal woman by society’s standards. In every culture, women are taught to chase after dirty pink bunnies but they end up feeling restlessness and unsatisfied. They know they are meant for something different. Something more.

I loved this metaphor. To me, my dirty pink bunny was a perfect weight and body. I was chasing the beauty myth.

The beauty myth is the ultimate way we chase pink bunnies and it’s not just women that do it. Our egoic obsession with flawless beauty and physical perfection traps us in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred.

We are using up our time, energy and our genius on earth focused on dirty pink bunnies when as Marie Forleo puts it, “the world needs the gifts that only you can give”.

This had me thinking of how sometimes in business today women are the ones selling pink bunnies to other women. We use our down-to-earth and brilliantly relatable charm to entice other women to buy our products. We share our cover-ups or cosmetics because they work well on all skin tones to hide our imperfections or our modern-day more comfortable bodices like Spanx that help women “feel and look their best” by hiding our unsightly naturally shaped bodies to smooths out our lumps and bumps to shape our curves into that Playboy bunny figure we all covet.

I can’t stress enough how excited I am to see other women doing well in the world of business and in politics and I think makeup definitely has its place in our society. I think from watching their interviews or following them on IG that both Jamie Kern Lima and Sara Blakely are exceptional businesswomen, and I may be out of touch but am I the only one that thinks that the eternally young smooth-skinned Playboy bunny image of a woman’s body in a push up padded bra’s time is up?

Shall we disrupt the bunny culture AND the hustle culture that keeps us from feeling embodied inside of our own beautiful bodies to guide us beginning as young girls that grow into powerfully intelligent women that are free in their beauty and in their right to be to serve the greater good? And I keep saying women, but I think this is beyond gender and applies to all genders, races, and identities or however we’ve decided to separate ourselves.

Even if it temporarily disrupts capitalism would that be so terrible? We may lose some jobs but by shifting to a more sacred and sustainable economy where love and not money is the bottom line we can shift how we perceive ourselves and one another and begin to heal. If it seems ambitious, unreasonable, or unlikely to us it’s only because of our egos. Seeing beyond dollar signs is like seeing beyond dieting. We can be free to begin to look past our quarterly profits to what it is we’re actually buying and selling to one another and the real cost of it.

Let’s free ourselves and listen to our bodies and stop chasing those dirty pink bunnies.

If we’re hungry, let’s eat.

If we’re thirsty, let’s drink.

If we’ve been hunched over our laptops like a gargoyle for hours like I have for several hours now, let’s stand up, stretch and get out into nature.

Let’s find what makes us feel good.

In an HONORING of self.

TO FEEL strong, vital, pleasure, and joy in our aliveness. To notice the magic happening in nature.

The world will be made new for us.

We can begin now this very moment to live and experience our lives beyond our egos and our fears.

Like the Velveteen Rabbit, we’ll finally begin to recognize our worth and power even in our shabbiness and we may even decide to hop outside one day without any makeup or Spanx and notice that we’re free and we have been all along (although a bra may still be advisable but I’ll leave that one up to you:)

I have a dream that ONE day when we finally all become REAL and we all feel safe doing it then we’ll know the truth and it will set us free.

“You cannot dismantle the Master’s house using the Master’s tools.”

Andre Lorde

As Niva Prian’s brilliant scholarly work shows us after decades of research our BODY is in fact our MIND. There is no distinction.

Once we see this we can do whatever we want with it.

We can even do another before and after if we intended to get into the best shape of our lives but it won’t feel ultimate or desperate like our very lives depend on it. When we stop caring so much and detach from the end results and just enjoy this moment and the process of creating our lives one fully embodied breath at a time. In the present moment which is all any of us even really have.

Once we are free we can begin to transform our business empires in new directions by no longer feeding the fear or the beauty myth, but by doing good in the world in service of our gifts and aligning with nature and our true nature.

I see you in your true beauty.

In your right to be. As you are manifesting opportunities to share your authentic gifts with the world.

Tomorrow morning before you “put on your face”, or before you step on the scale take a breath and decide whether or not today will be the day you trust yourself and listen to the soft animal of your body and give her what she (or he, or it, or they:) need.

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.

Don’t wait another moment to be yourself.

Not everyone in the world understands yet that none of us are ugly, but they will.

That’s the real myth that we can stop buying when we’re ready.

Thank you fat and weight struggles for showing me this deeper truth and for allowing me to have this platform to share it with others.

I pray that no matter where we are, even if we are still secretly holding on to that Playboy bunny image fantasy for ourselves that we also begin to embrace our inner velveteen rabbit.

One thing is for sure none of us are dumb bunnies and if I can see this, it won’t be long before others do to.

Change is coming.

With love,

Nona