Your Compulsions Can Heal You!

During this holiday time are your compulsions more present? Maybe it’s the compulsion to stay busy, or to eat a lot of Christmas cookies, or to go to Starbucks numerous times for peppermint mochas or buy lots of alcohol.  From one view, it can be very scary to see how compulsive we have all become. Over 68,000 people died last year from opioid overdoses in the US and even though for decades we have tried endless diets, we are heavier than we ever have been.

It isn’t only food, alcohol and drugs where compulsions are evident. You can be compulsive about most anything, all the way from busyness, to biting your fingernails, to OCD, to screen time, to shopping.  And the only way we know how to be with our compulsions is trying to control them, but what we try to control, controls us.

There is another way to work with compulsions. Rather than problems to be solved, they can become teachers to be listened to, for compulsions will not be healed through trying to manage them. Shift your perception just a bit and you begin to see that as you learn how to listen, they will show you how to move beyond struggling with life so that you can engage with it, rediscovering the joy of being present for life!

Everything I share comes from the living experience. I once gained 97 pounds in a year. Can you imagine how much eating that was on a daily basis? Actually, it was more like stuffing than eating. I was also washing a lot of that food down with alcohol and taking every drug I could get my hands on. Why would I do that?  Because I was trying to get far away from what I was experiencing because I didn’t know how to be with myself. My compulsions would stuff my pain deep inside for a short while, only to amplify it in the end.

When I was told that if I didn’t stop eating wheat, I would severely challenge my health, rebellion took over and I ate more wheat in the next two years than I had in the last 10 years combined. The struggle during those years was excruciating. I hated myself for being so rebellious, and I was terrified that I would never get out of this huge abyss of struggle.

But like a soft, sweet breeze on a hot summer day, I began to recognize that I wasn’t a weak-willed ninny for not having been able to control myself. I saw that control didn’t work! I also saw that they were like a lumbering beast on automatic pilot and even if I was able to control them for a while, they would come back with a vengeance. This is when my relationship with my compulsions began to change.

Slowly, as I learned how to listen to my compulsions rather than trying to control them, the need for alcohol and drugs faded away and my body slowly let go of the extra weight. I now eat whatever I want to eat because I eat out of kindness and my body has stayed the same basic weight for many years.

It takes a while to discover the art of connecting and listening to your compulsions rather than trying to control them. But it is so worth the effort. Healing the compulsive one inside of me has brought forth spaciousness, an open heart and the pure joy of being alive.

Imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you saw that your compulsions are not here because you are doing something wrong or life is punishing you or you are just a weak willed ninny. They are here to heal you to your core. They are an ally and friend on your path back to yourself, and the joy of being fully alive.

If you are in intrigued, I invite you to be a part of my online course, Being Healed by Our Compulsions starting January 29th. Currently priced $100 off.  If want to know more about the course, I invite you to register for my free webinar: Our Compulsions as Our Guide Back to Joy. Come explore how your compulsion can become a guide back into ease and joy on January 15th, 5:30 p.m. PST.

If it isn’t time for you to do the course, CLICK HERE the introduction and the first chapter from my book The Gift of Our Compulsions. May it help you to see that you are not bad or wrong for being compulsive. Instead, your compulsions are here to guide you out of the world of struggle and back into the joy of being fully alive.