The Healing of Weight Gain

With great trepidation, I reached for the bag of summer clothes nestled on the top shelf in my closet. I was aware I have been gaining weight for the first time since I started awakening many decades ago. The weight gain came from the chemotherapy I am on, coupled with being less active because of the fatigue that chemo and cancer brought in their wake.

When I was growing up, being overweight was a very predominant and painful experience in my life. I grew up in a family of tall and slender people, sharing a bedroom with an older sister who modeled for Nordstroms. And I gained and lost and gained and lost hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

As I learned how to listen and respect my overeating as a finely tuned survival system that I needed in order to survive a traumatic family, my weight began to let go. And I documented all of this in my book The Gift of Our Compulsions. But I hadn’t weighed myself for years because the scale was such a cruel dictator to my young and vulnerable self.

With a deep breath, I pulled on a pair of pants, and they no longer fit. A wave of self-revulsion overtook me so strongly that I had no space around it for hours. I felt this self-hate from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I was barely able to come out of it as I went to sleep that night and I asked, with deep sincerity, “Life, what are you showing me here?”

The reason why I asked the question is that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, my life isn’t happening to me. Instead, it is happening for me. As I said in my book What’s in the Way is the Way, “Life is set up, to bring up, what has been bound up, in order to open up, to be freed up, so you can show up for life.”  In other words, life will put us in situations to bring up what we had to stuff deep inside when we were growing up so it can be given the space to simply be here and be healed under the gaze of our loving attention.

When children are bruised and battered by life, they assume responsibility. They believe they are the ones to blame, and this is superfood for the inner critic. I have done a lot to heal my inner critic who at one time convinced me that I was so worthless I didn’t even deserve to live. And now, when it starts talking in my head, I say hello, tickle it under its chin and continue on with my life. But what I hadn’t ever truly met was a wordless judgment that felt like liquid self-hate in every nook and cranny of my body.

When I woke up the next morning, the liquid self-hate was there, feeling like it was engulfing my life. I didn’t want to get out of bed, which is very unusual for me. And when I did, walking was painful because it felt like I had gained 40 pounds overnight. I also didn’t want to meditate, which I can’t remember happening for decades. But as I sat, my inner world pinging around like an out-of-control pinball machine, I slowly found my breath and recognize its nourishing rhythm.

Of course, the chaos in my mind, body, and heart would grab my attention over and over again but I gently and firmly brought it back to my breath and like a bank of dark clouds moving away to the horizon, I began to become curious about what I was experiencing.

It was such a revelation to simply sit with liquid self-hate, feeling it all over my body and recognizing that this is what I felt as I was growing up. This is what led to breaking my own arm and three suicide attempts. As my heart opened to this energy that had been stuck inside of me all those years ago, I felt great joy in being able to be present for something that almost destroyed my life.

But I knew, as soon as I open my eyes and continued on with my day, this liquid self-hate could take over again. So again, with great sincerity, I asked life, “What are you showing me here?” For a few minutes, there was just stillness and breath. And then arising out of the depths came this statement, “This is the summer of Lynn.”

What did this mean? When I was growing up, I was known by my middle name, Lynn and then when I was 31, I changed it to my first name, Mary and my whole life changed. Lynn knew the agony of liquid self-hate and I knew this summer was an opportunity to meet her. So every time I feel the liquid self-hate arising, whether it was from putting on a piece of clothing or just walking around my life, I would remember this is life showing me Lynn’s world and for the first time ever she was not alone. A few minutes before I was contracted in agony and now, I was opening into heart-nourishing joy.

This is not a quick fix, but as far as I can see, it is the way out of the world of struggle most people live in most of the time.  This weight gain has reminded me that all lasting healing happens in our hearts!

It still continues to be intense and there is the fear of gaining more weight because I have the kind of cancer that doesn’t go away, and I have to take chemo for the rest of my life if I want to live. But I have the choice to react to it or to respond. And of course, I do react, but that very quickly brings me back to the response of my heart and the deep gratitude of being able to fully experience what Lynn went through all those years ago so she can let go, feeling loved, and accepted exactly as she is.