I know how deeply spiritually connected we are, so I decided to share this with you first.
I’m celebrating 40 years of abstinence from something that could have easily killed me.
It’s an eating disorder called Bulimia.
I started this behavior when I was a 20-something young woman in my first marriage, with a toddler, during a life-changing, unsettling time… especially for me coming out of a very conventional, sheltered life.
My husband and our toddler daughter had moved from our hometown… and it was 1970… we had moved to the Washington DC area. Culturally, everything was changing… and some things actually seemed upside down! And for this sensitive, empathetic, intuitive young woman, it really threw me off course and left me very ungrounded. Of course, later, looking back at my soul’s trajectory, I realized this was an experience I needed to have to become the person I was meant to be in this lifetime. But what a major energetic upheaval!!
We settled in. We started making new friends, but I remember thinking once when I went to the grocery store, “I’m not going to run into even one person that I know! This is not my neighborhood. This is all new.” So my next thoughts might sound strange to you, but here’s what they were… “Nobody’s going to be judging me. Nobody knows me. I’m free to be who I am. Nobody expects anything from me.”
Truthfully, when I look back on that time, I realize that one of the things that freed me to become the person I was meant to become was moving out of my hometown where everybody knew me and judged me… at least it felt that way… like I was being judged. I know I could not have become the woman that I ultimately evolved into without the freedom that those thoughts expressed. I hope you understand how important that shift was for me.
So, the bulimia began…and persisted in secret, as many addictive behaviors tend to do. At a later time in my life… still bulimic… I was participating in a very powerful psychotherapy training group. And when I arrived at the group that particular morning, someone quietly announced that a woman we all knew as a member of the psychotherapy community had died the night before.
It was publicly known that she had an eating disorder, and she died due to a ruptured esophagus, caused by her last bulimic purge.
Moments later, I grabbed the hands of two close friends on either side of me, took a deep breath, and said out loud, “I am bulimic, and I will never purge again; you are my witnesses.”
Shortly before this, I had met the man who clearly would be… and still is… over 40 years later, the true love of my life. I vowed to myself and to him that there would be no secrecy in our relationship. And so I shared with him about my eating disorder and my decision to abstain from it. And I shared with him how hard I was praying… how I was asking God for a miracle to remove these two habits from my life and from my person…
Because truthfully, otherwise, it felt impossible to release these habits. All these decades later, I do understand that what I was doing energetically was aligning myself with the version of me that was free of both of these habits. This is what I teach in my “Art of Miracles” work, and that is exactly what I did on an unconscious level.
At the same time, I made a promise to myself that I would also release a habit of smoking cigarettes, which had started when I was 15 years old, and so it had endured for 25 years.
I was awaiting a visit from one of my dearest friends. And I promised myself that at the end of her week-long visit, smoking and bulimia, either of which could have killed me, would be over, done, history.
Both of these habits were what I came to call “lifted”, which means I experienced no struggle, there was no craving, there was no difficulty, there was no suffering. They were simply gone from my life, my personality, and from my energy field. Gone within a day.
To say that I am grateful would be an understatement because 40+ years later, I am still in awe of what to me felt like a miracle.
For those who are still suffering from a disorder, a habit, an addiction, a compulsion that is, or could be detrimental or deadly to you and your life, I hope that this inspires you to ask for help, to turn to the divine in whatever way you understand that, and to trust in the power of prayer.
Know that you are worthy of a miracle. Know that you are worthy of your prayers being answered. Know that you are worthy of being understood, helped, and supported.
I humbly share this account with you… And I am here to support you if you are, or have been, in a similar life experience.
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