The Yoga of Food by Melissa Grabau

Author:Melissa Grabau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: body mind spirit, body mind soul, yoga, body issue, body issues, wellness, self help, self-help, eating disorder, holistic
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2014-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Energy of Identity

Cindy, whom you met in the section on Core Body Beliefs in chapter 3, came from a home with a physically and emotionally abusive father and a passive mother. Her mother was unable/unwilling to protect Cindy from her father’s unpredictable outbursts. Then in her late teens, Cindy experienced a significant cycling accident which caused her to be hospitalized and in rehabilitation for several months. These traumatic experiences coalesced to form Cindy’s view of the world as an unsafe place where she had little power to protect herself. Learned helplessness is a concept from cognitive behavioral psychology that describes the impact traumatic experiences have on a person’s sense of self-efficacy, which is another term from cognitive behavioral psychology, referring to a person’s perception of his or her ability to effect change in the world. When you are exposed to traumatic situations in which you are powerless to protect yourself, you learn that you are helpless. Consequently, you do not attempt to improve your plight when conditions change and you can impact a situation. Your “story,” meaning the way that you link meaning to the events, is that you are helpless. Your identity supports this story and you unwittingly support a victimized plot line.

During her psychotherapy experience, it became apparent to me that Cindy filtered her experiences through the lens of being a victim. Though “true” in her early life, this framework now resulted in her negating her ability to effect positive change in her life. Cindy has a binge-eating problem. She re-creates the “story” of being a victim by allowing the impulse to eat and the rhythm of the binge to overpower her, again and again, giving up her power of choice and reinforcing the story of her victimization and powerlessness. Her relationship to food and her weight are just one expression of passivity in her life. Things happen to her, rather than being chosen, or co-created, by her. Her marriage, her job, her home, her body all are unsatisfactory things that she feels powerless to change. The energetic quality underneath her storyline of being a victim is a weak, collapsed pattern that she repetitively re-creates in a food binge.

Who you think you are carries a distinct energy. It has an energetic hold on you that makes it very easy, in fact at times irresistible, to keep doing the same things over and over. We create and re-create ourselves everyday. And there is an energetic force that keeps us stuck in creating the self that we may want to desperately change. These are our samskaras, or habitual patterns. The yoga of food is so powerful because if you believe that “you are what you eat,” then changing what you eat gives you immediate power to begin re-creating who you are. Pretty exciting stuff! However, changing the “stuff” of your body also involves bumping up against the energy of your current identity. The hard part is that you must be very patient with this process because your current identity isn’t going to want to let go.

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