dailydatewithgod

Feelings are a funny thing.  As someone who has always felt them very strongly they can be overwhelming.  I often had the sense that I had to do something with them.  Perhaps it was just get them out of me. As a child I was accused of being overly dramatic.  I was compared to a silent movie star named Sarah Bernhardt who was very dramatic.  I took that to mean I needed to keep it locked down.  There was no room for my big emotions.  At least that was the implied meaning.  Feelings and thoughts have energy.  We are made of energy.  What we do not process in our minds, goes into our bodies. My body was clearly carrying a lot of thoughts and feelings at over 300 lbs.  It was only when I stopped using food that I began to experience the ones I had managed to shut down completely.  I also found that my body seemed to have held on to them as if it was waiting for an opportunity to release.  In recovery, I learned how to engage in my thoughts and feelings without being a victim of them.  It is a life long process and I presume I will keep learning until I die.  My first modus operandi was to make the feelings wrong, push them down and then eat over them.  The space between the feeling and the eating was long enough that I never would describe myself as an emotional eater.  The truth of the matter was that by the time I got into recovery I was way more than an emotional eater.  I had taken it to a destructive level.  One of the many gifts of not destroying myself with food is a renewed relationship with my feelings.  They may be uncomfortable or unknown, but if I don’t hurt myself over them I can pay attention to what they are indicating.  Feelings stir within us thoughts, more feelings, and can propel us into action.  Developing a daily relationship with God gives me a space to pay attention and evaluate those stirrings.  Are they coming from a belief system, a person, or a previous experience? Are the stirrings based in reality or fantasy?  Are the stirrings something I just ride the wave of or do something about? Are the stirrings coming from me, another person, or from God?  Any and all of the possibilities that can exist in a particular moment are a lot to process.  I need God’s help with that.  My part is to not judge the feelings that are getting stirred, but identify and accept.  Only then can I align the stirrings with my mind and heart to determine if there is any action to take.  I recognize the stirrings as simply indications of energy moving within me.  For someone who spent her life making her feelings and her body wrong, it has been quite a process of restoration and it happens with God’s help one day at a time.