Soul-surgery

Hello, my name is Anna. And, I am a compulsive overeater.

A lot happened in the months leading up to my first Overeaters Anonymous meeting. The pervious summer, I had uprooted my life in Wisconsin and moved to Belgium to live with my then Belgian-boyfriend. Less than six weeks after I had moved, we broke up. Subsequently, I traveled in a sort of foggy, emotional haze through Europe in the weeks that followed – I visited close friends, I hiked, I cried, I slept and I listened to personal development CDs, all of which, cumulatively, became my way of nursing my ego and mending my bruised and broken heart. In September, when I moved back to the states, I decided to get my 200-hour yoga teacher certification, invested $4000+, and sequestered myself in the Colorado mountains for a 21-day intensive training. Of course, the healing process only continued.

During my time in Colorado the following month, I had a lot of time to self-reflect. I spent countless hours in meditation, doing yoga, and venturing out on solo explorations through the mountains. And, it gave me a lot of time to think. It also brought up a lot of questions. Most of my questions boiled down to: How do I make it stop? The pain. The confusion. The ugly, shrill voice that won't shut-up inside my head. There nothing quite like a breakup to encourage you to fully examine your own self-worth. This is especially true when you discover a pattern of having placed so much of your worthiness and self-love into the hands of another human, constantly waiting and hoping for them to validate and affirm that you are desired, wanted, and loved. Then, when you are cut off from said human, it's natural to experience feelings of despair, hopelessness and self-piety. When those feelings of inadequacy become unbearably strong, it's no wonder so many people turn to addictive substances or unhealthy behaviors to quiet or numb the rejection and fear that become our emotional aftermath.

While I will not deny slipping into bouts of compulsive overeating during that period, it was then that I began to realize the power of really feeling those feelings, not numbing them. I started to recognizing that there is a message, a lesson beyond the pain and confusion I was experiencing. And, even if I didn't know exactly what that message was yet, it was there. It was within reach. There was a part of me that knew, deep down, that feeding the hungry bellies of the creatures that dwelled within my mind was only a temporary patch. The message I was looking for required some hard core, soul-surgery. The answers to the questions I kept asking was within me. The real question then became: Am I prepared to dig deeper?