Hunger and Healing
I just devoured a giant salad for lunch. With the activity level of my life, I do a lot of gleeful devouring of food. It’s very natural to me to devour food gleefully at this point in my life. It wasn’t always.
I started my 15-year relationship with eating disorders at 13. It didn’t actually begin with what I wanted to look like. It began with a repulsion of my own hunger. I was sexually abused from the age of 8 until I was 11. Needless to say, this distorted my relationship with my body. I had felt betrayed by some of my body’s responses to my abuse and I became mortified about anyone seeing me hungry or wanting anything sensual. That included crushes and showing people I wanted to be friends with that I wanted to connect with them; or trying hard for things I wanted to accomplish. To be seen wanting was to be vulnerable. I even became unable to speak, especially in social situations.
Of course, I didn’t have the words for this then. I just knew I felt mortified when I pulled out the lunch my mother had lovingly packed for me, felt the yearning to eat it, and then realized others would be watching me. And I would put it in the trash. People would ask me why. “I just don’t need to eat like other people,” I would say. This would be translated by others as “being on a diet,” or “staying pretty.” So that became a filter I could use, and eventually part of my identity.
Part of my current life conflict is being in a situation in which I have regular contact with someone who is not safe for me. I have spent a large part of my life in unsafe situations, one way or another. What I’ve begun to unwind over the last few years is that along with my hunger, I learned to disregard my self-protective instincts in order to talk myself into being polite. And re-created over and over again a state of deep freeze.
Learning to unfreeze and feel my hunger began with my first pregnancy. I was ravenous for meat. (I had been a vegan and my body changed it’s mind rather passionately.) I knew that my instincts to eat were good. I had no desire to stop myself. I gained a lot of weight (60 pounds). My midwives never shamed me, they made me feel beautiful and strong. Same with my second pregnancy.
A few years after my second child was born, my body collapsed. I seemed to have virtually no metabolism. My energy was incredibly low, and I struggled with depressive episodes that made it hard to function. With the help of my doctor, we found that I had subclinical hypothyroidism and that my adrenal glands were burnt out. I was carrying weight that made me uncomfortable, despite my advanced yoga practice and extremely healthy, whole foods-based eating.
My doctor was of enormous help. But what I really had to come to terms with was the way my chronic neglect of my hungers- for food, for sensuality and sex, for creativity and connection- had put my drive to move towards life into a place of being frozen over. I had been talking myself out of my instincts for so long I couldn’t hear them anymore.
To heal my body, I had to come to a deep standstill. For a few months, my practice was almost exclusively restorative poses (supported poses adapted by the Iyengar tradition to balance the nervous system.) And I ate. My body wanted more food, not less.
Miraculously, despite going against the common thinking that less food and more burning of calories would lead to weight loss, my body started to balance by itself. I know now that my body could not build muscle if I never moved out of panic. Freeze is panic that does not move. When I started to harness the power of relaxation and the instinctive body wisdom I could then hear, I started to bring myself into balance on many levels.
Body weight is not an indicator of health. But metabolism in terms of energy intake and out take is. This is what started to shift. The thing is as I came out of freeze, I became hungry for life again. And I had to hear a lot of the more complicated and difficult messages my body had been trying to send. While it is true that my body shed 50 pounds, without much effort; and recreated a body healthier, stronger, and more energized in my 40s than I had ever been able to starve myself into in my 20s, this was for once unimportant. My body was alive and talking. It was grieving the years we had lost. It was hungry to touch and embrace life. It wanted to give and receive.
Those cycles were as frozen in my life as they had been in my body. My body, now in motion, felt as though it had woken up in a freeze frame. It began to un-thaw. I had to let its desires and hungers into my life if I didn’t want to be sick again. I reached out and found creative and personal connection. I left my marriage. I moved on a tide of unfrozen movement into the most illuminating, challenging, and rewarding period of my life.
Not all of it is easy. Some of it is downright hard. But it is alive. And when I start to freeze, I look first to my body’s signals. I look for the hunger, where it comes from, what it means. And when I find the centerpoint of that impulse, I can act.
Recently I had my first real “fight” response to a threat. A person came into my yard who should not have been there and for the first time I felt in every inch of my body: “if I need to. My will is strong, and if I direct that into every inch of my body, I will come out just fine.”
I questioned at first if that was ok to feel. Was I responding inappropriately? Shouldn’t I be “nicer?” After kicking up into a few handstands and then quieting myself down so I could listen, I realized that that was one of the first healthy sympathetic nervous system responses I have ever had.
Since that episode, I have been able to navigate my nervous system, despite some pretty high-level stressors, with more and more ease. A heathy nervous system is adaptable, responsive and fluid. It has the freedom to go on and off. Just like the heart rate, it is made to vary- fixed patterns are signs of imbalance. I may have little control over some of my circumstances but when I listen to, accept, and move with my instincts, I can harness the full power of my body system to live fully, give and receive love, and understand my hungers as the crucial drives in me to express, embrace, and exude the life I have been so blessed with.
As I write this, I am waiting to meet to discuss my practicum on working with people who have experienced domestic and/or sexual violence. I will start my collaborative class with therapist Jennifer Kollasch on Yoga for Healing Trauma this weekend. I’ve been approached to consult on programs for eating disorders and managing traumatic stress in a workplace impacted by our government’s inhumane immigration policies separating children from their parents. For me, this work is crucial to share in part because it is about the human capacity of resilience. We need to know this part of ourselves right now, and our impulses to survive are in the healthy nurture of our hungers, and in the way we are created to mirror each others emotions (mirror neurons tell us we cannot be free while others suffer. The hunger of “the other “ is ours. The suffering of another is ours).
On one day, when I was finalizing plans to propose my workshop for healing trauma, I came across this quote twice; first in reading Peter Levine’s Healing Trauma; and a few hours later reading Stephen Cope’s The Great Work of Your Life (on dharma and the Bhagavad Gita):
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas
I have not read the gospels. I don’t subscribe personally to Christianity. But seeing these words helped me understand both the momentary impulse to flee and my deeper hunger to do the work. This is what is within me, this is what I am responsible for bringing forth. This is the place my hunger has led me to.
So often we are given the message – by others and by ourselves-that our hungers are to be overcome. But hunger is the life in you wanting to live, the desire to have the energy to live. Hunger, as one of the body’s many ways of talking, is a messenger. It tells you that the vulnerability of having the capacity to want is a beautiful place to be.
copyright 2018 Deborah King
Photo Credit: Norman King