Inside Out

I saw Inside Out yesterday afternoon with my girls.  I had really been looking forward to it as the movie is about emotions.   Yes, emotions! The characters names are emotions!! Really.   How much more could this appeal to me?  The central character was an eleven year old named Riley.  

Seriously! 

 I laughed, and I felt like I had to cry but couldn't.  I still feel blocked up about that.  I have been studying emotions for the better part of my entire life.  I've always been an observer.  Getting a Masters' degree in Counseling was just the beginning of my formal training.  I'm sure that it began earlier than that, in childhood.  Now, the last 7-8 years I've really been concentrating by using therapy, life occurrences and a passion to understand feelings.  Infertility and postpartum depression blew me away.   I felt so lost and alone.   Therapy helped me to begin to understand what was going on and to heal. 

Along the way, these are the issues that I have delved into head first:  dieting and exercise, eating disorders, compulsions, codependency, spirituality, religion, The Twelve Steps, mindfulness, perfectionism, self-esteem, forgiveness, acceptance, dying, and grief.  One has led into another and my life has opened up beyond measure.

But yet still I hide.  I feel like I hide. 

There are so many thoughts I have and I have spent so much time studying and learning, yet still I think I don't know enough.  I will always be a life long student but I do know some things.  I don't give myself enough credit.  

I am still afraid to tell what I really believe.  

I think one of the reasons that I do, is because I still label myself overweight in my head.  Because I have not attained perfection in my body size that discounts all of the thoughts in my head, my life experience, and the intensive study I have undertaken. 

So I still have low self esteem.  {chuckling}

I don't know what it is. But I feel like breaking out of this.   This coming school year I have less on my plate - less volunteering with things I felt I had to do.  There will still be volunteering just in another capacity - with less planning on my end.  I am currently feeling passionate about the following things: getting my house in order (clearing the way for a cleaner vision), practicing yoga, and planning time with my friends.  

Oh, and running a household and raising two daughters.  One being a teenager very, very soon.

I just can't sit around and wait for the phone to ring.  I have to get off my tuckus and initiate things myself.  

Here goes.

Namaste.

At Home In The Fringe

The Methodist church I attend has a Center for Spirituality (sounded so woo woo to me a few years ago, not so much anymore) and I have been moseying over during our Sunday School hour for the last few months. When I walk in and sit down with these ladies (and a man or two), I feel at home. Feeling at home is sacred to me now because I recognize it. Everything that is brought up and discussed is music to my ears. On a few Sundays, I was verklempt like therapy - like good group therapy which I have never done,  just studied about in my Masters classes. As I have been passionately pursuing all things healing for my inner self, attending this class has been an unexpected bonus, right in my own backyard.

The book we are currently reading is Richard Rohr's Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. I am fairly giddy aobut this topic. I attended a 2 day workshop of his last year and I sat transfixed to what he was saying...for six hours. I wrote about it at the time as THE best revival I had ever attended. And I have post traumatic stress from revivals I attended in my youth.

Father Rohr puts together ideas that do not seem to go together. As a Franciscan Priest, he is on the fringe of the Catholic church from what I'm told and barely hanging on and I like this about him. As you learn the deep truths of your life, your authentic self, being on the fringe is not the scary place that I thought it use to be. My faith is in a loving God and I feel his warmth all the time now and I don't live in fear of his retribution. And feeling that loving God up close and personal now makes me want to act in a loving manner towards the "least of these."

From the introduction of Breathing Under Water: "We cannot stop the drowning water of our addictive culture from rising, but we must a least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, and build 'a coral castle and learn to breathe under water.' The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the twelve step program called it recovery."

I embarked on a journey to find out why I couldn't lose weight and keep it off. I knew it was something deep, yet I had no idea in the process that I would embrace the concepts of codependency or Twelve Step ideas, and become closer to God.

Therapy led me closer to God!

I never would have put counseling therapy and God together because maybe no one I knew did it, or in my mind they were completely separate. Now I see God and the holy spirit everywhere, including in myself.

This is what healing is all about. Bring on the fringe. I feel so at home in the fringe.