“Frankly it wasn’t satisfying- I wanted something bad for me, mainly because then I could focus on being sick rather than feeling like my world was falling apart. Binging on bad foods vs cucumbers and grapes.”
Grief and loss hits us so hard. It can feel like a complete dissolution of self as we navigate (or don’t) a new experience of being in the world without someone or something that greatly impacted us. All too often, we don’t grieve or don’t complete the grieving process and restore our sense of self post-change or loss and the effect can devastate our physical and emotional health. If you are dealing with a health issue that won’t lift or emotional turmoil that won’t resolve, you may have unprocessed grief holding you back.
One of my favorite quotes is by Robert Heller, which is “Fear is excitement without breath” which simply means that the experience of fear and the experience of excitement are almost exactly the same. The only thing that separates them is mindfulness around the experiences. When we are excited and forget to breathe deep into the experience our excitement can turn into fear. Likewise, when we are scared about something, if we can be present with our feelings and breathe into the experience, our fear can turn into excitement.