RE-FEEDING (Part II)

WHAT IT IS-THE SOUL-AND HUNGRY GHOSTS

Re-feeding is a term used in the treatment of malnutrition, most specifically in the case of malnutrition due to an eating disorder. It is the main goal of residential inpatient care to feed the body with egregious amounts of (typically highly processed) food until vital signs are restored and stabilized according to the metrics put in place by the metric makers (you know what I mean).

There is value in this process when the body is starved to the point where any substance, with even faint amounts of nutrition, will help the body feel safe enough to begin receiving and assimilating again. At this point, and only for a short time, the body doesn’t care.

I recall the movie 127 Hours where the rock climber had to cut off his hand in order to climb out of the canyon he was trapped in. The first thing he did upon freeing himself was fall to his knees at a mud puddle and slurp up any liquid he could get into his body. Didn’t die from it. If he continued to do that- could die from it.

Unfortunately, in these facilities the body is mostly relegated to the intelligence of a machine that has no preferences- a banana and a handful of banana flavored jelly beans carry the same value according to this system. True story.

What I witnessed during my stay in “res”, what my fellow inmates and I called residential inpatient care, is that the re-feeding process fell gravely short of being able to provide the whole human with what it needed to heal. “Cope, live another day in some slumbering stupor of almost ok”- should have been the motto.

These *facilities are designed to get the individual back up and running (well more like mindfully walking if the hand in hand exercise addiction is present), they do have value as a stop-gap.

However, there is only a 50% recovery rate for all anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorders. And, what the system deems “recovery” is not clear, or is typically defined as an absence of physical self harm and stabilization of adequate body weight.

This to me is not re-feeding nor is it what I consider recovered or healing.

This begs into question- what is healing? Who determines?

My views and meaning makings comes from my own lived experiences. The healing journey is subjective and will take the shape of the each soul’s unique path and purpose, karmas and personal history.

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MY HEALING

The healing I speak of is not a recovery from a flu or a broken toe, unless either are tied to a chronic malady. It is not a bundle of coping skills that keep us barely buoyant in poisonous waters, although tools are necessary.

Healing is also not some idealized bio hack, life hack expert’s picture of perfection, or the achievement of some static state where Life never touches us again. Although the body may feel better- which is so good, we want that-does the trend or treatment include the soul? Does it consider the heart? Does it take into account long term, holistic impact?

~Simply put, healing is a return to living with Love a the center of our lives and resting into a relationship with Life’s rhythms that begets peace in the heart and mind.

It is an understanding that we don’t address the long term ailments of the body without addressing the soul, and the soul is God’s territory.

Healing is holistic and spirals out from my center to all of creation. It does not deplete other ares of life. It often requires resources, but not depletion. Healing will drive me to consume less, not more.

Most importantly healing is the ability to love what is. To see the field from a view point that helps us spot the blessing in the mess and preach our humanity from a pulpit of vulnerability that slices away all shame, judgement and alienation of the less than beautiful parts of us that we ALL share.

This will connect the psyche to an expanded understanding of healing, timelines, interdependence, soul purpose and belonging. A soul longing trust in something mysteriously powerful behind the makings of our lives is birthed from this, often momentary, flash of clarity. That flash is strong enough to re-feed, re-seed faith in an inviolable beauty at the center of all things.

Ultimately, the narrowed vision of the mind expands to see an endless path that winds through time where what is needed, when it’s needed, no more and no less is provided for the journey in a way that serves the soul’s return to Love.

Exhale.

Let go, 
step forward, 
hold your breath, 
get handed what you need for the next, 
build more trust, exhale- 
repeat until there is no more trying to hold back the tide.  

Re-feeding at this level is vital for full recovery as it lays the framework for transformation. In the case of deeply embedded illnesses and addictions, societal and personal, transformation is the healing.

Change must occur; an arduous dedication to dying to the old for new life, for new pathways of potential to seed themselves. The soil must be turned over.

The flower wasn’t growing in the barren landscapes that created the disease. To rehabilitate someone back to how they were, or how everyone around them is, or how they are supposed to be, often does not work. This potentiates the “there must be something wrong with me” and continues to bypass the root cause, which few, including the rehabilitation centers, want to look at.

Short story: I was a challenge in rehab. I was pinned as a rebel. Towards the end of my stay I rejected another snack package of highly processed cookies presented to me by the lead dietician as “a recovery challenge”. “Do you see this as a bad food, are you afraid to eat it?”

“No. One snack pack of crap cookies isn’t going to touch me, but compromising my virtues will. The reason I won't eat that is because the very reason that poor, life sucking excuse for food exists stems from the same place that created the eating disorder.

She just walked away.

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RE-FEEDING

Re-feeding is a process that peels the layers back to trust in the knowing that everything I need for my journey here on Earth will be provided to me. That I am unconditionally loved and supported by that Love.

Re-feeding is choosing, the best I can, to ingest, turn towards and align with what has sustained every death and birth cycle, Gaia has endured upon her body, and contains the wisdom of transformation. I seed my life with the wisdom that knows which way Life is meant to go for the greatest and highest good of ALL life.

Re-feeding is re-establishing, and daily cultivating, a relationship with the sacred.

Re-feeding is a remembering the lexicon of praise- my prayer, my intimate conversation with the Divine, the soul language that guides me home. Sacred language awakens latent, innate memories of belonging to a wider family of support and providence.

Re-feeding heals the Mother wound through restoring the laws of reciprocity in the hearts of humanity again.

THE PROCESS

This process is not relegated to clinically diagnosed eating disorders or addictions as the majority of the population is in multi- layered malnourishment, confronts disordered eating daily and habits that deplete rather than restore life force.

These, for me, are the three main layers of re-feeding, which have many nuances depending on the individual cosmology, life history and current circumstances.

The entry to re-feeding begins with awareness of what is needing to be re-fed, what is starving and why, as in my personal share in Re-feeding part I. I had to confront the hungry ghosts. This layer requires spiritual support, therapeutic processes and various healing modalities that address trauma and the preferred patterns in the mind/body.

We then turn to the manna for our physical bodies- food. How we eat is as important as what we eat. Food can teach us about what drives our choices and impulses in all areas of life as well as how we give and receive or receive and release. There will much more on this.

The next layer is re-feeding ourselves with less stuff, distractions etc, so that we have more of what sustains us. We re-feed with emptiness.

If we consume more than we need, or what is provided for OUR journey, we create a ripple of scarcity somewhere else that keeps bouncing back to us. The way we have conditioned ourselves not to feel the ripple of that woman crying on her knees as her children starve in her arms in some land far away, is to consume more in some heinous, fear driven belief that more stuff is the remedy to becoming her.

We fear the emptiness, the less-ness, because it opens us up to feel more.

Even if we can’t see her, her face is all around us in the dying off of so much life under the piles of too much stuff, we hear her cries in the dark disturbances that haunt our sleepless nights and in the blood shot eyes of the daughters who just pulled their heads out of toilet.

We cannot enter heaven with too much. And we cannot enter heaven without her.

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BLESSED BE and THANK YOU FOR CONSIDERING A PAID SUBSCRIPTION. IT FEEDS ME. FOR THE PRICE OF ONE CUP OF BOUGIE COFFEE…

AND PLEASE SHARE, LIKE OR COMMENT BELOW AS IT HELPS THESE WORDS TAKE FLIGHT.

LOVE, SHIRA

*The angels who work in our rehabilitation centers are doing an amazing job, the best they can with the tools they are allowed to utilize, with a population that has the highest mortality rate of all mental illness and addiction. I bow to what is good within the walls of rehab centers and the many loving hands who help those who pass through them.