Advice for those with eating disorders

I recently assisted a young woman who was dealing with an obsessive-compulsive eating disorder. The following are the words that I shared with her. I post them here in the chance they may help those who suffer in a similar way.

“ Before you eat breathe into your body to feel what is hungry in your body. Ask that place what it really wants. It is a place inside of you that you have forgotten to love. With your breath touch that place and bring gentleness and kindness to that place. Look at your [parents] and realize that you have ingested [their] voice inside of you and you eat to quiet that voice as a defense against being hurt. Instead of loving yourself you give power to the voice that asks you to seek yourself outside of your own center. You habitually dislocate yourself and eat to quiet the fear and anxiety you feel. Food will never quiet that voice.


The ingestion of food is a desperate attempt to quiet the terror of your own habitual abandonment of yourself. As I am sure you have experienced, you can loose yourself in food only for a few moments. Then the roar begins again. Food does not work to heal the basic dilemma. Only by rewiring consciously with nonjudgmental gentleness toward yourself will you quiet the crying pain of your inner fragmentation and abandonment.


Watch how over and over your desire for food overwhelms you each time you abandon yourself by seeking your answers outside of yourself. (Food, others, money, power. success, approval of others, manipulation of image). The abandoned being within does not need food… It needs your conscious love. It needs to be loved for no other reason than the fact that you are here. You need to pick that gentle part up in your arms like a mother would pick a crying baby up. For no other reason than the fact it is here and deserves attention because that is the way it is. Babies need love to live. We all need to be loved in purity but to get that we must first rewire and give that love to our self. FIRST FIRST FIRST

Print this out and read if each time you feel like eating and breath and search for real answers within.”