Introducing Kindness
I was fourteen when I first started dieting.
I was self-conscious about my size from a young age and the emergence of social media encouraged my beliefs. I believed myself to be huge compared to my friends even while at a healthy weight. So I avoided; I tried to not think about what I was eating or how my thighs looked compared to my friends. But guilt and shame gnawed away at my resolve until food became a judgement and pleasure was a condemnation.
I spent the next eight years jumping back and forth between “clean eating” and eating whatever I could get my hands on. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” “In six weeks, you’ll see it.” I listened to all the mantras, convincing myself more and more that I was overweight, unhealthy, and out of control and just needed to get it together.
At 21, I worked out that I likely had an eating disorder but it didn’t seem like a big deal; I could figure it out on my own.
I couldn’t.
I made steady progress with a nutritionist; still, something was missing. What is it? I wondered. The world taught me everything I needed to know about self-improvement and self-control. “Good qualities,” you might remark. But as I progressed forward, I wondered what self-improvement really meant if it lacked love? Without love, what is self-control? What were any of my greatest strivings worth when they came from self-loathing and not from love?
Nourishing my body with food is a good, but without love, it became an eating disorder. Self-improvement created undying discontentment with myself. Self-control turned into self-punishment. These hidden self-denials of pleasure and enjoyment all served to make myself lovable, beautiful, and good (or so I thought), and I flaunted these crucifixions as “self-control,” and “self-mastery,” the makings of a Saint.
My would would rebel, “Love me! Stop rejecting me! Stop telling me I need to be better! Stop telling me I can’t be loved as I am! Stop telling me all the ways to improve or fix myself! Let me be!” Yet I rejected the desire for love as another flaw to vanquish from my heart. I need nothing.
But kindness, gentleness, and patience knocked at my door ever so persistently. Kindness had called my name, wanting so desperately to befriend my aching heart.
Let me introduce her to you.
Kindness speaks in whispers, into the discomfort, into the judgments we place on ourselves. Where we see imperfection, failure, sinfulness, kindness whispers back, “Will you let me love you there?” Kindness implores us to listen to her as if our life depended on it because it does; our quality of life is dependent on the love we allow in our lives, not just by the love we give others. The Holy Spirit is a movement of love and it speaks to us,
“You are good and nothing you do can tarnish your innate goodness.”
“For you love all things that are and loathe nothing you have made; for you would not fashion what you hate. How could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you? But you spare all things, because they are yours, O Ruler and Lover of souls” (Wisdom 11:24-26).
So why start this by telling my story of recovering from an eating disorder?
Because how we nourish (or don’t nourish) the body tells us what we believe about ourselves. Do you allow yourself to enjoy food? Do you feed your body when it’s hungry or do you ignore it because it’s inconvenient or burdensome? Do you punish your body for liking sweets by never delighting in them or shaming yourself when you do? Do you allow yourself to take the last serving of something when you’re still hungry or do you fear being seen as selfish or as taking up too much space? Are your rules really about feeling good in your body or is it an attempt at controlling others judgement of you?
These are just some of the questions I’ve asked myself.
But what if, what if food became about nourishment and delight? What if my food choices didn’t determine whether or not I am good? What if I listened to my hunger and ate when my body was asking to but also listened to when I feel full so my body doesn’t sit in discomfort for the next several hours?
What if food became a practice of kindness, of fully inhabiting my body, and delighting in the genuine pleasure of food?
I learned more about my body being a temple of the Holy Spirit from embracing enjoyment than I did from any spiritual reading. This simple act of kindness in feeding my body overflowed into every area of my life, into how I approach chores, what kind of movement I add to my day, what boundaries I set, even how I come to prayer. It sets the tone for how I treat myself when I’m not eating and in turn how I treat others.
For when we cease cursing the body, our soul is freed to inhabit every ounce of space it occupies in this world. We are free to be who we are with unrelenting acceptance; no part of us is alienated or abandoned. The God of creation, the God of Love, uses this embrace of our whole selves to infuse his love into every fiber of our being, working miracles and creating abundance in the lives of his children in whom he delights.
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