Real eating disorder recovery is more about how you live than how you eat. Reasonable eating flows along with genuine recovery. To get there you need to recognize your challenges.
Here's a quote to put on your wall, on the cover of your journal and any other place that you see daily. It's more than a healing or inspiring message. It's a statement that describes what you can only accomplish in recovery It's the antithesis of how you live an eating disorder life.
"Stroll through the open spaces of time to the center of opportunity."
Let's look at what this means together.
In the jam cram, keep moving pace of an eating disorder dominated life, you can't stroll. Stroll, like meander, with no set agenda, no time demands, no specific task at hand, allows room for your mind and senses to be surprised and to discover.
Control is the operative word for eating disorders. You have to give up control to stroll.Through the open spaces ... that refers to room where anything could happen. It's room where you are vulnerable because you are only a small part of the vastness. This too means being vulnerable in a kind of way that is unbearable if you have an eating disorder.
Open spaces of time: again, no agenda, lots of room, no deadlines, no need to race to catch up or meet up... just open time as it is.
The center? Knowing what the center means is an incredible challenge if you have an eating disorder, especially if you are referring to your own center. That's the central hub of your being, where your honest feelings, beliefs, values, desires reside is blocked by all your eating disorder activities. hen you have an eating disorder you haves a ring of fear around your center. Your eating disorder numbs you to your fear, but by doing so, blocks you from your center.
And what's in the center? Opportunity, whatever that means for you. The center of opportunity, a place where you can discover and move toward fulfilling your true and authentic self in the ways that are meaningful to you.
So many eating disorder recovery challenges are condensed in this one line from Baltasar Gracian. When the day comes that you can live this sentence you will know that you are in real recovery.
Please share what it means to you. Have you had glimpses or experiences of any kind where you "stroll through the open spaces of time to the center of opportunity?"
If you'd like to further explore this view of real recovery, I invite you to look carefully at the photo above while reading the quote several times. Then journal about what comes up for you. You might get some surprising and helpful insights about yourself and what can do do to encourage more recovery effort in yourself.
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