and Other Personal Tools for Liberation
How do you bounce back when life knocks you down? What do you do with the urge to binge-eat or drown your sorrows with alcohol? That’s what we’re taking on in this chapter.
The term “resilience” refers to the process of adapting in the face of stress, adversity, and trauma. This chapter helps you rewire your brain so that your first instinct to manage stress and challenging emotions is thoughtful and caring, rather than a reactive behavior that may get you through the short term but doesn’t serve you as well in the long term.
Our focus is on the inside job in this chapter, but I don’t want you to lose sight of the bigger picture of resiliency—or the connections between personal and collective liberation. Though we may think we need to change ourselves when it comes to facing difficult times, research shows that resiliency has more to do with our ability to leverage resources in our environment and our circle of support—including things like health care, job opportunities, and social connections—than with our personal strengths. If you lose your job, for example, obtaining a scholarship is going to make attending college more feasible, helping you bounce back. Or perhaps you have family connections you can leverage to get a job interview. And hey, if the world was kinder to people who looked like you, your struggles would lessen. Resiliency is inherently social and political in nature and I’m going to remind you of that throughout.
Let’s dive in by discussing some terms and ideas and then we’ll put this info into practice.
Accepting yourself is about believing you’re good enough as is, that you deserve love and belonging. If you’re not feeling good about yourself, why would you accept who you are? Self-acceptance might seem like giving up. It’s not. It’s facing reality. It’s about sitting with the reality of being a flawed human and experiencing emotion, like humans do. It makes sense that we want to avoid pain, but the best way to do that, paradoxically, is to accept the pain, not run from it.
What helps me in a difficult moment is the awareness—born from experience—that avoiding pain typically causes more pain in the long run than just sitting with it in the short term. Think about rejection. It hurts when you get turned down for a date, but the greater damage will probably be that which you inflict on yourself. When we feel rejected, we often spiral into thinking that there’s something wrong with us and that no one would want to befriend us. We may even feel unaccountably angry about how we were treated.
Acceptance means you surrender to the reality of what is in the moment, giving whatever you are experiencing permission to be, not fighting what is. It doesn’t mean that you’re giving up or that you don’t wish that things had turned out differently or that you are flaw-free. Try to sit with this discomfort, without judging it and needing to make it go away. It allows you to have perspective. Yes, you may have gotten rejected. But that’s all. It doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you or that you are unlovable. Accepting what is gives you opportunity to learn from the experience and grow.
When you come up against traits you may not like about yourself, that’s okay, too. We’re all flawed; it connects us. When I first came clean about my eating disorder with a college friend, it opened the door to learning about her drug addiction—and for both of us to lighten our shame and isolation. Sharing your vulnerability can bond you with others; if people see you as perfect, they’re unlikely to confide in you or invite your confidences.
Cultivate the skill of being with yourself with love and acceptance rather than judgment. If, instead, you focus on your unworthiness, you’re going to want to hide from others. Please don’t wait until you’re perfect, however you define it, before you can accept yourself. Perfection will never come. Accepting that means that you recognize that you don’t need to be “perfect” or anything other than who you are to be worthy of love.
Accepting ourselves is hard, but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from who we are and caught up in maladaptive behaviors.
Compassion refers to having the awareness of someone else’s suffering and wanting to alleviate it. Literally, it means “suffering with.” It differs from pity because when you feel compassion for someone else, you realize that suffering and imperfection are part of the shared human experience. When you pity, on the other hand, you distance yourself and act more from a sense of duty. Pity isolates us while compassion connects us.
In self-compassion, you extend this same understanding to yourself. You recognize that you are human and that you suffer, and you offer yourself kindness. Self-compassion grows from acceptance. When I allow myself to feel my own suffering and accept that as an inevitable part of being human, I soothe that wounded person (myself) and soften. That makes it easier to examine my fears. I take back my power to handle the situation.
The power of self-compassion is not just an idea—it’s real and physically manifests in our bodies, creating measurable improvements in our biochemistry. For example, cortisol, the fight-or-flight stress hormone, drops when we summon compassion. One study asked research participants to imagine receiving compassion from someone else and how it felt in their body.1 Those told to picture receiving love and kindness had lower cortisol levels after the imagery than those in the control group. Other studies show that you also release the hormone oxytocin when you generate compassion.
How can you generate more self-compassion? That was a hard one for me, until I discovered this neat little trick. I excel at offering compassion to others. So I simply treat myself as I would someone else who’s struggling. I ask myself, what would I say or do for someone else in my position? Then I try to put it in action on myself. It works! Sometimes when things are really tough, I write a letter to that hurting person (myself), as a compassionate and loving friend. I saved one of those sweet letters and bring it out when I’m down. It’s always a tearjerker, but in a good way—what a good friend I can be!
Psychologist Tara Brach tells a story about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson on a camping trip.* They fall asleep and wake up some hours later. Holmes asks Watson to look up and tell him what he sees. Watson describes the millions of stars. Holmes then asks, “What does that tell you?” Watson spins off a story about galaxies and planets and God. Holmes is silent for a minute before he speaks. “Watson, you idiot, someone stole our tent!”
I tell this story to make the point that we all have distinctive ways of paying attention. While we all may see the same things, we project different meaning onto them. Our preoccupations tend to skew how we perceive things. (Maybe Watson was an amateur astronomer.) Sometimes they can blind us to what’s important or narrow our view of what’s possible.
Here’s an example of how my own biases can cloud my ability to see the world as it is. Years ago, I met someone I had a great connection with. I spun out the fantasy that she could be my new best friend. Yet when I asked her to get together a second time, she said she wasn’t available.
My traumatized brain—always on the alert to protect me from pain and keep me safe—concluded that more than a scheduling conflict was at work. She must not want to be friends with me. In keeping with the biologically wired confirmation bias discussed in chapter 5, I clung to my usual story that yet another person had found me flawed and uninteresting.
Fast-forward five years later. Out of the blue, I received an email from her saying that she was thinking of me and would love to reconnect. I was shocked. I had been so convinced she found me unlikable. Why did she want to connect now? Why didn’t she call me years ago? Could I trust this?
We got together and, once again, made a marvelous connection. We had a great deal in common and it was very easy to talk. A more evolved person by then, I thought I’d try to keep an open mind and ask what had happened when we first met.
She reassured me that she legitimately had not been available at the time I had suggested. Meanwhile, she herself had misinterpreted something I said and felt too shy to speak up about it. She was scared of rejection. So she had left it to me to make a show of friendship and get us together, to prove I cared. Well, as you know, I’d talked myself out of that. When I failed to propose rescheduling that early meeting, she decided that I must not want to be friends with her.
We both had wanted to connect, but our wounded brains led us both to self-protect and back away from the risk. This experience didn’t just hurt in the moment—it reinforced our recurring inner narratives that we were unlovable.
We’re all running scripts about ourselves and others that can blind us to what’s really going on. Instead of seeing what’s in front of us, we’re streaming the archival footage in our head. We each get stuck in our particular pattern of thoughts—for most of us, it’s beliefs that we’re inadequate, that we’re not enough, that we don’t belong. In other words, our self-protectiveness itself fails to protect us. Avoiding pain causes pain. I try to remember that when I’m tempted toward avoidance.
So strong is my “I’m unlikable” narrative that I project it onto new relationships and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophesy. I created her rejection of me; it didn’t come from her. Fear feeds this process. If I’m always scanning the world for evidence that I’m unlikable, that’s what I’m going to see. Confirmation bias combined with a negativity bias sets us up for misery.
What I’ve learned is that I need to start by getting some perspective. I ask myself, Why does it hurt? For me, the pain often comes down to a lack of belief in my worthiness.
What’s behind the stories that stream in your head? They’re not entirely false or made up (I did experience rejection as a young person, leading to my unlikability fears), but clinging to them may keep us stuck in reliving them. Our inner narratives are current interpretations of past experiences. Investigate those tough questions about what’s really going on, and whether your stories are true or whether they’re a way to disengage and self-protect. What happens if you let go of the scripts—can you see anything else? Your addictions and avoidant behaviors perform a function and are meaningful. What are the roots? What are they protecting you from feeling?
The next step is recognizing that the distress you feel is a fact of being human. You are biologically wired to need connection. So of course, rejection is going to hurt. Your natural response might be self-criticism. Try not to go down that path. What I try to do is notice it, label it—”Oh, there’s that same old story again”—and then let it go.
How do you gain the perspective to challenge the inner stories you tend to run with? You need to pause before you create your interpretations, then add a dose of compassion and kindness. This will allow you to come back to what’s real instead of clinging to what you’ve created.
Tara Brach tells another story about a woman on a layover in an airport. Hungry and exhausted, she got some cookies, put them in her purse, and sat down at a table where a man was sitting and reading a newspaper. She, too, took out a newspaper and proceeded to read it.
She fished out a cookie as she read and ate it, and then the man reached into the bag and took a cookie for himself. She was weirded out but couldn’t imagine what to say. She didn’t want to make a scene. So, she stayed quiet and took another cookie and ate it, and then he did the same thing. Well, as this pattern continued, the woman, not surprisingly, got angrier and angrier. Eventually, just one cookie remained. To her astonishment, the man broke it in two and handed her half. Then his flight was called and he left. Only later did she reach into her purse and, finding her unopened bag of cookies, realize she had been eating his.
The stories we tell ourselves aren’t always true! Yet we are so caught up in our interpretation of the world that we can’t imagine any other version. We live our lives through storylines that keep us disconnected from our truths. We buy into belief systems about ourselves and others that keep us from truly seeing ourselves and each other.
Brach calls this pattern of storytelling “Real but Not True.” This phrase reminds us that our experiences are not the same thing as our thoughts about our experiences. What happens to you is one thing, but it’s different from the meaning you later attach to it in your thoughts. What we’re thinking is a step removed, not the thing itself. The fact of the experience remains the same, but its meaning in your head may shift over time, and almost surely will differ from the thoughts and beliefs of others who shared the experience.
Because our thoughts and beliefs evolve, we constantly rewrite ourselves. We move from an authentic experience or feeling to an interpretation. We move from “I feel bad” to “I am bad, something’s wrong with me.” These beliefs are shaped by our culture and history. We get the message from the outside that we’re not okay. That feeds the core belief that “something is wrong with me.” Then we seek evidence to confirm our new belief. This “negativity bias,” you may remember, wired into you as a means of protection, means that we glom onto whatever confirms our interpretation, our sense of unworthiness. So we believe something that is untrue, and it causes us pain.
It is helpful to pinpoint what stressors trigger you. Some, like racism, may be unavoidable, so there’s no way to adjust ourselves to solve the problem.
Consider the fact that mental illness is so prevalent in the Native American community, and that addiction, alcoholism, diabetes, and autoimmune disease afflict Native Americans more than other racial identity group. But as we discussed, this tendency doesn’t come from their individual choices. It arises from social factors and intergenerational trauma that keeps them in vulnerable states and works against their immunity. In similar ways, this is what happens to people in all marginalized groups.
In a society that stresses people out, individualized solutions can’t work. Given the existence of social injustice, suffering is going to happen disproportionately. While there is no individual solution to a cultural problem, we have to find ways to work with the hand we were dealt. Coming together in community helps us identify the common struggles and move away from self-blame and the burden of seeing yourself as a problem to be fixed. And so, we must “theorize.”
bell hooks places “theorizing”—the work of naming one’s experience and understanding how it connects to broader systems of oppression—at the center of survival. Theorizing is an interwoven process of understanding one’s situation in terms of existing oppressive social norms, questioning those norms, and eventually opening your imagination to liberation from them.
Theorizing lets you take control of the narrative of your experiences in marginalization. When you theorize, you stop authorizing others to define your experience. This agency is important. If you think back to chapter 5, we saw that lack of agency allows stress to permeate and do its damage, explaining why stressed executives (who have high agency) are less prone to stress-induced disease and dysregulation than similarly stressed working-class (low-agency) folks. Theorizing is a way to develop your agency, and this can provide some insulation for those with marginalized identities. It’s a way to reclaim ownership of your identity and take back power in an unjust world—even as the injustice itself persists.
Theorizing helps you realize that, for instance, it’s not your fault you can’t get a job. There are structural contributors (like racism, sexism, or ageism, or a crummy economy) that stand in your way. It is also, as hooks describes, a path to liberation.
When I was hurting badly from my eating disorder, I “saved” myself by going to school. My multiple graduate degrees were an attempt to think my way out—to learn everything I could about weight as a way to rise above my mess. (They were also a reach for “legitimacy” and worth in others’ eyes.) What I came to see, by rethinking, was that my eating disorder, at root, was not about food or body insecurity; it was really an effort to banish pain.
Education was a liberating path for me because it led me to see the cultural roots of my discomfort with food and how I had absorbed toxic ideas that kept me from inhabiting my body comfortably. These ideas maintained a status quo that excluded me.
To heal, you’ve got to ask the hard questions about what’s at the root and be willing to sit with the discomfort you find there. You may get to the insight that tells you that the world is unfair and stacked against you, or that the people who were supposed to protect you failed miserably and didn’t teach you the life skills or provide the material or emotional support you needed. It may instead (or also) push you to understand that the world is unfair and you are benefiting from others’ pain. Most likely, all of this is true at once.
“That’s just a theory,” people say, suggesting that it’s not real. But hooks treats theory as an actual intervention. “Theorizing” enables you to make sense of what’s happening and imagine your way forward to alternative futures and outcomes. That’s why I undertook this book, to write myself out of pain and into a better future. As hooks explains, “When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.”2
One of the most powerful healing strategies is connecting with others. Emotional isolation is a major risk factor for disease, addiction, illness, and even death. We need each other. We connect by sharing our vulnerability with others.
When I was still recovering from my eating disorder, I spoke in a support group about how ashamed I felt about a recent binge and how I hated losing control. I told them I felt I was too fat* and that my body revealed to others what a failure I was. The room was quiet for a little while, and then people started crying and talking about how well they knew those feelings and how much they hurt.
We didn’t solve anything that day, but we drew connections among our assumptions. Why did we all suffer from these same self-judgments? Why were we all uncomfortable in our bodies? Of course, we all wanted to be thin. We saw how much better thinner people were treated. We wanted access to some of that love and appreciation. We wanted to be considered attractive. We sensed our only real value could come from thinness.
The thoughts were still painful, but there was magic in realizing that what I experienced was human, and that it was shared.
We came to recognize that our “body” problem wasn’t actually in our bodies, but in a culture that didn’t value those bodies. The shame belonged to our culture, not to us. By trying to control our bodies, we were doing what we could to survive. Knowing that let us see that what we needed was love and kindness and understanding—not weight loss or food. And we recognized that we could offer solidarity to one another.
Note that social support is good wherever it comes from but particularly potent when it comes from someone you care about. If a stranger offers affirmation, you may not trust or accept it as readily. Which is not to say that strangers or anonymous hotlines can’t be helpful. It’s just not the same as finding support within your social network, if you can.
An interesting rat experiment reinforced the biological value of connection. Investigators gradually increased the temperature under the rodents’ paws until they moved away. That was each rat’s pain threshold, and they made note of it.
Next, they ran the experiment with two rats side by side and saw that when both rats were exposed to the heat, it could lower the pain threshold of the companion rat next to it, some of the time. When the neighboring rat was a stranger, there was no effect. But if the pair were cage mates together, there was an empathic increase in tolerance for pain. This holds up in human experience, too. If you hold someone’s hand during a medical procedure, you’ll feel less stress and recover more easily, especially if that hand belongs to a relative or friend. It’s scientifically proven, as I’ll discuss later.
Now let’s look at some ways you can shore up your own resilience in the face of pain and negative narratives.
Outlets can release the tension (especially if it’s a physical outlet), distract you, and help connect your mind and body while reminding you of what’s important. All sorts of outlets work: various hobbies, working off the tension by pummeling a punching bag, screaming after a difficult meeting, dancing to your favorite music, talking with friends. Find what works for you. My favored childhood outlet was telling my problems to Tiggy, my trusted (stuffed) confidante. This (one-way) conversation helped me put language to my thoughts and feelings and better make sense of them. Whacking a tennis ball also gave me a satisfying way to release some of the energy behind these emotions.
As traumatic as it was then and for years after, I’ve managed to blunt the harshness of my modeling school experience by telling it as a funny story. I am far enough from that shamed and wounded kid now to see the humor in it. I enjoy it when others can chuckle with me, too. If I tell it right, it gets great laughs!
This is more than a few yuks—it’s a tool for getting through and past intolerable situations. Humor reminds me that my community can identify with me and laugh with me at the world’s wrongness. When I’m in difficult situations, I can sometimes get through them by thinking, This will make for a great story. I collect these accounts to bring back to my community, so they can tend to my wounds and break the oppressive spell with laughter and understanding.
When things are tough, it helps to remember that “this too shall pass.” This is a catchphrase I often repeat, even for small things. When you see that it’s true for passing annoyances—realizing that all it takes is one good night to get over feeling exhausted and depleted from sleep loss—you help scaffold an orientation toward acceptance of impermanency. If we believe in permanency, how can we see a way out of pain? The more we acknowledge impermanence—and treasure it—the more we can accept the flow of emotion and avoid getting stuck in our pain, including the pain that comes from clinging to happiness.
Rejection is never easy. It’s going to happen. It’s going to hurt. And you can learn skills that will lessen the pain and will help you recover from it and move on with confidence.
You know that classically cliché rejection “It’s not you, it’s me.”? Don’t buy it. It’s neither. It’s more helpful to reframe rejection as something that happens because two people (or a person and an organization) just aren’t a match. It’s a relationship issue. Your skills are a mismatch for a particular job or your communication style doesn’t match up with a potential new friend. The more you can reframe it, the less you will personalize rejection and get caught in a shame spiral.
Resilience involves recognizing that although one aspect of who you are may make you a mismatch in a particular relationship, it is not the totality of who you are. You have many other characteristics that make you kick-ass.
Rejection threatens our sense of belonging. To recover, we need to remind ourselves that we are appreciated and loved. If your work colleagues left you out of a lunch invite, get together with your dog-walking friends instead. If your kid was rejected by a schoolmate, make plans for them to meet a different friend. Or, when a first date doesn’t return your texts, call your grandparents if it will help remind you that your voice brings joy to others.
Please, in trying to heal, find a way to forgive yourself. Know that you are really doing the best you can in a world that doesn’t adequately support you. This isn’t about giving up, and it doesn’t mean you can’t do better, but you are trying as hard as you can right now to remove the stifling layer of shame and blame that befalls us all sometimes.
Grieving is an essential part of the healing practice. This is especially important when we think of changing behaviors that have taken care of us and have made us feel good even when they were not always helping us.
To heal from my eating disorder, for example, I had to grieve the fantasy body—and subsequently, the person—that could have been. I believed at the time that thinness would eradicate the hips that telegraphed “woman.” I had to grieve the loss of this fantasy, the story I told myself about the person I would become after losing the tell-tale weight.* I also had to grieve the time and energy I had lost to my eating disorder.
Fatter people, when they learn that repetitive dieting can cause weight gain, may also grieve their role in upregulating their body’s maintenance weight. (This is the protective mechanism whereby your body increases its fat mass to protect you in the case of potential famine—a hangover from our prehistoric ancestors that explains why many dieters get heavier in the long run.)
The pain of this process can keep many people in denial. Who wants to accept the fact that they may have spent decades agonizing over their diets, and learn that their efforts had been doomed to failure and may actually have contributed to the weight gain they were trying to reverse? Particularly as this belief system is linked to hope for a better life, it can be hard to accept.
You may be angry at yourself for being victimized by diet culture. That’s normal. Talking to others can help you transfer that rage to the culture, where it belongs.
You may also have to grieve the damages that resulted from your behaviors—like my friend who caused another driver’s concussion by drunkenly rear-ending their car—and the many ways we can hurt others with our trauma responses.
Grieving can be isolating. Our culture doesn’t support staying with our pain, but rather fetishizes happiness. That you often can’t really “do” anything about your pain also makes it difficult. You can apologize for bad behavior or offer restitution, for instance, but the results of your actions may still live on painfully.
Yet we are all grieving, whether it’s about losing someone or something, about transition, or about facing our disappointment in ourselves or others. At this point in this book you may be grieving the pain of living amidst disconnection and inequity.
Ritualist, writer, and self-described “grief practitioner” Holly Truhlar eloquently writes,3 “Grief opens us up to the fullness of our being, and we’re not meant to go through it alone; we never were. We need to feel cared for, loved, and held, when we’re grieving. We need a community—a village—to show up and see us, welcome us, thank us. We need to know the grief work we’re doing is important. Because it is, especially in these transitional times.” “[Grief] is absolutely what matters now, it’s your soul calling: asking you to show up.”
Don’t run from your grief. Find its wisdom and healing power.
One of the best ways to heal a traumatized brain stems from connection with others. When you listen to others, actively and deeply, from a place of acceptance instead of judgment, mirror neurons see this compassionate relationship and internalize this behavior. If we do it over and over again, our brains actually rewire, biological proof that connection matters.
Knowing that your brain is wired in ways that keep you mired in pain and that you have repeated these patterns for so long, it can be easy to think that you can’t break out, or that you’ll never change. But it is possible. Recognize that your biology causes you to keep repeating these old patterns, and you can change that.
Let’s turn our attention now to how you can rewire your brain in a way that shifts your habits of paying attention, so you can cultivate other ways of seeing things. One of the best ways to do this is through mindfulness, which is both an activity and a state of mind. In the next section, I’ll be discussing mindfulness specifically as it applies to habit change.
Meditation teacher, author, and researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.4 It’s about being aware, noticing and paying attention to thoughts, feelings, behavior, and everything else. It’s about openness to turning toward negative experiences rather than trying to make unpleasant feelings just go away. Can you see how this might work to transform your coping behaviors? When we lighten up on judgment and accept the moment, it helps us to make more thoughtful choices rather than resort to damaging reactive behaviors. Mindfulness can be practiced at any time, whatever we are doing and whoever we are with, by showing up and being fully engaged in the here and now.
Meditation is a way of practicing mindfulness. With a regular meditation practice, you can train your brain to better tolerate emotions and not be so vulnerable to needing to distract yourself or make them go away. It helped me stay with emotions that would previously have led to food binges or alcohol or drug abuse.
There are many forms of meditation, but the type I find most helpful as a regular practice is just sitting quietly and being mindful of my breath. Contrary to some popular conception, you don’t have to join a cult, pay money, buy special clothes, or sit in lotus position. There’s nothing fancy to it. There are three basic steps I recommend: sit or lie comfortably, breathe, and focus your attention on your breath. Focus on being in the moment and feeling the breath move through you. In this moment, there is no “other” and no judgment, just who you are. This is a moment to find your “ground.” It gives you that little space to distance yourself from the story you may attach to whatever is going on.
Your mind will wander. You’ll start thinking about the bills you need to pay and what you’re going to eat for dinner. That’s okay. Just notice these thoughts and gently bring your attention back to your breath. You will get distracted again and again—I like to just label it “thinking” and keep coming back to my breath.
This might sound too simple to affect behavior, but research tells us it works. A fascinating study on formerly incarcerated men who were substance-addicted exposed them to ten days of meditation training.5 They were asked at the start and again ninety days later to report on their drug use. Those who practiced ninety days of meditation reported drinking 87 percent less alcohol and using 89 percent less marijuana. That was six times as effective as the conventional chemical dependency plan provided to a control group. This study is part of a mounting body of research that points to what I already know from experience: meditation practice makes a difference. Personally, I celebrate how it helps me sit with waves of emotion that would have previously had me driving down roads I don’t want to go on. You can find mindfulness practices to try later in this chapter.
Thanks to neuroplasticity, we can change the habitual responses of our brain. For most of us, our brains are set to go into reactive mode and so we are less capable of staying with emotions. If you practice meditation, your brain grows more able to tolerate feelings. You can become a witness to your own experience and step out of the craving. The craving may seem to have the upper hand, but a meditation practice can weaken its hold by deconditioning you to its power. You won’t necessarily banish the desire, but you are more able to acknowledge it as a part of being human and recognize its transience, making you less vulnerable to acting on it.
Let’s review the trigger, behavior, reward process discussed in chapter 4 to understand how meditation can help you change problematic behavior. Say you’re sensitive to social rejection. (That’s called being human!) Your usual response is to reach for your vape. You draw in the smoke and savor the temporary feeling of pleasure and distraction, which further ingrains the biologic pathway so you are conditioned to keep choosing that response.
You can see some of the ways this is a problem. One of them is that the fix is temporary and you never really get satisfaction for the real need, which is feeling connected and accepted. Vaping soothed you briefly, but you still feel inadequate and unworthy. On top of the shame you felt from the rejection, you may have the added shame for vaping. Hating on yourself for vaping, or for whatever your habitual coping response is, just adds more fuel to your feelings of unworthiness and the drive to soothe yourself and get out of your pain. There’s no way you can heal from addiction or move on from your coping strategies unless you address your shame. Just as you can’t eat your way to happiness and stability, you can’t shame or hate yourself into better behavior. The focus on inadequacy also takes you away from your present. You miss out on a lot of life.
So how does meditation practice help with addiction or addictive-like tendencies? Research shows more neural density, cortical thickness, and overall activity in the prefrontal cortexes of regular meditators. Their “thinking brains” more readily come online, leaving them less susceptible to cravings. Meditation allows you to witness your impulses, giving you the opportunity to make choices.
Meditation also stimulates endorphin release. Endorphins make you happy and stimulate dopamine release, another excursion down the pleasure pathway.
Several research studies scanning the brains of experienced meditators may have identified another mechanism by which meditation tamps cravings.6 The meditators’ brains have relatively reduced activity in the part of the brain called the “default mode” network, a brain network involved in self-related thinking and mind wandering. Part of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it. This same brain region quiets down when we let go—when we step out of the process by exercising curious awareness of what’s happening In other words, a regular meditation practice may be teaching the brain not to get sucked into a craving. This is quite different from typical addiction recovery: rather than teaching you to “just say no,” a regular meditation practice may lessen your desire for the addictive substance or behavior.
When I was studying for my master’s degree in contemplative psychotherapy at a school with Buddhist roots, I asked about the relationship between the mindfulness techniques we were taught and larger social change. How could mindfulness better the world? I got the same facile response from every teacher: “Meditate on it.” As if meditating alone was enough to transform society. Meditation was presented as an individual, personal practice, meant not to address a flawed world but to mute my personal reaction to it.
Well, that’s not Buddhism. Buddhism, from which mindfulness was derived, seeks to address systems of oppression that cause human suffering. Its teachings are grounded in notions of interdependence, recognizing that we can’t separate our personal healing and transformation from that of our larger culture. When all we do is focus on self-awareness, without a simultaneous emphasis on social consciousness and taking action, we are disconnected from our environment. Mindfulness aimed exclusively at improving the lives of individuals misses the whole point. There’s a term for that, “cultural appropriation,” that refers to a dominant group borrowing a cultural practice from a marginalized group and changing it for its own benefit, ultimately erasing its origins and meaning.
Other traditions do honor the culture surrounding Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism, for example, a term credited to Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, draws the connection between personal and collective liberation. During the Vietnam War, Nhat Hanh and his community of monks and nuns had to decide how to react to the bombing of villages surrounding their monastery. Should they stay put and continue to meditate (for the greater good of humankind) or should they go out into the streets to help the wounded? They decided to do both, to practice mindfulness while helping people.
I have a hiatal hernia. (Yes, slender people get them too. My doctor probably missed early diagnosis because of fatphobia; had a larger person presented my symptoms it might have been more readily seen. This example is but one of many that demonstrates that medical reliance on BMI is harmful to people of all sizes.7)
On those rare occasions when I experience symptoms from my hernia, it can be terrifying. I feel like I can’t get air and I’m going to pass out and die.* This visceral awareness of breath as essential to life helps me understand that I can’t take breathing for granted. It helps fuel a meditation practice where I focus on being conscious of my breath—and knowing that nothing is more important in that moment than that breath.
Watching the heart-wrenching video that captured Eric Garner’s murder, turning his death into a national discussion about racism and police brutality (less discussed was the fatphobia), evoked deep emotion for me. Eric was an asthmatic, and as he struggled for breath, he repeated the words, “I can’t breathe,” eleven times. Eleven times. I was stunned watching the video, as it seemed so clear to me that I was watching a murder. How could this happen? I discussed his death and my reaction with a Black friend, who was not surprised by the video. “Welcome to my world,” she said. “Me and other Black people live our lives with the awareness this could happen at any time to any of us.”
Whoa. This was years ago and I’m still processing that. White privilege underlies my surprise that Eric Garner could be murdered by a police officer, someone with a job mandate to protect people. Not everyone can afford that kind of naivete, as my friend so eloquently pointed out. For some people, the simple act of breathing requires a constant vigilance well beyond my experience.
Meditation is much more than you alone on a cushion. The practice is strengthened when we integrate the awareness that some people are struggling to breathe because systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression have us in a chokehold. We’re all trying to breathe in a world that isn’t set up for us all to breathe. We can use our meditation practice to engage with it, rather than retreat from our collective reality into individualism.
The nonjudgmental acceptance of what is enables us to make sense of our experiences and allows us to learn to meet ourselves with compassion. Meditation can’t make the oppression go away, but it can help heal the wounds of oppression. By cultivating our ability to sit with our experiences, it can also teach us to extend that compassion to others, allowing for greater empathy and countering the othering that upholds oppressive systems.
Meditation isn’t for everyone. It can lead to dark places. Someone vulnerable to PTSD, for example, may need to avoid paying such close, sustained attention to their internal experience. Forms of meditation other than the formal, sitting-with-eyes-closed style can be helpful starting points, such as walking meditation or yoga. Be thoughtful about whether it feels right for you. If you are coping with trauma, you may want to seek out guided help from a trauma-informed and trained professional.
When we get curious about our cravings, we notice that our urges are made up of bodily sensations—we may sense tightness, for instance, or restlessness—and that these sensations come and go. These are transient pieces of experience that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting sucked into an overwhelming craving that we feel we have to react to.
If you smoke or stress-eat or check email compulsively, if you can’t resist responding to texts when you’re driving, see if you can tap into your natural capacity to bring your attention to the here and now and to your immediate sensations. Try to just be curiously aware of what’s happening in your body and mind in that moment. This is an opportunity to either perpetuate a painful habit loop or step out of it.
Suppose, for example, you feel that urge to check your email, though you know it’s a distraction from your work and may prevent you from meeting a pending deadline. Pause and take a few minutes to reflect on what you’re feeling. Consider whether your inbox will provide what you’re looking for. Intellectually, of course, this reflection may be easy. You know you’re looking for distraction and your inbox can provide that. But you know, too, that taking the time to check that inbox is going to increase the mounting pressure you’re feeling at your job.
In the past, you may have tried the “just say no” approach, trying to control your behavior cognitively. That requires action from your prefrontal cortex, which, as you’ll remember, goes offline when you’re stressed. So it’s not going to work very well in this moment when you need it. Rationally you may know that an email check won’t solve social anxiety, but your rational mind isn’t in a position to help right now.
See what happens if instead you go toward your feelings, rather than resisting them and trying to make them go away. Curiosity about our feelings can take us away from fear-based reactivity and into being. When we discover that our cravings are made up of body experiences, we can follow them.
Ask yourself: What am I feeling in my body? Our cravings and our emotions are not just “feelings” or mental states, but include physical changes in our bodies. The more you can see that these are just body sensations, the more you can learn to ride them out. You may notice a restlessness, or tension, or speediness. If you just sit with that experience, you’ll also see that bodily experiences come and go. Try to let your feelings percolate without trying to fix them. It’s okay if judgment comes up—it’s natural—but try not to follow it. For me, it helps to label it. I say to myself, “I am feeling judgment,” and then refocus on my breath.
Cravings take on different forms over time. Mindfulness helps you not get sucked into your cravings. That practice alone—and, particularly, in the beginning—is probably not going to stop you from your habitual behaviors. But what it will do is help you get more in tune with your body and slowly help reduce your cravings and develop more nourishing ways of managing those cravings.
It’s important to show yourself some compassion during this process. I remind myself that whatever I’m going through is just human, that we all experience emotion, and that we all have difficulty staying in the present moment. It also helps to maintain my sense of humor: “There goes my monkey brain again, but now I can come back to breathing.”
If you call yourself an “emotional eater,” have you considered the possibility that your out-of-control drive to eat, even (or especially) when dieting, is actually a biological response to restriction itself? That far from some perverse mind game, it’s part of a hormonal cascade generated to get your body more of the calories it craves?
If that’s true, the unexpected reality is that the only way to reduce your cravings is to dump the restrictive regime you’ve set in place and start responding to your bodily cues. Then you will be less vulnerable to your environment.
Diet culture teaches us to restrict our calories and to view certain foods or styles of eating as “bad” and to be avoided. The result is that most of us know guilt and restriction. Is that true for you? If so, dietitian and author Christy Harrison describes how to turn around that way of thinking:
The “I want ice cream” thought isn’t the problem, and the act of bingeing on ice cream is a completely understandable way that your body is trying to get its needs met. In the absence of guilt, restriction, and deprivation, those urges and behaviors tend to dissipate on their own, without us having to mentally think ourselves out of them. The real solution isn’t to use mindfulness to overcome your food cravings, it’s to honor them and give yourself full permission to eat enough food, and a wide enough variety of foods, so that the cravings don’t have such a hold on you anymore.8
Food isn’t an addictive substance. It’s food deprivation that makes food feel addictive.9 Steering away from the foods you love doesn’t work to reduce calorie intake.
Therapist, author, and speaker Judith Matz explains that “when you give yourself permission to eat all types of foods, formerly forbidden foods stop glittering. Now, you’re in a much stronger position to consider emotional overeating. Keep in mind that everyone eats for emotional reasons at times, but if it’s the primary way that you soothe yourself when you feel distress, it’s worth taking a deeper look.” Matz suggests that you start with self-compassion: “Yelling at yourself for overeating only fuels the binge! Instead, gently tell yourself that you are experiencing distress and food is a way, for now, to take care of yourself. Remind yourself the day will come when you no longer rely on food in this way. You’ve spent years engaged in dieting and overeating. Of course it will take time to undo these behaviors.”10
More advice on eating can be found in books by Harrison, Matz, coauthors Tribole and Resch—oh, and me, both alone and with coauthor Lucy Aphramor.11
The mindfulness movement tells us to work on ourselves by being more mindful, nonjudgmental, and accepting of circumstances. That said, the emphasis on “nonjudgmental awareness” and acceptance can disable critical thought, which can be a trap. By deflecting attention from unjust social structures and material conditions, mindfulness is easily coopted as a tool supporting the status quo. It’s also much more popular among more privileged people, who benefit from the status quo and may be less invested in changing it. For those reasons, I recommend supplementing what is typically understood as mindfulness with this next step: reflection and theorizing.
Lean into what’s going on and consider what’s fueling your feelings. You may not fully understand, but use this as opportunity to explore ideas as they come up. As Brené Brown advises, “rumble” with the stories you’re telling—that is, embrace the vulnerability and stay curious. Consider what happens when you try to separate events from your interpretations of events. Are there other possible interpretations?
This is the time, too, to make those connections between your story and its structural contributors. You are a human who was set up for this particular response, and others experience this too. What are the roots? Once you have a better handle on what’s going on, you can make an informed decision about how best to handle it and take care of yourself.
When considering self-care, it’s helpful to recognize a continuum of options. We can’t always be completely present in our lives—that would be exhausting—and sometimes harm reduction is all the self-care we need or can manage. Here are three options to consider when you’re having a hard time.
1.Lean in. Sitting with our uncomfortable feelings lets us make use of the feelings, rather than be simply bowled over by them. I look for safe ways to lean into my discomfort: strategies like creating a safe space, which can be as simple as brewing a cup of tea (the ritual of making it and cradling the warm mug helps as much as drinking it). It can mean going for a walk outside, finding nature or even a patch of grass, riding my bike, playing with my dog, or talking to a friend.
2.Distract. Sometimes embracing the discomfort is more than we can handle. That’s okay. Give yourself permission to be distracted—maybe read a novel or watch a movie. It will not erase your pain, but it can give you some breathing room.
3.Avoid. You’re human. Sometimes avoiding your stressor will be all you can manage in the moment. When that’s the case, there’s nothing wrong with soothers like comfort eating. Some avoidance strategies—like drugs or alcohol—may not be viable options for everyone, but for some of us they can be useful tools for occasional downtime and social connection and can allow us to better manage our moods.
Try not to judge yourself for which option you choose. Instead, reflect and notice how it works for you. As you develop your felt sense, it will affect your future choices. For example, as you notice that you can tolerate sitting with your discomfort more than you feared, and as you find it more effective than your usual avoidance behaviors, you’ll more likely turn to it in the future.
Now we’ll look at some other helpful practices. Remember that everyone is different, so you might have to try several approaches to find the best fit for you at any given time.
One of my favorite tricks for managing stressors is “priming my brain” through imagery. When I’m in a hard circumstance, I try to imagine what a compassionate person would say to me in this moment, and how they would they take care of me. For some people, conjuring a specific image of a person (or being) is helpful. I tried this once, in a desperate circumstance, imagining Yoda* in the room with me, giving me advice. He had sage wisdom! Many times, I’ve thought about the people who love me, and I imagine being wrapped in a hug or kind words. Controlled research studies prove that imagery is effective at stimulating hormones that soothe you.
I don’t think it will surprise you to learn that touch can be healing. Much research documents that physical touch stimulates the release of oxytocin and reduces our release of cortisol. Oxytocin sends signals to the prefrontal cortex, which in turn sends signals that calm the amygdala, which is the fear center. It’s like a fire extinguisher.
One study examined three conditions during which women received a shock to their ankles while an MRI scanner detected brain changes.12 The research subjects also answered questions about their subjective experience of pain. In one group, the individuals were alone in their scanners. In another group, individuals were holding the hand of the lab technician, and individuals in the third group were holding hands with their spouses. The response was predictable, confirmed by subjective report and the activated brain pathways. Those who were alone felt pain, those with the lab techs felt the shock but less pain, and those with their spouses felt the shock but no pain.
The Touch Research Institute has conducted more than a hundred studies on the effects of massage therapy on many functions and medical conditions.13 Their research identified many benefits, including reduced pain (e.g., from fibromyalgia), decreased autoimmune problems (e.g., increased pulmonary function in asthma and decreased glucose levels in diabetes), enhanced immune function (e.g., increased natural killer cells in HIV and cancer), and enhanced alertness and performance (e.g., EEG pattern of alertness and better performance on math computations).
Research documents the value of a gratitude practice—that is, intentionally thinking about the things you feel grateful for—in rewiring your brain. It’s also one of our best defenses to counteract the brain’s negativity bias. Consciously tapping into what we feel grateful for allows us to acknowledge the goodness in our individual lives and in the world. In the process, I always recognize that the source of that goodness lies at least partially outside me, helping me connect to something larger than myself as an individual—usually other people or nature. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, become more capable of handling challenges, appreciate good experiences, improve health, deal with adversity, and strengthen relationships, among many other benefits.
One study looked at what happens when people wrote letters of gratitude to other people, compared to a second group writing thoughts and feelings about negative experiences and a third group without a writing activity.14 Those who wrote gratitude letters reported significantly better mental health than other participants at both four and twelve weeks following the exercise.
Almost a quarter of the gratitude writers sent their letters to their intended recipient in the end, which was optional. The act of writing the letter resulted in improved mental health, regardless of whether the letter was sent. This suggests that you don’t have to actually communicate your appreciation to someone else in order to benefit from feeling your gratitude.
In the same study, three months after the letter writing began, fMRI scans revealed more activity in the letter writers’ prefrontal cortexes than the other groups. Merely expressing gratitude may have lasting effects on the “thinking” part of the brain, thus helping you make better decisions and better manage your emotions.
Humans have a tendency to get lost in our heads. Have you ever found yourself arriving at a destination and not remembering the process of getting there? Grounding exercises can help us reconnect with our body and restore our connection to the world. We all have very different experiences of what grounds us. It could be the feeling of your feet solidly on the floor or your back against a chair. My friend feels most grounded when floating on her back while swimming—she describes the feeling of weightlessness as a welcome relief from the body dissatisfaction that dogs her. For someone else, it may be eating a raisin, and the awareness of how that raisin connects them to the earth and to the many people who tended it.
It’s valuable to learn what grounds you and to practice grounding yourself when you’re feeling uneasy or emotionally triggered. The following are simple and practical exercises and practices you can use to help ground and soothe yourself. If you practice these when you’re not triggered in the moment, you can actually create “muscle memory” so they are more likely to be automatic behaviors when you need them.
Place your right hand over your heart so that the heel of your hand is at your heart and your fingertips are at your collarbone. You can also put your left hand on top of your right to apply more pressure. When you do this, you are applying pressure to your polyvagal nerve, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system, producing a calm and relaxed feeling in the body.
Cross your arms at your chest so that your hands are resting on your shoulders. Alternately tap one hand and then the other against your shoulder. This exercise stimulates the brain cross-laterally, which means it makes each half of the brain talk to the other. Getting them in conversation this way activates our prefrontal cortex and allows it to soothe the amygdala, your so-called fear center.
It’s simple. Just pay attention to your breathing.
This exercise may be triggering for people with body image concerns, so do be thoughtful about whether it’s right for you.
Sit or lie comfortably and let your breathing slow. Bring your awareness to your body and notice what you’re feeling. Do you feel tightness in your shoulders, back, neck, or anywhere else? Do you feel pain or discomfort? Do you have a feeling of concentrated “energy” or pulsing around a certain area? Start at your head and systematically focus on each area of your body on your way down—scalp, ears, nose, mouth, neck, shoulders, chest, and so on—and really notice what sensations you have in each area.
This exercise helps us jump into the experience of eating and appreciate it. All we’re going to do is eat a raisin, paying attention as you do it.
For many people, eating is fraught with anxiety. This exercise could be triggering to some people, particularly if you have an eating disorder or a history of chronic dieting. It’s very normal for people who’ve had trauma around food (dieting, other forms of disordered eating, food insecurity, etc.) to feel panicked when asked to slow down and eat mindfully, and that’s a direct result of the trauma. It doesn’t mean they’re “bad at eating mindfully,” it just means that their bodies are in survival mode and trying to make sure they’re not deprived again. Use your discretion as to whether the exercise is right for you.
Start by just feeling the raisin in your hand. Roll it around, maybe toss it from hand to hand. How does it feel? Sticky? Wrinkly?
Now hold the raisin up to your nose, close your eyes, and take a good sniff. What does it smell like to you?
Now look at the raisin. Notice its color, shape, texture. Look at its folds, the darker hollows.
Have you gotten distracted during this process? Maybe your mind started wandering off to thinking about what you’re going to eat for lunch. Or maybe you were thinking this is a silly exercise, not sure of the point. That’s normal. Just notice that you’re distracted and come back to the raisin.
Now, think about eating the raisin. Can you imagine what it will taste like? Do you want to eat it or not? Does anything happen in your mouth or stomach when you think about eating the raisin?
The time has finally arrived to put the raisin in your mouth, but don’t bite into it yet! Just let it roll around in your mouth. Let your tongue feel its texture and wrinkly surface. Can you taste the raisin already by just sucking on it in your mouth?
Okay, you’ve been waiting for this moment. Bite into your raisin! Notice what happens when you do this. Can you feel the flavor burst out with each bite? Do you enjoy the taste or not?
When you are ready, swallow your raisin. Imagine it making its way down to your stomach, offering up its nutrients and flavors to give you energy and pleasure.
What was that like? Did the raisin taste different than you expected?
Think about the long journey the raisin took to get here, how it began as a juicy grape on a vine, how it drew nutrients from the soil and the sun and the air around it, how it was cared for and ultimately picked by someone’s hands. Think about the grape being dried out until it attained raisinhood. Take a moment to give thanks for all the things in nature and for all the people who helped create that little raisin. Did those considerations affect your appreciation for that raisin?
Many people find that when they take the time to be fully present with eating, they become better attuned to sensations of hunger and fullness. They also find that food tastes very different than they imagine, and that the amount of pleasure they get out of eating is linked to the degree of their hunger. They are better able to discern what tastes good to them—and find greater pleasure in eating.
What was it like to do that for you? Did you notice anything new or different? It’s amazing how something as simple as paying attention to eating can pull us out of our autopilot mode and change our perception. Try being mindful the next time you eat, using this model. See what you learn from it.
Mindful eating is not a diet, and it’s not about helping you control or restrict what you eat. It’s about experiencing food more intensely. You can eat ice cream mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more if you slow down and allow yourself to fully experience the sensations. Or, you might discover that the idea of ice cream was better than the actual eating of it. You might decide, partway through, that your body has had enough—and that finishing everything on your plate is no longer appealing. Mindful eating can help us see whether the food we’re eating is really meeting the need behind the craving. It can also help us get more in touch with our hunger and fullness, which supports us in eating nourishing amounts.
Self-reliance doesn’t always work when the deck is stacked against you. That’s why I want to come back to where we started in this chapter, and remind you that resilience isn’t wholly an inside job. Finding opportunities in your environment—for instance, maybe some kind people will fund your Kickstarter campaign to get the gender-affirming surgery you need?—can go a long way to offsetting the limiting possibilities of personal change in an unjust world.
Or maybe you can help fund someone else’s Kickstarter campaign. Let’s not lose sight of how important it is to be responsible with the privilege of having money and to keep advocating for a more just and empathetic world, one that supports all of us in thriving.
In countries where the government provides a social safety net such as free universal health care, paid sick leave, and subsidized child care, people have been found to be happier15 and healthier,16 which makes it easier for them to overcome adversity. People suffer psychologically without these supports.17 As recently reported by the World Bank, social support networks are particularly pivotal for impoverished and/or marginalized communities.18
It’s not too hard to understand why social safety nets are valuable: imagine if you contracted the coronavirus and you lived in a place that provided free (and adequate!) health care and sick leave. Paid sick leave allows you to take time off without the fear of being fired, and universal health care means you will get treated for your illness. Because you are supported in staying home, these also reduce the risk that you will infect others, which is just one of the many ways that social safety nets benefit people across the economic spectrum.
Social safety nets can also help prevent hard times; one study,19 for example, documented that throughout a person’s lifetime, resiliency is associated with less frequency of adverse events in one’s life. Several studies have shown that states with strong social welfare policies—for example, those providing tax credits and better health care—had fewer citizens reporting disabilities than states that didn’t embrace these policies.20
There have been days when I’ve felt broken and stuck. I didn’t want to go to work, to answer phone calls. I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I want to write something for you in case that is what you are going through—or so you have something to turn to when you need it. I’m living evidence that things can shift over time.
It’s okay if you don’t believe in yourself today, if you don’t think that you have the strength to keep going or that you will ever see the change you want for yourself. So many of us have these lapses where we stop believing in ourselves, even consider suicide. You are not alone.
I want you to know that I believe in you. Just hear that and take it in. Please keep going. I am holding space for you until you get back on track.
I don’t need to know you personally to know that you, as a human being, have value. The world needs each one of us and our uniqueness. You are not failing; we, as a culture, are failing you. If you turn your back on everything, we can’t come to understand why we failed you and how we can do better. Giving your community that opportunity allows us to be better, not just for you, but for the many others in similar circumstances. The world needs to adapt to make space for you and others like you. We need you. I need you. So keep going, okay?
I won’t promise that tomorrow will be better. But somewhere, somehow, I know that you can find a reason to keep going. I know that eventually the pain you are feeling now—and whatever you are going to learn from it—will help make the world a better place. I believe in you.
The next time you’re jonesing for the ice cream that looked oh-so-good on that TV commercial or tempted by the “Buy Now/Pay Later” fantasy of owning the vacuum cleaner of your dreams, it’s helpful to become more aware of your sudden turn to autopilot. Then pause. That’s all. Just break the automatic reactivity. I gave you some tools, such as mindfulness techniques and grounding exercises, to make it easier.
Eventually you’ll be able to laugh at the impulse, see that your brain has been hijacked, and make a more thoughtful choice. I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. You won’t see the effect of the pause immediately, but research shows that having individual experiences of breaking impulsivity is additive in its own right and contributes to breaking habitual responses over the long run.
Know, too, that sometimes ice cream—or a new vacuum cleaner—constitutes the best choice!
Contemplative practices like those described in this book don’t just help us sit with difficult emotions and change our behaviors. These practices can also reveal the narratives we’ve internalized to understand the world, help us develop more empathy for others, and help us become more intentional in how we respond to others and engage in the world. They can be the bedrock for social change.
Also, remember that your resiliency is bound up in others and in social institutions. Recognizing that there are external contributors to resilience helps us lessen the self-blame that may arise when we struggle. When you’re going through a hard time, try turning to the people around you and looking for outside resources that can bolster you. Recognizing that our resiliency isn’t just about being strong and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps can also highlight the need to help people build their support systems—and to provide the structural support that allows individuals and communities to thrive.
Now that you’ve got some of the practical tools to explore your inner world and bounce back when life throws you curve balls, let’s turn our attention to the self-love movement. Can it help get us out of this mess?
*Sherlock Holmes is a fictional private detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1800s. Dr. John Watson is his assistant and friend.
*In the context of this support group, it was valuable to name my fear of fat. However, in other contexts, it can hurt others who hear this, suggesting a judgment that thinness is better and fatter bodies are bad. Please be considerate of context when discussing these issues.
*Reading that I, a slender person, considered myself too fat may provide valuable insight for some people. At the same time, it may cause harm to others. After all, you may be wondering, if Lindo thinks they’re too fat, how are they judging bodies that are actually fat? I want to acknowledge the tension and offer this insight with the hope that readers can focus on the problem being in the internalized cultural idea, not my body or your body.
*The choking sensation that I experience is a less typical hernia symptom. More common is to experience heartburn.
*Yoda is a character in the Star Wars movies, known for his sage wisdom. Parenthetically, Yoda was also my nickname in college. I never asked why it was bestowed on me, scared I might learn it had more to do with my small stature or looks than anything else. (He was a funny-looking little green creature, about 3 feet tall.) Nonetheless, I’m a huge fan of Yoda and gladly answered to the name. My favorite Yoda quote, which inspired me in managing the stigma put on my short stature: “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.”
*This section was inspired by reading materials by Faith Harper, an author, licensed professional counselor, and sexologist who provides excellent guidance for managing trauma, its associated maladies, and more.