Welcome back!

Everyone has at least one cross to bear. No one gets away without at least one. Ever. Some crosses are big; some small. Some are heavy. Some are psychological and thus, invisible. I’ve always been particularly galled by the fact that my cross to bear was big, heavy and visible. Three strikes!

I’ll bet you know exactly what I mean, don’t you? You’ve felt it too. You know the pain. And you despise this burden, don’t you? I have felt that way for over 65 years. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to set down this cross, dust off my hands and knees, and settle back into the harmony of my own wonderful being and have that be enough. Did you just sigh and ask yourself “How did she do that?” I will be telling you the story about my how.

Obesity has always been and is still the main catalyst in my life. Trying to solve this complex problem has dragged me through therapy, dieting, acupuncture, spas, hypnosis, fasting, high colonics, the est training, the convent, the Church of Religious Science, weekend group intensives, spiritual retreats, indiscriminate sex, smoking cigarettes, smoking marijuana, studying Eschatology, reading hundreds of books, hours of meditative introspection, making and losing dozens of friends, looking for satisfaction in my career, and swimming naked in an algae-laden frog-filled pool owned by “God” near San Diego.

You’re with me each page of the way. The growing incidence of obesity in our country clutches at my heart and makes me want to prove what I understand for me and then for you, because I love you.

You Are Another Me

I know that you are another me, struggling to discover your unencumbered self. I know what that’s like and that’s why I’m sharing my healing with you. You’re invited to step onto my path any time you choose. I’ll tell you the stories to catch you up because I’ve been at this for a long time.

You and I are in an incredible learning curve on earth during our few short years here. Ultimately, I think that the understanding we each unfold truly IS our life, and I believe it is the one thing of substance we ultimately do take with us.

This leads me to believe that when Jesus said “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” he meant “If you want to exemplify the kind of love I’ve shown you, share all that you understand with your friends.” That surely is what he did. It’s what I’m doing now, as instructed.

It is an amazingly powerful place that I’m in, writing to you with the full knowledge that with this writing and the processing of all my sublimated feelings of hurt and anger, I am curing my mistaken sense of self.

I can see your eyebrows go up and your forehead furrow with doubt. That’s okay. I’ve seen your doubt before. I’ve come so far in this process of healing my sense of self that I now know beyond any fear or doubt that I’ve experienced in the past, this time is the charm, the period at the end of the sentence.

This is an excerpt from “My Cats Have Seen Me Naked.” Reading the whole book can help you turn on the “I love and accept myself as is” switch. You can purchase it here.

Arrowbear Lake

Each year, by the end of September, Arrowbear Lake - just down the road from my house - only has a wet spot left in the middle of it.  That’s due to evaporation. As you must know by know, evaporation is an invisible activity, although relentless.  Eventually, it accomplishes it’s might task and there’s no lake left.

Making changes in your life can be like that if you take the example from Mother Nature.  MN is relentless, invisible much of the time, and a persevering sort.  I think those are great qualities to emulate in our lives.

When you create a Mind Model of how you’d like your body to look, and you invisibly (to your friends) persevere in thinking it, and you are relentless about quitting your task, you’ll become a persevering sort as well and obtain the results you want.

Every spring, the snowmelt fills the lake up again and the process starts all over.  We don’t have to wait for the calendar spring.  When we become aware that our mental processes have slipped away, we can renew our desires, and as the old song said “pick yourself up; dust yourself off and start all over again.”

Small changes persisted in will give you the desire you want.  In our world today, there is so much of instantaneous gratification marketed that we think all of life should be instantaneous.  I’m not going to knock instantaneous.  It is just that “things persevered in” has been more of my experience and I wonder if you have recognized how this instantaneous idea has gotten in there?  If you haven’t consciously recognized it, you might think you’re failing in your efforts.  You’re not if you’re persevering because at some point, you’ve crested the hill, you begin to see changes and discover that your silly millimeter steps have gotten you what you desire and you’re on the downhill slops.

Changing your mind - your sense of self - takes persistent work.  If you are arriving at this blog for the first time, I invite you to go back and read some of the older posts, fill out  your sense of what this work is all about, and begin. And if you’d like the whole tamale in one package, there’s always my book - My Cats Have Seen Me Naked: How I Achieved Self-Love and Self-Acceptance While Obese. It’s quite the inspiration too.

I wish you steady, tiny steps.

Love,

Pat

A New Deck for Me

Yesterday, a new rebuild-the-back-deck project was begun at my house.  If I enumerated everything that preceded this new beginning, many of you would have given up on the back deck and run screaming from the house. If I have learned anything about life, it is this:

All of life is a series of processes.  If there is something you want, you truly need to persevere in your desires.  You have to become non-judgmental about the results that face you if they are not to your satisfaction, because another go-round may net you the precise results you want. And you have to stay open to new ideas - ideas that maybe you did not generate yourself.

My back deck project was one of these challenges.  It began two years ago and I’ve gone through so many challenges getting to yesterday, I sometimes felt as if it would never happen.  There was the enormous costs for engineering; the creating of the funds for both the materials and the labor; the refusal of family to help; the generosity of non-family to help; the heavy winter snows….  I’m tired just re-thinking about everything but these are the key elements plus a whole lot more.

What I’m getting to is that every process you go through bears similarities: the need to persevere; the non-judgment about results; the fact that  you are in a process; the requirement to persist; the open-mindedness you must maintain.  I can see how similar this deck-building thing is to my struggles with obesity.  The process requires the exact same things.  So go back up to the italicized paragraph and re-read it while thinking about your weight issues.  Surely you didn’t think I’d suddenly switched the theme of this blog over to construction, did you?

I haven’t chatted you up for a while about My Cats Have Seen Me Naked. I’ve written about the many years of self-correction and perseverance I’ve exercised in the book. I’m still willing to autograph one for  you. 

Love ya!

Pat