My Cats Have Seen Me Naked
How I Resolved Self-Acceptance And Bodily Issues While Obese
Copyright © 2007 by Patricia L. Matson
All Rights Reserved
This is a Mental Universe
Here’s a little example to help you decide if you are ready to embrace the ideas in this book and get off the “I’m fat” concept. If you came to me and asked me to teach you how to hang wallpaper, I could do that because I would know that you don’t know how and, more importantly, you would know that you don’t know how.
But if you called me up one day and said “Pat, how do I handle obesity?” I couldn’t teach you that because basically you already think you know how. I cannot add anything to a cup that is already full. You cannot have a sleep over if all the beds in your home are already occupied.
In the tropics where fruit-loving monkeys live, the ladies who pick the fruit weave baskets to hold it. The baskets have long, narrow necks which might allow a skinny monkey’s arm to reach in, but once he grabs the fruit, he cannot retrieve his arm because the fruit-holding hand forms a closure. We’re kind of like this with our ideas. We’ve got the fruit in our hand. In order to move away from the basket (away from our old ideas,) there is only one thing we can do: let go!
I’d like you to let go of your previous conceptions about obesity and about life. If you can begin to do that, you can move forward. That’s what I had to do to move forward. I had to let go of a lot of cherished, family-taught, and school-reinforced ideas.
Most of us have been taught to judge using our initial senses: hear, see, touch, taste, and smell. From the day I was born until right now, I became quite skilled at doing just that. I saw a grey cloud and I thought “Rain.” I heard the volume go up, and I knew a commercial had come on TV. I learned to sense heat via my fingertips, and I sure know when a skunk is in the neighborhood.
Like me, you have been judging life from the physical senses all of your life. But I had a deeply felt sense that there was more, and I went searching for it. What else could there be? Why do the train tracks appear to meet at the horizon when they really don’t? How are the yogi’s able to hold their breath when buried under ground? Why do people have out-of-body experiences and I don’t? How can the Breatharians exist without eating? So many questions? I had to have answers!
I searched for answers in all the traditional places and didn’t find them. Then I learned that in this life there are things that are visible and things that are invisible. Ah ha! Now we’re getting somewhere. When I learned to judge using the senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling it did not take into account those things that are invisible. It’s kind of a shame, really, because there are just tons of them. I wanted to know how I could get in touch with those invisible things and make them part of my life. I sure didn’t want to lose out on anything!
I discovered that to learn about invisible things, there were two more virtues in my born-with set of virtues! The first five are hear, see, touch, taste and smell. There are two more? Oh really? This excited me. The last two, seldom-recognized or talked about virtues are reason and understanding, and they should be brought to the forefront and made sovereign. But it’s just one of those invisible things that get bypassed somehow.
The unfoldment of reason and understanding can happen automatically in the process of life itself. You just keep breathing in and breathing out, and eventually, if you hug the desire for more understanding to your heart, it will arrive. This is the slow boat method.
Or, reason and understanding can be stimulated into expression through the simple exercise of your desire to do so. You know they exist now. If you want to begin to exercise and strengthen them, your desire will automatically create each next stately step for you to accomplish this task if you continue to actively think about that desire. This is what I learned. I was a fumbling fool when I got started and I’ve become rather skilled by persevering.
Have you ever noticed the number of things that come in threes in this life? Stop lights, the colors in many flags, the number of legs on each side of insects, types of Greek columns, body types, and the list could go on and on. Why do you think folks turn naturally to a division of threes when identifying something? It’s because our very nature – that of being thinkers – has intrinsic to itself a triune mental process.
The desire I talked about in the previous paragraph is the first part of that process. The process looks like this:
Desire Thinking Objectification
You may never have considered that your mind has all tucked into its design a tri-unity of capability. You were born with it. It works by bringing up from inside of its self a desire as the first step in this tri-unity. Because your mind has a built-in ability to think, the first thing that happens when you bring up a desire is that you begin to think about it.
In this second step of the triune mental process, thinking, you have lots of latitude: you can think well or poorly about your desire; you can persevere or you can quit thinking about it; you can search for more and more details about it or you can not seek very deeply. Whatever activity you perform in the second step, thinking, determines the objectification of your thought.
Take a moment and re-read that last sentence. It contains the key to governing your life and creating whatever you want in it.
Let’s say you’d like to have a new Hummer. That’s the desire in the first position. You begin to think about it. You might think “Oh, I could never own a car that expensive!” The objectification of that kind of thinking would be No Hummer.
If instead you think “I’d like a deep burgundy Hummer; I want it to have all the bells and whistles; I can detail my current car so it brings more when I sell it; I could tap into my savings account for the down payment; maybe my dad would lend me money..” This kind of thinking would eventually objectify a Hummer as your third step!
I hope you have gotten the concept that if you want to understand the whys about this obesity curse, you are going to have to let go of some older ideas and replace them with new ones. You are right. Don’t be that monkey in the basket, hanging on for dear life to a piece of fruit that you cannot even eat, let alone move away from.
The biggest change that needs to be made is to burrow into the invisible realm – change your concept from this is a physical world to this is a mental world. I worked for years to get this into my brain. But if I hadn’t done the work, I could not have written this book, so I want to encourage you: you can get there from here. If I could do it, anyone can do it. I’m just your ordinary girl.
Change the Way You Use Your Senses
One of the first ways of getting into the invisible realm is to change the way you use your virtues of hear, see, touch, taste and smell.
When I began to judge invisible things through using my last two virtues of reason and understanding, everything changed. I began to “see” visible things differently. Oh, it may have appeared the same as it always did, but inside me, I had learned that seeing is only believing!
I had stood on the train tracks as a little girl and it sure looked to me as if they met at the horizon. I could see it. I then proved that seeing was only me believing they met because I walked those tracks and then I knew for sure that they did not meet, in fact, could never meet. I learned that what I saw was just a belief. I believed they met. I began to learn how to use what I had learned (my understanding) versus what I merely saw with my eyes (my belief.) This use of understanding learned from accurately using my sense of sight made my old ways of judging no longer satisfying.
I now “hear” differently, too. I used to just listen to the words. Now, I’ve learned to hear what is not being said or what meaning is being woven into the words I hear. I can now tune in to what is motivating the words.
Now I have a heightened sense of touching – a more respectful sense of what the privilege of touching another implies, for example. All of my early use of the five senses of hear, see, touch, taste, and smell has taken on a new, more wonderful meaning – a heightened sense of aliveness and this is a big change. You can accomplish this too.
Take a Fresh Look at Spirituality
Spirituality is another concept where I’ve made big changes. I used to identify spirituality as that which lived inside the Catholic Church, dictated to me from Rome as what was right and good, and limited to their set of rules. I became a nun to learn more, to delve deeper. This is a decidedly sensitive area for many of my readers because you are so good.
I don’t see spirituality that way any longer and I know that I made an enormous shift in my thinking to get to where I am today. I’d like to encourage you to remember the monkey, take a deep breath, and let go, so that you can examine objectively my new sense of spirituality.
I discovered that to get within myself, I had to understand what that Self was. I had not been taught the truth about my Self in my church despite my craving and searching for it there. I eventually learned through my search that I was a mental being. This mentalness of my being had nothing to do with my former concept of spirituality learned inside a church. I discovered that true mental and true spiritual were synonyms!
I learned that because I was thinking, I was being mind itself, being 100% spirit! If you are thinking, therefore you are mind, because it’s only mind that can think, and mind is mental and mental is spirit. Mind is mental and invisible. Spirit is mental and invisible. Spirit and Soul are the same. Mind and spirit and soul are the same.
It was after I left the convent that I stepped into the world of spirit without input from any religious organization. I know that those organizations want desperately for you to believe along the lines you have always believed. If you are completely satisfied with what you have inside your choice of church, so be it. I would advise you to keep an open mind, continue to look deeply, and keep asking questions until all your questions are answered to your own satisfaction.
My experience is that great dissatisfaction lives inside religious organizations – dissatisfaction without reasonable answers. In my experience, spirituality and church are mutually exclusive. I just could not get my questions answered there. I had to go within myself and ask myself questions and then search for satisfying answers to gain my understanding.
Observe Medicine Keenly
I’ve noticed in my life that no matter what improvements there have been in the world of medicine, there has been no real reduction of sickness. People are as sick today as they were 65 years ago, and the drug companies and the doctors are richer, but there is no decrease of sickness! I once leaned on the world of medicine to cure obesity. It didn’t cure me.
I think this is an accurate observation and one that deserves your attention.
These are some of the major reasons why I let go of my old concepts about myself, about religion and medicine. Having let go, I was able to move into a more workable understanding.
Proving All is Mental
Can I prove to you that we live in a mental universe? No, I cannot. I can only prove it to me. I can encourage you to get busy and discover this for yourself, but only you can prove it to you. If you simply accept what I’ve said to you, you are only believing, and what you really want is understanding.
I am inviting you to understand this is the truth and I am encouraging you to begin your considering. In your bed at night, ask yourself to prove that it’s a mental universe. That’s how I did it. If you truly want answers to your questions, they will unfold to you from within your wonderful self. Keep asking each night, and every time you ask, your mind will provide one more detail of truth until the whole picture unfolds from within you.
I find that when you move over to the realm of the invisible universe, your experience will change magically because you’ll view life from a “what am I supposed to learn from this” viewpoint, and you’ll develop eagerness for the lessons. You cherish these experiences because you can understand precisely what you are unfolding, what character you are building, what specific good you are recognizing about your own good self.
You already know that my discovery about mentalness, spirituality, and the world of within began out of dissatisfaction with religious organizations. That dissatisfaction led me on a search for greater truth. I found it wrapped up in the land of metaphysics. The word metaphysics never frightened me. I hope it doesn’t frighten you. It just means beyond physics – beyond that which is visible to the world to that which is spiritual, invisible. It’s those invisible things that exist but we simply aren’t taught to recognize them. It’s such a lovely place. It’s the place where I found the I of me.
I can share an idea with you to help you on your way to proving it’s all mental to yourself. Like produces like. Only dogs can have litters of puppies. Only pears grow on pear trees. You cannot use the ingredients for a cake to make soup. Only water can make raindrops. This is because like produces like and it’s a law. So if you can think, wouldn’t that make you mind because it’s only mind that can think and produce thoughts? You are a mental being.
I’d like to share with you the mistakes I made in the earlier years of my life that created my mistaken sense of obesity in the hope that you will have some of your own Aha! Moments and recognize similar mistakes in your own sweet self.
A Cutesy Rhyme
My family called me Patty Fatty as a toddler. My mother said it was because the words rhymed, but I believed they were true. Arggghhh! There has not been one day in my life when I did not believe I was fat. This was the birth of my erring human belief that I was obese.
My dad’s mother was obese and so was his sister. When I was told I looked like Aunt Ida, I thought they meant her body, not her face. My face looked like her face. Add this mistake to my Patty Fatty mistaken concept, and you can see this mental error growing stronger toward creating physical fatness for myself. Your thoughts will out-picture on your body so you can see what you’ve been thinking. It’s like getting a Thought Report Card.
Being born in the 1940s did not involve the emaciated body images held as right and good and wonderful in the 2000s, and yet I was obsessed with bodily image. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t tugging my blouses down over my bottom. I couldn’t walk in front of a mirror without harsh self-judgment. I was singularly uncomfortable in bathing suits during my grade school years. Not okay was my mantra. Do you see the problem growing longer fangs?
I believed my parents when they told me that I was fat. I began to claim that I was fat. Others around me picked up on my own sense and confirmed for me that yep, sure enough, you’re fat. I can look back in my mother’s photo album now and remember what I thought about myself when the picture was taken. It was a bleak sense. And all the while, my body had not yet blossomed into full-blown obesity. It was an invisible sense-snowball, gathering mass and speed.
I was terrified of the negative judgment of others. I made me paranoid. I turned it inside myself and watered and fed it with regularity. By the age of 26, I was developing and strengthening my erring thought habit until that sucker could no longer hold itself from manifesting and finally gave me an obese body. I used that obese body as a symbol of protecting myself from the words, the judgments, the sneers and the derision of others. I was singularly unsuccessful. I managed to keep my mistaken sense of self buried and hidden from even me for over 50 years. Therapy, introspection, and studying about the truth has decidedly helped.
One of the very best ways to keep obesity in the picture is to diet. Try this diet. Try that one. You have to maintain and retain the habit of thinking “I am fat” to diet, otherwise, why do it? I learned nothing from the diet experience and did it over and over again with no lasting results. I gave food powerfully causative capabilities that it simply does not have, because food is pure effect and effect has no causative properties at all! If you’d like to remain obese, keep dieting. The food and drug industry just love it that you do this. Helps keep their wallets fat, too.
One of my therapists once called me a score keeper. Those words resonated inside my mind for years until I saw it for myself. I sat in self-judgment upon myself, and I always gave me low scores. I was unforgiving of myself for my real and imagined failings. I wallowed in self-pity, with a sense of victimhood that stunk. I blamed myself and punished myself for not being able to get a grip on this obesity.
And criticism: I learned it and sharpened it to a fine art, mostly impaling myself with my own skill. I developed moods and attitudes that were not healthy or supportive – depression, loneliness, boredom, guilt. It’s not a pretty package and it all requires lots of work to clean out all that muck.
Until I unfolded the ability to reason and understand my life from a scientific perspective, I perpetuated my mistakes with the strength of my will by using repetition and ignorance of the facts. I simply didn’t see what I was doing.
Fortunately, my good heart and my wonderful mind continued to lead me forward until this day, when I can share what I’ve seen and learned with you to make your path a little easier. I know that’s a long list of mistakes, but trust me, there’s an equally long list of good things I’ve unfolded. I encourage you to begin to make a list of this type of mental mistake that you’ve made. And don’t neglect to remember that you did it innocently, as I did.
Wow, Pat, this is all pretty amazing, and what the heck does all this have to do with losing weight and loving myself large? I think it has everything to do with it.
How can I live in a visible realm and embrace the invisible? St. Paul said that you can understand the invisible things by the visible things that were made. But how? For me, the savior has been Asking Questions. When I observe visible things and start Asking Questions, I eventually reach a settled sense of understanding and salvation from my previous erring ideas. I learned that the only thing I had to do to find peace, acceptance, and love is to change my previous ideas. I explain in great detail in the second section of this book.
Ask questions and observe are two ways to embrace the invisible. Study and ask more questions are another way. Study what? You’re the boss! Study whatever comes before you that you feel attracted to. That is what I did and I learned that questions, observing and study were right and good for me to welcome and accept for the sake of my spirituality and the resolution of this obesity issue.
Read lots of books. Listen to documentaries. Our world today is chock full of self-help experts who will share their understanding with you. As you go through this process, you will be examining those things not visible. As you persevere on your stately path, you will involve yourself in a higher proportion of invisible concepts, until that day comes when you are fully immersed in fundamental spirituality. The idea that at one time you read this rather basic chapter in this book becomes laughable, for you will have eased on down the road so far from this place.
Have you ever lived in a place where you did not think? It’s not possible. So then, you have experienced living in the invisible realm – the realm of within. I encourage you to consciously go there more often. Simply shut your eyes, close off all outside input, and exist inside your mind. Once you get inside, think about things from a purely mental perspective. Ask yourself this question: “If there was only me living inside myself, how would I view xx?” You can exercise incredible control from within your Self. Decide today that you want to get more into the realm of spirit and you will.
With love and a wish for a Happy Thanksgiving for you,
Pat
