Finally Integration

Wow, my last blog post (right underneath this one) which was also the newsletter that I sent out this month really generated a lot of response.  I mean a lot.  People I don’t even know wrote to me to tell me how brave and raw and honest it was.  It’s funny because a lot of planning usually goes into my newsletter content but this piece just flew out.  I hadn’t made the decision to make a formal announcement about switching the focus of my business just yet but when I sat down to write I just felt compelled to write about that.  The people reading it who know me read into the deeper level of what was going on.

I want to be free to unhook from my food and body issues.

They’re what my identity has been wrapped around personally–for my entire life and professionally–for the last seven years.  I think what happened is that I had a stunning realization that I’m just not that person anymore.   It’s been a long time since I’ve constructed my day around my exercise routine (a regular practice in the past) and I’ve found more compelling things to focus on than the size of my thighs and figuring out how I can lose three more pounds.  There’s definitely a part of me that feels as though the central axis of who I knew myself to be was removed but I think the operative there is the phrase “who I knew myself to be.”  It was only one part of who I was and yet I chose to make that my defining feature.  There’s always that part of me that can’t bear the thought of being too happy or too successful so when things were going well I could always count on my food and body issues to bring me back to earth.  Going public with this stuff was my way of telling the world: I may be successful but look, I’m still a mess deep down inside.  And doing workshops for women who are struggling with the same issues was just living in the wound…it was exhausting and kept me from having the time and space that I needed to heal.

Moving into the future

So deciding to let go of the Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body workshops was a total relief.  Having two separate focuses was really diffusing my marketing messages and all of my work.  It’s so interesting to me because all of my life I’ve had one main goal and that is:  integration.  I wanted everything in my life to be connected to everything else, which is actually the organic and natural state of things.  I wanted to stop having a passion and a survival job, I wanted the work I did to reflect my values and use my existing talents, I wanted to stop running all over the place, getting this thing here and that thing there;  I wanted all of it to work together like pieces of a puzzle.  Making the decision to let go of what wasn’t working in my life and in my work allowed that to happen.

So finally what I have is what I want and what I’m doing with my work is a conglomeration of all of my experience along with my natural talents.  Feels integrated to me.