How Caroline Myss Shaped My View of Addiction and Overeating

Addiction, Overeating, and Slowing Time

I haven’t written much about my time in Caroline Myss’ Addictions workshop that I attended the last week of August. Truthfully, I am still trying to digest the intensity and depth and emotional charge of the material. She’s such a brilliant thought leader and spiritual teacher and knows exactly how to shatter the lies we love to tell ourselves and others.

I’m still plowing through my own 38 pages of single-spaced typewritten notes (I can type really fast, like transcriptionist-fast…just a little fact you probably don’t know!) and am now also reading through the real transcript from the conference. Her material is not the feel-good stuff of the New Age…not at all.

Myss talked to us about addiction as a strategy for slowing down time. I find this fascinating and incredibly useful and hope you get how powerful it is too.

She says that in any moment that we have a question about something, we get immediate guidance, immediate feedback. We’ll usually hear the answer in our mind. It’s instant, always (your IntuitiveBody). But, if we don’t like the truth, if the answer or guidance we get is something we’re not prepared to own, or to act on or make a decision about, we will “slow down time”, or the impact of that guidance into our being, by reaching for one of our addictive strategies. Something that we’ve probably used before, which will divert our energies away from the truth we don’t want to deal with. This concept of addiction blows my mind… seriously.

I learned a long time ago, and gathered through my attuned sense of my clients’ conflicts and emotional binds, that disordered eating was primarily about blocking out painful thoughts and feelings. Period. That’s it- eating and obsessing about weight or what to binge on or whether to purge or how to get out of the cycle… all of it is a diversion to avoid what else you might be thinking about. There’s something that would cause you more pain, a truth you feel you’re not able to manage that you’re trying to block. Knowing what that is can be tricky because before you’re even aware, you may reach for an addictive substance or behavior. My clients often find themselves in the midst of a big-bad-binge with no idea how it began.

Being willing to slow down time, and connect with what’s true in your life, painful emotions or relational conflicts, isn’t for the faint of heart… but that’s not you anyways, is it?! I suspect that you’re already getting “information”, hearing pieces of where you need to face your own truths , as you read this.

Compassion, loads of it for your imperfect self, for your humanity and for all that you don’t know.. is everything. So is learning how to slow your life down and your thoughts…nothing good happens in the racing around, seriously nothing. All healing and coming back into wholism happens in slow-time. Doing less. Being with yourself in simpler ways. Coming home to your body and resting there, for at least a bit every day… day in and day out. Over and over. Finding moments of soothing, and of deep connection.

I will be talking more in future posts about my takeaways from Caroline Myss’ work and our Addictions workshop.. It was powerful, impactful, and personally challenging to begin to integrate and consider her no-nonsense perspectives, as always. She’s been a teacher for me for many years and in spite of how much her views shake mine up, she is a bright light of guidance for me (and countless others).

I wish you great love and every blessing,boundless compassion for yourself, always-

xox

Lisa