The Struggle: Feasting on the Present Day 2

The skipping, whirring, pacing thoughts began their morbid merry-go-round when I was ten.

 

I called it nervousness.  The asthma medication inhaled would bring it on, the late dinner would leave me shaky, ordinary stress would demand I put on the brakes for hours of after-school napping.

 

The first memory startles with clarity: My two best friends were playing in the back of the woods at the school playground, a fort of dead vines and roots around a tree, a child’s Eden.  And then it hits me, this anxiety.  I am seeing outside of myself and I AM NOT LOVED.  It was concrete truth.  I was sure of it. I am not accepted here, not wanted.  I want to lash out.  I want to run.  And then the bell rings, I eat my bag lunch and life and clarity is restored.  The shakiness goes away and harmony restored.

 

But years of the truth blurring and I became blind with a lens that got smudged thicker and thicker.

The physical manifestations soon attached themselves parasitically to my relationships and I began a battle with a social-anxiety that left me clamoring for acceptance.

 

Insulin Resistance, PCOS, this unholy hormone cocktail pingponged me mercilessly from anxiety to depression with long periods of self-loathing in between.  Perusing the blur of memories I recognize periods of light and the fog lifting and now I see clearly, those were periods of Health.  They were periods of constant exercise, of learning to combat stress through practices like Feasting on the Present — things which have become integral now.

 

I was living life blurred.

 

Until Andrew and I tried to have children.

 

Two years later, countless doctor visits and various endocrinologists and then came the diagnosis: Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome.  I was not ovulating and there was a simple solution: glucophage, a common diabetes drug.  The lens of insulin resistance (commonly connected to PCOS) was removed and like a person rubbing her glasses, I could finally see a life unattached from the blur of fear.

 

Joy and healing began:

The healing of a marriage exhausted from my emotional roller coaster,

The inner healing and disentangling of true emotions from the still-daily physical manifestations of PCOS,

Grace, God-acceptance granting the possibility of self-acceptance,

and then the hunger of now, the desire of God and the gift of feasting in the present moment.

 

He has grasped and has lifted and I have become Eve resurrected.

 

This is my resurrection story.  What is yours?  We will treat it with honor, friend.

How is your daily feast and celebration coming? 

What has been the struggle that keeps you from staying grounded? 

Do join me for ten minutes a day of stillness of bringing your awareness to your senses, taking deep breaths, of feasting and celebrating the present. (Start with five if ten is too much?)

My feast this morning was me slipping deep into the warmth of a bath, the smell of citrus soap, the hum of the interstate racing past our sweet little town, the quiet of an empty house.  And thank You, thank You, thank You to the Giver of all these gifts!

Did you miss the struggle or the first day?  Find it  here and here