The Spiritual Solution
What has spirituality got to do with binge eating?
I am here to tell you that, it has everything to do with it. Let me explain how.
Spirituality is concerned with meaning, purpose, inner peace, and fulfilment - for some it’s also about connecting to something greater than themselves. You may not be religious but we can say, that all human beings to some degree or other are spiritual beings. Who doesn’t want more peace, fulfilment, purpose and meaning?
Binge eating as a quest for peace
Perhaps, unconsciously, when you binge eat what you are really desiring is for your soul to be soothed and comforted, your painful emotions pacified and for you to be made whole again.
Typically, emotional pain makes you feel lonely, alienated and disconnect from yourself, from the people in your life and life itself. This state of being becomes so unbearable, making you to turn to food to escape from the hollowness you feel inside. You use food to fill the void, and to distract yourself from the mundanity of your life.
During some dark moments, your life can feel hopeless, meaningless, disconnected and perhaps even directionless. You feel uninspired, joyless, stuck and yet again cycling through the binge-diet, guilt and shame cycle. Every time this cycle is repeated you feel more and more despair, and lose hope for yourself and your life.
The Spiritual Solution to healing Binge Eating
When you seek a spiritual solution, you instantly elevate your consciousness. You will come to know that you are more than your habits. Yes! Binge eating is a habit. It is not you, neither is it your destiny. Binge eating is a habitual mindset that is fuelled by wrong beliefs. Habits, no matter how ingrained, can be broken.
When you take up spiritual practices such as meditation or connecting with a higher source, you start to see yourself differently. You will begin to see yourself as somebody who can change and transform. If you learn the skills of tapping into a source beyond yourself, you will have access to a limitless and powerful source of energy that will help you let go of habits that don’t serve you at a soul level.
Finally Fulfilled: Becoming whole
When you contemplate the bigger questions of life like what’s my purpose? What’s the most meaningful use of my life? What’s my reason for living? All the while realising that your life is short, this can change everything. At the heart of binge eating is emotional stagnation and a general sense of mundanity. One of the common reasons why people emotionally eat is out of boredom. Eating gives them something to do, to pass the time.
Contemplating the bigger questions in life, including cultivating an awareness of your own mortality can be a sharp awakening. Yes, we all know, we are not here forever, but do we really know this in our hearts of heart? Or do we live in denial, with the vague assumption that we are here to stay forever. This assumption is not only false but also costs us a lot. It makes us take our life and other’s lives for granted and leads to complacency and mundanity. Our life becomes filled with trivialities and there’s no joy or appreciation for what life has to offer.
Awakening your death awareness is a potent medicine for releasing emotional stagnation and transcending mundanity. It brings with it vitality, vibrancy, a renewed sense of purpose and clarity as well as a zest for life that will fill you up from the inside. When you feel whole from the inside, there is no ‘hole’ to fill. You won’t need food anymore, in that way.
"Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely."
- Spiritual quote from a meditative tradition
Try to keep this awareness with you when you are going about your life and see how things shift. We all need a little reality check sometimes and I have personally found this so useful in my own journey to help me feel full of gratitude and make the most of life.
