ASK ABDI: HOW TO DEAL WITH EMOTIONAL PAIN RELEASED FROM WEIGHT LOSS?

QUESTION: I have been losing weight, which has been an isolating and spiritual experience and is becoming more strange. There is a level of both disconnect and connection within it. As I approach my last 10 pounds around my belly, I feel so many old issues coming up of pain and ghosts and fear and childhood that I thought were gone. My body feels a bit foreign and my connection to the world, at times, feels more tenuous. I begin sobbing while running or transcending.

I feel as if I am being re-situated in the universe and my original pains are being relived vividly. Where is this new portal I have entered? Who am I, now that who I thought I was has melted away? Thanks for any road signs.

ANSWER: When we lose weight, we lose a layer of protection from all energies externally. But we also lose a layer/release emotions and energies that were held internally. Due to the latter, it is common for old issues to come up as they get released. Memories in the form of thoughts or feelings are a part of that release. The fact that the body “feels foreign” can be due to the fact that you are changing your relationship to it by actually being in it, instead of "on top" of it: in your head.

So yes, you are being “re-situated in the universe", because you are in it on a different level. The body is ancient; it was on the scene way before the modern brain. There is much wisdom in it. Due to emotional pain, many of us, if not most, leave it for a heady life in the brain at a young age. We live in our heads, web stories there, and take them for reality, while the body soldiers on regardless. Make friends with this wondrous body of yours and you will be guided as to what and where the next step is.