Having worked with bodies for over 25 years now teaching Movement, Strength Training, Pilates and Nutrition I have come to see that the body is so much more than the nuts and bolts of muscle, bone connective tissue and organs. It’s not an isolated department of your life. It’s not an edifice that you grudgingly drag around through your life while you are busy doing more important stuff.

At this time of the year, particularly, many people look on their bodies with disdain as they bemoan the carnage of many a Christmas treat laid to rest on their ever expanding waistlines, legs and asses.

If we take a step back and look at the bigger picture that our bodies are desperately trying to communicate to us, our transient goals to trim and tone, pale into insignificance when we understand what the body is really trying to say.

Obesity and Over weight

The text book definition of obesity is excess body fat (20% and higher for men, 30% and higher for women). Its causes have been debated ad nauseam for the last 50+ years. All scientific explanations aside and not excluded what I have seen obesity to represent on an energetic level is the following:

1. Not being safe in your body or in the world.

The fear response and the survival impulse have never been so prevalent as they are in the modern world (see Adrenaline Junkie)

Many people morph into larger bodies on a subconscious level to be a bigger structure and feel safer. In the animal kingdom larger males are always favoured over smaller males by their female counterparts as they represent strength, safety and the ability to protect. Obesity in the modern world is in many ways an aberration of this phenomenon.

2. A defence mechanism.

Following on from part 1, if you don’t feel safe in your body, you feel constantly under threat. That which feels under threat feels the need to defend. Body fat can be a physical barrier to the harshness of the world and the harshness and aggression of other people. I gave an example of this phenomenon in this blog (Your Emotional Belly)

Obesity is an actual sickness. It is a disease.

In the book “A Course in Miracles” it is stated:

“Sickness is a defence against the truth.
I will accept the truth of what I am,
and let my mind be wholly healed today.”

So if Obesity is causing you great pain and suffering in your life either mentally, physically, emotionally or spiritually I challenge you to ask yourself the following question daily:

“Who or what am I defending, that if I didn’t defend it, would allow me to Have, Be and Receive all of Me?”

3. The Back Log Catalogue of Emotion

In my experience working with clients over many years one of the greatest causes of obesity and excess weight, is emotional repression. People who are emotionally repressed cover up their emotions with layers of fat. Overeating buries and numbs out, temporarily, the difficult feelings that we do not desire to entertain. As a populous we have been living in a head based reality for the last 5,000 years of Patriarchy. This means there is no room for emotion or expressing how you feel. People who do have the courage, power and the might to express how they feel are often labelled “Negative”. This is such an overwhelming injustice and inaccuracy that it needs to be addressed.

Feeling your feelings, facing your feelings, owning your feelings and expressing how you feel without blame, judgement, projection or expectation is one of the most evolved practices that anyone can engage in.

Almost nobody does this out of fear of being judged as a lesser human being or in some way being weak. You have to be very vulnerable to express your true feelings and this requires an enormously greater level of strength than repressing them and pretending you are O.K. when you are really not.

So the next time somebody asks you how you are feeling or how your day is going, practice telling the truth, without blaming anyone or anything for the situation, and see how your life starts to unfold. And for all of you superior peeps who don’t like being around “Negative” people take a good look at yourself in the mirror and wake up to your own emotional repression. It’s a gift that will set you free and maybe help you shed a few lbs of emotional baggage as a bonus prize.

Your body is a living testament to the truth of your existence. Learn its language, follow its lead and you will not be disappointed.