Weight carries symbolic language; wait; tight; loose; overweight; heavy and flat: it is almost a dialect full of symbols of distraction and of personal and social interpretation. If you pay attention to the weight, what are you not paying attention to? What is weighing you down? Why, your feelings. “Metaphors transform unconscious patterns that hold and reveal deeper truths,” said Dr. Anita Johnston at a workshop Tuesday in Chattanooga, TN at the Center for Eating Disorders at Focus Healthcare of Tennessee. When your attention is more about being flat than being self-attentive, then what is abandoned in your soul? Carl Jung said that metaphor is the healing symbol on the emotional level.

What does this have to do with attention? Everything! It’s all about mind/body connection – and our ability to be fully in our body and fully attentive all at the same time. Dr. Johnston promotes the conceptual use of mythology and symbolic language as an entry point to consciousness. And consciousness is an entry point to attention. We need our consciousness in order to pay attention to the world within and the world without. She reminded us that in eating disorders there is a point of departure from full consciousness, often a trauma is the distraction to full attention.

Symbolically the disorder is like filling your home with many flags – ‘the flag is a symbol of the experience of being free, but you’re not more free because you have many flags’ Dr. Johnston explained. The eating disorder is like the number of flags, it is the symbol of nourishment but the resulting fat/thinness does not mean you’re more/less nourished.

How do you get someone back in their body? Use laughter to disconnect the Left Brain monologue long enough to feel again. Feelings are waves of energy said Dr. Johnston, suggesting the metaphor of water, the language of one who lives in Hawaii. Feelings pass like waves on the shore.

This body/mind disconnection is like a war against the body and the soul of the person.Dr. Johnston reminded us that we humans have a body, a mind and emotions, yet we are much bigger than the sum of all the parts. The body becomes the vehicle to take me places. The mind is the co-pilot and emotions help me understand all the parts. Recalling the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia, don’t fall asleep while all the brooms (Left Brain monologue) work to drown you (keep you under or over-nourished). Feed your attention.

And that’s my distracted childhood environment in a nutshell. It was all delivered day after day with a kiss and a smile and a badge of being a good child to my mom. It was different with Daddy. ‘Can’t you see what’s in front of your face?’ he would say coming up behind me when I couldn’t see what was in front of my face that he had sent me to retrieve. It was either momentary blindness or paralytic fear of his anger that completely blocked from my view whatever it was he wanted. I was trained in both physical and emotional distraction.

I remember asking one of my kids to get something for me that we all knew I was capable of retrieving on my own. I didn’t get anywhere with them. My Irish grandmother would tell us cousins to get something for her because our feet were younger and healthier than hers. But my kids knew my feet and legs were quite healthy, thank you very much. Have I trained them to be distracted, too? 

I believe we were born distracted and then endlessly drilled to develop it more fully, helplessly/naively hoping that someone in the world around us had a better handle on attention than we did. (Excuse me while I pick up the letter to take to the mailbox. I’ll just take that cup to the sink while I’m on my way out and maybe stop and pet the dogs which reminds me I have to buy more food and what’s that collar doing under the bureau? It sure is dirty – I better take it to the laundryroom…

Will I ever make it to the mailbox – oh, well there goes the mailman and my neighbor Jeannie is outside so we can talk about our flowers and…

What was the name of this blog? 

What’s your intention today to stay attentive and feel good about it?

Maureen