Trauma Informed Healing and Ramen Noodles

Ramen is delicious right?

In my perfect world I've conjured up in my head, my life has order and routine and enough time for everything. All of it. In my real life where I actually reside, trade offs are constantly made between what I want to do and what I need to do. And the line between the two isn't always clear. Sometimes taking care of my health, physical and mental is pitted against my needs as a grad student. Meal planning is for post grad people- students eat on the go - walking between the library and their next class. But I'm too grown to live that ramen noodle life even if that's about the budget in working with. I also know that for me, not getting enough exercise, sun light, quiet time, and clean foods affects my mood and ability to concentrate. But knowing what you need and the ability to prioritize those needs does not always feel possible or even encouraged. I feel like the message I receive in this culture of higher learning is. that the time for health comes later, after you are a student. Students are supposed to be stressed, and hungry, and unhappy- the price I pay for access to education now. Student loans the price I pay later. I struggle with the culture of glamorizing exhaustion at the expense of well being for the sake of education. Why can't becoming the smartest version of myself also include learning how to have a work, life, school, health balance? And while I try to create that for myself, I am still working within a culture that tells me I can sleep when I'm dead. Or graduated. Whichever comes first.

Trauma informed Ana

This week I had the opportunity to find some compassion for my birth mother which is a bit of challenege seeing as I never knew her past the age of 2, remember nothing about her, and  will never have the opportunity to since she passed away when I was about 12. I have spent some time doing grief work and forgiveness work for her and my father throughout my adult life but I haven't always gotten the opportunity to find compassion for her. And so this week, through opening myself up to loving and supporting women who shared a similar journey to hers, I was given the chance to extend that compassion to the memory of my birth mother. These women are my teachers. They are my birth mothers. They give me the opportunity to know her struggle without ever having met her. They give me the chance to love her journey without having witnessed it first hand. They give me gratitude for not having to have lived it first hand as her daughter. I've always known that I've ended up with the mom I was supposed to, with the life that makes sense for my journey. But because my life is so different, I haven't always been exposed to the darkness of what she might have suffered or the possibility of the redemption she might have found at the end. These women teach me to love her by allowing me to love them. I never imagined this to be a possibility when I was an angry teenager who felt abandoned by her birth parents and like I didn't belong anywhere. And yet last night as I tearfully thanked these women for being my teachers, I healed a part of me that while no longer angry for many years, is still emotionally sore in many ways. I want to believe that as I heal these pieces of me, that I learn to love myself more authentically and that it translates to taking kinder and better care of myself. That the energy that was needed for holding together the stitches of where my heart is broken by feelings of abandonment is now released to work on self care. Energy cannot be destroyed. Just transferred. And so I send that energy that for so long has had to hold hurt pieces together towards the parts of my body that need energy for laughter and having it in me to call back a friend at the end of a long day, or get in a workout or read a good book. That's what I believe healing can do for me. It transfers the energy needed to keep me from falling apart towards giving me the opportunity to live a fulfilled and more balanced life <3

Body Mantra Thoughts and Practice

Today during yoga the instructor kept asking us to be present with our bodies of today. To let go of the body we had 10 years ago or the one we went 10 weeks from now. To thank the bodies looking back at us in the mirror and acknowledge how hard it worked during the practice. Something about this statement stirred my heart and I found myself wanting to come home and sit with the gratitude for my body and its strength. 

I don't always give my body enough credit for the ways it has taken care of me when I wasn't strong enough to take care of it. The way it has made room for the pain and trauma and eating disorders. How it found physical places for the things my mind and heart weren't ready to face. My body figures out how to work with my emotional capacity and coping mechanisms, never losing patience with my progress, even when I don't extend the same courtesy in return. My body that levels itself out and is constantly working to come back to center. To healthy. To home. My body that commits to being pushed  for 90 minutes of yoga in the heat and each class gives a little more- a reminder to not underestimate its commitment to supporting my journey. At times when I am sick, however that might show itself, it forces us to slow down. Sleep. Rest. Drink water. Breathe. Reminding me that we are only human, after all.

I wrote my body a mantra for the week and wanted to share <3

"My body aligns with the universe from which it came.

It embraces health and welcomes healing.

It supports my weight loss journey energetically and holds me up with compassion."

The Things I Hunger For: Reflections of Healing and My Weight Loss Journey

I recently had a meeting regarding my capstone
project for my graduate program. I am in the home stretch of completing this degree, about only 15 weeks to go and this last phase is the implementation phase. My capstone work is focused on providing healing and mental health resources for recently incarcerated women who are reintegrating into their communities. This project is a combination of my lived experiences with trauma, and grief, and healing and the tools that I have picked up over my last two years as a grad student. So at this meeting, we were discussing some of the challenges the women who will participate in my program face and how healing mechanisms will hopefully improve their quality of life. I found myself speaking so passionately about the need for access to healing resources and the powerful impact it can have on behavior change. Because healing changes not just what you do, but who you are. I found myself showing these women so much compassion and love for their journeys, and struggles, and impassioned in my calling to make a difference in their lives.

And then I went home and later that night and beat myself up about having had Target brand trail mix for dinner instead of the perfectly prepped salad sitting in my fridge. I stressed about the weigh in I had coming up in a couple of days as part of a challenge I had signed up for with some of the women from the office. I couldn't find the same level of compassion that I had so willingly extended to the women in my capstone program. This has eaten away at me for a couple of days (no pun intended) and I have decided that like the women in my program, I too will embark on a healing journey.

I will practice what I teach.

For some people weight loss is about access to healthy foods, or developing workout habits. For me it is about healing. It is about a life time of trauma and grief and what it means to shed it simultaneously with the weight.

I want to love myself more deeply on the other side of having lost the weight.

So much of my life has been made up of losing things I was not ready to. My birthparents, my son, my innocence, my childhood, my health. I have a lifetime of practice of grasping and holding on followed by traumatic goodbyes and very little practice in voluntarily letting things go.

I cannot physically carry my pain any longer. 

After Mateo died, I spent the following couple of years bringing myself back to life. Resurrecting. Healing. I have created a healing toolbox that works for me, one that I turn to throughout the ebb and flow of my still present grief. But I have a toolbox. Part of the work of my capstone is asking these women to build their own and asking them to believe they have the power to become whole again. I need to believe that I can do that as well. I can run my fingers over the scars of my child loss and point to the places that healed because of therapy, or mediation, or friends who stayed up on the phone with me all night while I cried. My community brought me back to life because I believed that it was possible even when I didn't know how.

I have to believe that I can heal from my weight related grief and trauma as well.

So I am going to try even though I don't exactly know all the hows. Because I am asking these women to try to hold on to their sobriety, and their dignity, and their responsibilities while coming back to life. I am asking them to face their past, and their fears, and heal their traumas. If I can believe in their ability to succeed, and I do, I need to start believing in my own.

This blog will be a reflection of this journey. It won't be about numbers on a scale or inches off my waist. It's about allowing there to be more of me emotionally and spiritually as there becomes less of me physically.

It's about discovering the things I truly hunger for.