For those who don't know me well, I'm the kind of person who struggles with two to four kilograms. I don't suffer from being overweight but can eat compulsively and mechanically. Last year, a post @ritamayblog from Rita May made me aware that I had built a harmful habit around food: a "Me Time" eating escape. I connected with her ideas immediately, and we started messaging on Instagram.
In 2021 I began working on what I call T-Kei —an inner space where one can find a natural balance between mind, body, heart and soul— a home within. Being an Interior Designer, I'm worried about how our world is changing faster than we can adapt. Thus, promoting our wellbeing feels like our most pressing need. It's in our homes where we can design good habits and good living.
Martha Beck summarized it rather nicely. "You cannot change your life without changing your living space, and you cannot change your living space without changing your life". Thus, I bring into alignment concepts of wellbeing, interior design and balanced inner life. At home, one can nurture every aspect of T-kei, design and plan for a balanced life regardless of how crazy the world gets.
Rita's Emotional Eating Training has widened my experience of my T-Kei. Six weeks of coaching sessions have been an incredible journey. Let me explain what I discovered:
A path to change. One definitely needs to frame change (whatever one may want to change) with a holistic approach. Nothing in one's life is a stand-alone situation. Habits are systemic. Eating may be the clearest example; it is never a linear event. Me and food...nop, it is never that simple. It expands to whatever happens before and after eating; it's related to relationships and work, and it also involves emotional fluctuations, energy levels, and mindset.
Talking to your body facilitates the flow. Change is about becoming someone else; it's not about control and restriction; it's about flowing into a better you. For this, it's best to anchor intention into the physical environment and create the sensory stimulus to coerce your body to do things that your mind doesn't want to.
You can transfer insight from this change-flow process into other areas of T-Kei. In my case, I imagined a new identity, a new Adriana that wanted a balanced and nonjudgemental relationship with food. This non-judgement intention started impacting the rest of my daily thought processes. I cannot stress how liberating that was (my inner critic is not entirely silenced but significantly subdued).
Flowing into change is training on being present and aware of what's happening to you. It's hard, yes, because it demands one's attention. But being in the present moment is being in control from Tkei rather than from our mental frenzy. As Eckhart Tolle puts it: being present allows your mind to work for you, rather than you working for your mind.
Conclusion:
Eating habits can be a portal to work on one's Tkei. But there are many other approaches. Change is hard in the short term, but one can find reasonable scale objectives and evolve into better versions of oneself. As one learns to trust the process it feels like adding solid bricks to the home inside us. It's all about mental muscles; train yourself in just one flow-change, and you will build momentum for who you want to become.
Have a great day!
Adriana