How to stop being anorexic

feel god - or life - or whatever you wanna call it

I sit in the sun sipping too strong coffee laced with fresh whipped cream as I write this. It’s a miracle because I was afraid of food for decades.

Afraid of anything rich or decadent or full fat or buttery or dripping in honey. Terrified of bread. Of cheese. Of anything with substance. Anything satiating, calorically dense, or that was non eating disorder coded.

Being a girl who was afraid of food was a deeply written part of my identity. Not because I didn’t like food. But because I couldn’t stand the feeling of fullness. And not just fullness, but the felt sense of my own belly, period. My womb. The place where so much abuse, neglect, and malnourishment was concentrated.

I couldn’t handle the dense, dark energy there. Feeling my own belly overwhelmed my nervous system and at 18, I didn’t have a single clue what was happening. Nor the tools to work through it.

So I avoided it the only way I could figure out how — overexercised to the point that my body was one continuous loop of painful tension — which overrode the deeper pain in my body. I stopped eating as much as possible. Rushed through meals whenever I was with company. And substituted what I really wanted with low fat everything, almond milk, and sugar free chocolate.

I did anything and everything I could to make sure my body did not for a single second relax into its own desire. Because I knew — unconsciously — that relaxation meant I’d start to feel the deeper things. The throb of life force. The impulse of Shakti to live. Eros’ longing to open.

~~~

In eating disorder treatment they focus on feeding you. Try to scare you with words like osteoporosis and heart failure. But that hardly concerned me. I was invincible. Floating. Of a different breed. Traditional methods of therapy never worked for me. All you do is lie to the therapist. Easy peasy. I wrote the rules of the game they were trying to play. Didn’t they know that?

Honestly though? I wasn’t ready to give up the pleasure of starving.

That’s the thing. Starving was the only lightness I’d ever known. It wasn’t painful to me. I loved it.. The emptiness. The despair. It was erotic. I was self excavating. Lying on the floor doing sit ups for hours was the most turned on I’d ever been.

It felt utterly honest at the time. My early sexual experiences were lackluster, and now I was in a soul crushing relationship with a man who physically and spiritually repulsed me. Plus I’d successfully stifled any glimmer of creativity that tried to emerge until it came out twisted and contorted - in my marathon yoga practices. Lol.

Fucked up as it was, it wasn’t wrong. It was actually exactly what I needed. It was the only way it could’ve been

The thing about the yoga practice is that it anchored me into the center of my body. My spine. My hips. My pelvis. My heart. My breath. The awakening was already happening beneath my conscious awareness.

~~~

One day, probably while stoned out of my mind, I decided it was time to change. I realized I needed to cut myself open, peel the layers of crust from my skin, and feel beneath the surface. I knew there was something humming within me.

The longing.
Oh, the longing.

I guess at that point I’d softened up a little. At least enough to feel the gaping void. The spacious blackness of Shiva. Shakti humming, begging, desperate for my attention.

So I started going in. I danced and writhed and took photos and made videos and cried and laughed and felt all the things. It was the most intuitive process I’d ever been through. Day after day I moved with intention to listen to my body. I really had no idea what I was doing but I put on music and let it move me through waves. I opened to the core, felt the pain. Let it leave my body. Felt something different. I was buzzing with aliveness. Everything about me was changing.

What exactly was this change? At the time I didn’t have a teacher or a framework for making sense of it. Which meant I wavered when it got to be too much and I thought I was going insane. But eventually I found teachers and started to understand that releasing trauma from the body is an oddly ecstatic experience. That it was okay to feel both repulsed and turned on at the same time. That feeling the pain and breathing it out of my body was exactly what I needed to do to become more of me.

Needless to say, unraveling these patterns of self destruction, disconnection, and sabotage that had been living within me since… idk probably birth… is an ongoing process.

And after years and years of working through it, I’ve figured out the alchemy. It goes like this:

Make love.
Make art.
Be hot.

Of course there are nuances ~ but that’s the most basic I can get.

Choose love over fear.
Use the raw material of your life to make art.
Look at yourself through the lens of love, adoration, and curiosity.

~~~

Listen, I know this started as a post about eating disorders and then I stopped talking about food altogether. And that’s because eating disorders are fixations on food to distract from the deep longing one denies within oneself to experience the richness - the purity - the satiation that can only come from connecting with god. With Eros. With life force.

At least, that’s my experience.

So when I started feeling my body, tending to my needs, moving in accordance with my body’s desire to move — allowing my body to become a force of desire, reckoning with itself intentionally, creatively (vs destructively, because eros will emerge however it needs to — creative or destructive — often both) — the eating disorder dissolved. I didn’t need it anymore because I developed, in my physical being, the actual embodied capacity to channel eros. To feel god without blasting my nervous system.

This longing for god is a real thing. A really real, deeply physical thing.

And I have so much more to say about it.

But I’m writing this on my notes app so, for now, my loves, that is all.

And remember: Make love. Make art. Be hot.

Xx Faye

unfucking your art means daring to go to the depths of your heart. so that’s exactly where we go in make love make art be hot. subscribe for free if you want a front row seat to the mess and the magic.

or for $7/month, peer behind the curtain and receive instant access to a growing library of creative prompts and embodiment practices to open your creative channel and unfuck your art one delicious drip at a time… plus behind the scenes peeks at my upcoming poetry collection.