Initiation by Starvation

In Which I Discovered Presence through Absence

Raoul Auger from Pièces Condamnées

I was hungry, but I’d never let you know that. 

A love affair with anorexia was my initiation into the heat of the erotic feminine. Weird? Maybe. But I bet if you look, you’ll find a similar story in your life. Of being starved of something, and through it, discovering the penetrating presence of longing within.

Before I shut myself off from it, I wasn’t aware of the desire within me. I wasn’t aware that this fire was the essence of life. 

What woke me up was the sharp contrast. A lightning bolt through my system. Where there had been nothing, now there was a burning rage.

I came out of the womb with a penchant for diving straight into the deep end. One thing about me has always been for sure: I fuck around and ohhhhh do I find out. When you submerge yourself in the black velvet consciousness, there’s no way to not find out. 

Shallowness never appealed to me. It was glaringly obvious from a young age, and became more apparent during the wretched years of high school. I was afraid of being deemed too weird if I became an artist like I wanted, so I said fuck it and fell in with the jocks and preps, but I couldn't even begin to relate with them. Why were they so popular? They were all but lifeless.

I always felt my soul was here for something more than the norm they seemed to covet. But I didn’t know how to reconcile my inner feeling with everything I’d been told about how life was supposed to go.

In my last month of  high school, I started dating an awful guy which I’ve written about here… I drove myself mad and became utterly obsessed with my body. With perfecting it. With building an impenetrable armor. With having complete control over every aspect I could. My weight sure, but more so the way I moved and expressed myself. I woke up at the crack of dawn to do hours of calisthenics, and went to two yoga classes nearly every day. The control I had over my body would make most yogis swoon. 

But for me, it was never enough. Nothing was. No matter how much I tensed and tightened the muscles bound around my midsection. No matter how much my abs rippled beneath my skin. I remember lying in the back of the car one summer in Kentucky, trying to sleep, but instead running my hands up and down my belly for hours, making sure nothing had appeared there. I remember yearning for warmth. Why would anyone ever want to be so cool?

My lightness carried such weight as to become my entire identity. It was torture.. Especially because I was that kind of anorexic that didn’t quite look like a dying bird… I was like, hot climber chick anorexic. All the guys at the gym made eyes at me, and wanted to talk to me or train with me, which made my ex astoundingly angry, and inflated my ego’s assertion that this was definitely the right way to do life. 

Yoga and  eating disorders went hand in hand; I couldn’t stand the feeling of food in my stomach, especially not when I was bending and folding and twisting and handstanding. So I stopped eating except for at night, after the day’s activity was over with. Then, I had the “I’m full,” excuse to ensure that I’d never, ever have to fuck him.

My, oh my, was I in a pickle. 

Through the lens of internal family systems, pretty much everything in the DSM is a cluster of behaviors of protector parts trying to do their job of protecting exiled parts. Eating disorders and obsessive exercise were ways to shield me from the pain that had become too much for my system to handle — a system which was stuck in time believing I was about 6 years old. At some point, intuitively, I realized that. I started to feel compassion for the parts of me that were just doing their best to help me deal with the shitstorm. More importantly, I got curious.

After I left the relationship, I started exploring new ways of being and relating with myself. One of the first things I did was hire a dietitian who was out of this world amazing. I saw the fire in her eyes in a photograph on instagram and knew I needed to learn from her energy.

She taught me so much more than nutrition… more than the sciency stuff (which I already knew because eating disorders will do that for you). She taught me about my mindscape — my perception of food and myself in relationship to food (and through the ripple effect, my perception of all things and all relationships). And she helped me learn to pay attention to how I actually felt, in my body, when it came to eating (and through the ripple effect…) 

Learning to eat again was my introduction to the value and nuance of sensation. Knowing the distinct experience of knotting up my own stomach with mental spirals. Knowing what desire felt like. That it felt exactly like hunger. That I didn’t have to fill it. Or get rid of it. That it would always be there, the wanting.

From there my intrigue about my body grew. I stopped with the obsessive exercise and started experimenting with movement. One of the few benefits of my yoga obsession was that I developed a deep awareness of the way everything connects to everything else. 

When I stopped using my energy to destroy myself, my ability to manipulate my form became a blessing. I realized I knew how to shapeshift. I discovered the power of sensitivity, agility and dynamism. Which I’d later learn are some of the greatest gifts of the feminine. 

Somewhere within those years, I went to a retreat in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado held by my dietitian and three other women, one of whom I could not stand to even look at from the moment I laid foot on the property. Something just felt off about her. Apparently it was too much sensation for my still frazzled system to handle, so I jumped into my mind, into what I thought was logic but was really self manipulation, and told myself, “if my dietitian trusts her, so should I, right?”

Turns out my senses were spot on. This woman claimed to be an “energy worker” (ps we’re all only ever working with energy) and said she did “psychic surgery.” Oh my god, typing that makes me want to vomit. I knew it was bullshit all along. Everything in me screamed not to trust her. But for some reason, I wanted to… I wanted her to fix me. Ya know… put the responsibility in someone else’s hands. Poor Rapunzel in her castle. Poor child looking for someone to save her.

Shitty as it was at the time to invest thousands of dollars in an experience that traumatized my relationship with women for years to come, I learned from it immensely. Actually, for a while, I learned more from shady coaches who weren’t embodied in their work than I did from masterful ones. I learned how wise I already was. I learned to listen to my intuition. Which is priceless.

But the most important part of this hurricane is that it thrust me full force into the world of feminine embodiment & polarity. I guess that’s how instagram works… you stumble upon something  and it changes your life forever. I mean, that is how Luke and I met. (Okay, I kinda masterminded that one… guess it’s the Taylor Swift in me.)

Soon after the psychic surgery debacle, I found myself immersed in the world of John Wineland’s work. Suddenly I was spending hours every day just feeling things and expressing them and being weird as fucking fuck. I was living in a world of archetypes and myths and seeing through the lens of feminine and masculine energy and nothing had ever made so much sense and I had never felt so alive. I was wriggling and writhing and shaking and crying and melting into the floor and making love to the walls. I reveled in the moments he said, “stay in it, go deeper, beneath the thoughts.” And I did. And in the truest sense of the word,  it was miraculous.

“How was nobody else teaching this?” I wondered. The ascetic yogis never went this deep. It’s like they were missing the biggest, most important secret there was to know: you didn’t have to control yourself to “become enlightened.” You just had to feel the fuck out of things, moment by moment. Take the shape, literally, of whatever is inside you. 

Forget triangle pose. Forget warrior 2. Forget endless hours of meditation. Forget all that sterilized prescriptive nonsense. I was a fucking swamp witch. I was a primordial goddess. I was a bratty teenager stomping her feet and sticking her tongue out. I was a femme fatale. I was a whore for love. I was being fucked by god’s 6 foot cock of consciousness. 

I was hungry.

xx Faye

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