Somewhere in the poverty and emotional struggle of my teen years and early adulthood the dream got buried under the clutter, the emotional eating, and my resulting obesity.

But after I turned my life around, the dream of travel was suddenly within reach.  We moved abroad several years ago and the novelty of living in new places means that day-to-day life is interesting and stimulating.  Just before Christmas we took our kids to the Sahara Desert for a few days.  Yes, I rode a camel 8 miles into the desert and back out again!  And last week we made an unforgettable trip to Florence, Italy backpacker-style with our three teens.

This all would have been impossible seven or eight years ago.  It’s hard to pack for a trip when your home is chaotic and it’s hard to leave a house when you would be embarrassed to have anyone come look after it while you’re gone.  When I weighed over 350 pounds, it was even physically difficult to travel — airplane seats didn’t fit and I worried about going anywhere that might have chairs with arms.  Walking long distances was painful.

I’m writing this to encourage you to ask yourself what you would do if your clutter and your weight no longer held you back.  What are the things that you are truly passionate about?  What experiences are out there waiting for you? What would you do and whose lives could you touch if you could find a way to release the clutter and find your way back to a healthy size?  What does the life you are supposed to be living look like?

What’s your dream?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/decadence/

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There is a critical, self-loathing voice inside my head, and it seems like it has always been there for as long as I can remember. Perhaps you have one too. It tells me that I’m just not good enough, that maybe I don’t really have my life under control, that maybe I’m just a misstep or two away from living in squalor and filth again, that maybe my eating is already out of control and I’m back on the road to morbid obesity. It tells me that I can’t trust myself, that I have to be self-critical and hard on myself or my life will fall apart again. The voice both creates and expresses a sense of fear and anxiety that can be paralyzing at times.

A month or two ago I was discussing this self-critical voice with Bill. He asked me a question that boggled my mind: “Catherine, what would it take to accept the part of you that does not accept yourself?” At first this question seemed so paradoxical that I could not even comprehend it. My self-loathing voice is like an enemy who is determined to make me miserable, an enemy whom I cannot escape. I desperately wanted to eliminate this part of me, not accept it!

And then I stumbled across Radical Acceptance, a book by Tara Brach. Brach is a psychologist and a meditation instructor who has woven her own life experience, her clinical experience with clients and her Buddhist beliefs and practices into an approach to dealing with the crippling inadequacy so many of us feel. Brach tells her readers that they can offer every feeling and thought friendly acceptance — even feelings of inadequacy and our most self-criticizing thoughts.

In an interview posted on Beliefnet.com, Brach says:

When some people talk about accepting themselves they have this fear that they’re condoning some bad behavior, or that if they accept themselves, that means they’ll never improve. But the truth is, we’re not saying, “It’s OK that you did that bad thing.” All we’re accepting is the actuality of our experience in the moment: I’m accepting this shame is here, I’m accepting this fear is here, I’m accepting this anger, I’m accepting that there’s craving, I’m accepting the truth just now, that I acted out of that craving and I ate too much. I’m accepting how bad I feel about that. But in the moment of accepting, we’re not condoning. We’re just acknowledging the truth of what’s here with kindness. The reality is, if we can do that, it actually begins to free us so we can in the next moment, be a lot more wise.

Reading Radical Acceptance has opened a window for me into the possibility of a powerful sense of acceptance of all the thoughts and feelings I have, even those that I would prefer to be without. I feel like I’m just starting to get an inkling of how profound the practice of radical acceptance really can be.

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