I once embarked on a 21-day cleanse.  The details are foggy to me now, but it consisted of drinking only a thin concoction of elemental proteins and quick digesting sugars thrice daily.  The objective of this 3-week fast is to “starve out” troublesome bacteria that can be known to overpopulate the intestines.

I succeeded at the fast for 7 days until I finally lost it.  I was over it and solid food was on my menu.  The cleanse protocol allowed for a small amount of plain chicken breast.  I, however, had embarked on the fast as a purest with no intention of stooping to mortal levels.
Day 8, I sliced and browned (or fried) a large chicken breast and inhaled it.  My stomach capacity had shrunk considerably by this point and the sudden introduction of a full meal made me uncomfortable.  For the next seven days all I could think about was eating….  And I ate, obsessively.  I ate every chance I got.  Not only was I undoing whatever benefits may have come from a cleanse, but I was physically hurting myself.  My stomach was killing me with the rapid introduction of so many foods and with so little time between meals to digest it.  I knew I was on a familiar bender, one I hadn’t experienced for possibly a decade.  As a teenager and young adult I would binge eat almost every evening until my stomach hurt.  I would want to vomit to undo the discomfort of so much food, but I hated vomiting even more than I hated the thought of so much food and possible weight gain.  Fast forward to the 21 day cleanse and I had thought this awful habit was behind me, but I was back in the holding pattern.

I admitted to a counselor in my regularly scheduled therapy session that I was on a bender and didn’t know how to stop.  She insightfully paused the dialog and offered me a guided meditation.  I really wanted to talk about how to solve my crises, but I agreed to participate in her suggestion.  By now I had done this meditation a time or two.  I was guided to drop into my feelings, to find the sensations in my body.

I was to observe this feeling and attempt to put words to the feeling: describe its color, temperature, weight, etc.
Where in my body was the sensation?
Did it feel heavy or constricting?
Was it hot or cold?
What color does it seem to be?
What feeling are you experiencing, can you name it?

During the meditation I had the brilliant epiphany that the strong feeling I was internally resisting lived in the region of my stomach.  The feeling in my belly was SHAME.   I haven’t taken a poll, but I imagine that few people have a positive experience with feelings of shame.  As young children, feelings of shame are usually associated with guilt, isolation, and rejection.  Those feelings and their effects get stored deep in our brains as important warning systems to ensure our long-term survival as tribal mammals.  My feelings of shame had been activated by my perceived inability to complete a 21-day fast and aggravated by my worry that I could never complete anything hard and ultimately I could be deemed a worthless failure and possibly rejected by my then-husband, who easily completed the 21-day fast as pure as a white lamb.

The good news?  After identifying and sitting with the feeling of shame it no longer had the same power of me.  I had been eating non-stop because I was unconsciously trying to numb the feeling of shame that had come through disappointment with myself.   It was an unconscious coping mechanism to not feel an uncomfortable feeling.
The feelings meditation has become a regular part of my life as I try to become aware of other patterns where I am resisting a feeling I don’t want to feel.  I have found that checking in with the feeling, meditating on it, allowing it to have its time and place generally reduces the intensity of the feeling and often times is all I need to do to move past it.  When I can I like to journal about intense feelings, sometimes pinpointing my earliest memory of that feeling or combination of feelings.  You can read more on that subject in the my post entitled Visits From the Fat Gray Cat.