With Mother’s Day coming up this Sunday, I would like to dedicate this newsletter to all the moms out there in the Shift Community, and to the moms of Shifters, and while I am at it—all those Inner Moms that exist within all of us.
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Lessons My Mom Taught Me
I always miss my mother on Mother’s Day. She has been gone eight years now but the lessons she taught me I remain grateful for to this day. My mother taught me how to take care of myself and how to not take care of myself, how to show up for myself and how to disconnect from myself, how to hate myself and disown my body and yet how to protect myself and preserve my body all at the same time! How could she do such an amazingly varied job of mothering? Without knowing it she was teaching me at both the conscious and unconscious levels.
My mother was one of a small group of women who graduated from University of California at Berkeley in 1947. She worked hard to put herself through college and was very proud of the BS in Nutrition that she earned. She had dreams of working abroad in Europe and had even landed a job and was literally packing her bags to leave when, as fate would have it, she met my father and stayed in California while he was drafted into the Korean War. She went to work for a bank and never got to use her nutritional expertise in any formal sense. She, however, made sure she ate healthy and balanced meals in those days and recorded her food nutritionals and calories and kept herself slender.
When she had children, she consciously began teaching us all the great lessons of eating right and nutrition. My earliest memories are of my mom in the kitchen cutting up fruits and vegetables and telling me “spinach has vitamin C and helps your eyes and bananas are a good source of potassium.” I loved soaking in all the her knowledge about the way food worked in our bodies, but at the same time watched her begin to over eat at meal time and binge on caloric desserts, which she also loved to bake. “I am being bad,” she would say as she cut a second piece of cake and ate it.
My mom was overwhelmed with all the typical stressors of a dysfunctional middle class family. Life hadn’t delivered on the promise of a glamorous career abroad—she was dealing with three kids, my emotionally unstable father, and clipping coupons--so food became her sedative. Soon her food recording tablet, that I also remember seeing on the kitchen counter, disappeared. She was gaining weight (70 lbs. over 3 years) and struggling with herself. I would watch her weigh herself in the morning and mutter something nasty sounding and get up and go into the kitchen. I would follow. “Drink your orange juice,” she would say to me, “it’s full of vitamin C” and then she would spread extra jam on her toast and eat it.
My mother’s struggle with food and herself made a big impact on me growing up. It made me feel sad, angry and confused. My mother was so smart, so strong, so beautiful—and yet she seemed so powerless and weak when it came to food and taking care of herself. She would tell me to study, to take care of myself, to protect myself from stupid mistakes and even stupider men, while at the same time, she placed herself on the lowest on her priority list, never exercised or engaged in fun activities.
Little did I know at the time, that my mother was stuck in a power struggle between her Inner Critic and her Inner Rebel. Her Inner Critic would berate her for being so out of control—“I know how to eat healthfully, I just can’t seem to do it” she would say angrily at herself for being so weak. “I have no willpower, “ she would say, as she sliced off the edge of a layer cake and offered it to me “ so we may as well finish this off this edge.” Her Inner Rebel loved company and that company was me.
Soon I was caught in the same struggle with weight, with food. And just like my mother, I knew better. I knew how to eat right, but that didn’t keep me from getting caught up in the negative dieting cycle and the power play between my own Critic and Rebel and the diets and binges. For years I struggled until I was able to break out of the cycle with the use of hypnosis and connecting to the more powerful voice of my Inner Coach.
I don’t blame my mother. I thank her for all the love and knowledge she passed on. The struggle with weight and food that I unconsciously picked up from her may seem like a nasty legacy to pass along, but it caused me to dig deeper in order to find answers—to harness resources I never would have known I existed had I not needed find a way to take back my power from all of the limiting beliefs and behaviors—the “Fat Thinking". What hypnosis allowed me to do was to take all of those unconsciously learned lessons that were working against me from my past and reframe and re-wire them into new ways of speaking to myself and showing up for myself that allowed me to create a truly healthy relationship with food, but more importantly a healthy relationship with myself—“Thin Thinking”. My mom’s negative lessons therefore became positive ones! My mom helped me to make the Shift!
Now as a mother myself, I strive to pass on the love of understanding food and its nutritive power but also the power of staying present and connected to both my body and my head. I understand too well that what I say to my children is important, but what I do and how I take care of myself is, in many ways, even more important because that is what they are imprinting on an unconscious level.
Coaching: This week I invite you to tune into your own relationship with yourself, food and your body. What are the positive traits that you learned from your mom? What are some of the limiting beliefs and behaviors? What can you Shift from negative to positive this week, therefore giving your mother the unconscious gift of having passed on a positive lesson to you (even if you did have to Shift it around a bit first).
Have a great week and Mother’s and Inner Mothers Day!
oxox Rita
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