I’m writing to you from India where I’ve been traveling for the last 2 weeks, with my husband and our friend Lorelei.

We’ve been on a spiritual journey, voyaging from one sacred site to another, seeking peace and wisdom, and it’s been working! True, there were few bumps along the way, where chaos prevailed and peace was nowhere to be found, but as the trip draws to an end, we find ourselves more open to the magic of life than ever.

Have you ever been on a spiritual journey?

If you’re struggling with food, weight or body image, I would dare say, you are either on one, or being called towards one.

For a while it’s easy to philosophize about spirituality until the (sacred) cows come home, where spirituality really comes to the test, is in its application to real life matters. For example, how you show up in relationships, how you care for your body, and how willing you are to love yourself unconditionally, no matter your size or shape.

Not being a Hindu myself, I’ve always been inspired by the Hindu stories of the gods and goddesses, who with their epic dramas, sound so much like humans. Their tales of conflict, passion, jealousy, and divorce, to name but a few of the qualities they embody, are a great reminder that all aspects of ourselves, from light to dark, are part of the divine.

Another extraordinary trait about India, is witnessing how in the midst of the hustle and bustle of daily life, people regularly stop everything to devote their attention to the sacred. Whether it’s a short ritual in front of an alter in the back of their restaurant while the customers patiently wait, or making a pilgrimage to dip in a holy lake, Indians of all faiths, refuse the modern trend of constant productivity, and happily turn their focus to celebrating the participation in the cycle of life itself. Busy bees that we
are, this is a practice we can learn from and embrace in our own way.

Wondering how you can embark on or deepen your own spiritual journey without going to India? Here are three strategies you can put in place right away.

1. Construct your own spirituality to include compassion for yourself. No matter how much time or money you donate to charity, unless your compassion is also directed at yourself, it’s shallow. This includes compassion for the needs and struggles of your female body. If you are guilty of negative self-talk, especially negative body-talk, the fastest way out of it, is to increase your compassion. Turn up the volume until your compassion drowns out the criticism.

2. Embrace the dark side of yourself as sacred too. In India, one of the most widely encountered goddesses is Kali, the goddess of destruction and rebirth after destruction. She’s a sight to be seen with blood dripping from her mouth and a necklace of skulls around her neck! Kali teaches us that the dark side of life is sacred too, and that the traits we wish to get rid of, can act as powerful fuel for our greatest transformation.

Why this matters is because when you make the decision to not over-eat for comfort, you’ll encounter all the emotions you’ve been using food to stuff down, and they likely won’t be pretty. If you only think of these aspects of your self as “bad,” then you’ll find yourself running back to the cookie jar, faster than I can say Kali. But if you can embrace the emotions that lie just below the habituated pattern of eating unconsciously, then unpleasant as they may be, you’ll have access to an incredible source of power for change. Whatever these shadow emotions may be–fear, shame, guilt, jealousy–they are a part of you and a part of life. Look them in the eye. Breath with them. Get to know them. Once you can face them without squinting or running away, they simply become messengers for information, and not a further cause for shame in your life.

3. Make time for the sacred in your daily life. I was raised in a family where apart from semi-regular visits to church on Sunday, time dedicated to the sacred was non-existent. We did do fun things on weekends, but on the day-to-day level, life was about accomplishment and other practical matters of survival. Taking time out to give thanks, or to experience peace and silence, was unheard of! As an adult I’ve had to work through layers of guilt for not doing enough, every time I’ve expanded my commitment to carve out sacred time.

If you don’t already have time set aside for the sacred in your life, start with baby steps. Give yourself 5, 10, or 15 minutes in which there’s nothing external to accomplish. Allow this time to be an exercise in discovering what makes you feel most alive, most peaceful, most relaxed, most grateful, or whatever other feeling you associate with directly experiencing the sacred. You’ll notice that as you give yourself this time, the inclination to over-eat for comfort or to hold yourself to unrealistic perfectionistic standards fades away, as your heart if full with the remembrance of the sacredness of simply being alive.

There you have my 3 strategies for deepening your own spiritual journey fresh from the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, each one also a potent strategy for healing your relationship with your body and with food.