2 Months In, 1 To Go

From my hike with a friend, 1 April 2023

April 2nd begins week 9 of the 12-week Journey that I’ve been on. It’s an intense 12 weeks of letting go of attachments, addictions, the stories we believe about ourselves, the lies we tell ourselves, etc. It’s 12 weeks of removing pretty much all the distractions with which we use to escape our issues we need to heal and our responsibilities that overwhelm us. It helps clear our minds of all the noise so we can get more deeply in touch with our higher self, and to God, by whatever name you call God. It’s intense, y’all. It’s been both frustrating and beautiful. I’ve been Te Ka, Moana, and Te Fiti throughout this journey, sometimes all 3 at once.

Te Ka is just a raging beast who doesn’t understand why we are doing this bullshit, is often grumpy and resistant, but in reality she just needs some love.
Moana is on a mission and she’s excited and makes mistakes and learns from them and keeps going!
Te Fiti is just quietly amused by it all and gives love, and hope, and a stern look, where needed.

Keep in mind I’ve been healing many levels and areas of all the traumas, bad programming, bad habits, and such for 3 years before starting this Journey. It’s not something to jump into without support, guidance, and without having done a lot of work already.

The first month is just removing all forms of media unless required for work. All of it. No music, books, magazines, tv, movies, social media, etc. all of it is gone. For 12 weeks. Replacing it with meditation. The amount of time in meditation gets longer and longer throughout the 12 weeks.

Then the 2nd and 3rd month there’s a diet portion that gets more and more restrictive as the weeks go on. It’s not for dieting purposes, it’s not one anyone should be on for more than 8 weeks. People do lose weight on it, I have, but it’s not for that purpose. It’s there to remove food addictions & attachments, stories and lies we tell ourselves or believe about ourselves around food. Break bad habits and help us understand what we actually need and don’t need.

This process has monitor person that you update weekly to make sure you’re ok and on track. I just went back and re-read all of my check-ins just to remind myself of the vast amount of crap I’ve been able to confront and heal or am in the process of healing now.

So far, I’ve come to realize that I used social media scrolling, music, tv/movies as a way to cope with a wildly active mind. I used it to escape my issues and responsibilities instead of facing and dealing with them. I used it to drown out the good and the bad energies around me. Why would I want to drown out the good? Because good felt too good to be true and I didn’t trust it. I don’t have this issue any longer. It’s true, sometimes we think something is good and it turns out not to be, but I’m much better at discerning what is and isn’t actually good. I’m not perfect at it, but I’m much better at it, and when I am wrong I’m healed enough to just shrug and say, “Oops. Well, that wasn’t a vibe after all, at least I know for next time.”

My mind is so much clearer, y’all. Oh my goodness, is it clearer! Don’t get me wrong, there are still 30 brains running around in there, but they’re all nearing adulthood now and not 30 toddlers hyped up on cupcakes running around screaming 24/7. In 8 weeks I went from 30 sugerized toddlers to 30 teenagers. It’s amazing. By the end of week 12, I’m hoping they’ll all be in their 20s and training to be ninjas. Fingers crossed. Note: 3 years ago I had 100 sugarized toddlers, so it’s been a progression.

My mind is clearer in that I can process my emotions that come up fairly easily. It’s clearer in that I can actually hear messages from my higher self, my guides, and from the Hierarchy of Light now. Amazing!

My mind is clearer in that I can plan better. I can prioritize what needs done better. I can see my starting point on a big project better. All of this I’ve improved on as I’ve healed old childhood traumas and such, but have refined more in the last 8 weeks.

I plan to do a whole blog post series or podcast or something on how a LOT of what gets lumped into an ADHD diagnosis is actually trauma response. Clear the trauma and you clear entire areas of ADHD, as in they don’t exist in your life anymore. Or if they do sometimes, it easily identified and it’s easy to adjust. Most of the rest is turning 30 sugarized toddlers in to refined ninjas. We don’t have broken brains, we are wired exactly as we’re meant to, we have a specific purpose, we need 30 brains in one. We just need to train them to work together and I am living proof it’s possible. Stop telling people with ADHD brains that they’re broken. We’re not. We’re intentionally wired differently for a reason.

ANYWAY, like I mentioned, the diet is very restrictive and gets more so along the way. I had a lot of stories and attachments to my stories about what I could and couldn’t do diet wise. I was totally wrong. I don’t like this diet, at all, Te Ka comes out the most with the food stuff, but the purpose of it is working wonders in my life. I can do this and still thrive. All the stories I believed have turned out to be illusions. I was not living in reality at all, and without this craziness I wouldn’t have known it. I was also worried about losing weight too fast and losing my boobs and a list of other things on this diet, and while I have lost weight, it hasn’t been much. Less than I imagined, and I’m actually ok with this. I didn’t do this to lose weight, I did it, in part, to figure out why I have so much trouble losing weight, so I can fix that, and that I’ve learned. However, there’s still a month to go and the most restrictive part comes week 10-12, so we’ll see what happens, haha. No attachments. Just accept what is and take the action that is needed to move forward.

My troubles with weight loss was a mixture of mindset, lack of consistency, and impatience. I would try try try, then when I didn’t see enough change, in x amount of time, I would give up because I felt like a failure. I would just think that it was impossible for some people. I also didn’t believe I deserved or was worthy to lose weight and would self sabotage. It was also all the stories I believed that I needed to eat x amount of this and that in order to stay healthy. I’m eating literally none of this and that and I feel great. Hungry, but great, haha.

When we have so many unhealed traumas, we have all these emotional triggers, and when one is set off, it’s food that makes some of us feel better. Either the act of eating, for some, or just eating certain types of food, for others. I fall into the latter group. I wouldn’t reach for food when triggered, but when I was ready to eat it was usually carby comfort food and there would go the diet right out the window. When we have all these emotional triggers that are not healed, it literally causes PMDD. How do I know this? Because I healed a lot of shit and I no longer suffer from PMDD. Now it’s just regular PMS. I stopped all mental health medication (with a doctors help and supervision) by August of 2021. No spike in PMDD when I did so, which is what I worried about the most. Heal your shit and it all drastically changes for the better. No more PMDD means no more insane cravings that derail diets. Regular PMS cravings I can ignore. PMDD cravings? Not a chance. I honestly feel (I am not a doctor) that PMDD has a lot to do with where our nervous system is at. When we have a lot of trauma we’re not healing, our nervous system’s normal level is flight or flight, which when we’re in that as a baseline, it’s incredibly stressful on the body and the body can’t regulate normal processes properly. Get that nervous system down to healthy levels of existing, as a baseline, and a lot of ADHD and PMDD simply vanishes. Somatic trauma therapy helped a lot with this and I only had 3 or 4 sessions. Christina Hudson is an amazing therapist and I will recommend her till the end of time.

There’s also a sense of belonging and acceptance when you’re bigger or you have some kind of something that causes you suffering. You don’t trigger other overweight people when you’re overweight, at least not nearly as much as when you’re thin. When I was thinner I would trigger the shit out of people I knew, just by existing, and at times I was treated badly for it, by people who I loved. I feared that returning. I feared the people who like me now because I’m “one of them",” not liking me anymore. Dealing with the comments and the rejection that will come with some of them. I watch this all the time with other people I’ve seen lose weight and then look around they’ve lost friends or said friends started being passive aggressive to them. I’ve been various levels of overweight for 20 years now and when I’m smaller my circle of friends becomes smaller and less nice. Which I also get when I’m bigger from some thin people, so it’s hard regardless. When the mean words come from people you love, though, it’s harder. Specially when those people also want to be thinner. Hurt people hurt people. Being overweight is harder on so many levels, so I’ll take the comments. I will do what is right for me and I will lose the extra weight and I will not apologize for it. When people ask me how I did it, I will say: I love myself too much now to feel this shitty and to treat my body badly, so with commitment, consistency and self-love I figured it out. Now I know that I can do it. Thanks, Journey.

I have a lot of compassion for almost all humans, I struggle with some still, but for the most part I’m full of compassion for like 98% of people, because I’ve known pain and suffering. Hurt people hurt people. I also understand, more than ever, that when we have a bunch of unhealed traumas we see the world through a very dirty lens. We become triggered by things other people say and do that, in reality, have nothing to do with us and weren’t about us on any level. We see proof of fatphobia or homophobia or this ism and that ism, where it never existed, that person wasn’t even thinking of your or aware of you. We just see examples of our unworthiness because we’re searching for it and it became part of our story of how badly we’re treated and examples of rejection of who we are. We get to add trauma badges and show them off. When we heal, we begin to see the world a lot more clearly. We see less and less examples because we’re not looking at every situation with a rejection smeared lens. We are able to see reality and most of the time most people are just trying to get through the shit in their own life and are barely aware you exist, let alone have any kind of opinion about you. Most people don’t care, they are just trying to survive themselves.

I heard an author speak at a large book signing once in like 2016 ish. She shared a story about how a woman parked in front of her, saw her, and moved to another parking spot. To her, this was an example of racism. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t tell you if it was or wasn’t, but it reminded me once of when I was the white woman who moved her car. I had not eaten all day. I was about to do two hours at Jensen gym, Zumba and Hip Hop aerobics class. I had two hungry kids in the car who were about to play hard for 2 hours in the gym daycare. I drove us through Carls Jr. and when I pulled into the parking lot and parked I noted that a human was about to see me quickly stuff my face with a lettuce wrapped bacon burger before going into the gym and I was ashamed of that. So, I pulled out and parked in an empty area of the lot with my car facing no one. Who was in that car? I have no idea. White, black, male, female, fat, thin, differently abled, no clue! All I knew was I was ashamed to let them see me eat that burger. Is that incident a story that person tells of the day some woman didn’t want to park near them due to whatever trigger they have about themselves? See, it had nothing to do with them at all, I was ashamed to be an overweight woman eating a burger before heading into the gym and I moved. Maybe that woman who moved her car in the author’s story just wanted to pick her teeth or her nose or wanted to pray or wanted to ___ without an audience. We can’t just assume the worst all the time and then own it as part of our story. I am willing to bet that 80% of the examples we have of someone dissing us for x,y, or z had nothing to do with us at all. The more healed I get the less examples of rejection I have. It’s a rare, rare occurrence anymore.

The other week, it did actually happen, I was at LA Fitness in Phoenix. I finally got myself to go into the pool there. I just neeeeeded time in the water and the lakes are still too cold in AZ. Some young guy saw me floating slowly, gliding, just do-to-doing down the lane and yelled out walrus. I looked over, startled by the sudden noise, and the group was looking in my direction. In the past I would have been MORTIFIED and angry. This is a clear example of someone being mean to an overweight person for merely existing, there’s no ambiguity here. What did I do? I just laughed. He didn’t hurt me or sting me at all. Not even the tiniest of bit of anger. I love the walrus exhibit at the Tacoma Zoo. They are beautiful and graceful creatures. Thanks for the compliment, buddy. I know my self-worth. I know I am a wonderful and powerful human. I know I’m an eternal divine being here having a physical experience (as are you). This, obviously, hurting human was telling on himself and that’s all it was. I didn’t turn it into proof that I’m worthless or don’t belong. I didn’t bring it into myself and own it. I didn’t become the victim. I just kept giggling and floating back and forth for another 45 minutes. I love this story so much because it shows just how much I’ve healed. It didn’t derail me at all. It just showed me how great I’m doing. I left in a blissful natural high that lasted days. Thanks for showing me how great I’m doing at healing my shit, guy. I hope you can find healing too.
End of story.

The point I was originally aiming for here is that when we heal our shit, life gets so much easier and happier and all the parts heal. Let go of your attachments to your traumas. You’re not a victim, you’re a survivor. Let it all go. Get therapy. Somatic trauma therapy works wonders. Call me and start an AMAZING path of progression that has literally changed my whole life and I’m absolutely thriving and I experience so much more joy. Yes, healing all the shit is hard. It’s messy. It’s 100% worth the effort. We can live our whole lives in anger, resentment, victimhood, shame and misery. OR we can let all that go and heal and live in peace and joy. You cannot share what you don’t have. Meaning all you can share is what you do have. If all you have is anger that is all you’re sharing and the world is not going to get better with large populations of humans only sharing anger. It’s impossible.

There’s so much more that I’ve learned and healed, but it’s 1140pm on 1 April and I still need to meditate for a while… oops.

Time management hasn’t improved much, haha! Maybe next year. I got the bug to write, so I did haha.

Stay tuned for more blog posts more often. Join my newsletter!

Till then, watch some walruses swim below. Wook at dat baby! SO cuuute!

Jennifer L. Miller

Healer | Artist | Photographer | Storyteller | Divine Eternal Being and so are you.

https://www.magickhourstudios.com
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