Dear Kelley,
I’m at crossroads, and feel as if I soon will “take flight.” I recently realized that I’ve been spending my energies in an effort to be everything to everybody, but left myself off the list. One of my current quests is to discover myself and learn how to take care of myself. I’ve had a long-standing battle with my weight. I now have an awareness of my habits, what is good for me, how I comfort and punish myself with food, etc., yet I continue to choose to eat in a way that keeps the weight on. Can you offer any insight into my apparent need for this weight and how I might move past this to heal and be healthy?
Thank You! Faith

Thanks for your note, Faith. Eating is a grounding experience. In fact, after very intense trance work, eating a healthy protein is a good way to feel back in the body, to feel energetically stable again. In this case, eating has the effect of downward movement of life force in the chakra system, enabling you to root the knowledge from the trance into your formed awareness, and to feel physically balanced with your etheric field. What I’m seeing is that somewhere at the onset of puberty, you began feeling radical shifts in your life force that felt very uncomfortable. The way that you sought to feel stable in your body was to eat.

Puberty isn’t just biochemical changes. It is in essence a spiritual crisis. It’s the point at which we are coming into command of our spiritual wills, and our parents can no longer be our primary intermediary with All That Is, as we experience it in the formed realm. There is a lot of activity in the chakras at this point, choices being made around compassion for self and others, as well as burgeoning awareness of one’s sexual presence and ability to express sexual truth in the tribe and community. Our culture doesn’t include this aspect of puberty in how we help young people cope with it, and it most definitely doesn’t understand how to usher these changes into a balanced manifestation of Selfhood. It’s not a coincidence that kids who have been easy going and respectful suddenly become rebellious and/or frequently emotionally distraught.

When I ask to see the source of your need to hold this weight, I see you at the age of puberty (which happened earlier for you than for most), and your etheric field is fluttering, winding in on itself, sending off sparks. I do feel that there was some event in younger childhood, the deeper relevance of which didn’t sink in until puberty. I don’t get a vivid idea of what this was; rather, I have the vague sense that you observed someone else being hurt and did not have the words to express or explain what you saw. When you hit puberty, along with the normal changes it brings, you realized the harm you witnessed and it fueled the already wild energetic ride of your maturation process. I do not see that the realization of this event is connected to the weight, just that the timing of processing it and your etheric field being erratic coincided. The result of the changes in your field compelled you to find a way to control them, or to at least ease the effects of how those changes made you feel. You were a very intuitive child, and for that reason the effects of this energy shift were very debilitating. You did not have the emotional capacity to deal with all of the information coming in at that time. A way to dull that sensation was to eat, particularly sugar. Sugar unbalances the upper chakras, especially the crown. It creates a quasi-trancelike state, but the ravages of sugar on brain chemistry keep you from being able to draw meaning from the trance. It’s like inducing an altered state of awareness and being visited by the most profound wisdom you could ever want to know in your life, but because the etheric and physiological systems are out of sync from the sugar, you can’t recall any of that wisdom when you ground again. You felt this way repeatedly growing up. As soon as you would start to feel that anxious tweaking of your life force, you would eat to stabilize it. This pattern has persisted into adulthood.

Many people cultivate ways to quell spiritual emergency. It feels so distressing that we are willing to believe we’ve suddenly gone mad, and the only way most of us know to deal with it is to seek medical help. Some doctors and therapists understand spiritual emergency, but many don’t. They end up prescribing antidepressants or diagnosing stigma-inducing mental conditions that are really part of a process of spiritual maturation. This doesn’t mean that symptomatic relief is bad, or that you shouldn’t seek support or help from others. It means we are holistic creatures, and we crave holistic support. The thing is, developing a coping skill–any coping skill-to stave off etheric changes is also going to prevent you from the benefits of those changes. We need support to move forward through that process, so that the symptoms we don’t like can come to a true end, so that the coping means we’ve adapted to ease the tension in shifting life force can be released, and so that we can manifest that changed life force in a healthy, powerful, lasting way.

Sit with this info and see how it resonates. If you feel compelled to greet that life force now, enlist the support of friends who understand your spiritual perspective and the help of caregivers from all sides of the holistic spectrum to help you allow it in and manifest it. You are an adult now. Your fears of having more than you can handle coming in spiritually and intuitively can be released. And if you do feel panic around this shift, make use of that support network. Remember to tell your guides you need them to slow down and take things more gently. You are in control of the transitions you make in life, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically. When you feel the groundedness of your own life force, you won’t need food to provide that for you anymore.

Thank you, Faith, for doing this reading. It’s been really nice to meet you.