Women's Empowerment Stories ...

An Invitation to Join Me on my Journey of Awakening
~ Joyce Boudreau

Dear Friends,

I am sending you an invitation to accompany me on a very personal journey to lose weight over the next year. I call it “My Awakening.” If you see yourself in any of this letter and feel it may be something that you might like to connect with, join me into your own awakening.

I have started a blog on my web page where I am creating a very personal daily diary. Although this is personal, I hope to reach out to others on a similar path and create a healing community. Here, I explain why I am doing this in much more detail if you are interested. This letter is long; I promise the daily entries are not as long LOL.

It was very important to me to explain the reason and purpose for my venture, as a dear friend reminded me of the importance of this not only for you but for myself. I committed to starting this year-long journey on November 1, 2008.

The purpose in this radical stepping out into such a public form with such a private journey is to open myself up to sharing with others the message of healing within the struggle.

I know that part of what I have done my whole life is to “play it safe” in some way or another - and that has kept me very hidden.

I also want to bring into the world my “real life and day to day” journey that will share who and what I stand for in this world.

I cannot be the Life Coach that I want to be without the willingness to walk this journey as openly and honestly with myself and others as I can.

I became quite sick recently with bronchitis which triggered my asthma. While I was sick I realized being so short of breath was a symptom of my life.

I told a friend that even with all the amazing revelations and gifts of healing that have been present in my life, I was still unwilling to walk through the last door and claim my own light without the protection of my weight.

This is exactly what I was asking my clients to do.

This is where the idea of creating a blog came from.

Yes, it is so important to love and accept ourselves completely just as we are right now. Doing so lends itself to a continued journey of self love.

Self Love is not selfish! The opposite is true! Without taking care of our health and wellness, how can we possibly care for others or be in service of any kind!

I have walked the talk before but now it is time to radically walk through the next phase and stop denying my weight as a barrier to my own journey.

I really have come to love who I am more than at any other time in my life.

This journey of self love is too important to only go ¾ there. It is now time for all the way home! We cannot love others without first taking care of ourselves.

My mission statement for the next 365 days is to “breathe and wake up to life.”

I hope to inspire others to do the same so that we can help each other along the way.

If each of us stepped up and radically entered into who God sees we are, how different our world would be.

Join me and create in your life your own mission statement to waking up to life!

“My Awakening” is not just my journey but that of every man and woman who finds themselves looking at life from the outside in, knowing there is more and seemingly stuck inside a compulsion. We all have compulsions; my greatest one happens to be food.

Yours may be the same or you may have found other ways to hide from living life to the fullest! This is for all of us determined to break through to another level of awareness that is full of love and passion for life! I am starting today a very personal spiritual journey with God. Although I am a practicing Catholic, I am blessed to journey with people of all faiths and spiritualities. It is my quest to embrace and value all people and what creates healing inside. I truly do not believe that “Christianity” is the only way to God. So although I am deeply moved by my religion, I hold Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa as my guides. They both knew what truly loving one another meant! My journey with God is very personal and I respect that in each and every person. Because I embrace Christianity, I will refer in my blogs to “God” or “Father” but please know that I respect and honor any other term that others use, be it Goddess, Universe, Great Spirit, etc.

I have been so blessed to have been on a path of discovery and healing for many years now. I have learned so many tools and techniques from spiritual mentors and teachers that have created in me a “deep sense of responsibility” for my health and wellbeing.

Most recently over the past 2 ½ years I have completed and graduated as an Integrative Life Coach at the Ford Institute with Debbie Ford and her amazing staff. I love this career so much and I am so honored to be a part of this amazing work.

It has radically changed who I am! Because the training involved very deep inner work, I uncovered and found a profound reconnection to my body that I am not sure I had ever had in my life.

My childhood was not easy, living in the first 7 years of my life with my father who was very violent and abusive to my mother and siblings. Also in my childhood I had several encounters with men who were very sexually inappropriate with me, causing even deeper withdrawal and numbing in my body. Through my training I was able to change my childhood story even more to one of forgiveness, great strength and compassion for people and myself as well as developing and learning to start trusting my intuition and people.

Many practices like yoga, prayer, meditation, journaling, dancing and even walking on the beach helped play a part in my learning to love and care for my whole being, including my body, in ways I never had before. Because of my childhood I developed what is called in our training an “underlining commitment.” (If you want to understand more about underlining commitments and how they are formed, read Debbie Ford’s book called “The Right Questions.”)

I had decided as a very little girl that I had to suffer pain in silence for I could not trust anyone, so I did. In a way I stopped “breathing fully into life.” As a very young mom of 19 I started putting on lots of weight to protect myself and hold all that pain inside. I was not able to break that cycle for a very, very long time.

Only in recent years, as I have taken more responsibly for my healing, have I understood the damaging effects that this can create.

I have been able to reach out and “trust more” in my life and because of that I have been able to lose over 60 lbs and have kept this weight off for over a year. I am, however, still carrying over 75 lbs extra and need to radically step into a journey that I call “My awakening.”

Because living so present in my body and even to the world is so foreign to me, the times I have experienced it have been both exciting and frightening. I have not yet learned to completely trust being so open; therefore, I still hold on to the rest of my weight and still allow myself to shut down feelings with food at times to numb fear or pain.

When I do experience this wholeness, this fullness of life, I describe it to my family and friends as “like waking up from a life time of sleeping”!

Now I am ready (but scared) to wake up more and face my underlining commitment head on!

Because part of what I still do from time to time is do this alone and in silence, I have been compelled to share this journey with you. For the next 365 days I will be using daily reflections from the Bible and other spiritual books and tapes such as “A Course in Miracles.” One of my favorite authors, Marianne Williamson, refers to this book a lot as it deeply, profoundly affected her and her writing. I also personally love the philosophy of Buddhism as well as have a deep love of Native spirituality. From both of these I have gained a great deal of healing.

I will share gems from different spiritual teachers along the way that continue to feed my soul and possibly connect with yours.

I have made a commitment to stay as present as possible each and everyday. I realize I will struggle. In sharing this with you, this is the most vulnerable I have ever allowed myself to be.

My prayer in doing so is that if even one person does not feel alone in their struggles, I will have succeeded in bringing our world a little closer to loving and accepting ourselves and each other. One mission here on earth is to understand we are more alike than different. Each day I will journal online and you are welcome to journey along with me. This journey is very personal and it is my commitment to be as “honest and open as I can.”

In the past few years I have dedicated myself to embracing a different way of eating and connecting with food. (Not all the time for sure!) Through two amazing books called “Nourishing Wisdom” and “The Slow Down Diet,” author Marc David inspired me to love my body and food again.

I have learned about being “present” to food when I eat, so I gave up so called dieting a very long time ago. When we are eating slowly and in the moment, it leads automatically to eating less quantity and much better quality of foods. Trust me, take 20 min. and chew a hamburger from your local fast food place and you will soon realize how horrible they are! Try it sometime!

Part of health is being intuitive with what and when and how I eat. If I am invited to a friend’s house and they are serving food I would not normally eat, I give thanks and enjoy every morsel that was prepared with love. So for me it is more about intentional and intuitive eating versus dieting.

Another great teacher is Mary O’Malley who wrote the book “The Gift of our Compulsions”  This book is full of wisdom that allows us to be full of love, compassion and curiosity with ourselves and our compulsions!

I have learned from my training with Debbie Ford and Mary’s book that the way to healing is to become the observer of your life.

When we struggle it is important to not get upset or angry with ourselves, become curious and ask questions to learn. Compassion and curiosity have been my greatest teachers! With that being said, I have learned for me that the weight is “only a symptom” and because of that, I weigh myself only once a year. I do, however, know that it is important to have a measurable goal in mind when we set out to radically change our lives. So I want to let you know I weigh 256 lbs now and will not weigh myself again until November 1 2009. At that time it is my intention to weigh 175 lbs or under.

I want to once and for all embrace this beautiful life head on without the protection of extra weight! So although this is really only a number, my goal is to be healthy and be more awake!

Awareness is a life time practice that most of us do not arrive to, but it is my goal to shed my protective layer so that I can breathe more deeply into life! In this way I will have broken through another barrier to living life to the fullest! I love this life and I am ready to face the last layers of my weight. I ask for your prayers and know that I am praying for you, now let the journey begin!

To read the blog, go to www.sacredsharing.ca and click on Joyce’s blog.

Take care and lots of love!

~ Joyce Boudreau