I don’t often write of my personal life but this summer truly marked a time of deeper understanding and transformation. For those of you who only encounter me in the digital world, I am quite proud to tell you that over the course of 10 weeks, I lost 35 pounds. I don’t mention this to toot my own horn but rather as a means of saying that I have battled with weight as many others have and I have been lucky enough to find a system that worked for me.
This article is not meant to sell you on any particular weight loss system but in the wake of my success, I took some time for reflection because I wanted to help those who also battle with excess weight and the affects it has on their health. There are so many articles out there that list the downside to having excess body fat. As someone with a degree in Physical Education and Health, you would think that having studied and known all about those things would have prevented such weight gain from happening…sadly it didn’t.
I had been trying different methods and have been working out consistently for years but there were parts of me undermining my own health and success that needed to be addressed. I needed to get to the root of those behaviours and THIS is what this article is about. I had to come to a personal and much deeper understanding of some keys teachings of esoteric astrology in order to shed the physical, emotional and mental weight I was carrying.
Many of these understandings simply shifted within me and it took conscious exploration and meditation to be able to present them to you. I sincerely hope that some understanding of these esoteric astrology teachings helps you in your own battles with health, weight (or anything else for that matter). While I explore how these teachings apply to spiritual progression and weight loss (a seemingly funny combination), they are applicable to almost any issues you may find yourself encountering.
From the perspective of esoteric astrology, the 3 keys I had to master (to greater degree) were:
- Higher Desires vs. Lower Desires
- Comfort
- Humility and obeying the higher calling
If you choose to read on, I will address how these teachings helped me to manifest greater health, greater strength (of will) and joy. I hope that this can lay a new foundation for you to manifest the very same!
Spiritual Weight Loss Lesson #1: Higher and Lower Desires
This teaching comes to us from an esoteric understanding of the nature of Sagittarius…ironically, Sagittarius is the zodiac sign with the greatest love of food and is often prone to becoming overweight. Desire is something that comes to us from spirit (there’s an amazing teaching on this in the Empower Thyself class). If it comes from spirit though, in theory desire should be good for us – but we all know that we have desires that aren’t always good or healthy for us. This is what makes it important for us to understand where our desires are coming from and which desires we are spending time, energy and money to fulfill.
What are termed Higher Desires come to us from the Higher Self and these are the desires that are good and healthy for us – things like success, health, good relationships, living a fulfilled life, having purpose, etc. The Lower Desires come to us from what we call the negative ego and our lower desires are generally neutral in disposition or not good for us at all. Lower desires can be material items or they can be negative feelings or actions such as revenge, emotional eating and self-destructive behaviours.
Unfortunately, we live in a society that has taught us to perpetually fulfill our lower desires. With media and advertising constantly appealing to the negative ego and its fulfillment, we often neglect our higher desires and spend all of our energy fulfilling our lower desires. It’s no wonder that we feel so empty! Through the satiation of the negative ego via our lower desires and the energy we waste on them, we sabotage the long-term joy that we would derive from manifesting what the very soul is calling for!
In my own case, I had to come to realize that I truly wanted to look good and feel good and be healthy. I really did! I also had to acknowledge though that I spent more energy feeding my negative ego through my own desire for food that was “tasty” but unhealthy or just completely unnecessary. As I spent so much of my own time, energy and money on that lower satiation, of course things got out of control! I had given my negative ego the reins and it had driven my health into the ditch!
So to lose weight I had to do 2 things:
#1: Take back the reins from my negative ego, which meant doing…
#2: Sacrificing my lower desires (unhealthy and unnecessary food) and being ok with it
As I kept reminding myself of what I really wanted, the “sacrifice” wasn’t all that bad! In fact, as I started seeing success, the sacrifice didn’t feel like one at all! I stopped feeling like I was missing out on things and a lot of my cravings disappeared under the light of my success.
Sacrifice however, is not always easy…this brings me to the second lesson.
Spiritual Weight Loss Lesson #2: Comfort – the hindrance to any progress
The next statement I’m going to make is very simple but if you really take this in, then you will have the understanding you need to tackle ANY issue in your life:
Our issues (weight or otherwise) take root when we become comfortable and accept a behaviour, environment or lifestyle that is not good for us.
In the Modern Mystery School, I am privileged to teach a class on the perspective of ego from esoteric Astrology. This class is called the 9 Trials of the Ego. In this class, we delve into all of these trials however comfort is a particular favourite of mine to discuss. Why – because it is so insidious, so pervasive and so detrimental that there are very few areas of our lives that comfort does not hinder.
We are taught that comfort is “good”. Oh how much more wrong could we be?!?! The degree to which we indulge our own comfort is the very degree to which we resist our own growth! Comfort is the enemy of spiritual progression and it leads to stagnation. All of our issues are formed in spiritual stagnation and the truth is that we put a lot of energy into creating comfort in our lives.
Are you willing to be uncomfortable in the pursuit of weight loss, joy or progress?
For myself, I had to look at how comfort had sneakily made its way into my life and called itself logic. I wasn’t comfortable cooking, but I was comfortable eating out – it consumed less of my time and allowed me to eat conveniently. In not cooking my own food though, I was presenting myself with countless opportunities to indulge my negative ego and its lower desires. This also left me in a place where the outcome of my weight and health was being dictated by people/places that didn’t have my best interest at heart. For the most part, restaurants survive by appealing to our lower desires!
Here you have to be honest with yourself and ask questions like I did – what are the comforts that are feeding the weight issue? Attachments to particular kinds of unhealthy food? Dislike of activity and exercise? Exertion? Convenience? Being uncomfortable with the fact that there’s an issue to begin with?
Do you want to know what the funny thing is about comfort though? We seek comfort not out of love for it but rather out of the fear and loathing that discomfort brings. The very idea of discomfort is enough to drive people to spend ridiculous amounts of energy to avoid it! Most of the time, the discomfort isn’t really all that bad. Sometimes, you even find joy in the discomfort…
As I recognized that I had to sacrifice the comfort the convenience provided me and start cooking (something I had truly hoped to avoid at all costs), I discovered a newfound joy in preparing my own food that I was never expecting to happen. I would have happily allowed for others to keep cooking me unhealthy things and not experience how happy I am preparing something with my own energy!
So get comfortable with being uncomfortable knowing that the discomfort really is temporary.
Spiritual Weight Loss Lesson #3: Humility and Obeying the Higher Calling
So another way in which we allow our issues to flourish is when we think we know better (than the universe) when in reality we really don’t know at all! To begin my own transformation, I had to say “I don’t know” which was hard for me given my educational background in physical education and health. When we say “I don’t know”, we come to the realization that our knowledge, thoughts and opinions aren’t working for us – this is the first step of true humility.
The kicker is that those thoughts and opinions and the “knowledge” that backs them up are what produced the unhealthy behaviour, environment or lifestyle to begin with! If you try to come up with a solution using that same knowledge or opinion, you’ll only end up with the same result! You have to surrender your knowledge and opinions in order to be successful – we call this emptying your cup.
Myself, I had a gigantic cup I needed to empty and the beauty is that now I get to re-learn and re-experience in a truer way.
Now, humility is not just saying “I don’t know” because truthfully, I’ve worked with a number of people who say that but are not humble enough to follow instruction and therefore don’t see any results or progression. Believe it or not, that lack of obedience is a subtle way of saying “I do know better” and is the negative ego’s way of tripping you up or hindering your progress. So not only do you have to be willing to say “I don’t know”, you also have to be humble enough to obey the higher call – not for the sake of obeisance, but for the very reason that what is being asked of you is GOOD FOR YOU!!!
This might mean following a system, a professional or your own higher connection – but for your own best and highest good, I urge you to follow instruction to see success. In my own case, I followed the directions of a professional to a ‘T’. I humbled myself enough to do as I was told (when previously I would have had a truckload of opinions) and because of that, I successfully navigated the system presented to me and lost a lot of weight!
If you can cultivate and maintain this humility, then you will be able to achieve so many wonderful things!
Final Tips for Weight Loss (the Spiritual way):
- Get honest with yourself about what stands in your way – is it a comfort? Is it a lower desire? Can you find a weight loss system that will help you address that behaviour or block?
- Know that your discomfort is a necessary but temporary component of your success. Also know that it will eventually be replaced with the joy and elation of achievement.
- Be willing to experiment – the cause of weight for one person is not the same as another. What sabotages you may not trip someone else up. You have to find what works for you.
- Talk to yourself about how great it will be when you’ve fulfilled your higher desire and demonstrated your love and devotion for yourself. This will help keep you motivated when you’re struggling, uncomfortable or even when you think you’re suffering.
- Focus on your victories! If you can change a bad habit that has contributed to your weight gain (like eating out), then know that you have transformed an aspect of self-sabotage that will pay off in the long run!
I know that in and of itself, these are some pretty big steps to take and do necessitate some deep digging and incredible use of Will (I can’t tell you how many people have made comments on the strength of my will as I underwent my own transformation) but for your own joy, health and good living, I wish you the strength necessary to come to a deeper understanding of yourself so that you can be successful.
Good luck with embracing your higher desires, kicking comfort to the curb and cultivating true humility! The more you do this, the more success you will see – I promise you this!
