“Just love your body” they say. Really? Do you know who I AM?

I have always had a huge problem with my body and I have never liked my body. Whenever I looked in the mirror I was always seeing the flaws – everywhere and all over. Why did all the other girls look so slim, trim and fine whilst I was so short, fat and ugly? Why did dresses look so good on all the other girls and never on me? Try as I may, my entire life I have never ever felt good about my body. Total truth is deep down, I have always loathed my body and felt extremely embarrassed by it. Rarely did I ever feel good about the clothes I was wearing as somehow I believed they made me look fat and ugly – this devastating war has raged between my ears since about the age of 5 and I’m 50 today – that’s 45 years – a hell of a long time to be at complete odds with your body.

Before I go any further with this article on my body, I want to bring your attention back to the above opening paragraph and highlight the powerful, emotion-charged words which I experienced as a truth for my body and which I believed was how the world saw me….

Huge problem; never liked; flaws; short, fat and ugly; never felt good; loathed; extremely embarrassed; rarely feel good; fat and ugly; devastating; complete odds.

I know that you’ve already made the connection – those words which are my words for my body, created my perception and reality around my body and therefore influenced how I experienced it. As you will see in the pictures included this article and in Part 2, I was everything but fat as a little girl. These photographs have only come to light recently, as I asked my Dad if he had any pictures I could use. My mothers house burnt down in the late 1980’s destroying most of the photographs she had, and any that survived she destroyed before her death in 2013. However that truth did not matter to me as I’d been programmed by what my mother said over and over to me, to believe that I was. Understanding the mind as I do now, whatever you believe, you receive – therefore because I believed I was fat, I became fat and yoyo’d that way until a few months ago (I’m 50 today) when it all began to change because I chose to no longer believe or accept my mother’s cynical, malicious and destructive lie. You see, your body is an instrument of your mind – and given that in my mind’s eye my body was fat and ugly, that’s exactly what my body became, fat and ugly.

Losing weight is as easy as 1,2,3 or A.B,C – there you go, just look at me…

How many times have I heard this line, over and over again? Every time I heard it I wanted to slap the pretty face of the “sexy little thing” telling me this so hard that she’d have to pick it up on a neighbouring continent. Telling me how easy it is to shed the pounds and kilos, just by eating this way, or exercising that way, oh and just love yourself, see your natural beauty shine through! Puke. Vomit.

I have been on one diet or another all my life, starting out as a child with the there’s-no-money-for-food-diet (you can read about it in Nature or Nurture when there was exactly that, no money for food. Then, when there was money for food it certainly wasn’t the best quality, nor was the cooking style of the day conducive to keeping the weight off either – we ate food which filled our tummies – which stuck to the ribs as we weren’t certain where the next meal was coming from.

Do you want to know a secret?

Right now, I feel compelled to let you in on a little secret, one that most women never get to hear. This is not a secret weight loss tool, but it will give you some insights in to why you keep it on day after day, month after month and year after year. Yes of course it’s true that you do need to eat healthily, watch your portion sizes and be active, but, if you don’t know deep down (in your subconscious mind) why you are emotionally holding on to the weight in the first place, you will never achieve your body goals or have the shape and figure you desire.

The subconscious mind, your emotional ding mind, is a tricky and sneaky mind. Consciously, logically, you will make all these commitments to a great body and use every ounce of will power, but, nothing, that’s right nothing, happens, or if there are some gains they’re soon lost. The frustration and irritation from this are all too often painful to bare and after the umpteenth diet you give up because nothing works. Only once you have visualised and accepted within your subconscious mind that you WILL HAVE your beautiful new body and that you are worthy and deserving of your beautiful new body, will your old body respond. This is what we professional coaches call praxis.

Before sharing more of my “I AM FAT” story with you and how this belief was strengthened through various other events, please allow me to go off on a tangent for a moment as it’s so important for you to understand what praxis is and how it makes or breaks absolutely everything!

Praxis is a very powerful mental state and once you’ve understood and mastered praxis you can cause exciting and marvellous things to happen in many areas of your life outside of just your new beautiful body. Until now, praxis is a word which very few people have ever heard of, let alone use. What praxis is, the integration of belief with behaviour. Chris and I love teaching from Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich and one of our favourite line is “no one’s ready for a thing, until they believe they can acquire it. The state of mind must be belief and not mere hope or wish.” What this means is you will never go beyond where you believe you can go – or stated another way, you will never have more than what you believe deep down you are worthy and deserving of. You see you have belief on two levels. Belief in your educated (conscious) mind which is based on thinking, reasoning and logic. Then you have belief on a very deep level, on a subconscious, emotional level, as it what you believe on this level which gives you everything – all your results – that’s right, your body! So, even if the consciously created picture (trim new me) and supporting words (yip, those “mindpower affirmations”) coming out your mouth about your new body are upbeat and positive, if the emotional subconscious picture which you hold of yourself deep down (fat current me) is different, that is the picture which will always win. Fat current me will always trump trim new me. Only when your subconscious mind has accepted trim new me as a truth (there are simple, powerful ways to achieve this – ask me if you want to know how) will the trim new me appear – until then, you’re up against it and spending loads of money on expensive slimming products that work on the body, but not on the ROOT CAUSE of your problem – YOUR MIND.

Back to my body story…

If I look back on my experiences I can see a pattern that emerges and how over all the years I have used extra weight for protection on a subconscious level. I have, save for two brief periods, one induced by an eating disorder and another from emotional reaction, always been on the chubby side, sometimes closer to downright fat, but mostly chubby. This was all my strategy for self-preservation.

I had experienced abuse as a child, emotional, physical and sexual at the hands of my mother and her friends. Before I was a teenager I had sold favours for money to feed my brother and me. I had been through divorce, unplanned pregnancy, I was an old man’s darling, and a young man’s fool, I was a mistress and I was a betrayed wife. I experienced the complete betrayal by my children, and my mother. I lost everything financially, my home, my much loved personal items. I looked the shame and guilt of these experiences straight in the eye, I embraced them, and I wore them like a cloak and watched them almost eat me alive.

It didn’t matter what I ate or how I exercised the weight never shifted. I would read books on learning to love my body, accepting me for who I was, but they all focussed on the external. How could I look in the mirror and love myself when I could see the distaste and sadness in my eyes? In order to start the healing process, you have to identify with the pain in your eyes.

You have to look yourself right in the eyes

Don’t just look in the mirror and tell your reflection that you love yourself, rather look deep in to your eyes, connect emotionally with that which is deep within you and then tell yourself, that you love yourself. It’s something you have to do for you and nobody else can do this for you. I now make time every day to gaze in to the mirror to tell myself how much I love myself and now I love doing this as how can I love others if I can’t love myself? Top priority now for me is to love and appreciate “me” more every day, and as I’ve fallen in love myself on the inside, so the outside has started to play along too and with that has been the release of what for me, has been a lot of weight.

Like I did initially, you too might find this to be a most daunting task but that’s ok, because know this – when you do that, you’re connecting with your powerhouse subconscious mind and that’s where you want to be and who you want to be talking to as that’s where the REAL magic happens.

The subconscious mind is your conditioned or emotional mind and is governed by prime directives, it works in an orderly manner in line with these prime directives;

1. It stores your memories in relationship to time [Temporal] when they happened and not in relation to time [Atemporal] like when you learned to speak, language etc.
2. It is the domain of all your emotions, it is your heart mind.
3. The subconscious mind organizes all you memories on your timeline and files like memories in a Gestalt, which means that memories are filed according to subject and feeling.
4. It represses memories that have unresolved negative emotions linked to them, it can supress them until it feels you are ready to deal with the issue or resolve it.
5. It sometimes represses these memories to protect you, traumatic experiences can result in memories not being fully recallable.
6. It runs your body, it has a blueprint of your body now and your perfect health at conception.
7. Your Conditioned Mind (aka subconscious mind) maintains the integrity of the body. It preserves the body. This is the highest prime directive, its main and most important function.
8. Your Subconscious Mind is very moral – the morality you were taught and accepted as a child. There is a saying “There is honour amongst thieves.” A thief steals for to earn his living. Yet he won’t steal from another thief. Which means that we can have unique and individual perception of what is moral and what is not.
9. Your Subconscious mind controls and maintains all perceptions. It’s in charge of your perceptions and whatever it receives through your 5 senses or telepathically, it processes it and reflects it on against your conditioned mind. So it receives and transmits this information to the Conscious Mind.
10. Your Subconscious mind maintains instincts and generates habits or paradigms Instincts are naturally installed, almost hard wired in our neurology. If your life is in danger, you will either choose to stay there and Fight or you will choose to Flight – to run away or safely take yourself out of that situation. Habits and paradigms on the other hand are learnt over time.
11. Your subconscious mind takes everything personally, in that as far as your Subconscious Mind is concerned, there is no one else but you.
12. Your subconscious mind doesn’t process negatives. If you don’t believe that, think of this. I don’t want you to think about a lime green elephant with pink dots wearing a purple tutu. Isn’t she pretty? But, don’t think about her ok? That’s why saying “I don’t want to be fat” is just the very worst thing you can ever do as your subconscious is hearing “I want to be fat”. If you want to turn a desire (I want) in to a result (I have) just change your language. Saying “I want to lose weight” will only ever exacerbate your “wantingness” of this and won’t take you anywhere. Remember, when it comes to what you put out there – Want Doesn’t Get! Change your language; rather say “I AM slim and I look amazing.” That’s it, nothing more; use as few words as possible and tell (i.e. command / instruct) your subconscious exactly how it is – say it as a matter of fact – say it exactly as you would when you have achieved your goal. Repeat this I AM statement over and over again and with feeling – repetition of the right emotion-charged words is how you reach your subconscious mind – that’s how you change the old you in to the new me.

Having read Just love your body. I would hope that many simple truths around your body have hit home. I experience great distress around my body for many years because the wellness of my body, my Sacred Temple if you will, was being impacted upon hugely by my mind and the fear, worry and doubt which underpinned most of my mental activity every day. Here’s why…

I want you to always know and remember this – there is no solidity in the universe – you and I live in a perpetual ocean of motion. The law of nature that states everything has a vibration. Now, if you’ve even happened to take a chemistry class you will probably remember learning about atoms, and that everything is made up of atoms. These atoms are in a constant state of motion, and depending on the speed of these atoms, things are appear as a solid (ice), liquid (water), or gas (water vapour). Sound is also a vibration (just think of an orchestra and all the vibrations that you feel coming off the instruments being played if you sit close enough to them) and so are your thoughts. Everything that manifests itself in your life is there because it matches the vibration coming from you!

So, a form that appears solid is actually created by an underlying vibration. Did you know that there is agreement among science, medicine and metaphysics that certain frequencies can repel disease, and certain frequencies can actually destroy disease? Herein lies the link between frequency (vibration) and health. Everything in nature vibrates at different frequencies. In fact quantum physics describes the universe as nothing more than vibrating strings of energy! Even more incredible is that scientific research has shown that different parts of our bodies have their own sonic signature. In other words the sound of the cells of your heart differs from the sound of the cells of your lungs. Why am I sharing this with you? Because your body is an instrument of your mind and therefore if your body is unwell it is because this “dis-ease” flows from your mind – from the thoughts you’re thinking and because your thoughts are frequencies, it goes without saying that if you want body to be feeling well and resonating a high frequency (wellness) then you need to mind your mind – or said differently, watch your thoughts.

To begin to understand what impact your vibrational energy has on you, it helps to realize that your body is really a magnificent quantum physics machine. You are made up of literally nothing more than vibrating energy. You are made of cells, which are made of atoms, which are made of particles, and those so-called particles are actually just vibrating energy. Every atom is just a probability wave, and most of the stuff we like to call “solid physical matter” is really made up of completely empty space. You are more empty space than physical stuff; more vibration than mass.

Whether you consciously know it or not, you are trying to move into higher and higher energies. Energies such as love, joy, happiness, unity, and creation are all examples of that higher vibration. They quite literally have a higher resonance, a higher vibration. Various Master Teachers like Buddha, the Dalai Lama, the core teachings of Jesus – have been speaking about this for a long time; the importance of self-centred – in other words, “centering” yourself in love, joy and peace.

There are really only two states for us to choose from – love (faith) or fear, as all other states and emotions flow from these two primary states. So, when we feel love we move in to a high vibration and therefore feel “lighter” – love lifts the burdens of the world from us if you will. Then, there’s the opposite side of the spectrum – low vibrations. Low vibration is that “heaviness” which we feel in our hearts and stomachs (and sometimes head) – sadness, despair, grief, frustration, anger, victim, regret, and so on. It quite literally “gets you down”. If you desire to experience wellness and if you want to live in the body you desire to have, the single most crucial thing for you to do is to become very aware of your thoughts and the words which are coming out of your mouth and every thought and every word is affecting your body. So, if you’re in extreme physical pain it is because you’re in some form of emotional pain which flows from thoughts rooted in fear, anger, resentment, hatred, disgust, loathing etc.

Question:

Were you aware that your body is an instrument of your mind and therefore whatever physical “dis-ease” you might be encountering right now flows from the emotions which you most experience and these emotions all flow from your most dominant thoughts? So, what are your most dominant thoughts and why?

Exercise:

1. What do you loathe / don’t like most about your body? Write this down in detail.
2. What other emotions go with this feeling of loathing / don’t like? Name them.
3. At what age did these feelings start?
4. Who was the person or persons responsible for causing you to feel this way? Name them.
5. Why did they do this to you?
6. What did they stand to gain from this? Remember someone only ever does something when in their mind the advantages (rewards) outweigh the disadvantages (risks)…
7. What impact has this had on your body over the years?
8. What’s the price you’re paying physically right now?
9. As you think about all the above, what are your most dominant thoughts? Write them down.
10. Now that you have your thoughts out in the open, what are they telling you?
11. Are these good thoughts or are they bad thoughts?
12. Whose thoughts are they?
13. Given that they’re your thoughts, do you now realise how much damage they’re causing you?
14. Do you desire to change this?
15. If yes, then let’s take this exercise to a whole new transformational level:
    1. Refer back to point 1 and write down again what this is – e.g. I hate my body because I am fat and ugly. This is the subconscious belief (paradigm) you have about yourself; this is what has to be changed.
    2. Now, using polar opposite thinking (e.g. I AM DUMB when written in its polar opposite form becomes I AM A GENIUS) write down exactly the opposite of the above – e.g. I LOVE my body because I AM slim and trim. Excellent – now you’re moving away from the current pain, toward your new gain. Please ensure that somewhere “I AM” features as these two words send your new message straight in to your subconscious mind as within your subconscious mind exists the blueprint you have created over the years around I AM (i.e. who you believe you are)…
    3. Now – say the above bolded success affirmation out loud to yourself with real feeling. Yes, it may well feel strange and uncomfortable in the beginning as what you see in front of you is everything but slim and trim. However, that’s not why you are doing this. It’s not your eyes that you are influencing, it is the fertile soil of your powerful subconscious mind that you’re accessing, that part of your mind which accepts, without question, every emotionally charged statement you make.
    4. Persist – the more you say this new, love-filled body affirmation the faster this new seed will take root in your subconscious. You will know when it has taken root because when you say it, you won’t feel so “out-of-sorts” anymore.
    5. Now, just as you would lovingly nourish a seedling with water and light so that it can grow, so too do you look after this new seedling in your mind – and you do this by saying the same affirmation over and over and over x 1000 as this builds the root which will give forth the fruit. The bigger and deeper the root, the greater the fruits will be, so keep doing the work on the inside and suddenly, miraculously, your body will be begin to change. How can this be? Because your subconscious has acknowledged all the work you’ve done and accepted your new body belief and now there’s no reversing the process – it (your subconscious mind) is now telling your body exactly how it will be and your body, being an instrument of your mind, has no choice in the matter.
    6. Ta-da! Your hot beautiful body is racing in at you – now just do all the sensible things which go with having and maintaining a gorgeous body – eat sensibly, look after it, and tell it how much you love it – many times, every single day!

My profound lesson:

Yes I know – over and over again throughout It Is What It Is I make mention that my most significant negative emotional events were almost always all the hands of my mother. I don’t do this to vilify her – quite the contrary. As said before, she has been my greatest teacher and given what I have experienced and now know and understand, had I not experienced all this “dis-stress” through her I would not be able to write these articles, share my story and be of service to millions of other female breadwinners and women who have “body issues” which they’re trying to resolve and free themselves from.

I loathed my body and when I was “unaware” I would often tell myself this – merely through the eyes whenever I looked at myself in the mirror and saw my fat-self. Everyone around me in my business was going on about how I had to just get on with it and lose the weight – little did they know – in fact they did not know – that the root cause of all this went right back to when I was a little girl who was THE FAT ONE. Being told I was fat did not help. Being told that if I even looked at a cake I would pack on the pounds didn’t help either and when I had to “sell” my young body in order for Douglas and me to be able to eat, the certainly did not help. How interesting it is that people around you are always offering up so much free advice on how to be what they think you should be, yet they are completely clueless as to the impact of the mind and your subconsciously buried emotional paradigms, because all they know is – eat right and hit the gym hard.

Thankfully a new awareness and consciousness around the soul-mind-body connection is growing throughout the world and as everyone becomes more aware so they will judge less and understand more – because it all lies in the past – that very dark place where nobody wants to go because it’s so much easier and more fanciful to just do the quick fix in the here and now.

I am proudly telling my body story so that millions of other women can realise that if they too loathe their bodies and want to change this, they can – but that means they have to have the balls (excuse the pun – after all we wear ours a little higher than men do – on our chests…) to go to that dark place and face that which is buried deep within. I encourage you to go there. I have and I am winning and that’s all that matters because each new win I chalk up, I am able to let go of the old – which creates space – for the new!

To your Success, with love

Suzanne Styles