Thursday, June 25, 2009

Consumerism, Bulimia and Anorexia

Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,
“In some cases the psychological need for more or the feeling of not enough that is so characteristic of the ego becomes transferred to the physical level and so turns into insatiable hunger. The sufferers of bulimia will often make themselves vomit so they can continue eating. Their mind is hungry, not their body. This eating disorder would become healed if the sufferers, instead of being identified with their mind, could get in touch with their body and so feel the true needs of the body rather than the pseudo needs of the egoic mind.”
He continues and talks about our struggles with body image thus
“she ‘sees’ is the mental concept of her body, which says ‘I am fat’ or ‘I will become fat.’ At the root of this condition lies identification with the mind. As people have become more and more mind-identified which is the intensification of egoic dysfunction, there has also been a dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia in recent decades. If the sufferer could look at her body without the interfering judgments of her mind or even recognize those judgments for what they are instead of believing in them--or better still, if she could feel her body from within—this would initiate her healing.
The body is “after all no more than a physical form that shares the destiny of all forms—impermanence and ultimately decay.”

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