I am a pleasure seeker. Food became my main source of pleasure to escape a world that felt uncomfortable, difficult and scary—a world I didn’t know how to cope with.
I ate to numb the anxiety and the depression when I either felt too much or didn’t feel at all (and wanted to feel something). I ate to avoid the very big calling that loomed ahead. I ate to run from my inner world. I ate to bring a sense of pleasure that masked the harsh reality around me.
“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
I have always required a deep sense of meaning in my life; I am wired to seek below surface level. I searched for a very long time to bring a quality to my life that surpassed the everyday monotony of life and revealed the magic that exists beyond the worldly facade. I yearned with an insatiable appetite for a deep sense of spirituality, to feel loved and to know I am loved. And that appetite was filled with food—that is until I found God.
I left church when my spirit wasn’t moved within those walls any longer. Since that day, I’ve searched far and wide to bridge the gap between me and God that I couldn’t find sitting in a pew reciting prayers that didn’t hold personal meaning to me.
When I wasn’t buried in food to replace the meaning I struggled to find, I dove head first into relationships just so I could feel loved. Because I didn’t love myself or even know true love, I attracted people who couldn’t love me like I loved them (or so I thought).
I hit my first rocky bottom when I lost my grandfather and fiance a the same time. What appeared to be the worst week of my life was an entry point into the meaning of a spiritual life. Because that opening in my heart led me to realize I am called to seek beyond the surface for a purpose, rock bottom became a blessing of infinite proportions.
Because I broke open to the me I hid from for so long, I found something I didn’t expect to find there: God. I found the in-dwelling God which revealed the Godliness in me. Once the spiritual journey ravaged me from the inside out, I grew a desire to change careers.
The discomfort of breaking out from everything I know while navigating relationships with an unhealed heart brought my binge eating to an all time high. For years, I din’t know I had an eating problem. But denial runs deep, and I was in much further than I realized. I discovered that my next rock bottom, brought on my more loss and impulsive decisions was needed for me to realize the meaning I searched for with a new career had to be redirected inward: to the God I found along the journey.
While I get deep meaning and satisfaction in my career, it’s ultimately something outside of myself that I seek fulfillment from to replace the lack of inner fulfillment i experience. It’s purely ironic to see that the career I sought at any expense brought me to my knees in humility to remember the true source of my fulfillment: God or Love. In building a new spiritual career, I was unknowingly preparing myself to serve God by undergoing deep spiritual warfare. I had no idea that by agreeing to seek deeper meaning in my work that I’d be signing up for such a wild ride, but before I could serve others, my own heart had to be healed.
I am forever grateful for the path to find purpose and meaning because it led me to understand fully how important it is to gain a sense of fulfillment and meaning inside myself. I see now that the weight of the pressure I put on myself to build something from nothing in order to help others was brought on because I didn’t have fulfillment when I embarked on this new career path.
Every journey serves a purpose, and even if I was destined to change careers, I was not meant to let it define me or fill me up. God was always meant to do that. I went down the path I did so I could learn from my struggles and provide an example of what truly matters in life and then pass along my wisdom to those who search for the same sense of deeper meaning through outside means.
While we are called to greater destinies, our inner world must first come together in harmony. Because until this happens, we’ll continue to feed an appetite in other ways. If it’s not food, it’s relationships. If it’s not relationships, it’s working too much. If it’s not working too much, it’s another form of pleasure that replaces the meaning that can only come from within. Only then will service be selfless and aligned with God’s will for our life.
If we fill up with any form of pleasure to avoid discomfort or pain inside—especially if that’s a high from helping others—we will always be putting our sense of meaning and satisfaction in the future. We will rely on something or someone outside of ourselves to feel better than we do. We will relinquish our power to find happiness in the present moment by simply being alive and enraptured by love. We will be waiting to live until the next day or fix or adventure.
The search for meaning
We are all looking for meaning, fulfillment and happiness. When we look to outside means of temporary, worldly pleasure rather than looking within to the true, lasting source of our happiness, we find that while the pleasure brings us quick satisfaction, we ultimately end up right where we started; we end up looking for the same thing—the same lasting satisfaction.
The spiritual journey teaches us that sustainable happiness and meaning can only be found within by searching for God, our true nature—which is love, and a deep connection to that eternal nature and to each other.
This route has no easy button and isn’t a quick fix, but it has the potential to bring us more satisfaction, happiness and meaning than we’d ever hope to find in life. It turns out nothing easy is worthwhile which is why anything used to gain a quick dose of pleasure is fleeting; it’s replacing the only source that can ultimately provide what we are longing for.
We are all longing for is love; we all desire to come home to the essence of who we are. Only then can we stop running down the rabbit hole to dead ends looking for what we already have deep inside of us. Love is what we are made of and until we come in contact with the love we are and learn to both love ourselves and love others as we desire to be loved, we will go looking for outside sources to fill us with the meaning we long for.
The spiritual journey is the shift from searching outside of ourselves through worldly pleasures to looking within for eternal Truth. For within is our direct connection to our source, Spirit or Love—where we came from, what we are and what we will return to.
The spiritual journey I embarked on three years ago has woven my life into a rich tapestry of satisfaction, meaning, purpose, peace and fulfillment. There’s been plenty of loss which jumpstarted my journey and eventually led to loss of who I thought I was, a loss of my false sense of self and identity, a loss of Earthly security and comfort.
Spirituality stripped away everything I used to gain power outside of myself, so I was left weak and completely reliant on God. This dependency drew me closer to God and my faith in order to turn my attention away from what I once used to gain a sense of self, security and worth and redirect that into a true sense of Self (through an understanding of who I really am).
I couldn’t build up a sense of my true Self until I lost everything that once gave me a sense of worth: relationships, material wealth, career, achievement, perfectionism ect. In becoming weak in a worldly way, I gained spiritual strength beyond comprehension. Even if I’ve faced incredible loss in my life, it is what I have gained that brings me everlasting joy, satisfaction and fulfillment—all of which can never be taken away.
With God and a strong spiritual foundation, I became equipped to retain contentment and meaning and happiness in the face of change, loss, uncertainty and hardship. By turning within to fulfill my longing and feed my heart, I was finally able to heal my insatiable need to fill myself in unhealthy ways.