I am a self-proclaimed 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 intense inner world. I ate to bring a sense of pleasure that masked the harsh reality around me.
I have always required significant 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 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 mainly with food, that is, until I found God.
Rocky Beginnings
I left the Catholic Church after college when my spirit was no longer moved within those walls. Since that day, I 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. Words meant nothing without true experience of the Divine behind them.
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 at the time, I attracted people who couldn’t love me back.
I hit my first rocky bottom when I lost my grandfather and fiance at the same time. What appeared to be the worst week of my life was an entry point into the meaning of a spiritual life. That opening from intense grief 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 true self I hid from for so long—the woman who longed for a rich spiritual experience—I found something I didn’t expect to find in my pit of despair: God.
I found the in-dwelling God which connected me to the God I felt so far from growing up. Once the spiritual journey ravaged me from the inside out, I grew a desire to change careers (to something that befits my spiritual truth).
New lows with my friend, food
The discomfort of breaking out from everything I know while navigating relationships with an unhealed heart brought my disordered eating to an all time low. For years, I didn’t know I had an eating problem. But denial runs deep, and I was in much further than I realized.
It turns out my next rock bottom—spurred on by more loss and heartbreak—was needed for me to realize the meaning I searched for in a new career had to be redirected inward, to the God I found along my journey. While I get deep meaning and satisfaction in my spiritual career pursuits, it’s ultimately something outside of myself that I seek fulfillment from to replace the lack of inner fulfillment I experience. It’s quite ironic to discover that the career I sought at any expense brought me to my knees in humility to remember the true source of my fulfillment: God and His endless Love.
In building a new spiritually-based 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 trauma had to be healed.
I am forever grateful for the path to find purpose and meaning because it led me to understand 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 inner fulfillment when I embarked on this new career path.
But 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 can learn from my struggles, provide an example of what truly matters in life and now pass along my wisdom to those who search for the same sense of deeper meaning in life.
While we are called to greater destinies, our inner world must first come together with greater harmony. Until this happens, we’ll continue to feed an appetite in other ways—if it’s not food, it’s relationships. If its not relationships, it's working too much. If it’s not working too much, it's any other form of pleasure that replaces the meaning that can only come from within.
Then and only then will service be selfless and aligned with God’s intention for our lives. If we are filling up with any form of pleasure to avoid any 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 "high."
The Spiritual Journey: Finding 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. We yearn for deep connection to our 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 worldly ways. The truth as I know it is: 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.
That thing we are 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 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 inward search for everything we desire and it’s all found within. 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, a loss of security and a loss of 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 used to use to gain a sense of self and worth and redirect that into a true sense of self through God and my 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: men, money, career, achievement. 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 able to give up my insatiable need to fill myself in unhealthy ways.