detox
How many images does that one little word conjure? Quite a few I imagine, some of which I’m going to talk about here.
That’s the process I’m going through at the moment. I’m not addicted to drugs, or alcohol, or gambling. I’ve been eating incorrectly for over 41 years now. I know that because I’ve spent the last 41+ years eating meat, refined grains and sugars, and all sorts of cooked foods. Late last year I started looking into raw foods, and I’ve spent most of this year up and down trying to make the majority of my diet a raw food diet. Well, that choice is finally paying off. I’m feeling better physically than I have in a long time and the excess weight is finally starting to go away as my body sheds the toxins that have been stored in the fat cells for far too long.
But the process doesn’t stop there. It’s been spilling over into other facets of my life as well, as you may have guessed by my previous entries. I’ve been doing a lot of re-evaluation of the things in my life, and I’m getting rid of the things that aren’t working for me any more. Fear, anger, negative emotions, possessions with negative attachments, or not needed any longer, I’m sweeping them all out the door.
Not many people call emotional detoxification by that phrase. Most self-help books call it something else, focusing on some particular aspect of it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, emotional detoxing is far more complex than physical detoxing. Physical detoxing can generally be summed up in a few simple phrases: eat right, exercise, and get enough rest. sure there’s more to it than that, but it’s a pretty sensible and sustainable regimen.
But emotional detoxing? Much more complex subject, because emotions rely on thought, and thoughts are more difficult to change. But in the case of physical or emotional detox, the steps are the same: figure out where you are, where you want to go, and what you need to change to get there. Sounds simple enough, but it’s not. This is why physical detoxing is much simpler than emotional detoxing. Physically, it’s fairly simple to evaluate what your weight is, what you want it to be, what your diet is, how it needs to change, how much exercise you do, and how much you need to do.
Emotionally though, it’s a different story. How can you determine where you are? What are the recurring patterns in your life? What are the situations you want to change? How did they get there to being with? Did you create them , or did you get pulled into the middle? Most of us, I think, have an idea where we want to be in our emotional lives - it’s correctly evaluating where we are and what to change to get us where we want to go that is the tricky part. It’s extremely difficult for people to be objective about their own lives.
What I have decided is that I don’t want to be where I’m at any more. I know where I want to go, the kinds of people I want to bring into my life, the kind of re;lationships I want. I’m still working on what I need to change to make that happen. I think the process is already underway, in that I’m seeing things that aren’t working for me that I want to change.
Detoxing is hard work, especially the non-physical sort. Physical detox can produce symptoms of illness. Non-physical detox though, can produce a whole range of ’symptoms’. I go through periods of lethargy, sadness, fear, anger, it runs the gamut of emotions. But in the end it will all be worth it. As the detox process progresses, I won’t have all the mood swings and the like, I’ll even out at a higher level than I’m at now. Detoxing. Necessary, and sometimes difficult. I can’t wait ’til it’s over.