About Me, Mana

Hi, I’m Mana

Hi! My name is Mana, and this is my story. An unhappy marriage, a messy divorce, seeing my kids struggle after the divorce, I was left with feelings of anger, guilt and disappointment. I needed help, I did not know what to do with what I was feeling and how to move forward. My mother then noticed a lump in my throat, a part of my thyroid had enlarged. I prayed for help to understand what was going on with me, then a friend of mine gifted me ‘The Journey’ by Brandon Bays. Reading it I began to understand why my body had developed this lump, how I had become an emotional eater over the years, how I would rather stuff down my emotions with food than feel my emotions that were to painful, I learnt the connection between our not feeling our emotions and physical disease. I did a Journey session and felt lighter, Brandon talked about how one could experience one’s soul in a Journey session, being a spiritual person I wanted to experience my soul so I did the Journey Intensive program, I ended up doing all 7 programs through the course of a year and now I am an accredited Journey Practitioner.

While married my family was my universe, after my divorce a strong fear of loneliness gripped me, I got into relationships I would normally never get into, through my healing, this fear has left me, gone, vanished, not a part of my personality anymore, now I am learning to feel my loneliness and other emotions I would normally have avoided feeling in the past, I feel them and let them pass through, not stick inside my body.

One of my coping mechanisms is food, there were some emotions that did not feel safe for me to feel, I was not able to feel the love of my partner or my mother the way I wanted, and I turned to food to fill that void, as a child I was very sensitive, my pet name was Telly, short for Television, my building friends would touch me and I would cry, they would switch me on and off. They laughed at my sensitiveness and that was painful for me, somewhere I decided it was not safe to feel my emotions and I shut down, stopped feeling my emotions. In what ways have you shut down to life, to your emotions?

I attended a healing program that deals with food issues, called Stop The Food Fight. There I learnt to how to re wire my brains, to feel the emotions like shame, guilt, acceptance of failure of my marriage, pain I felt in my marriage, accept, let go and healing happened, I learnt how to take an unhealthy behaviour like bingeing, look at my belief systems that kept it alive, feel emotions that I didn’t want to feel in the past and turn it into a healthy behaviour, my bingeing has reduced, I still reach out  for that chocolate or chip but much much less, if presented to me I still once in a while eat it, but my journey to freedom has definitely begun, I love eating from a place of freedom, most of the time now I eat out of choice not need and that for me is huge. I love writing about this transformation, come read my journal and discover yours along the way.