Sofia Bothwell

 For me the giving up of my addiction to food when full came about in a strange way. I had spent five years on the diet, break the diet see-saw. Although  a roller-coaster ride is more apt in many ways.  There I was looking for a way to be slimmer.  I wandered into my favourite bookstore on my lunch break and found the book Fat Is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach. I loved it!  My love of psychology taking flight and healing me in it's wake. My study of that book and others of a similar vein helped me heal my compulsion to eat when full. It took me a short six months and by the Autumn of the following year I had left home and by that following May I moved to London. There I studied at The Women's Therapy Centre (the centre for compulsive eating women founded by none other than that wonderful author Susie Orbach herself).  My true vocation began in earnest when I set up my own self-help support groups for compulsive eating women in London.  Many years l...

The following phrase from a coaching tape of Jim Leonard, founder of Vivation Breathing Technique, really struck me as intriguing ''You can enjoy your life just as it is right now.''   The right now bit really got me interested. What,  with all this shit going on some enjoyment might seep in? Another phrase, in this vein of thought, is from Ram Dass the spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now - ''Is the shit you are in good enough?''  The idea being to accept the negative and unwanted aspects of your life. Accept it as being where you are now, and use it to create some good thing. To work with it to do something good. Accepting and even enjoying your life right now, makes you more able to make decisions and take actions that allow your life to grow in the direction of your ideal life. This is the power of accepting and enjoying the challenges of life. It is easy to enjoy the good and wonderful that is in your life, and by allowing that to encompass...

 Life is a stage and all of us are actors. Now who said that?  This noble truth is certainly a mystical truth and so are the various stages of life that we go through as human beings. As we get older the stage and scenery change, even the costumes and makeup change with the set. From the beauty of youth which brings its' blessings and its' drawbacks, to ripe old age with its' blessings and drawbacks too, we all must live this life which we have been given as some sort of a Cosmic Gift which few understand.  So, in the stage of youth we have to realise that beauty and slimness have negative connotations as well as positive? Yes! Unwanted attention for one. Feeling you would have no substance, no grounding is another. For example, in the subconscious many have the idea that being beautiful and slim is dangerous, too much power, the fear of being promiscuous, and facing jealousy from other women and unwanted advances from other men and women even. So the beautiful one must a...

 The thing with addiction is when an unpleasant emotion arises you are focused on feeling better. The panic, the discomfort then the craving to feel better.   When feeling better  becomes your only focus, you are off the mark, on the wrong road so to speak.  Whereas when you know there is a dynamic at play with the arising of an uncomfortable emotion, you are in a more authentic position from which to relate to that emotion. The uncomfortable emotion must be experienced, felt, and gone through in order to get to the feeling better. This going through the uncomfortable emotion is necessary to avoid addiction and also the way to give up addiction. We go through rather than suppress . Why is going through an emotion preferable to suppressing it? Well, when you suppress anything, it gets worse. The uncomfortable emotion looks to an issue in need of resolving. To suppress it is to ignore it, not address it; and we all know that issues ignored or dismissed as unimpo...

Dylan Thomas wrote - 'We sail a boat upon a path, paddle with leaves down an ecstatic line of light.' This is an amazing line of poetry engraved on the side of a fountain in Swansea's Castle Square.  What caught my attention was the concept of sailing a boat upon a path. Who sails a boat upon a path? You sail a boat upon a river, or sea, or other body of water, not a path. A path is a material thing, it does not allow flow, it is hard and solid and does not allow sailing in a boat in any conceivable way. What idea was the poet trying to convey? Who is the 'we' who is sailing this boat and has such miraculous powers as to be able to sail it on a path?  The 'we' is our soul or spirit. The poet automatically propels us to the Cosmic Truth of our being Spirit in material form. We sail the boat, the boat being the material body, upon the path which is the material world, but is fundamentally underpinned by the light of creation - that Cosmic Source. The human con...

An unresolved emotional issue is simply an issue whose totality of emotions you have not felt nor experienced. At the time the issue or trauma happened you either consciously suppressed, or unconsciously repressed, the totality of emotion that it caused within you because basically you couldn't handle it.  It was too much, too painful, too weird, too uncomfortable or too traumatic to feel in its entirety. The healing scenario is that at a later time when you are in safer surroundings and safer circumstances, it will automatically surface and you can feel it, experience it and thus it gets resolved, heals and you have completion around that incident. Now this is basic psychological and physical health wisdom. To know this automatic phenomenon of the emotional nature of a human being is essential. Most of us are not taught this truth. This dynamic is not understood and instead we are given the idea that surfacing emotions associated with past traumas are dubious things and need to be...

The mainstream phrase  - 'I don't wanna go there!' - shows how much time and effort can be put into avoiding a painful issue;  but what if the avoiding of that issue actually makes you sick. Addiction is a sickness and addiction is all about avoidance. In fact when we face up to something that previously was a painful issue, daring to feel the uncomfortable feeling involved, taking any peaceful appropriate action if any is needed to be taken and thus resolving it, we find ourselves devoid of any craving to eat when full or indulge in any other addiction. Addiction is an avoidance tactic. Avoiding our unresolved emotional issues. That fight you had with your husband. The tension between you and your mother-in-law. The work stress, the dead-end career or what ever it is that is bothering you so much and you find so repulsive that you just don't want to go there.  Master Healer and Author Deborah King has stated that in mainstream society emotions are viewed with suspicion...