A Journey into the Body: Lessons in Surrender, Pain, and Transformation

A Journey into the Body: Lessons in Surrender, Pain, and Transformation

February 20-21 2025

Heavy in the Body, Heavy in the Mind

The past few days have been a strange weight—one that isn’t just physical but sits somewhere deeper, pressing against my mind, my spirit. My body has felt heavier, sluggish in a way that I can’t quite explain. I’ve been trying to listen, trying to decipher its messages, but the only voice that speaks loudest is the one that tells me I am too much. Too much in my body. Too much in my emotions. Too much in my thoughts.

I had my metaphorical card session with Anita, and before we started, she asked me to think of a question to focus on. Instinctively, I knew it would center around my weight. But it wasn’t just why do I feel the need to control my weight?—it was bigger, more insidious than that. It was why am I obsessed with my weight? Because this isn’t just worry. This is an all-consuming fixation, one that has shaped my thoughts for as long as I can remember.

The Cards Speak

As I climbed the stairs to the yoga shala, my body already felt uncomfortable, heavy in its movement. I wasn’t feeling well, and despite my efforts to cut back on the sugar-free sucking candies—something I was proud of—my stomach had been uneasy for days. I settled in, and Anita explained that we would be working with limiting beliefs—those subconscious narratives that hold us captive.

She told me there were three main ways we inherit these beliefs:

1. From past lives.

2. From decisions we made in childhood.

3. From beliefs we unconsciously adopted from someone else.

She then suggested a rewording of my question: What is my limiting belief that makes me worried about my weight? But even as she said it, something felt off. I’m not worried about my weight—I’m obsessed. The weight doesn’t just sit in my body; it lives in my mind, filling every corner. I rephrased it: What is my limiting belief that makes me obsessed with my weight? That felt more honest.

I shuffled the deck, barely thinking, and two cards immediately flew out. The moment I saw them, my breath caught in my throat.

The first card showed an image of a person with colors—bright, vivid colors—spilling out of their mouth. Purging. That was the first thing I saw. The second card was darker, its imagery unclear at first, but when I looked closer, I saw what I swore looked like a toilet. I couldn’t have made this up if I tried.

I showed them to Anita, and she nodded. “Tell me what you see,” she pressed.

I hesitated, then spoke. “It looks like purging. It looks like… energy leaving the body. But it’s giving power to something lower.”

Anita kept guiding me, deeper and deeper. “Lower energy?” she repeated. “If someone has food poisoning and they purge, is that giving their energy away?”

I resisted. “No, but… I make myself sick. That’s different.”

She nodded, absorbing my words, then spoke again. “You’re trying to purify. You just didn’t know another way to do it.”

The truth hit like a blow. I am trying to get rid of something. Something I don’t know how to release. And this is the only way I ever learned how.

The Body as a Battleground

As Anita pressed me to go deeper, the message became clear. I was giving my power to something lower. This wasn’t just about food, or weight, or numbers—this was about energy.

She asked me, “If you had food poisoning and needed to purge, would you see it as giving your energy away?”

I shook my head, resisting. “No, but… I make myself sick. That’s different.”

She nodded slowly, letting the words settle between us. “You’re trying to purify. You just didn’t know another way.”

The truth hit like a blow. I had always seen my body as a war zone, something to be fought against, something that needed to be controlled, manipulated, emptied. Every time I purged, every time I counted calories, every time I measured my worth by the size of my reflection, I was battling myself.

But Anita wasn’t telling me to stop the fight—she was telling me to change the battlefield.

“What if your limiting belief isn’t about weight?” she asked. “What if it’s that you don’t see your body as what it truly is—God’s creation?”

I froze.

“This body,” she continued, “allows you to travel. It allows you to experience. To love. To sing. To taste dragon fruit. To listen to music. To chant and speak to the Divine. These senses—you don’t have them as a pure spirit. This body gives you access to the world in a way your soul alone never could.”

I sat with that. For years, I had treated my body as the problem, as something to control, as something to be ashamed of. But had I ever stopped to recognize the gifts it had given me?

And then came the hardest realization.

“I chose this body,” I murmured.

Anita nodded. “Yes, you did.”

I let that truth settle, warring with my old beliefs. If my soul chose this vessel, if I selected this exact form before incarnating, then perhaps—just perhaps—it is not my punishment. Maybe it is my vehicle. Maybe it is the key to my evolution.

Symbols, Signs, and Unfinished Lessons

The next cards deepened the journey. One showed a child, sitting alone, wearing glasses. I saw myself in her immediately.

“That’s me,” I said. “That little girl. Being neglected. Just wanting someone to play with but having to play alone.”

Another card showed a person standing at the edge of a mountain, overlooking a breathtaking world. It was impossible not to see myself in it—standing at the precipice of a new journey, about to leave for Rishikesh.

Anita pointed out something I hadn’t seen. “That world—God created that too, just like your body. You look at it and see its perfection. But why do you deny that same divinity within yourself?”

The next card made me pause: a person hanging upside down, forming a peace sign with their hands.

“Even when the world is turned upside down,” I whispered, “joy still exists. It’s all in how you look at it.”

The final card was the most haunting—figures made of stone, faceless, stuck in the earth. One figure was breaking out, stretching toward something beyond. It looked like pain. It felt like pain.

“This is me,” I said. “Trying to escape this body. But I can’t. Because I still have work to do here.”

Anita nodded. “The soul, when it begins to awaken, starts to long for home. But in this world, paradise doesn’t exist. The body will always feel heavy because it’s not your true form. But it is your current form. And you have to honor that.”

Breaking Down: The Overwhelm Takes Over

The session had gone on for hours, unraveling me layer by layer. And suddenly, I couldn’t anymore. The heat in the shala had grown unbearable, the air thick and unmoving. My stomach ached with hunger, my body stiff and pulsing with discomfort from sitting on the hard floor for so long.

Everything hit me at once—the weight of the conversation, the sheer exhaustion of processing it all, the overwhelming too-muchness of everything. My thoughts started spinning. I could feel my mind grasping, trying to control something, trying to find an answer, trying to fix it all right now. I was suffocating.

The pressure built, and before I could stop it, tears began to well up. I wanted to hold them back, to push through, but my body had reached its limit. My voice broke as I tried to say something—anything—to ground myself, but the words felt stuck.

Anita noticed. She softened, her voice quieter now. “You’re exhausted,” she said gently. “You need food. You need rest. This is a lot to take in.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Because in that moment, I wasn’t sure what I needed—I just knew that I couldn’t keep going. I felt raw, my emotions stretched too thin, my body heavy with the weight of all I had uncovered.

There was no resolution. No clean ending. Just me, sitting there in the heat, drained and unraveling.

And maybe that was the lesson, too. That I don’t have to fix everything in one sitting. That healing isn’t one grand realization, but a slow unraveling, a continuous meeting of self over and over again. That sometimes, the best thing I can do is stop. Eat. Rest. Breathe. Let it settle.

So I did.  I let Anita’s words hang in the air as I made my way back to my room, still feeling like I was floating between worlds. The exhaustion was all-consuming, but underneath it, something was shifting.

Transmutation in the Water

Later that afternoon, I had my queen’s treatment—two and a half hours of massage, a flower bath, and rituals of renewal. As I slid into the warm water, fragrant petals floating around me, I felt my body begin to soften. And then, without warning, words started pouring out of me.

The session with Anita, the revelations, the pain, the surrender—it all surged through me, demanding to be transmuted. With damp hands, I reached for my phone and let the words flow.

The poem emerged from the water, a raw and aching truth that I hadn’t even known was waiting to be spoken. It was about the war with my body, the longing to escape, and the realization that freedom isn’t found in leaving the body—it’s found in learning to inhabit it fully.

Because isn’t that what transmutation is? Taking pain and reshaping it into something sacred?

Maybe this is the real work of healing. Not erasing the wounds but finding beauty in them.

And maybe, just maybe, I am learning how.

The Nightime: Spiraling Again

By the time I got back to my room, I was physically exhausted but mentally restless. My stomach was still off, but I wasn’t sure if I was hungry or just feeling everything.

I scrolled through some pictures from the past few days, and at first, I thought I looked okay. But then—one photo, one angle, and the spiral began.

I fixated on it, analyzing every inch, searching for proof of what I feared most. I look bigger. I knew it. I’ve gained weight. It’s obvious. It’s real.

I sent the picture to my mom, already bracing myself for the shame. I don’t know why I do this—why I invite confirmation of my worst thoughts—but I needed someone outside of myself to see what I saw.

And just like that, the beauty of the day was gone. The card session, spa treatment, the revelations, the breakthroughs—they all faded into the background, eclipsed by the voice that had haunted me for years: You’re not good enough. You’ll never be good enough.

I wanted to fight it. I wanted to remember what Anita had told me, what the cards had revealed, what I had just written about in the bath. But the weight of it was too strong.

So I let myself fall into the familiar cycle. I over ate the veggies since I hadnt eaten much all day. Fixated on what I wouldn’t eat. How I’d adjust. How I’d fix it. I told myself I needed to save room for my fruit at night, that I’d feel lighter if I just held back a little more during the day. Then proceeded to overeat fruit until I physically couldn’t sit up.

And I hated that I was thinking this way, but at the same time, I felt safe in it. The obsession was comforting in a twisted way—it was control, and control felt like the only way to ease the chaos in my mind.

I laid down that night with a stomach full of fruit,  conflict and a mind that refused to rest.

Unfinished Lessons

I know this isn’t how healing is supposed to work. It’s not linear. There is no perfect breakthrough that fixes everything in a single day. But it’s frustrating to see the pattern so clearly and still feel powerless against it.

Maybe I’m still in the thick of it. Maybe this lesson isn’t fully absorbed yet. Maybe the real work isn’t just in understanding it but in catching myself in these exact moments—when I spiral, when I reach for control, when I fall back into old ways.

I don’t have all the answers yet. But what I do know is this: Kali doesn’t reveal illusions just for us to ignore them.

And so I will keep unraveling. Keep listening. Keep trying. Because I don’t want to spend my whole life at war with myself. & maybe, just maybe, I am learning how to surrender.

With love and gratitude,

Kali Grayce