Creating Beauty Might be the Easiest Why to Find Yourself

*This post is being share with client permission. Names and some details have been changed to protect client privacy.

Rey was that girl. You know the one. She was the cute girl. The one with lots of friends and not so many boyfriends in high school. She had a lot of personality and a few extra pounds, and when I say few extra, she thought she needed to lose fifty.

Rey told herself it was because she loved food. What she really loved was eating. She loved standing in front of the refrigerator late at night while everyone else was asleep because she was afraid to go to sleep. Nightmares from PTSD haunted her nights. She tried to avoid sleeping at all costs. Eating kept her awake and comfortably numb. As much as she hated the extra pounds, they kept her cushioned and safe from the attention of men.

Rey met her husband in college. He was everything she thought she didn’t deserve. He was kind, creative, and present. He saw past her broken parts and he inspired her to see past them too. He was healing and liberation all in one heavenly package.

He was her savior in too many ways. On their wedding day, Rey was the smallest she’d ever been. She looked stunning in her wedding dress.

They married and moved to Monterey, California. Rey got a job in a pastry bakery. He went to work for a tech company. They would walk the foggy beach in the early mornings almost every day. They would picnic on the cliffs overlooking the ocean nearly every evening. They mused about their future. Rey toyed with the idea of opening a shop of her own. They were planning on starting a family and all she wanted was to have children that weren’t scarred the way she had been.

Then one day, he didn’t come home. His car slipped off a cliff on the winding drive home and he was gone. Just like that, it was over. For the first month, Rey didn’t remember anything except his funeral and the ever-so-familiar light of the refrigerator in a dark room at night. Five days after the accident on the day of his funeral she was already twelve pounds heavier than she had been before he died.

Six weeks later Rey was wealthy. She had a lot of money. The insurance company sent her a check. As she sat there alone on a foggy beach holding it, she made a decision she barely had the courage to follow up on. Rey decided to go to culinary school as far away from Monterey as she could get. It made perfect sense because she loved food.

Two weeks later Rey was in Florence, Italy. She’d seen Eat, Pray, Love. Italy seemed like the best place to disappear.

Italy was not what it looked like in the tourist brochures. It’s a hard place to be when you’re depressed. It was hot. Everything is louder. The colors are louder. The tastes are louder. The people yell a lot for no good reason.

Her instructor for the first three months of her training hated Americans. He routinely referred to Rey as Porcellino, which means Piggy. She finally quit crying during class, which was often nine hours a day. But she  sobbed the rest of her waking hours. Two months after arriving in Italy Rey was the heaviest she’d ever been. When she stepped on the scale it read 109 kg. That’s about 240 pounds.

Then something happened. Rey quit eating and started tasting. She only ate when she was at class. At first, it was a protest, an act of defiant will for being call Piggy. Then it became something else. For the first time in her life, Rey started tasting and I realized something profound. She’d had never eaten because she loved food. She never really allowed myself to taste anything. Rey had been eating to stay numb.

And there she was, in Italy, at culinary school, tasting for the first time ever.

Nine months later Rey graduated. She weighed less than she did on her wedding day. Then, Rey met a man from France, and she fell deeply in love. Falling in love wasn’t on her agenda, but it happened. He didn’t have to liberate her. She had liberated herself.

Food saved Rey, or should I say taste saved her. She learned to honor her desires by only eating what tasted delicious and absolutely nothing else. When it came down to it, Rey had a pretty sophisticated palate. Not too many things made the cut.

The perfect simplicity of a vine-ripened tomato with sea salt made Rey melt. The artistic elegance of a lovingly prepared five-course meal cooked to perfection was better than any therapy.

Two years after her husband died, Rey traveled back to her hometown in the Midwest with her fiance to meet her family. When she walked toward her parents in the airport, they didn’t even recognize her.

On the way home from the airport, her mother did what she always did to celebrate. They drove through Krispy Kreme. Rey anxiously opened the box in the back seat of the car and picked up the perfectly glazed maple bar and took a long awaited bite.

She gagged. And for a minute, she almost considered eating it anyway. Rey was nervous being home again. She was uncomfortable with the awkward juxtaposition of having her new life and new self, in a Honda with her old life in the front seat. For just a moment she was tempted to use the drug to go numb.

She didn’t.

That night Rey and her fiance cooked her entire family the best meal they’d ever eaten. They stayed in a hotel far away from the light of the refrigerator in her parent’s kitchen. They married in France three months later. Her parents didn’t come.

Rey only eats what really pleases her. She doesn’t eat because it’s there. She don’t eat because she should. She doesn’t eat because “it’s time”. She doesn’t eat to numb.

Rey only eats what pleases her, what is truly delicious. By learning to do that, she know knows how to live a truly sacred life. That skill, that commitment to giving herself the best of what pleased her, taught her how to treat herself like she mattered more than anything else. She began treating herself like Goddess.

Rey is currently living back in Monterey with her husband and her twin girls. She always wanted to raise children there. Rey’s life is like a manual for living with intention and attention to detail. She moves slowly and deliberately through her days. She savors every bite and moment as if it were her last. Rey lives every single day surrounded by the good stuff. She curates perfection with discipline. 

Rey lives a life that is dedicated to the sacred. She is uncompromising. Every single bit of it is beautiful and delicious and it goes way beyond food. Rey is a hedonist by almost every definition of the word. 

Rey is one of the most emotionally and spiritually grounded people I’ve ever met. She radiates a kind of peace and love that is utterly uncommon. She is filled up from the inside all the time. She gives of herself unconditionally almost all the time because she’s got plenty to give. She meets her own needs. She can afford to be generous. 

A lot of people think a lot of things about hedonism. Hedonism is almost always associated with being selfish. Rey’s version of hedonism has nothing to do with anything pop culture tells us hedonism is. Rey’s version of hedonism isn’t selfish. It’s generous. It’s sacred.

he·don·ism:

noun

the pursuit of beauty, pleasure; sensual self-indulgence.

The ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life.