One day, I was doing my monthly tele-class for my Ho’oponopono Way members and one of my students asked me, “Mabel, I am a chiropractor. I don’t have problems attracting patients or money, but my challenge is paperwork. Even though I assign one day of the week to doing paperwork, I still don’t do it.”
When she said that, the first thought that popped into my head was “ice cream.”
So I told her, “You know, what you need to tell your inner child is that, after you guys do the paperwork, you are going to go for ice cream.” And she said, “Okay. I can do that.” The class continued, and she asked me another question, and inspiration came to me much more clearly this time. I said, “You know what I told you about the ice cream? You have to go for the ice cream before the paperwork, not after.”
The following day, I was at the supermarket mentally having a conversation with my inner child. I was talking to her about our weight and saying, “What is it that we don’t want to let go? Because I’ve been on different diets for over a month, and no matter what I do, nothing works.” Every morning I’d get on the scale. That scale did not move for over a month, no matter what I did. So I was saying, “What is it that we don’t want to let go?” And the answer came to me with the following thought: “vanilla ice cream”. I immediately said to my inner child, “Of course, after we lose the weight, we are going to have a lot of vanilla ice cream, but first we need to lose the weight!” At that point, I received another thought, “First, give me the vanilla ice cream, and then I’ll help you. I’ll cooperate.” At that moment, I decided to show my child that I trusted her, so instead of buying the gallon of vanilla ice cream at the supermarket where I was, I went to the ice cream parlor and asked for a big vanilla ice cream cone. I actually took the time to eat it there. I enjoyed it, taking it as an outing, a fun activity with my inner child. The next morning, to my surprise, when I stood on my scale, I had lost two pounds!
I am sharing this because I want you to realize that, as Dr. Ihaleakalá always says, “When you ask how to clean, how to erase, if you hear something ridiculous, do it because you heard correctly, because God has a very good sense of humor.”
Losing weight has a lot to do with working with your inner child. He or she handles your body, your physical manifestation. Definitely, eating has to do with the emotional and the physical body. The body holds on to memories. For this reason, it’s impossible to lose weight by resisting it. So, you must not only avoid resisting your weight but also, and more importantly, love yourself just the way you are. Even if we are overweight, we have to love ourselves first. That’s the most important point, the foundation to loosing the weight. If we don’t love ourselves, even if we lose the weight and we find that perfect body that we all wish to have, we are not going to be happy. Happiness is not fitness, or having the perfect body, or the perfect weight, height, hair, or eye color.
Most of us are never happy with what we have. If we have straight hair, we want curly hair, and if we have curly hair, we want it straight.
So my point is this: to lose weight, you must definitely work with your inner child and love yourself. Let go of wanting to lose the weight. In the end, it’s not about concentrating on being thinner. It is about being okay just the way you are.
As Dr. Ihaleakalá says, “It is not the food that makes you fat; it is your thoughts of the food that makes you fat.” So, for example, if you say, “This is going to make me fat,” guess what: it will make you fat!! I personally believe him. I know in my heart he is right, but the honest truth is that I still have a lot of memories playing that tell me that it’s the food, so I am still on a diet, and working with my inner child.
We all have our cleaning to do, but one thing is clear, once we change our goal from losing the weight to being happy just the way we are, in all likelihood we will lose those pounds, and even if we don’t, we will be happy inside. It’s more important to be happy than to be thin!
