Hi everyone, Ana Nieto here, our friend Yiska from RedefiningDiet.com wants to share with you a few enlightening ideas for 2010. Enjoy this message.

Here we are in a new year and there’s a certain sense of rebirthing that goes with that newness. The image that keeps appearing in my life is of an egg being hatched. All around me and within me there seems to be a desire for a new self-expression to be birthed. The thing about being born is that it either takes us through a place of extreme constriction and contraction or it feels like a shell around us is cracking and life as we know it seems broken. This is the experience of new life emerging, and it hurts!

Years ago when my weight was at an all time high, my father said to me, why are you burying yourself? Hearing that was both incredibly painful and also one of the biggest gifts of my life, because it was true. My excess fat was a shell I had been using to cover and protect myself. Inside and underneath was a voice wanting, though terrified, to be born. The overeating was like a plug stopping up my desire for self-expression. The fear of wanting and being rejected felt too great. I was so afraid of showing a part of myself that would not be wanted, so sure I was too much! The weight felt protective, but I realized if I tried to stay in the womb forever I would die there. Greeted with the fear of being too much again this week I recognized an even fuller authentic self-expression longing to be birthed.

Also this week, a friend shared her strongly emerging desire to be expressed more fully as a woman, to feel and be more feminine and strong. In that space though, she was experiencing the pain of her imagined limitations, instead seeing herself as fragile and weak. Add to it that she had not been eating or sleeping, her self image of fragility and weakness were slowly being met in reality. Her mind was the contracted place, the place where the certainty she isn’t strong lived. Set up with the intention to protect her and keep her safe in the womb, this belief was both starving the growing chick inside of her and not allowing that possibility emerging within to be born. The cracking egg felt frustrating, stuck, vulnerable, scared, and hopeless.

I think the reason our new year’s resolutions so often fail is because we try to live out a new reality from within the womb, instead of feeding and connecting with the new life that wants to be born and letting it push past our fears and old, limited, constricted self-images. When a resolution stems from an alignment with our emerging self, however bold, our follow through is inevitable. But even when the chick has hatched, it can take some time to stand steady. There is a lot of new learning and practicing involved, so as a loving parent does with any newborn, we need to hold this emerging self both gently and firmly as it learns the ways of its new reality.

So let this be an invitation to connect with your own emerging self. Ask yourself the question, what wants to be born within me? Take a look at where you hold back, where you “starve” yourself or “weigh” yourself down. Allow all that wants to be born in you, your passion, your love, your creativity, your power, your desire, your gift, to be expressed. Seek out your midwife, be it a coach, supportive community, or a good friend, to help you move through the contractions, the thoughts and fears that tell you, it’s too scary, you can’t possibly…, don’t risk it, and dare to truly let yourself give birth to something new this year and watch the “baby weight” melt off! – Yiska