Cooking Without Made Easy: All recipes free from added gluten, sugar, yeast and dairy produce. Barbara Cousins
in the same hours in the office because I needed time to shop and cook, but the work I produced reflected a new clarity and confidence. Even my boss commented on it.
Over the next few years I made some major changes in my life. I let go of the security and trappings of my career and left to set up a consultancy. As I downsized I realized that the freedom and satisfaction I now felt easily replaced the big salary and company car. Creating more space in my life meant that I had time to walk, horse ride and spend more time with nature and the people who mattered to me. I felt much more in touch with myself as I began to live more from my heart than from my head.
My next major change came when I took off with my partner on a 16-month, round-the-world trip. That really was a leap of faith, to let go of everything and just trust. It turned out to be the most amazing time of my life. While travelling I started to write a travelogue, tapping into a creativity that had lain dormant since my schooldays. Now I am working on this material and hope in the future to become a travel writer. Combining travel and writing would be my dream way of life. And the endometriosis? It just disappeared, much to my consultant’s surprise. I am so glad that I took those first steps towards controlling my own health and my life.’
Detoxification is like a life jigsaw
When I look back at the person I was before I started to detoxify I can hardly believe that I’m the same person. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that ‘I’ve arrived’, as I’m constantly gaining new insights and growing stronger, and will continue to do so until the day I die. But looking back lets me see how eating the right food has enabled me to recognize the next stage in my development; to see issues that needed working on as they appeared and then, after working through these, moving on again, rather than staying stuck and repeating the same mistakes.
I often liken detoxification to a life jigsaw. It’s as though a jigsaw has been put together but the pieces are not all in the right places. When you start to detoxify it’s as if someone has thrown your life’s jigsaw onto the floor and it has smashed into hundreds of pieces. It is then up to you to fit it back together—only this time with all the pieces in their right places. At first this is difficult because you know that your life doesn’t work but you haven’t a clue what the jigsaw is meant to look like. At this point you need a certain amount of trust and faith that your new direction will appear. And it does.
You find yourself considering a piece of the jigsaw that holds the key to a certain area of your life. It may be a piece about guilt, or pleasing people and you spend a few days or weeks thinking about how this affects your life and how you could change it. Then one day you consider another jigsaw piece and have a new insightful realization, and suddenly you’ve fitted two pieces of the jigsaw together. And so it goes on; as you peel the layers from yourself you gradually build up a new picture of the real you. I’m still working on my jigsaw; I still have issues with lack of self-worth but the universe keeps providing me with opportunities to grow.
My lack of self-worth
My parents were basically good people who loved me in their own way, and they were doing what they thought was their best. However, their attitudes to parenting were based on their own dysfunctional upbringings. They were very money orientated—to them, money in the bank equalled security. I had very few toys or books, the most basic of clothes and the home didn’t contain any of life’s luxuries. I remember birthdays and Christmases with nothing to open—instead my parents put money in a bank account for when we were older. We never had a Christmas tree or bedtime stories; I didn’t go on holiday or have friends to stay. The message that I constantly received as a child was that I didn’t matter but money did. Self-worth was one of the lessons my soul obviously came here to learn.
Wanting the perfect marriage
My lack of self-worth and inability to be in touch with my feelings have drawn many lessons to me throughout my life. Because of my relationship with my father, I was attracted to emotionally unavailable men, whom I hoped would fulfil my every need—if I loved them enough. Basically, there was still a little girl inside of me desperately wanting the love of her father, so I transferred this on to the men in my life. My husband had come from an equally cold and dysfunctional family, where he was taught fear and learnt to control in order to allay his fears. Once married, I also gained an equally controlling mother-in-law and so my self-worth took another battering and my ‘people pleaser’ ran on overdrive. I wanted to have the perfect marriage and I was willing to suppress any discomfort I felt in order to make this happen. I loved being married and I loved being a mum to my two boys. I went to no end of trouble to make the home a warm, comfortable environment and was determined to make sure my children felt loved and secure. But I also felt trapped and controlled. No one was interested in how I felt and whether my needs were being met and I didn’t have sufficient self-worth to put my case forward. If I did try to assert myself then I tapped into my husband’s fears, and he couldn’t cope, so I suppressed my feelings yet again. And, of course, I never dreamt of talking to anyone outside the home, as my sense of self-worth was invested in being perfect.
Eventually I was introduced to astrology and I started to question what life was about. I read alternative books and looked at what was going on in my life from a different perspective. The floodgates of emotion eventually burst when my dog was accidentally killed. I remember finding her and wanting to cry but not being able to at first—but when I did start crying, I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t just crying for her, devastated though I was, I was crying for me and all the hurts and injustices I’d suffered throughout my life and had never cried about before. That marked a turning point in my life. I could no longer be what everyone else wanted me to be; I had to start standing up for what I needed.
It was hard, however, to put the blinkers on and follow the path that was revealing itself to me. I felt like I was on a long, straight road that disappears into the horizon. On each side the land was lower than the road and all along were people trying to pull me off my path and divert me. It would have been easy for me to use everyone else as an excuse for not following my own star, especially as I didn’t know where my star was taking me. We are, however, always aware of the next step and the rest is revealed to us one day at a time.
Facing the fear
When I eventually re-trained and set up a healing clinic in the mid-eighties I was full of fear. Alternative medicine wasn’t exactly popular in Manchester, and nutrition was at the bottom of the list. I was fearful of failure, of not being able to help people, or being thought of as foolish. But more than that, I was frightened of putting myself, and my growth, first.
Self-growth, however, is like giving birth—you can’t stop it once it’s started, and so I kept moving forward and taking the next step. I was facing the fear and doing it anyway.
I also learnt to trust in God and the universe. For God is like a kind, caring father, who’s going to push a little so that we grow, but he will never put us in situations where we really can’t cope. And so my clinic was a success. The more I trusted God and handed over control, the more he helped. I was frequently guided to treatments or found myself uttering statements that I didn’t know I knew.
Natalie
Natalie was a client of mine who had three young children and a husband. She was organized, hard working and capable, with a tremendous amount of untapped potential. She wanted to set up her own business, but she had a husband who was married to his job. This meant that he arrived home later than he said he would, ended up working weekends or on his days off and, when he was around, his mind was elsewhere rather than on his family. Natalie took responsibility for everything concerning the home and family. In their early married life, when the children were young, Natalie didn’t mind too much; it was only when the children started school that she resented being the support system with no hope of a career other own. But Natalie avoided facing the fear involved in forcing the necessary changes—instead she used food as a substitute for love and to cover up any feelings of discomfort.