by Marianne Williamson: The weight you are seeking to let go of was added to your consciousness before it was added to your body. Your body is merely a screen onto which is projected the nature of your thoughts. When the weight is gone from your consciousness, it will be gone from your physical experience. Asking God to remove the cause, you will then have the power to remove the effect.

The weight on your mind, and thus on your body, is the weight of your own dark shadows that have not yet had a light shone on them, whether they be unprocessed feelings, negative thoughts, or fear-based attitudes and personality traits. They are no different from the shadows that other people have.

What is unique to your situation is that for whatever reason, these thoughts or feelings have become frozen within you and are not being processed properly. Instead of your getting sad, let’s say—going through the sadness and then moving to the other side of it —your sadness is likely, for various reasons, to stay stuck within your mind. And then it gets stuck within your body. You are failing to assimilate an experience and let it go. Emotionally and mentally, as well as physically, our systems must process waste.

Painful experiences are not meant to linger. They are meant to teach us what they need to teach us, and then dissolve into the realm of soft-focus memory. Even bitterness in our past can transform into peaceful acceptance. With your system of psychological-waste removal on the blink, however, you’ve subconsciously tried to get rid of these thoughts and feelings by eating them. If I can’t process my sadness, perhaps I can eat my sadness. If I can’t process my anger, perhaps I can eat my anger.

In the absence of an exit valve for what could be seen as your psychological sewage, your unprocessed thoughts and feelings have embedded themselves in your flesh—literally. They are the materialization of dense, unprocessed energy that had nowhere else to go. You are carrying your burdens around—not only with you but on you. This course is a way to release them to God.

It’s not as though other people don’t have unprocessed emotions; we all do. In some of us, unprocessed pain expresses itself through taking drugs or drinking; in others, through emotional outbursts; in others, through promiscuous sex, and so forth. The form of dysfunction is not particularly relevant; what matters is that we address the unprocessed suffering behind it.

In order for your healing to be real and deep, you must be willing to be real and deep with the issues you address. No one else needs to know what is revealed to you, unless you choose to share the information with a trusted other. This journey is a sacred one, in which you travel with God through the secrets of your heart.

With Lesson 2 in my book A Course in Weight Loss, you’ll begin to tear down the wall.

Knowing that there are only two categories of thoughts—those of love, and those of fear—you are beginning to achieve spiritual mastery: the ability to transcend fear by replacing it with love. As you identify fear-based thoughts and then surrender them to Divine Mind, love emerges. And in the presence of love, miracles occur naturally. When the thoughts that lead you to overeat are surrendered, then those that lead you to wholesome eating come forth naturally to take their place.

The unprocessed thoughts will then leave your system, in time taking with them the pounds of flesh they’ve produced. In bringing them into your conscious mind and surrendering them to God, your thoughts and then your weight will be transmuted and removed.

In the past, you may simply have ignored or suppressed the thoughts, feelings, and memories that caused you pain. By doing so, however, you stopped a natural process by which such thoughts and feelings could be transformed. The pain has literally been pushed into your flesh. Now you are remembering that you can make another choice: you can look at your pain, and then release it to One in Whose hands it will dissolve forever.