When I filled out my intake questionnaire to work with Laura Fenamore, the theme that came up over and over was time. What did I value? [Time with my little family and friends.] What did I want more of? [Time to write. Lazy-in-the-grass watch-the-clouds free time.] and on and on. The question that stopped me in my tracks, however, came up during our first session. It was What are you afraid of? That question stopped me. The answer hung like a noose around my neck waiting for the floor to drop – it was the unrelenting, unavoidable passage of time.
Since my husband’s first heart attack, I had felt every moment, as though I were looking into some dark, spiraling vortex. I could almost hear the ticking of the clock in the back of my head. Some nights I would wake up and sit on the edge of my bed, in the twilight from the window, and wonder how long would my life be as it is now -- with my husband and daughter? Other days I would find myself terrified of simple things like driving the car. The every-day beauty and fragility of life was killing me.
For those of you who know us, this won’t be a shock – we had definitely had a rough couple of years. We had lost our dearest friend. She died, but lost was definitely the right word – it felt like someone had come in one night and simply stolen Theresa – and no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find her. A few weeks after that, during surgery to remove two broken disks in my neck, my husband had a heart attack in the waiting room of Good Samaritan Hospital. So while the blessing of being in the hospital (which literally saved his life) was too obvious to miss, the fragility of life itself started to take my breath away. And despite all of my spiritual attempts and exercise to get past it, that clock kept ticking. Every day above ground became so potent and so beautiful that I would sometimes stand in paralyzed agony as it ticked by.
And so it was that two years later I ended up working with Laura Fenamore. The coincidence that she was a Body Image Mastery Expert and had lost 100 pounds was simply a bonus. Stop the clock in my head and help me stop hurting myself with food and inactivity? That would simply be too much to ask for.
Now to be fair, Laura thought I came to her for the latter – and I suppose I did too. But it was my unspoken, deeply hidden hope that her expertise could help me stop that clock. After all, her website says that she helps you handle paralyzing emotions. (I’m sure she meant without eating them away – but with a size 20 butt, I guess I qualified any way you looked at it.) I’m embarrassed to admit to that size, but I’m already 2 sizes smaller – and hey, when you call most people a BIG ASS, it’s a bigger insult than a dress size.
My first appointment with Laura focused a lot on time and how my fear was literally eating me alive with every pound I gained. Laura knew intuitively where to guide that conversation and what questions to ask, and she quietly picked up on something I said about my friend, Theresa. Before she died Theresa told me, “It’s just for now. It’s only right now,” and I had remembered it in a dream. Laura asked me to breath and to imagine what life would need to look like to be the life I wanted – but to be centered and perfect right now. She went on to say that losing Theresa and Tommy’s heart attack and my neck injury… that all of it was an old story. That with my fists clenched around this old story, I simply could not embrace anything else. (I wondered, silently, if I wasn’t beating myself up with those fists too.) Laura added that although my fears might be very valid, my husband was here with me and our little family of three was just fine – right now.
And quietly, almost without notice, the clock stopped ticking.
There is an irony to this story, and it is right up there with me losing pound after pound without dieting at all. It’s about the clock in our living room. Fourteen years ago, my bridal party gave me a Grandfather Clock before we were married. And somehow, day after day, year after year, it never got turned on. It’s a beautiful clock, and it’s face watched us, silently from our living room, throughout our whole marriage. But it did not mark time. It didn’t chime; it didn’t tick.
Then two days ago a wonderful man named Elan Hahn came to tune our piano, and noticing the clock, he reached up onto the top, as if he somehow knew where the key was, and explaining that he had a grandfather clock store with his brother, he began to hang the weights and attach the pendulum that had sat silently at the bottom of the locked glass door all those years.
If you stand quietly in our beautiful house on Mombasha Lake and really listen, you can hear that clock in every room. Every single hour, day and night, the house fills with chimes more beautiful and gently louder than my fear ever was. Life is here. It is right now. And halfway through it, I am learning, finally, to take care of the body I live in and live the life I deserve.
I write this blog mostly for myself, but if you have struggled with body issues or tried endlessly to lose weight, somehow working with Laura Fenamore is changing my life. I told her today that the question her clients need to ask isn’t if they can afford to work with her (you can), but if they can afford not to.
Yours truly, Mary Agnes Antonopoulos
Freelance Writer and Magnificent Woman
Contact Information:
Laura Fenamore, Body Image Mastery
http://www.laurafenamore.com/
415-464-1234
Since my husband’s first heart attack, I had felt every moment, as though I were looking into some dark, spiraling vortex. I could almost hear the ticking of the clock in the back of my head. Some nights I would wake up and sit on the edge of my bed, in the twilight from the window, and wonder how long would my life be as it is now -- with my husband and daughter? Other days I would find myself terrified of simple things like driving the car. The every-day beauty and fragility of life was killing me.
For those of you who know us, this won’t be a shock – we had definitely had a rough couple of years. We had lost our dearest friend. She died, but lost was definitely the right word – it felt like someone had come in one night and simply stolen Theresa – and no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find her. A few weeks after that, during surgery to remove two broken disks in my neck, my husband had a heart attack in the waiting room of Good Samaritan Hospital. So while the blessing of being in the hospital (which literally saved his life) was too obvious to miss, the fragility of life itself started to take my breath away. And despite all of my spiritual attempts and exercise to get past it, that clock kept ticking. Every day above ground became so potent and so beautiful that I would sometimes stand in paralyzed agony as it ticked by.
And so it was that two years later I ended up working with Laura Fenamore. The coincidence that she was a Body Image Mastery Expert and had lost 100 pounds was simply a bonus. Stop the clock in my head and help me stop hurting myself with food and inactivity? That would simply be too much to ask for.
Now to be fair, Laura thought I came to her for the latter – and I suppose I did too. But it was my unspoken, deeply hidden hope that her expertise could help me stop that clock. After all, her website says that she helps you handle paralyzing emotions. (I’m sure she meant without eating them away – but with a size 20 butt, I guess I qualified any way you looked at it.) I’m embarrassed to admit to that size, but I’m already 2 sizes smaller – and hey, when you call most people a BIG ASS, it’s a bigger insult than a dress size.
My first appointment with Laura focused a lot on time and how my fear was literally eating me alive with every pound I gained. Laura knew intuitively where to guide that conversation and what questions to ask, and she quietly picked up on something I said about my friend, Theresa. Before she died Theresa told me, “It’s just for now. It’s only right now,” and I had remembered it in a dream. Laura asked me to breath and to imagine what life would need to look like to be the life I wanted – but to be centered and perfect right now. She went on to say that losing Theresa and Tommy’s heart attack and my neck injury… that all of it was an old story. That with my fists clenched around this old story, I simply could not embrace anything else. (I wondered, silently, if I wasn’t beating myself up with those fists too.) Laura added that although my fears might be very valid, my husband was here with me and our little family of three was just fine – right now.
And quietly, almost without notice, the clock stopped ticking.
There is an irony to this story, and it is right up there with me losing pound after pound without dieting at all. It’s about the clock in our living room. Fourteen years ago, my bridal party gave me a Grandfather Clock before we were married. And somehow, day after day, year after year, it never got turned on. It’s a beautiful clock, and it’s face watched us, silently from our living room, throughout our whole marriage. But it did not mark time. It didn’t chime; it didn’t tick.
Then two days ago a wonderful man named Elan Hahn came to tune our piano, and noticing the clock, he reached up onto the top, as if he somehow knew where the key was, and explaining that he had a grandfather clock store with his brother, he began to hang the weights and attach the pendulum that had sat silently at the bottom of the locked glass door all those years.
If you stand quietly in our beautiful house on Mombasha Lake and really listen, you can hear that clock in every room. Every single hour, day and night, the house fills with chimes more beautiful and gently louder than my fear ever was. Life is here. It is right now. And halfway through it, I am learning, finally, to take care of the body I live in and live the life I deserve.
I write this blog mostly for myself, but if you have struggled with body issues or tried endlessly to lose weight, somehow working with Laura Fenamore is changing my life. I told her today that the question her clients need to ask isn’t if they can afford to work with her (you can), but if they can afford not to.
Yours truly, Mary Agnes Antonopoulos
Freelance Writer and Magnificent Woman
Contact Information:
Laura Fenamore, Body Image Mastery
http://www.laurafenamore.com/
415-464-1234
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