I like leftovers. To be honest though, I have to admit that I like leftovers best when they’re shoved way into the back of the fridge and have a nice crop of mold growing on them. Yeah, I know. I’ve always been a little ashamed of this tendency, but the compulsion to leave a little food in the fridge is so powerful, it’s always just been part of “who I am.”

In getting to know my new friends recently though, I’ve noticed something weird. Believe it or not, there are people out there — people who look completely normal — who tend to eat all of their leftovers, thereby maintaining a relatively mold-free refrigerator. I know, right? 

Watching them has been freaking me out. It’s bad enough when they eat their own leftovers, but when I offer my (not yet respectably moldy) odds-n-ends for a communal dish and they get used up, I start to hyperventilate.

I realize this is weird. 

It’s just leftovers. As much as I understand it’s good to use up leftovers, I know I’m not going to eat them. But it freaks me out to know there’s no food left happily molding in the fridge.

This has always been one of those “why do I do that?” patterns. I just didn’t know until I dove into this healing work that those patterns point to a place of woundedness in me, and those underlying wounds can be healed.

So the other day, as the previous night’s leftovers were being repurposed for a lunchtime salad and I was losing my grip, I began looking for how to stop feeling this way. My investigations brought me to several parallel stories around the threat of starvation — some were situations I remember living, some were inherited fears, some cultural or karmic or however you want to look at that level of transpersonal experience.

Ultimately it came down to a core message of “that dish (the one currently molding in the fridge) didn’t kill me, but the next one might.” In this healing work, I know we’ve hit pay dirt when the wackadoodle sentence carries with it a heavy-duty charge. Because that’s how you know you’re hearing from the precognitive self. We’ve all done our cognitive work — we’ve told ourselves how good it is to clean out the refrigerator, how wasteful and expensive it is to leave food to rot, yadda, yadda, yadda…. And still, the pattern repeats itself. This kind of trauma isn’t held in our cognitive space; we can’t talk our way out of it.

So I’ve learned to listen. And that starts with listening to myself when I say “why can’t I stop doing this?” The next step is refining the issue down to what my trainer Mark Wolynn calls “core language,” the language that’s out of rational proportion to the events at hand and that makes your hair stand on end when you hear yourself say it.

So now that I’ve refined my moldy leftovers issue to a core idea of “that dish didn’t kill me but the next one might,” I can go a number of ways with it. I can try to make sense of it by looking at the story it comes out of — whether it’s a moldy peach I brought to school for lunch when I was seven, a fear handed down by my parents, or some kind of past-life thing. Now, tracking down the story can be exciting. It can soothe our egos which are afraid of letting us say crazy things, and it can distract us from actually doing the healing work we set out to do. But in order to truly heal, we have to get out of our heads, and into our bodies, and surrender.

For me, the “that dish didn’t kill me but the next one might” energy was in my gut, unsurprisingly, around my umbilicus. It was also held as a sensation of panic around my heart, and a tightening, or closing off, in my throat. So, with compassion for the pain held there, and courage built on a history of watching this process work, and the intention to live free of this kind of crazy, I open myself to the pain of this and hold it in a healing way.

And hold it. 

And hold it. 

And when my mind squirms, and my heart breaks, I look out at the beauty around me and remind myself the trauma isn’t happening right now, and I continue to embrace the energy of that fear and pain.

And I do so until repeating my core sentence no longer makes my gut hurt or my throat close up or my heart constrict. And most importantly, I hold it until I can eat all of the damn leftovers in the fridge without needing to leave some in there, just in case they’re the last piece of non-toxic nourishment I’ll ever see. Because that’s why I actually do this work. If it were just about some mold in the fridge, I wouldn’t bother. But the mold is a tiny piece of a very large pattern. This “leftovers” issue shows up in my entire relationship to nourishment — the way I receive food, appreciation, security, love, work — anything that nourishes me has to go through that deep energetic filter of “watch out — the next one might kill you.”

And it’s that kind of crazy I know this work can free us from. 

Which is why I say again and again, the pain just shows us where to begin.