Emu, the Third Door, and My Return to Equilibrium with Food

At the beginning of 2026, I chose Emu as the Dream Arc bird I’d walk with for the year. In the Dream Arc, animals become companions for contemplating particular qualities of consciousness. Emu carries the Vision of Grounded Majesty and is linked with my Life’s Work (GK 34), so the relationship is mine by birth as well as by choice. I chose Emu because I knew—before I knew how—that my body wanted to come into alignment with my thoughts, emotions, and spirit. I wanted embodiment. Grounded majesty. Gentle strength. I wanted to live all the way inside this human vehicle. My body, it seems, had read ahead.

For most of my life, food seemed to belong to one of two rooms in me. In one, I tried to be good enough to feel safe. In the other, I resisted anything that might control me. Both had helped me survive. In both rooms, eating became something larger than eating—a test, a fight, a verdict, a way to disappear, or a way to refuse disappearance. One managed the body. The other defended it. Neither one knew how to inhabit it. Between them, I’d forgotten how to sit at my own table without choosing a side.

This summer, something began to change. A fairytale I wrote, the questions it gave me, and two different kinds of support helped me discover a third possibility. A naturopathic physician helped me listen to what my body actually needs, including support around food sensitivities and hormones. And I hired a trusted guide who knows me well, recognizes the emotional and mental patterns beneath my eating disorder, and is available when I stumble. Together, the story and these two women are helping me relate to food and my body instead of trying to win against them. What a relief that’s been.

In the fairytale, the house is my inner life, and two old doors stand in its kitchen. One promises safety through being good, careful, and controlled. The other promises safety through refusing anything that might rule me. Then a third door appears between them, marked With. It opens into a household where Care and Choice can live together, younger parts of me can belong, and practical support can become a drawer handle—something that makes care easier to reach without turning it into a rule. I’m not retelling the whole story here. I only want to give you enough of its language to understand what’s happening in my life now.. I’m not retelling the whole story here. I only want to give you enough of its language to understand what’s happening in my life now.

The shift has gathered around three questions that came from my fairytale—What is here? What is welcome now? What needs to stay small enough to remain kind?

I’ve begun asking these questions in the ordinary moments when food becomes crowded with fear, rules, memory, or resistance. What is here? Hunger, perhaps. Tiredness. Suspicion. A practical need. A younger part of me trying very hard to keep me safe. What is welcome now? Food, company, quiet, a boundary, professional support, or simply more time. And what needs to stay small enough to remain kind? The plan. The hope. The decision. Sometimes the enormous meaning I’m asking one meal to carry.

As I’ve worked with Emu, I’ve begun to understand the questions as a grounded pause. They bring me out of the argument in my mind and back to the body that’s actually here. Feet on the earth. Breath moving. Hunger or tiredness speaking in its own language. They don’t ask me to rise above the moment. They ask me to come down into it. This has been no small thing for a woman who’s spent a great deal of her life living from the neck up.

The two kinds of support meet me in different but connected places. My physician helps me understand what’s happening in my physical body and offers practical help with nourishment, sensitivities, and hormones. My guide helps me understand the thoughts, emotions, and old patterns that arise as my body changes. She recognizes the triggers that can turn Care into control or wake the urge to resist. Because she’s read the fairytale, we share its language—doors, crowns, handles, Care, Choice, the parts of me gathered around the table. I don’t have to explain the entire inner world before she can help me find my way back. I didn’t hire her to supervise me, correct me, or replace my own knowing. I hired her to accompany me. She knows the terrain, recognizes the old doors, and remains available when I lose the path. Sometimes another person is the missing handle. This matters more than I can say.

One of the clearest changes has happened on Sundays. I dislike cooking. I also know what can happen when hunger arrives and food must still be prepared. Resistance can enter the room before nourishment has a chance. So Sunday has become shopping and preparation day. I make the meals I’ll need during the week, and I buy alternatives too, because having only one acceptable option can feel like another door closing. From the outside, this may look like ordinary planning. From inside my life, it feels like care. I’m noticing where hunger, cooking, and too little choice create a trap, then adding handles before I need them. The preparation isn’t a new rule. It isn’t proof that I’m being good. It’s a way of making food reachable while keeping Choice at the table.

This, too, feels like Emu medicine in ordinary clothes. Strong legs need ground beneath them. My Sunday practice creates that ground before I need to stand on it. Now hunger can be met before cooking becomes another obstacle.

My guide and I speak twice each week, and she always begins with the third question—What has needed to remain small enough to remain kind? I know she’ll ask, so the question stays with me between our conversations. It arrives before I’m overwhelmed and reminds me not to turn this new way of living into one more enormous project. Not to let care grow so large that it becomes control. Because she knows me well, she helps me notice the difference between keeping something small enough to be kind and making it small because I’m afraid. That’s only one of the ways fear can hide inside my choices, and I don’t always recognize them on my own.

What feels most miraculous is how natural this has become. A way of eating that was disrupted in childhood—what I understand through Gene Key 50 as corruption—has begun to find equilibrium. Not a perfect balance I have to hold onto, but the ability to notice, adjust, and return. My body is responding with greater steadiness and vitality. My reactions and decisions are finding balance too. Care doesn’t automatically become control. Choice doesn’t automatically become resistance. Writing the fairytale gave me a language for this possibility. The language of Care helped me recognize what was happening and work with it instead of fighting it.

The goal was never to lose weight. I want to say that clearly. Over the past three years, I’ve done deep inner work to accept and love my body as it is—in its sixty-nine-year-old shape and condition. I came to the naturopathic physician not to make my body smaller, but to fine-tune this human vehicle so I can live a vital and healthy third stage of my life. I’d already shed so much of the body self-hatred I carried for years and years… and I believe that’s one of the reasons this chapter could open at all. This body isn’t an object to correct, a project to finish, or an enemy to overcome. It’s part of the household. My household. And I’m learning to live in loving relationship with it.

Emu gives me another image for this—grounded majesty. I love those words. Not making the body smaller. Not polishing it into acceptability. Standing firmly inside the body I have, with its age, history, limits, instincts, beauty, and power. Strength and gentleness together. A body supported for the life it still wants to live. My body. My life. Here I am.

Long before I chose Emu for this year, I was already walking at dawn and dusk with Merlin, my red heeler, every day, no matter the weather. Rain, snow, cold, mountain wind, summer light… out I went. I never thought of those walks as exercise meant to correct my body. They were and are a devotional rhythm of earth, weather, breath, movement, and presence. Dawn and dusk are threshold hours—neither one thing nor the other—and perhaps my body was already practicing the third door. Emu didn’t give me this rhythm. Emu helped me understand what the rhythm had been teaching me. Movement made with presence can be sacred, and my body can belong to the earth without first becoming different.

And then there’s Rowan. While this equilibrium has been emerging, I’ve also been writing about my teenage years through a fairytale version of my younger self. Rowan is helping me see my own teenage self more clearly. She’s helping me understand that the body I now love is the same body I once learned to mistrust, hide, discipline, defend, or leave. The patterns I’d learned around food and my body followed me into my teenage years. As a teenager, I found new ways to protect myself—to be careful, resist control, hide, and distance myself from what I needed. These weren’t signs that I was broken. They were tools a young person found in the rooms available to her. Emu offers another possibility now. Rowan can have legs. Ground. Breath. A place in the household. Loving my body now doesn’t mean rejecting the girl I was. She was trying to protect herself with the tools she had. I can understand that now and help her see that we have more choices. She’s still part of me, but she doesn’t have to do all the work alone.

I want to speak carefully about this equilibrium. I’m not announcing that my eating disorder has disappeared. I’m not offering my path as a formula for anyone else. The old doors still know their speeches! But the change is relational and embodied. Food is becoming less of a courtroom and less of a battlefield. My body is no longer the enemy or the project. It’s the living companion I want to support through this third stage of life. My decisions are becoming less reactive and more able to hold Care and Choice together. That may sound smaller than a cure. From inside my life, it feels IMMENSE.

And then there’s the timing, which still amazes me. I wrote the fairytale using five of my Gene Keys—34, 20, 40, 37, and 45. Their gifts found their way into the story as support, nourishment, gentleness, belonging, and humor. Then I moved into an immersion with Gene Key 50 and began living the story in real life. Gene Key 50 is about corruption moving toward equilibrium. That’s exactly what I was experiencing. Working with Emu helped me bring that equilibrium into my body and my daily life. Apparently, the story and the bird both knew more about the next chapter than I did.

This is what gentle strength is beginning to mean in my life. Strength without gentleness becomes force. Gentleness without strength can become giving myself away. The third door holds them together. It asks me to remain inside my own body with enough strength to stay and enough gentleness to listen.

This may be what the third door looks like in a human life. Not a perfect middle. Not the disappearance of old patterns. My body is getting the care it needs. My thoughts and emotions are getting support too. My younger selves are being welcomed rather than conquered. I’m moving my body with presence rather than trying to correct it. I’m keeping daily choices small enough to remain kind. None of these pieces created the shift alone. Together, they’ve helped me stop fighting myself and begin living in the alignment I’d longed for.

The old doors haven’t vanished. The careful part still wants safety, and the resistant part still watches for crowns. The miracle is that neither one has to run the whole house. Care and Choice are finding equilibrium. I have questions, practical support, and people who know the terrain and can help me find my way back. I have a sixty-nine-year-old body I no longer need to hate, shrink, or overcome—a body responding with greater steadiness and vitality to attention and love. I have legs carrying me into dawn and dusk, breath meeting weather, feet remembering the earth. And sometimes, in the midst of all that complexity, food becomes food… then warmth… then the next ordinary moment. What once felt corrupted is remembering its balance, not through force, but through relationship. My body is becoming home. I’m amazed. I’m grateful. And I’m living it.

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*My guide is none other than our wonderful Hayley Curtis who agreed to work with me for a brief time as I get my emu-legs under me! Thank you my friend.

*And I love that the image I generated of the inside of the house actually has an owl in it (unintended) as it represents Lizzie Dewey who is my constant support through all things.