Stay

The following piece was written on November 7th, 2016 after the results of the U.S. presidential election were announced. The words remain relevant today.

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Every cell of my body is screaming “leave!” this morning. There is no where I want to be less than here.

But I stay.

When I heard the news I ran to the toilet to throw up. I sat on the floor of the bathroom rocking back and forth, trembling, breath shallow, wanting so intensely to leave this moment, this world.

But I stay.

My mind grips and grasps for me to run away to the future. To the what ifs. To the terror. To the tracing of all the steps in history that lead me and us to this moment. To the search for blame. To the desperation for salvation. My mind implores and beckons me to leave.

But I stay.

As a woman, my body has rarely felt like home. For too long I didn’t live here. Here was not a place to trust. Here was not a place that I thought I could handle with my eyes open. But I found my way back and I stay.

Today the invitation I have for you may not be easy: stay.

Stay in your body. Stay with the tremors and the shaking. Stay with the pit in your stomach. Stay even as you notice yourself bobbing in and out. These feelings. This trauma. This fear and anger and sadness and confusion and despair cannot kill us. In fact staying is our salvation.

Stay in your body. Just sidle up next to whatever sensation is coursing through your flesh. Feel the pain. Notice the quality of your breath. Are you hungry? Cold? Perhaps the best way to describe here is ‘numb’?

That’s all welcome. Stay.

The body knows and it has evolved over millennia to process trauma like many of us are experiencing. These processes require little effort on our part other than loving presence…other than staying with kindness.

Stay.

In staying we can receive our bodies wise requests. Is it aching for companionship? Asking for quiet? Nudging us to put away the screens or put on a sweater? Now is the time to heed our body’s requests. Now is the time to stay.

There may not yet be answers to the questions in our mind but we can answer the requests of the body.

There will be a time in the near future that we act boldly, consistently, together and with steadfast determination but right now the impact has just happened, the car has just rolled, the fire just ravaged through, leaving our skin raw and our being bewildered. So right now our best action is to simply stay.

Stay and tend. Stay and feel. Stay and listen.

Here is my call: let our response to this moment be deeper embodiment.

Why embodiment? What can embodiment do in the face such real-life practical threats? Embodied people are resourced. Embodied people are awake. Embodied people are rooted.

If there were ever a time for people to be resourced, awake, and rooted this is it.

Let our commitment be to stay and to feel and then to act on behalf of those whose bodies are most threatened. And it’s all a threat to bodies isn’t it?

Marriage equality and LGBTQ rights? Human bodies.

Racial justice? Bodies.

Reproductive rights? Bodies.

War? ISIS? Bodies.

Affordable and accessible healthcare? Bodies.

Responsible gun control? Bodies.

Immigration? Bodies.

The disembodied cannot support and protect the physically vulnerable nearly as effectively as an army of the deeply embodied.

Don’t move to Canada. Don’t disappear. Don’t check out. Don’t give up. Don’t turn to your escape of choice. Stay. Just here. Just now. In this hurting, reeling body.

All you need to is stay and when you leave, come back as soon as you are aware. Stay.

When all you want to do is leave. When hopelessness nips at your toes. When you don’t know where to go or what to think or how to proceed. Just stay here in your powerful, vulnerable, sacred flesh.

The way forward will be found here and together, in our bodies, we will rise.

How You Know You're Done Dieting

You see now that a diet by any other name is still a diet.

Whether it’s the traditional Weight-Watchers or Jenny Craig or the nouveau Paleo or Whole30 you know that if it asks you to follow rules, if it tells you that your body’s cravings can’t be trusted, if it makes someone else the expert, if it demonizes certain foods or entire macronutrients that it’s a diet. Plus you’re not going to be fooled by misappropriated buzzwords and phrases like “wellness” and “body love” and “make peace with food.” A spade is a spade and you know it.

You see that yo-yoing in weight is not and has not been a fault of yours but an inherent side-effect of dieting.

When a human being is threatened with starvation over and over again as they are when dieting the body acts in the interest of self-preservation and decreases metabolism. This is the brilliance of our bodies, they want us to live. This the problem with restriction. This is the "planned obsolescence" or built in expiration date of diets. It's diets that don't work but people blame themselves for not sticking to it. They blame themselves for not having the willpower, for eating sugar or bread, when all all along it was the diet itself that was set up to cause weight-gain. You see this now. You're not playing a rigged game anymore.

You see now that you’d rather be happy than weigh any specific amount.

Most often when we’re chasing weight-loss we’re really chasing what we think weight loss will give us: happiness, love, desirability, etc. Most often when we’re restricting our food we’re chasing order in our life, a sense of control, or a decrease in our anxiety. But now, you realize that people have all the things we’re promised weight-loss will give us without the pursuit of a different body. Now you realize you can have those things too. Now you know that diets aren’t the most effective anxiety management approach. Now you just want to be free and happy.

You’re not holding out hope anymore for a miracle, quick-fix, lose-weight pill, plan, or program.

You’ve tried enough to know that the next diet will not have different results from the last one, or the last ten. You also know that the path from chronic dieter to normal eater won’t happen overnight or in six weeks. That speedy pace is only ever sold by industries that care more about profits that results or your well being. You now know that being the tortoise is a better bet than being the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

You see now that weighing less, if it means you have to starve and torture yourself, isn’t worth it.

Priorities change. As we live, we learn. It can take a while but eventually, if we’re lucky, where we find meaning and fulfillment becomes clear and it turns out that’s it’s never found in how we look or what we weigh or how "perfect" of an eater we are. Meaning is found in relationships, in creative expression, in service, in play, in nature, in enjoying our bodies, and in loving one another. It’s not found in a pants size. The cost is just too high for you to continue to inflict harm on yourself in the name of calories or points or carbs or pounds or inches. 

You have just enough faith that you can relearn how to be a “normal” eater even if that scares you.

You may not know how. You might crave support. But you have faith, however faint, that you can be free. Others that you respect and trust have gone before you. Somewhere inside is a voice whispering "We're done. So done. Never again. So what's next?"

Letting Go of What "They" Think

In the early months of anorexia the praise I received about my appearance and weight loss served as fuel for a dangerous fire.

“You look great!”
“What are you doing? You look awesome.”
“I wish I had your willpower.”
“Wow, you have a great body.”

Friends, strangers, and even my parents, in the early days, doled out praise for what appeared to be a newly discovered commitment to health and the smaller pants I could fit into. Approval was like a drug. It felt good, really good, when it started and it served as a motivation later on. When I didn’t want to go to the gym or I wanted to eat something beyond my ultra restricted diet all I did was think about what people would say if I gained weight and that was enough to keep me in line. In a lot of ways I was addicted to praise. The high I got from others celebrating my physical form (and how it conformed) was palpable. The panic I felt when (I projected that) others judged my body negatively was crushing. My colleague Tara Mohr is brilliant when it comes to the topic of unhooking from praise and criticism. Tara says that being hooked takes different forms, including:

1. Dependence on, or addiction to praise – causing us to do only those things that are likely to get us gold stars and others’ approval

2. Avoidance of praise – not wanting to stand out from the crowd – even for positive reasons, which causes us to self-sabotage, to not do our best work

3. Fear of criticism – which causes us to not innovate, share controversial ideas, pursue interests where we’ll be fumbling beginners or fail along the way, or do anything that makes us visible enough to be criticized!

She makes the astute suggestion to “always look at feedback as giving you information about the person or people giving the feedback, rather than information about yourself." Tara's writings explores this topic mostly in the context of our careers and I want to take it further and apply it to praise and criticism of our bodies and food choices.

And unhooking in this realm is not an easy thing to do because we all want to belong. We all want approval. When we are praised it feels great. When we are judged or rejected it can feel devastating. And yet, living at the mercy of the approval of others, striving to conform in our appearance or diets to what others or “society” deems good is the definition of disempowerment.

Being able to live our lives and make basic choices like what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat without factoring in what other people will think is essential if we are to feel free and unmasked. It’s essential if we are to stay connected to the immense wisdom of our bodies.

Feeding ourselves is one of the most basic acts of autonomy. No one else should have a say in what we put into our bodies and yet for too many women, with each bite, comes a cacophony of judgemental voices—some real, some projected. This happens when we get dressed too. Our minds run off with thoughts of "Does this make me look fat?" "Does this show my belly/thighs/arms/butt, etc?" "Will so and so think I’ve gained weight?" "Will they think I’ve given up?"

Too often we sit on the side lines, skip the party, or spend more than we can afford on clothing just to mitigate the judgement we fear others will have of how we look. But, as Tara so eloquently explains

“the goal...is not to become impervious to praise and criticism. That would be impossible. It would also be inhuman, and would force us to deny an important part of ourselves….The part of us that wants others to receive us with appreciation, with enthusiasm – the part that wants to be loved by those around us? I think that’s a very tender, real, part of us, a part to honor too. The point is not to become disconnected from feedback, to have such a thick skin that we can’t feel it or hear it, but rather, to become “unhooked” by it, to not be run by it. The point is to be run by our own wisdom...The goal is to not have others’ ideas about us distract us, silence us, or take us on an emotional roller coaster.”

I agree. In the end it comes down to what we each, as individuals, decide is important in a meaningful life. Unhooking from praise and criticism when it comes to our bodies and our food choices is a life long practice. Each of us has an ego that is ready and willing to lure us back to that to the roller coaster. Getting hooked isn't a failure.

So what does it look like when we’re unhooked from body praise and criticism? It looks like this:

• Eating what we want, not more or less based on what other people are eating or who we are eating with, or what social function we have coming up on our calendar.

• Allowing photos of us to be taken and seen, knowing that a single moment captured in 2-D doesn’t define us or tell our whole story.

• Not hiding in the ways we dress or hiding what we are choosing to eat.

• Letting someone else’s comments about our appearance be about them.

• Dressing and adorning ourselves for ourselves, with pride, and the body we have today.

• Observing the hurt or fear that comes from criticism and looking inward to where we may be holding self-judgement. After all, it’s much harder to be hurt by criticism we don’t agree with.

• Doing our best to practice non-judgement when it comes to other people’s eating and appearance.

• Sometimes consciously giving up the SHORT-TERM high we know we'd get if we went on a crash diet. We unhook when we choose long-term, internally-based sustainable happiness instead of short-term, external hits of power. This happens in small moments.

• When necessary, reminding other people that our body, appearance, and food choices are entirely our own domain—no outside contributions needed or welcome.

Unhooking is a practice, but remember, what I think of you, or she thinks of you, or he thinks of you, or your inner critic thinks of you doesn't much matter. You are in charge. Your body is yours. Your reasons behind your food choices are personal and multifaceted and no one's business.

Go to the party. Take the photograph. Put on whatever size clothing fits your body today and feels comfortable. Eat what you want, in public, in front of people who are still entranced by diet culture. Have no shame for struggling, getting hooked, bumbling toward finding your way, or being a human who feels deeply—this stuff isn't easy. Ultimately though, when you can, remember that what other people think about your body and food choices only has as much power as you give it.

Participation Optional

Even though we in the developed world are relatively free, we’re still socialized to go along with the crowd. Today’s reminder is that participation is optional. Today I invite you to opt out when you don’t want to do something.

Opt out of being weighed at the doctor’s office. Did you know it’s optional? You can simply say “I pass” and if they pressure you, and you don’t feel you have a choice, you can step on the scale backwards and say “I don’t want to know the number, it’s not useful to me.”

Opt out of allowing your child to have their BMI measured at school. Seriously. Let’s stop this early weight stigmatization and use of this most meaningless measurement.

Opt of out the pervasive “I’m so bad, I ate a piece of bread” conversations. If the people around you are gib gabbing about their latest diet, weight loss success or failure you can: change the topic, explain that you don’t partake in ‘diet culture’, or even say “You know how some people don’t talk about religion or politics because it causes conflict, well, I don’t talk dieting.” And leave it at that. You do not have to participate in or respond to every conversation you’re invited to.

Opt out of "Operation Get Bikini Body Ready". You already have a bikini body, whether you want to wear one or not. This summer is not something to dread. The beach is not something to starve or slave for. Opt out.

Opt out of the hysteria over eating clean and of the diet fad (aka “lifestyle change”) of the moment. Just because “all the cool kinds are doing it” doesn’t mean it’s good for you (or them) and you have every right to opt out without any guilt.

Opt out of any yoga or exercise class that doesn’t feel welcoming to you and your body. As a wise friend of mine once said about bad yoga classes: “Treat them like a bad movie and walk out.”

On that note, opt out of the "free" body fat scan that comes with your new gym membership. When it comes to movement, you and your body deserve to feel welcomed, accepted, and met. Anything less is a great opportunity to opt out.

Opt out of seeing any medical practitioner who brings weight stigma into their practice. Increasingly you have choice and more and more there are medical professionals who understand the harm of weight-stigma and scientific validity of the Health at Every Size paradigm. Don’t like your doctor? Afraid to go see them because of the weight shaming comments they've made? Opt out.

Opt out of television shows (I’m looking at you Biggest Loser), magazines (I’m looking at you Shape Magazine), and other media that leave you feeling less than. Turn them off, unsubscribe, and go enjoy entertainment that respect you and everyone.

Bottom line: you are free. You can say “No” and “No Thank You” and “No Fucking Way.”

Even if you feel like the odd one out, no one ever regrets doing what feels right and true to them.

Participation is truly optional.

Perfection Coins

I spent several years unraveling my motherhood knot—the jumble of questions, fears, desires, and beliefs I had about having a child. As you can imagine (or perhaps relate) this tangle had many layers but one in particular, while perhaps obvious, surprised me. Perfectionism. Or, as I’ve come to think of it: Perfection Coins.

Perfection Coins are what we amass the more in control and ‘perfect’ our life is. If our life somehow reflects a greater percentage of our personal preferences, with minimal compromise or vulnerability we are very rich in Perfection Coins. When we want something that requires risk, or change, or giving up control we have to trade in our Perfection Coins.

And why would anyone trade them in?

Because the payoff is often living a life in greater alignment with yourself, deeper intimacy with other people, more meaning, and more happiness. When we become a mother we have to trade in a lot of our Perfection Coins. For some women the cost is too high. For some women, the giving up of control, of order, of predictability is not worth it. And yet most mothers would tell you that what they trade in Perfection Coins (sleep, a clean house, clothes without stains, etc.) is paid back ten times over in love, connection, and intangible magic. And as I began to think about this in the context of motherhood it struck me that the same is true about the choice I made to give up my eating disorder and become a body-respecting intuitive eater. I traded in compliments from strangers who idealized by anorexic body, an ego high from eating ‘clean’, and so much more.

Tons of Perfection Coins given away and in return I’ve received freedom, sanity, well being, joy, ease and pleasure.

Had I known ahead of time things would work out, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But we can’t know. When we make the trade it’s done on faith. It’s always a bet taken because something else becomes more valuable than Perfection Coins. With each run of Feast my students arrive at this crossroads too. Which would they rather have: Thighs that don’t touch or sanity around food? The (false) sense of order delivered by a diet or feeling good in their own skin? The approval of judgemental family members or freedom to take up space? Being numb to life’s pain (but also numb to joy) or feeling joy, and all the other emotions too?

We can’t have both.

We can’t hold life white-knuckled, gripping to the safety of what we know and also receive the good stuff.

There are simply times when we have to make a choice, or rather, we get to make a choice. Times when we choose to stay in or leave the relationship. Times when we choose to quit or take the job. Times when we choose to tell the truth or bite our tongue.

Increasingly I choose to trade in my Perfection Coins for the messy, unknown, not-in-my-control, but deeply connected, vibrant life that calls to me. And truthfully, at the end of life I imagine that Perfection Coins aren’t worth very much.

Sola Dosis Facit Venenum

I love television.

That might be a bit taboo to say, but it’s true. I get an enormous amount of pleasure from watching my favorite shows.

And there is nothing wrong with loving television. It gives me a tremendous amount of joy, laughter, and relaxation. Put simply, it feeds me. Most of the time. I can also use TV as a tool for avoiding life when checking in, not out, is would serve me most. A while back I noticed my viewing habits detracting more than helping and no surprise my first thought was “I’m going to just give up TV. Go cold turkey. Block Netflix from my computer. Commit to reading a book a week....” Yes, my initial response was to go on a diet. But the problem for me in this case wasn’t television, but the amount and the way I was using television.

Sola dosis facit venenum.

This translates to: The dose makes the poison.

I learned of this principle in graduate school. We were taught that everything in the world is medicine and everything is poison, depending on the dose. This idea is a pretty radical in a world that loves to categorize most things into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Organic local apples = pure goodness.
Wonder Bread = bad, devoid of any value.

But it’s not that simple. It never is. You can eat enough apples to make you sick. You can enjoy a sandwich on Wonder Bread without any negative consequence. And this rule, "The dose makes the poison", extends beyond food to include everything we take in: relationships and people, music, television, movies, alone and social time, time in the sun, and so forth. With everything there is a tipping point where it goes from serving us to taking away from us. Herein lies the delicate balance of self-care. It’s easy to make blanket statements like “Get rest” or “Move your body” but at what point is sleep or physical activity no longer of service?

We can’t say, can we?
Or rather, we can’t say for anyone but ourselves in a given moment.

There are no rules here. There are no formulas. And what works for us at one point can change in a moment. We might have spent months exhaustively working on a fulfilling project and then run out of steam. So we turn to a period of restoration, but without mindfulness the even rest can turn excessive when it’s not longer what we need or what serves us. Oh how we love an all or nothing scenario though. Our black and white oriented brains get a hit of calm when we (attempt to) draw a hard line in the sand. This is the rush that comes with the start of a diet or a rigid commitment to be in bed by 10 pm, every single night. We love the boundary—until we don’t.

We spring back from the hard line, rebel against the confines of our tightrope-of-a-plan in part because the things that we think are poison, are also medicine when served up in a different dose.

A warm, carb-filled meal after a long day. An extra two hours of sleep. A marathon of our favorite television show when shutting the world out is sometimes, even often, just what’s called for. Nothing's all bad, or all good, as much as our reductionistic minds would like to make them out to be. There is a time and place for just about every thing. So what are we to do when the very same thing can turn from serving us to detracting from us in a day?

We forget perfection and stop chasing purity. Outside of a newborn baby, purity and perfection don’t exist. When we try too hard to eat perfect, look perfect, and be perfect we end up cutting ourselves off from life and from things that, in certain doses, are really do serve us.

We pay attention. Diets, even those that restrict television and not food, allow us to be on a sort of autopilot. When we’re on one we don’t have to think or feel, we just have to follow the rules. But, to live our lives free and well we have to pay attention and make choices.

We find the kind choice. If nothing is all good or all bad, we have to inquire moment-by-moment what the kind choice is. Sometimes not doing the thing is kind. Sometimes doing the thing is kind. By following kindness we find our way in a world where nothing is just black and white.

Lastly, we double check our knee-jerk reactions. Notice what you label as good or bad without question. What gets a knee-jerk green light from you? What gets a red light?

Sola dosis facit venenum.

The Illusion of the Bottomless Pit

"I am never full."

"The pain will never stop."

"There isn’t ever enough love."

"I will never not want to eat the entire grocery store."

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Many of us walk around with the sensation of deep emptiness.

With that sensation often comes a fierce belief that there will never be enough.

Be it food or love—too often we walk the earth feeling as though we are a bottomless pit.

One strategy we use is to try to fill it. With entire bags of chips. With another pair of shoes. With 5 o’clock bottles of wine.

On the flip side, we might attempt to cover the bottomless pit with the story that we have minimal needs. This where we tell ourselves we’re fine to subsist on crumbs—literal or metaphoric. We keep it together. We don’t need a partner, or attention, or carbs, we’re fine—or so we tell ourselves.

The sad part is the bottomless pit is an illusion. One that has us running in all directions for temporary salves that aren’t sustainable and never leave us feeling very satisfied.

Imagine this:

Your local child protective services agency has shown up at your doorstep with two foster children you are charged with taking care of for a year. They tell you that the children came from a home where there was barely anything to eat.

Over the first few days you notice that one of the children eats until they are sick. They eat quickly and with an anxiety that clearly belays their fear of there not being having enough.

The other child eats very little. Nibbling on this or that but not taking enough sustenance or enjoying the delicious food you have offered. This child is attempting to exert some control where they can. When they wasn’t enough in the past, they told themselves that they didn’t need it as a way to feel a level of control where none was.

And all of this makes sense.

Neither of them can be sure that there will be enough. They can’t yet trust that there will be more food anytime they want, and that they don’t have to eat until they're sick or continue to deny themselves nourishment.

What you find over the weeks to come though, as they learn that there is enough food and they can have as much as they want, when they want, in any quantity they want, is that they normalize. They are each able to eat with enjoyment, relaxation, and able to stop when they are physically sated.

Our lives are the home where there will always be enough food.

The question is whether we are willing to heal the trauma of our deprivation by ceasing to deny ourselves. It is we who too often deny ourselves the love we long for. It is we who too often deny ourselves the food or pleasure we hunger for.

The result is that we feel like a bottomless pit.

And all along we had our hand on our own spigot able to turn it on and let it flow.

The trick is to turn the spigot on and don’t turn it off until we’ve had enough. We can only find the point of ‘enough’ after a period of reconditioning ourselves to know that there will always be more.

We must let it flow long enough to teach the part of us that is traumatized from deprivation that there will always be enough. What we find when we do this is that that part of us relaxes.

What we find is that the bottomless pit, the one that never existed in the first place, disappears.

A Time for Everything

“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions”

Alice Sebold

One of the most common traits (and pitfalls) I see is dichotomous thinking – or seeing everything as either black or white.

There is a frenzy to our lives. A striving, masculine energy to achieve, improve, and purify.

Many of the women I work with come to me when they can no longer bare the tightrope walk their life has become. Slaving in pursuit of being ‘good’, being ‘liked’, and being ‘beautiful’.

But life isn’t a tightrope walk, unless we make it that.

Nothing is good or bad, unless we name it that.

Green vegetables and white sugar are not opposites, nor are they enemies.

Everything is everything, depending on the circumstances. Depending on where we are standing and what is needed now.

I’m calling out for less purity and more messy holding of both. Less pigeon holing. Less throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This requires paying attention.

When we think in binaries, we get to sleepwalk through life. We decide ahead of time which category something fits into and we live accordingly. No need to reevaluate, it’s all already been decided.

Doritos? Toxic.

Meditation? Pure.

Real Housewives of Anywhere? Pathetic waste of time.

Homemade food? What good parents serve.

And on and on.

If we could use our Martha Stewart label makers on life, I’m sure we would.

But life isn’t black or white. It’s every shade of gray, and pink, and green, and yellow that can be found. And those colors change moment by moment.

This requires we pay attention. This requires we get comfortable with an unlabeled life.

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

:: Ecclesiastes

and I’ll add…

There is a time for Facebook and a time for being miles away from a screen.

There is a time for zafu cushions and a time to find stillness in the least likely place.

No one thing is arbitrarily better than another.

If you want to know if something is medicine or poison you must listen.

Your heart will tell you. Is it soft?

Your lungs will tell you. Are they tight?

Your flesh will tell you. Is it supple?

If you listen.

Sensations of ease, joy, enoughness, and vitality are signs of a medicine.

Sensations of deadness, contraction, and insecurity are signs of poison.

Right now — not yesterday or last year — what’s your medicine?

Sacred Ground

"...and your very flesh shall be a great poem..."

— Walt Whitman

Growing up just outside Washington, DC resulted in my childhood having it’s fair share of visits to historical sites, such as Civil War battlefields, like Gettysburg.

If you’ve ever been to a memorial site, especially one where great loss actually took place, you know that you can feel it. What you’re standing on at these places is sacred ground and each has a powerful energetic fingerprint. Perhaps you’ve felt it while visiting the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, Auschwitz in Poland, or The Killing Fields Museum in Cambodia.

Sadly the world is full of sites where atrocities have left an imprint, physical or energetic.

In my early twenties as I was emerging victorious from my own battle with anorexia the only way I could relate to my body was as this sacred ground. While not visible to the eye, my body felt like modern day Gettysburg battlefield.

This flesh—my flesh—was where a war had been fought and won.

And what this meant to me was that anything less than sacred awe was not good enough.

In the years since then I have encountered in my life and in the lives of those I work with serious trauma. Childhood abuse. Sexual assault. Mental illness. Loss of parents and children. Battles with cancer. Amputation.

And it doesn’t take catastrophic incidents like these to leave trauma. Life is traumatic.

Life is traumatic and our bodies bare the brunt of it. They are our sensory input tool and they are where we experience (or repress) emotion. Our bodies are the tools or fight or flight...or freeze. Our bodies are the recipient of heinous cultural norms. Our bodies, depending on where we live in the world, aren’t even always considered our own.

Life is also miraculous. The ways in which our body heals, allows for connection, creates new life, and enables our lives is marvelous.

All this is to say: feel the sacred ground you are living in.

Feel that you are sacred in every cell of your body.

Stand in awe of not just what has happened on your ‘land’ but on what you have survived and created.

Stand tall.

Consider reverence as a new template for how you inhabit this flesh of yours.

Like Whitman says, your "flesh shall be a great poem".

A Sweet Middle Path

Sugar, specifically white refined sugar, has gotten a bad rap.

While I typically abide by a “to each their own” approach to food, it seems that this era is abundant in celebrities and influencers ‘coming out’ with their sugar-free lifestyle.

To many this seems logical and saintly. To me this is yet another extreme shift of the dietary pendulum that leaves people swinging between restriction and over consumption, more obsessed with food and less at ease in life

Out of a desire to offer a different perspective and perhaps provide a middle path, I bring you my thoughts on sugar. This post isn’t for the nutrition police who have, for the time being, made up their mind. This is for those of you lost in the middle of a world that plies you with sugary sodas and tells you it’s poison at the same time.

Here are six thoughtful ‘spoonfuls’:

1. A sweet role model on the sweet middle path...

Henry Ware. “Hal” to most. Grandpa, or more often Bapa, to me.

At 91, my grandfather lived alone, remained active, and, for his age, was very healthy. He also ate dessert nearly everyday of his life. He lived to be 96. [Cue needle scratch]

When I hear of people saying sugar is poison I reminisce about the lemon meringue pie I used to bake with my grandmother. It was so delicious.

2. When there is nothing to rebel against…

In my experience, when I have something to rebel against, I rebel. When I have nothing to rebel against, I’m free and traveling an easeful middle path. A no-sugar rule would, and has, in my more restrictive days, made me straight-up bonkers. Being a freedom-junkie is what has kept me from being a sugar-junkie.

3. Play food has a place…

Here’s an excerpt from a favorite book of mine, Intuitive Eating:

“Sometimes you have a desire for food that has no nutritionally redemptive powers. We call this food play food. We prefer this term to one of the most commonly used terms to describe what’s considered unhealthy foods–junk food. The term junk food implies that there is no intrinsic value in this food–in fact, that it probably should be thrown in the garbage can. But we feel that this thinking is unwarranted. There are times when a piece of red velvet cake or a stick of licorice is just the food that will satisfy your taste buds. And eating these types of foods doesn’t mean you are an unhealthy eater.”

I have often found important, health-promoting, value in foods with little nutritional value.

4. The secret ingredient...

Food is way more than just a sum of it’s macro and micronutrients. Michael Pollan calls this misconception nutritionism. The truth is that there are intangibles in food that we can’t quantify. For example, why does, for some of us, our mother’s version of a dish taste so much better than our own? The answer is something we can’t see under a microscope or write into a recipe. Food, if we pay attention, has (or doesn’t have) soul to it. A factor often ignored when we eliminate whole categories of food.

5. Pleasure as a food group…

Speaking of intangibles in food. I’ve found that just like I can eat a diet deficient in fat or Vitamin C, I can be deficient in pleasure. I’ve learned to treat pleasure like a food group with a hearty dose of daily servings. This is how I feel most well-fed and this sometimes includes sugar.

6. We’re all moderators…

Some people argue that people can be divided into moderators and abstainers - people who have just a little of something and people who can’t. I balk at this argument.

In my experience, and the science supports this, an inability to “have just a little” of something is a result of the pendulum swing that occurs for everyone where there is some sort of psychological belief that the item is scarce (“Remember, you only get to eat this when you’re on vacation”) or shouldn’t be eaten (“Good thing no one is here to see you stuffing your face with this naughty food”). When we truly feel free to eat whatever we want, whenever we want, in any quantity we want we naturally find that we don’t overdo much. In my experience, overdoing is a result of compensation for some form of restriction. Moderation is the result of being free and deeply trusting oneself.

7. Information overload...

Lest you think I’m clueless about nutrition and sugar's effect on our bodies, rest assured that I know my omega-3’s from my omega-6s. At the height of my own eating disorder I was a walking nutritional encyclopedia. I also spent three years spent earning my master’s degree in holistic health education where I studied everything from the USDA guidelines to Ayurvedic eating approaches; raw food to the Weston A. Price approach; Chinese medicine to eco-political food systems.

In the end, I believe we suffer from a dangerous mix of information overload, food paranoia, and body disconnection.

Bottomline: I don’t want to live a life without sugar. I’m all for taking into account what my body and our planet need in order to be healthy, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my mental health for it. I also think the answer is always somewhere in shades of gray, not in the black and white approach of forgoing sugar all together. Turns out I don’t have to. Thank goodness. So this is the path I have chosen: turn down the noise, ignore fads of the moment, aim for a middle path (all things in moderation, including moderation), restrict nothing, listen to my body, pay attention to the seasons and where my food comes from, and deeply enjoy sweet foods whenever I want them.

In Praise of Awkward Toddlers

As a child, if I couldn’t be assured that I’d do something right the first time, I didn’t even want to try at all. The result of this fearful stance was that I didn’t learn to swim (until I nearly drowned and my parents insisted) or to ride a bike (I’m still working on this).

What I’m talking about is the resistance we feel to being less-than-masterful at anything. We loathe performing awkwardly, even though this is a precursor to doing anything more gracefully.

Embracing our inner awkward toddler crucial if we’re to find our way to being well-fed. Like toddlers learning to walk, this is the two-step we must do: Toddle forward. Trip. Stand up. Toddle some more. Go splat on the floor. Get up. Toddle again.

Towards the end of 2013 I looked around my life and saw that everything was fine.

Fine.

Fine is good.

Fine is important if we’re to function in the world.

But fine is not enough.

Feeling fine isn’t the same as feeling alive or particularly satiated. Fine is just fine.

What I know: the only way through to what’s really good in life is to embrace being awkward for at least a time.

In the spirit of embracing more of this energy in my life I started attending Laurie Wagner’s brilliant Wild Writing classes again where we were instructed to write poorly, pen to paper, and then share it aloud with the group.

It’s awkward training at it’s best.

What you and I have in common is a hunger to feel alive. To feel more than fine. This I know.

As a little girl, my fear of being criticized trumped my hunger to feel alive, to have fun, to ride a bike, or to swim in the lake.

As a grown women, though, I’ve learned that external sources of criticism don’t matter much and that I can soften around my own.

As a grown women, I’ve learned that being awkward is just one exhilarating step toward being well-fed.

The Point of Contact

Imagine there’s a knock at your door right now.

You go and answer it.

It’s your mother.

How do you react? Not how should you react, but how would you really react?

Now imagine that happening all over except instead of your mother it’s your ex-lover.

How do you react? Feel it. What is your knee-jerk reaction?

Now imagine it again, instead of your ex-lover, it’s a policewoman.

How do you react? Really. What would your first reaction be?

Now do it again.

Knock knock.

You walk over and it’s a singing telegram with balloons, flowers, and a box of chocolates.

How do you react?

The point of contact with anything is the most important moment.

Two objects collide and whether they shatter, ricochet, or merge all depends on the moment of contact and what happens there.

I’m utterly fascinated with the moments of contact with our hungers.

There is so much to learn about what happens when one of our hungers knocks on the door and we answer it. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we peer through the keyhole and decide to remain silent and still. Hoping it thinks we’re not home and goes away.

Maybe we answer and with tears of joy pick up the hunger and spin it around in our arms as though Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes has just bestowed a windfall upon us.

Or we might open the door but as soon as our hunger speaks we plug our ears and say “Lalalalalalalala” in attempt not hear what it has to say.

It could be as simple as opening and shutting the door, with a quick ‘no thank you’ in between.

I offer you this meditative inquiry:

What is happening at the point of contact with my hunger or hungers?

If it played in slow motion, could I see and feel the moment of contact? Could I feel what happens next?

A Weightless Year

Fact: my coaching clients send the nicest cards.

Fact: this card moved me to tears.

Dear Sweet Rachel,

It was exactly one year ago that you and I had a one-on-one. You may or may not remember that you presented me with a challenge. The challenge was to not weigh myself for one year. I remember at the time being overwhelmed with the challenge, especially given that I had purchased a scale several weeks before our chat. But after our call I made the decision to trust the process and stay away from weighing myself. So here we are, a year later, and to date I haven’t stepped on the scale. I just wanted to thank you – this past year has been quite the journey and I’ve just barely begun. I am grateful for you, your dedication to the work that God has designed you for!

xoxo

It’s updates like this that reinvigorate me and rekindle my fire for calling us forth into Well-Fed living.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: what we weigh is useless information. It tells us nothing of value. Just about everything worth knowing comes from inside of us. Knowing our weight is rarely ever about well-being. We step on the scale to measure our worth, to gauge how out of control we are (or feel) in our lives, and to help us make decisions we’re afraid to let our bodies make.

If you didn’t know what you weighed, what would happen? How would you know when to eat and when to stop eating? How would you know when to move your body and when to rest? How would you know if you were enough or too much?

You would listen. Ear to yourself and you’d hear “Feast. Rest. Trust.”

You would listen. Ear to your heart and you’d hear “You are enough, never more, never less.”

The scale takes you away from yourself. Giving it up brings you home.

The Five Languages of Body Love

Have you heard of The Five Love Languages?

I’m guessing yes given the best-seller status of the book, but if not, here’s the rundown.

Gary Chapman, the author, posits that there are five ways that we can show love to each other, and especially toward a romantic partner: through gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, act of service, and physical touch.

The idea is that each of us has a dominant love language, or way we are best able to receive love. If our partner shows their love in a language we don’t ‘speak’ well then we might end up feeling uncared for or unloved. The trick, Chapman argues, is to understand each others love language and do our best to communicate accordingly. Some people feel loved when they are given quality time while others interpret physical touch or gifts as an affirmative signs.

I think this theory has a lot of value AND I think we need to take it with a big grain of salt. I’m not sure that love can be simplified so easily, but it’s valuable to note that we all experience it uniquely.

Switching subjects for a minute, let's talk about our bodies and how we feel about them. It's a pretty body-unfriendly swamp that we're swimming in. Everywhere you look are shame-inducing messages, overt and subliminal, targeted at our natural and diverse forms.

As a life coach and woman who seeks to practice self-acceptance and respect, I know just how much our relationship with our body determines how fulfilling our life is overall. Seriously, what's possible for a woman who is body-respectful is two-fold to what's possible to those ensnared in body-loathing.

So what does body love and The Five Languages of Love have to do with each other?

A lot. I’ve noticed that there are periods when we either communicate with our body through only one language or not through the language our body is asking us to love it through. To explore this further, here are the questions I began to ask myself and that you might find useful.

Gifts

Do I give my body gifts? Do I find yourself making kind purchases with my body’s care in mind? What’s the last gift I gave my body?

Quality Time

Do I give my body my time? Do I leave space in my life for my body to be heard and cared for? When is the last time I spent quality time with my body?

Words of Affirmation

Do I speak kindly towards my body? Are the messages I surround my body with respectful and/or loving? What’s the last generous and sweet thing I said to my body?

Acts of Service

Do I consider myself my body’s advocate and caregiver? When was the last time I went out of my way to do something for my body?

Physical Touch

Do I lay my hands on my own flesh? Do I do so with love? Do I provide my body with opportunities for caring and loving touch from another? When was the last time my body felt that it had been touched “enough” or to the point of “fullness”?

This line of inquiry was powerful for me and it opened me up to all the ways I could expand my body-love practice. So interesting to see where we easily give love and where we have blind spots. If you want to communicate your body through a broader range of love languages, here are a few ideas:

Gifts

Purchase a foam roller and use it to loosen up with myofacial release.

Treat your body to a coveted care product, be it lotion, massage oil, or scented soap.

Offer your body clothing that makes you feel good, comfortable, and stylish.

Quality Time

Dedicate 10 minutes in the morning to scanning your body with presence and curiosity.

Allow your body to write you a letter in your journal.

Take a nap, regularly.

Words of Affirmation

Commit to one day of body-respectful talk towards yourself.

Put up affirming words on your walls, bathroom mirror, or refrigerator door.

Come up with a mantra to recite every time you are feeling anything less than loving towards your body.

Acts of Service

Advocate for your body to another. Make a request. Make your body’s desires known.

Cook for your body. Prepare food that delights all your senses and your belly.

Take your body to see the doctor or dentist for a routine check-up.

Physical Touch

Massage yourself with sesame oil after a shower.

Try out a new type of bodywork, such as craniosacral or Thai massage.

Make love to yourself or with a partner.

The trick here, if this inquiry interests you, is to explore what makes your body feel loved?

Hungry for the Impossible

“What if what I’m hungry for isn’t possible?”

This is a question I get asked not infrequently.

In fact, in a recent survey, over 50% of my followers reported having this question.

To start, let me say that it is possible. It truly is.

If that's all you needed to hear, off you go. If you want a few more thoughts, read on.

The people who have the greatest percentage of their hungers satiated are those who embrace, honor, and pursue being well-fed.  If you believe it’s not possible to have what you want, then your actions (or rather inactions) follow this story and the result is a hungry life.

And when we have a hunger that we falsely believe isn’t possible to satiate we often numb it through food, sex, shopping, drugs, exercise, television, or some other means of distraction. The result is that not only does the true hunger not get fed, but the numbing bleeds out and blocks other wise messages that are trying to reach us.

The truth is that what we hunger for is always available, just maybe not in the form we expect.

This is why it’s important to separate primary hungers from secondary hungers.

For example, if we think we’re hungry for our mother’s love, but our mother isn’t alive anymore, instead of throwing our hands up and saying “oh well, guess I’ll never have what I'm hungry for” we can peel back the surface layer (our secondary hunger) and look at what’s below (our primary hunger). In this case, it might be a hunger for care, or a maternal figure in our life, or guidance, or to be held. When we look at the primary hungers, we can then begin to look for all the ways that are possible to satisfy them.

The things that we all truly hunger for, such as affection, creative expression, comfort, meaning, time in nature, and so forth–these things exist in abundance if we’re open to them taking a different form than we might expect.

I’ve yet to meet a hunger that wasn’t possible.

I’ve met surface hungers that were masking root hungers. I’ve met hungers that called the person out of their comfort zone. I’ve met hungers we didn’t yet know how to communicate to others or satiate ourselves. I’ve met hungers that we can’t satisfy instantaneously. I've met hungers that didn't have a safe enough environment, one without a thick layer of judgement, to make themselves known.

What I have never ever met is an impossible hunger.

If your hunger feels impossible, here are some reflections to explore:

Am I in touch with my primary hunger? Have I dug into what I'm TRULY hungry for?

Do I feel ashamed about what I'm hungry for?

Do I feel at a loss for how to feed my hunger? (quite different than a hunger being impossible to feed)

Do I simply feel impatient for my hunger to be fed?

Has anyone else ever had this hunger and satiated it? Who? What steps did they take?

Terms of Endearment

I want to show you something. There’s this amazing transformation I’ve been witness to. I wish I could show it to you. What I want to capture is what happens to a woman’s face, body, and whole being when I ask her to identify a meaningful and resonate term of endearment for herself.

As part of some retreats that I’ve lead, after delving into our inner critic, I have each woman identify and share a name for herself that elicits love, safety, and adoration.

First they journal to themselves, listing all the names that might be fit. Tossing out the ones that feel cloying or inauthentic. Considering the things only their inner circle calls them or perhaps a childhood nickname. They weigh “Lovely” with “Beloved” and “Sweetheart” with “Sweetness.”

They are looking for the moment their body says “Yes. that’s it. That’s us. Let’s curl up with that one.” Many of them know they’ve found their term of endearment when tears well in their eyes.

I’ve heard it all, from "My Love" to "Darling" or "Pumpkin." From "Cookie" to "Sarah-Loo" or "Babygirl."

There’s a name for everyone that calls us home.

Once they’ve got it, we go around the room and share. As we move from feeling our patterns of self-abuse to the healing that comes from self-kindness, the women I work with change right before my eyes. It’s a pretty remarkable thing to watch. They change and the room changes. What had been a circle of sadness, grief, and angst becomes one of delight, compassion, and understanding.

Having a name, rooted in love, to call ourselves gives us a foothold. When we’re in pain or feeling disconnected all we need to is reach for this name and it brings us back. It's a name that embraces us.

Having a term of endearment for ourselves helps to build safety and intimacy in the most important relationship we’ll ever have: us with ourselves. me with me. you with you.

If you want to experience the power of this practice, next time you catch yourself with a self-directed whip in your hand, next time you’re body is contracted from shame or insecurity, go find a mirror and greet yourself.

Look into your own eyes and call out the name that only means “I love you. Yes, you. I love you”

You're Not Needy, You're Starving

You are not needy. You are starving.

A while back I was working with a client and we began to talk about the prospect of her finding a post-divorce relationship.

She shared her fear that she’d be too needy.

I’ve heard this before. Many times.

And I say: NO. You are not needy, you’re starving.

This client had a 5 year old boy.

I explained it to her like this...

If her son skipped breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then said “Mommy, I’m too needy for food.” I know she’d reply:

“No sweetheart, you aren’t needy at all, you’re very hungry. You haven't gotten what you need. Now let’s get you something delicious to eat.”

Something about this needy feeling has us feeling like it’s bottomless, insatiable. That no matter how much we “eat” we’ll never be fed.

Not so. I speak from experience. Mine and many of my clients.

Yes, it feels like we’ll never get enough.  Just like, when we are starving for food, at first, we think we really could eat the whole kitchen. Not so in either case.

We can find satiation. Here are just a few things I often hear women saying they are too needy for:

love, being seen (often confused with attention), touch (the way they uniquely like it), affection + adoration, being desired, a circle of women friends, companionship, being listened to + feeling understood, validation…

You’re not needy. You’re starving.

You certainly do not want for too much.

These are all entirely normal, natural, its-your-birth-right, your-parents-probably-didn’t-give-you-enough things.

So you’re starving.

That’s okay.

You can begin there. Begin bit by bit. or bite by bite.

Begin by renaming this 'neediness' with a more accurate term: hunger.

Begin by asking for what you want.

Begin by honoring your hunger and by feeding yourself.

Begin by receiving the cravings with kindness, instead of shame.

This hunger of yours. It’s so very wise.

You’re not needy. You’re simply starving.

Now darling, let’s get you something delicious to eat.

Note: I use the word ‘starving’ here to refer to often first-world emotional deprivation. Not to be confused with actual lack of nutrition needed for physical survival, which is a very real problem in our world.

In Praise of Safety

Social media abounds with images of softly lit, sunrise horizons with the words "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone" emblazoned across the sky. Or perhaps it's a mountain peak behind text that says "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

I believe life begins inside of our comfort zones and only when we feel safe enough to stretch out does life (and our comfort zone) expand.

I am simply a huge fan of everyone feeling safe and I think safety has become linked up with weakness.

In contrast, I have seen how safety allows us to blossom. I believe that feeling safe is a prerequisite for connection, learning, relationship, growth, and for feeding our hungers. The only time I have ever been able to heal or grow is when I first felt safe. The only times I’ve been able to hear my own hungers calling for me is when I created a safe space for them. The only times when I’ve been able to ask another to feed me is when I feel safe with them.

It’s true that we often want or need to do things that aren’t safe or don’t feel safe. Taking the stage. Quitting the job. Asking someone out on a date. Trying something new and unknown. It’s my experience though, that we have to feel a level of safety first. It’s also my experience that many of us tolerate lives, situations, and relationships in which we are not safe to be who we are, want what we want, and say what we think and feel. This needs to change.

Needing safety does not a weak person make. It’s okay to value safety. In fact, it's imperative. It’s okay to ask someone to create a safer space for you. It’s okay to remove yourself when you don’t feel safe. When we feel safe enough, we can sail away from the harbor.

I'll leave you with a few questions for us to ponder:

Where in my life don’t I feel safe?

What factors create a sense of safety for me?

What would change if I felt a greater level of safety to be who I am, want what I want, and say what I think and feel?

Who don’t I feel safe around?

Who could I offer more safety to?

How could I offer myself more safety from which I could try new things?

Where am I pushing myself too far outside of my safety zone?

May we all be safe.

Change How You See Weight Change

Here are just some of the factors related to weight fluctuations:

Metabolic changes , hormonal changes, side effects from medication , pregnancy, socio-economic class shifts, restricted & binge eating, grief & trauma, stress, returning to or away from intuitive eating, injury, changes in activity, depression, happiness, hydration, puberty, menopause, genetics…

Of these, only pregnancy in a thinner body can be seen with our eyes. I had a client who, over the past few years, had gained weight. I can tell you that at least five of the above factors were present in her life.

She came to our session stressed about running into an ex-boyfriend and wondering how she’d explain her weight gain to him. She doesn’t have to. She doesn’t have to justify the change in weight at all. And while people will assume to know why someone weighs what they weigh, you know what they say about that.

What really matters, for my client and for all of us is this: sovereignty. What matters is having a body and life that is our own. What matters is having the freedom to experience life’s inevitable shifts.

Weight changes. It changes daily, weekly, annually, and throughout our entire life. It’s normal. It’s human. Our society shames bodies for sure, but we shame bodies who change weight even more. Unless of course we idolize and worship the change (almost always a weight loss).

I want to make crystal clear: Weight changes. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to justify your weight or anything else about your body. Let your body finds it’s way. Oh, and try not to assume why someone else’s weight has changed. We really never know.

Meditations for Sunrise & Sunset

I used to teach a course called Ease Hunting: Six Weeks of Discovering Every Exhale. The program included lessons, live calls, an ease scavenger hunt, expert interviews, and two guided audio meditations all aimed at supporting the hunters in discovering an easeful way of being, no matter what life was throwing their way. It was truly beautiful. One participant described it as "A yoga class for your mind."

The Ease Hunting course isn't offered anymore but each of us continues to seek ease in our own ways. In support of your hunt I'm sharing the two Ease Hunting meditations. These recordings, one for morning and one for evening, are simple 10 minute opportunities to recenter and rest. They were among the Ease Hunters favorite parts of their experience. Here are a few of their words:

"I've been using the PM mediation every day, and I'm going to keep using it. I loved that I could download the meditations onto my phone. That made it easy to listen to them on the go and also as I was falling asleep. Doing 15 minutes every day has definitely impacted my ease levels."

"I liked having the meditations as a go-to if I needed them...when I did need them, they were both helpful and I'm grateful to have them as a tool in my toolbox. There was one morning in particular where I was fretting, and I said "ah, we have a tool for this: AM meditation." I did it, and the fretting subsided and made way for some ease."

If you're needing a little more ease in your life or a supportive, simple way to start and end your day, here is my gift to you.