From Dieting & Disembodying to Deeper Nourishment - Part 2
(Below is Part 2; If you missed Part 1 of this blog, visit here)
Dieting as Clues to Deeper Hungers
Instead of looking at chronic dieting, compulsive eating or exercise, or body image blues as fixed states of distress or pathology to be swallowed or consumed with another cookie cutter plan or quick fix, what if you consider them as clues to discovering your deeper hungers, your appetite for life?
If your relationship to dieting could reveal a deeper relationship to your self, your matter, how do you release your desperate grasp on counting, weighing, binging, restricting? You know that “just stopping” a behavior or urge or compulsion is really darn hard, if not impossible, and there’s good reason: Your body doesn’t want to restrict or feel deprived or feel stuffed or feel worn out, it wants you to pay attention to its deeper callings. Your body craves support and nurturance, but it needs relational support rather than another lonely deprivation and binge cycle.
Relational Safety for Embodiment
We learn how okay it is to embody, to be present in an exploratory way, to have and express big feelings, to live with a variety of movement expressions, during our earliest experiences of life. The degree to which our early relational experiences and environments tended to our physiological and relational needs to connect and separate, as well as our multi-generational patterning, set a foundation for our relationships, nervous system patterning, movement expressions and physiological functioning (including breathing, sucking, swallowing, digesting and eliminating).
However, no one gets what is ideal. Many times, we need reparative experiences to reconnect with our core self, to repattern physiological functioning of eating and digesting, in an effort for a more embodied and present journey through life along with healthier relational dances with others. A robust movement vocabulary, practicing inhabiting your body through exploring relationally-based developmental movement patterns, helps you to be who you could be if you are loved no matter what.
Intuitive Eating as a Practice and Process
In order to move from the deprivation/binge cycles, in order to begin exploring your unique interoceptive sensations and ways to feed and sustain your unique life force, your nervous system craves relational safety. This takes a supportive, reparative relational experience to help move through and explore feelings and body-based sensations, over time, with curiosity, compassion and care. This relational journey, setting the stage for Intuitive Eating instead of a life of dieting, might include practicing:
Taking risks to trust the process like deleting diet apps
Getting curious about your own hunger cues
Finding ways to appreciate what your body can do
Being mindful of old, sneaky diet rules
Pressing pause on rigid exercise to make room for play
Exploring what activities, interests and social connections fill you up
Being kind to yourself by taking up more space
Exploring your own embodiment process as a way to move into your body with vitality, a hearty appetite for life
Relational Somatic Practices as Symbolic Nourishment
When you can practice moving back into your unique bodily experiences (urges, feelings, awareness) with the support of a trained trauma-sensitive helper, you eventually can create a greater capacity to feel a more robust range of emotions and sensations with a sense of being internally supported.
In other words, you can live less reactively and can ride the inevitable waves of life with more ease, sustainability and empowerment. With practice, you can be more capable of self-regulation and handle what needs to be felt, experienced and fully tasted to thrive.
Body awareness exercises, other mindfulness practices, and cognitive techniques that help to bring a sense of ease for your unique experience can be helpful and can be an initial way to start dismantling diet culture and healing your body wars. However, deeper core wounds, sometimes visceral experiences of feeling empty, ravenous, intense, shameful, desperate, or unworthy, to name a few, require reparative somatic experiences in relationship with a trained helper.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
These deeper wounds, those that show up as the insidious flares of feeling “not enough” or “too much,” are actually where more of one’s potential resides. Often, this chronic pain is begging for unconditional support and eventual expression that happens as a relational process, a bodily experience, a birthing into the being one can be when they a have reparative holding environment.
No point or macro tracker, no Weight Watcher’s weigh-in, no amount of sweat, no buttercream cupcake, no superfood salad, and no pill will soothe the ache of that potent sensitivity. Only the birthing and love and celebration of one’s unique being will do.