You won't get very far in this episode without realizing the click-baitiness of the title.  The truth is, there was a time I wanted to keep all of my body shame and use it for fuel to "fix" my body and chaotic relationship to food. It never worked, and in this episode I'll talk about what did.

Links:

Work with Me 

Reimagining The Body course  (use the coupon code REIMAGINE2023 at checkout for 50% off in the month of November)

If you've spent any time in the somatic healing world, you're likely familiar with the concept of the body saying "no". I'll also often say that the body has a language that it speaks - sensation. emotion. pleasure and pain. Reactions and responses that say "no" and reactions and responses that say "yes". 

And it takes a lot of time and practice to understand that language.

In today's episode I'll speak about feeling for the body's "yes" and the body's "no", and how it applies in several situations. 

Links:


Work with Rande


Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

What I wish I would have known when I was struggling and reading books about "mindful eating":

- Slowing down isn't a tool to make you eat less. It's a tool to notice what's happening.

- No amount of mindful eating is going to make eating less than you actually need serve you.

- Mindful eating doesn't have to be precious. You can eat in front of your favorite show. You don't have to be deeply meditative about it...it's really just in the case of compulsive or binge eating that removing distractions can be a useful tool.

- If you're absolutely desperate to change your body, attempts at mindful eating are probably still just going to be attempts at control.

- Mindful eating isn't just about the "mind". It's an embodied experience. It's not about an idea of how much you SHOULD eat, it's about getting to know your actual body.

- "Embodying a binge" really does mean "embodying a binge". What does a binge urge feel like in your body? What changes as you start to eat? What does the food actually taste like? What's it like to have this food take up space in your body? If shame comes up, what does THAT feel like? What's it like to breathe into it rather than let it spin stories in your head? What happens in your body if you don't immediately distract yourself after a binge? If you don't plan to starve yourself the next day? Can you get to know those feelings?

Binge eating taught me so much. Rather, EMBODYING the experience that I'd been fighting with for 15+ years taught me so much.

As it became safe to embody the entire experience of a binge, it started loosening it's hold.

It also became safe to change things from the inside of that experience.

I learned I could stop shaming myself and "starting over" when the binge was over.

I learned I was actually capable of stopping somewhere in the middle rather than being all-or-nothing.

Eventually I learned that a binge urge (the survival energy driving me to eat) wouldn't kill me if I didn't follow through. Or if I did so in a less checked-out way.

Basically I learned that I was lovable and safe, even in a pattern that felt like the worst thing about me. ⁣
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And creating that kind of safety opened up room for other hidden parts of me to come to the surface. Embodying the binge was just the beginning.⁣
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P.S. I have a couple of spots for private clients and all clients get lifetime access to Free Spirit Academy courses (including Binge Freedom) DM me with questions, book a 15-minute call, or fill out the application through the link below ❤️

Work with Me

Healing doesn't happen in a hurry. The hurry to be healed, integrated, enlightened, free, arrived...it's not as neat and tidy as a lot of self-help books or before-and-after photos might suggest. 

It's more like, the harder we try to fix things, the harder our nervous systems work to keep us where things are familiar. Whereas, if we can slow down with ourselves, right  in the behavior or with the part of us we hate or struggle with most, we can get to know it. There are often so many unknown steps in a healing process that we couldn't possibly plan them all out, let alone by a certain date. And often, the version of us that exists right here is the one most needing our acceptance and attention.

In this episode, I talk about the desperation and hurry I felt to "fix" my binge and emotional eating. I'll also share about the parts of myself I'd have missed meeting if the "hurry" had worked.

Links:


Work with Rande


Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

THE TOP 10 MISTAKES I’VE MADE ON MY HEALING JOURNEY:

Honestly, I cringe a bit using the words "healing" OR "journey" because the internet is so oversaturated with wellness or spiritual teachers. I'm not interested in making "healing" my whole personality, but simultaneously I have always had this deep interest in why things hurt. What any kind of pain, emotional, mental, or physical, is saying. and coming from a background of religious and family trauma, being queer and undiagnosed neurodivergent, and all of the ways those pains spiraled out - into years of an eating disorder, self-harm, depression, anxiety, dissociation, and chronic health symptoms...I became fixated at some point on what it would take to feel free. 

So whether I like the term or not, I found myself on a "healing journey" that I would say began when I got fired from my door to door missionary job and started removing myself from my church and toxic family patterns. I was in the thick of struggling with food and my body and had sooooo much accumulated trauma that it was just my "normal"...but taking those steps felt incredible. In fact, something I wish I could have told myself at various points is that there's no "heaven". There's no one point where all the things on all the levels are healed and you live happily ever after. Simultaneously, you don't have to WAIT until all the things on all the levels are healed to feel better. 

Life, my body, my general state of being being better than they ever have been. As I thought back, I got to thinking about all the missteps and misunderstandings up until this point and I want to share them with you.

Links:


Work with Rande


Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

This podcast is for you if you're feeling unsettled and unsafe right now.

It's for you if being alone, or home all the time, or having your world turned inside-out makes you want to crawl out of your skin.

It's for you if you're like a client of mine who told me this morning that she doesn't want to be stuck in her house with all that food.

This episode is the first class from my 30-Day program Coming Home to Your Body. In the month of August you can use the coupon code COMINGHOME50 to get 50% off the course. 

We'll be talking about:

...why you can be "perfect" with your  healthy lifestyle and still feel unwell.

...how to build resilience in challenging times.

...the struggle to be 'present', 'mindful', or 'in the flow' no matter how much you meditate or use spiritual and self-care practices.

...the desire to take care of your health while struggling with self-sabotage, compulsive behaviors, and repeating cycles and patterns like overeating but you don't know why.

...when you've talked about your issues and traumas in therapy and feel like you've processed your childhood, but still struggle with anxiety, depression, a constant feeling of frustration or other painful emotions that don't seem to match the present circumstances. 

...you've tried to 'just relax' or maybe you KNOW some of the nervous system lingo and you take deep breaths to 'deactivate your parasympathetic nervous system'...and you still just feel like a mess.

...and how to ACTUALLY learn to FEEL, rather than thinking about our feelings, reacting to our feelings, or numbing our feelings.

I hope this episode feels useful and supportive right now ❤️


Links:


Coming Home to Your Body (code COMINGHOME50 for 50% off)


Work with Rande


Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

The 15 minute audio you're about to hear is the introduction to my 30-day course Coming Home to Your Body. This is a course that all of my clients get when we start working together but it's also available on it's own or part of the Free Spirit Academy membership. This is easily my favorite course, addressing how the effects of trauma and stress can leave us feeling disconnected and trapped in our bodies. Learning about the autonomic nervous system, as tedious as it seemed on the surface, was huge in my own journey and I try to approach it in a way that's fun, hopeful, practical, relatable, and alongside simple but impactful tools that really make a difference over time. If this audio grabs your attention, there are links in the bio for more on this course.

Links:

Coming Home to Your Body 30-Day Course

Free Spirit Academy Membership

Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

Work with Rande

Coming from a challenging childhood, dissociation became my "normal". As I left religion and pursued healing, the dissociation that was once completely disconnected from my body...went internal. Today we're looking at how attempts at embodiment and the pursuit of health can get sticky.

Links:

Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

Work with Rande

I love a project. I love working towards something. I think that's pretty human. But for a long time my body was my project. I grew up in a holistic, seventh day adventist, vegetarian home. we used homeopathy and natural remedies and drank carrot juice and ate homemade bread. To this day I LOVE the taste of barley green powder because I have early memories of drinking it as something that would support my health. I wanted to know about all the supplements in the kitchen cupboard and what they would do for me. I wanted to be strong so I ate spinach straight out of the can. There was an early connection with the fact that what you eat has an impact on how you feel. 

Simultaneously alongside all this, my relationship with food was kinda weird...

(Listen to this episode for more)

Links:

Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

Work with Rande

 So many folks I see, and this was me too, attach goodness and morality to their health. If something is wrong, they feel wrong. They will spin into stories about how they're creating their own disease or this is going to turn into something far worse. Can you make some space for the fact that not all of the contributing factors were in your hands? Your genetics,  adverse childhood experiences, your environment and day to day stressors that accumulate.

There are areas where we have choice and can learn to be empowered...and there are factors we don't have control over. There are elements, like childhood trauma, that weren't our fault but that  as adults we have quite a large degree of choice in how we address the effects. Having a sense of humor, when possible, can bring some lightness to what can be a serious and heavy healing process. Life is very short. Literally no amount of it needs to be spent beating yourself up anymore. That time would be better spent taking care of that part of you that so automatically goes into shame. Then, just coming back to what you best know works for you. again and again and again. 

Links:

Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

Work with Rande

Today I'm talking about the ways that shame lived in my body and fed into the cycle of binge eating and disembodied practices with food. I'll also talk about making my body safe enough to finally feel the shamed parts of me so that they could be understood and come to a more whole and free place.

Links:

Free Spirit Academy on Instagram

Work with Rande