MODULE 1

EATING PSYCHOLOGY & MIND BODY NUTRITION

Section 5

We’re learning how to be healers, and how to get to the heart of the healing process. This unique presentation will help lay a foundation for working with the healing journey.

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PART 1

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. And here we are in a conversation about the architecture of healing. We're gonna talk a little bit about what healing might be, what your role might be in it. As the practitioner, we're going to look at what helps this process along, what might hinder it. Ah, we are so fortunate to be in this conversation, just to be able to be learners and students of a good way to help ourselves and others transform their relationship with their food, their relationship with their body, and the body itself. Um, we are fortunate, so I am glad to be here with you. And let's just start out with a few musings on healings and a few reminder. Our food and body challenges compel us to find answers. You know this, as soon as something's not happened the way we want it to happen, we start to look, we start to explore. We wake up from life, we look around us and we say, oh my goodness, something's amiss. Something is happening here. Something needs to shift. What do I need to do? And the journey begins. So our challenges are asking us to search, to look deeper. It's asking us oftentimes to hope and to trust and to try different strategies to find any kind of answers. And this is the healing journey. And the healing journey in and of itself is healing. Just going on the journey, even though you haven't fixed the problem yet, even though we're still dealing with the symptom, we're dealing with the unwanted eating challenge. The path is made by walking on it. Just taking that first step on our healing journey is something good. It's an awakening. And the journey itself is a significant part of our healing. So of course, we're human, and you and I and our clients and all the people that we know, we wanna focus on the destination. Just, just get rid of this already. Just get rid of my overeating issue. Get rid of my emotional eating issue. Get rid of my weight, get rid of my digestive issue. Whatever it is, get rid of my heart disease, get rid of my cancer. Get, we just want it gone. Make sense? We human. And this is something we humanity has been facing since Time Memorial, is this journey that is always asking us on some level to wake up. It's asking us to grow. It's educating us. It's maturing us like a fine wine. It's maturing us like a fine soul. And in so many ways, the journey to healing is a journey into consciousness. And when I say consciousness, it means increasing amounts of wakefulness, of presence. The part of us that witnesses our life. You know, here you are and whatever age you are, think back to when you might've been 2, 3, 5, 15, 20 years old, whatever it is, that each point along the way, despite the fact that you and I are also different than we were when we were infants, toddlers, teenagers, et cetera, there's something that's been consistent throughout. There's this me that has always been there watching our life. So there's a me, there's a witness inside of us that is witnessing the journey. And the more we can step into that witness conscious consciousness, it's, it's literally kind of stepping above the fray. It's stepping above the drama and just noticing, oh, here's me going through puberty. Here's me going through being a 23-year-old. Here's me going through my body image challenges. Here's me going through my health challenges. Here's me going through my fears and my insecurities. And then eventually we conquer a few of those. And now here's me going through the next lesson. Life seems to be bringing to the forefront. So indeed, my friends, the healing journey is teaching us about life. It is inviting us into, you know, dealing with disappointments, dealing with angers, dealing with uncertainty, dealing with fear, dealing with the unknown known. These things aren't easy. And these are the things that help season us, that help turn us into real humans, help turn us into real people. It's the challenges that we face that in so many ways are here to help us grow. So my friends, one of the things you and I as practitioners, and I'm gonna say as human beings as well, need to learn ongoingly and get better and better and better at, is to learn how to drop into various archetypes or various roles or various personas. So once again, you've heard me say that some of the useful words to describe your role as a coach or a counselor is being a friend to your client, a mentor to your client, A guide, a confidant, a cheerleader. Now, I mean this. And what I mean is, when you're sitting in a session, I want you to be able to, in your mind, assume a role as if you're an actor. And in this role, what I am asking you to do oftentimes for your client, um, when in doubt become their friend, become their best friend with a capital B and a capital F. What does it mean for you to be sitting with your best friend? When you're sitting with your best friend, you're wearing a certain hat, you're speaking in a certain way, you're communicating in a certain way, you're holding them in a certain way, you speak in a certain voice, you are seeing them as my friend.
And in many ways, being a friend is a very unique kind of relationship.
There's an inherent honesty that is, um, that can come out in a friendship. There's a certain kind of quality of care. There's a certain kind of detachment you have with your friend because they're not your partner though. Your friend is not your husband, they're not your wife. So you can be intimate with them in a certain way in terms of conversation, in terms of closeness, in terms of emotions. And yet, you know, you separate. So there are moments in the session with my client or many moments where I will literally put on the role, the costume, the archetype of being their friend. When you do that, you're in a flow. It's easier for you.
If you don't choose your archetype to operate from ongoingly with a client, you will go to your default archetype. And oftentimes the default archetype for coaches and counselors and practitioners tends to be a disembodied know-It-all voice that speaks to people and is kind of, it's a little artificial and it's a little strange, and it's a little removed, and it's a little separated, and it's not as rich. And people feel that they feel when you're creating separation.
So once again, if you're not used to operating in this way or thinking in this way, hallelujah, welcome to a new way of doing things.
And for people who are already some version of professional or practitioner, this can be very liberating to sit with a client and to pretend in your mind that they're your best friend. How would you speak to them? Because all of a sudden you're gonna become more natural, you're gonna become more effortless, you're gonna have more ease. At the same time, be willing, be free to, in a moment's notice in a session, just put on a different hat. And all of a sudden, and you'll do this with your friend, you're being friendly with them, you're hanging out, you're having a nice little meal, and all of a sudden you see a place in your friend where, hey, you're a little bit older, wiser, you've been down this road before, and you need to give them a little bit of mentoring. So when you put on the mentor hat, when you put on the mentor archetype, you are adopting a very specific role. You are being committed to being with someone as if you are older and wiser than them. As if you have been down this road before and you are giving them advice, you are making suggestions, but you are coming from a place of confidence, and you are coming from a place of ownership. You are coming from a place of a different kind of maturity where you're owning the fact that, that I'm now going to say something from a mentoring standpoint. You know something, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I really would love to see you to begin to step into to more of your maturity with your partner. I really want to see you step into better communication, better truth telling. I want you to watch the places where you go into blame, because whenever you and your partner start to argue and fight, he's right, she's right. You both think you're right. And everybody walks away thinking that they're right. I really want you to start to take the high road. I really want you to see where you can put yourself in the other person's shoes and really understand where they're coming from before you take the road of I'm right. So I would really love to see you do that more because, you know, I think that's really going to help when it comes to the challenges that you've been having around emotional eating because your relationship is, is driving you a little bonkers right now, and something needs to shift there. So I'm just, so, I just came from a mentoring standpoint, you know, closely related to being a mentor is being a guide
that might feel like a good hat, role, persona, archetype. I'm using all those words interchangeably for you to put on. Uh, think of a wilderness guide, somebody who's been down the trail before, somebody who's been down the river before and there's a certain confidence because I've indeed been down this road and I'm not getting on my high horse when I'm telling you, Hey, look out for this, look out for that. I'm just simply speaking from experience. I've been on this trail and I'm telling you, here's what we're gonna expect. It's gonna go uphill a little, then it's gonna go downhill. So maybe when we're going on the uphill, you might wanna be prepared to take off your sweater because you're gonna get hot and you're gonna be doing a little bit of work. So when you are functioning as a guide, you just have a very relaxed confidence and you don't even have to convince anybody of anything. If you are in a session with a client trying to convince them of something, um, if you're trying hard to convince them of something, then chances are something's wrong. It doesn't mean that there's often moments where a client where I really have to make a point, but when I have to make a point, I'm actually not trying to convince them of something. I'm trying to explain my point clearly so it lands. That's different from trying to convince, because once you're trying to convince, it can end up as an argument, it can end up as there's pushback. So do clients pushback. Sure. When I'm coming from my guide role, I'm especially doing that. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you know, I've been down this road before. I've been a meal skipper just like you. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I've been down this road with so many clients who skip meals and who then complain of overreading or binge eating later in the day. And you'll see, as soon as you start to have a regular breakfast and a regular lunch, your appetite will start to be naturally regulated. It's just what happens. So I'm not trying to convince you that you should do this. I'm raising my hand and saying, Hey, based on your complaints and based on everybody that I've seen, walk down this road, this is what you can expect when you start to have regular meals each day. Because I want you to have an appetite that works for you. I don't want you to feel like it's outta control. And quite frankly, this is a way to get there. So I'm being a guide, a confidant, you know, very close to being a good friend, but it's a little bit more specific. When you're being a confidant with your client on some level, my friends, you are letting your client know you are letting them know that they can confide in you, that they can trust you, that they can tell you something that they're not comfortable telling other people.
At the same time, you can switch that on them and you can let them know that you are gonna share with them in a way that you don't necessarily share with everybody. And what I mean by that is, okay, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's what I, here's what I would tell you honestly, if you were my best friend, if you were my best friend, here's how I would tell you to handle this challenge. If you were my best friend, here's how I would tell you to handle this particular aspect of your emotional eating. So as soon as somebody hears that, if you were my best friend, they know you are going to tell them something that you don't need, tell your best friend, you wouldn't tell some stranger on the street.
At the same time, how do you be with your client? How do you look at them? How do you conduct yourself? How do you language yourself in such a way that they feel like they can trust you? And a lot of times you can just speak it right out. You know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, listen, in our work together, I'm gonna ask you a lot of questions and I don't ask these questions frivolously. And sometimes I'm gonna ask you really personal questions and I ask you these personal questions because I care and I want to help you get where you want to go. That's the bottom line. So just so you know, everything you tell me is a thousand percent confidential. That means I don't even tell one person that this is between you and I. Um, and you know, I will hold anything that you say as special and sacred and just between us.
So you're adopting the role of confidant. There are going to be times when you put on the role of a cheerleader and you can wear five or six different archetypal hats in a session. You could bounce back and forth. That's what I want you to be able to do, because the more archetypes you have at your disposal with your client, the more effective you are because there's so many different voices coming out of you that your client needs. They need a friend, they need a mentor, they need a guide, they need a confidant, they need a cheerleader, they need a teacher. They need somebody who conveys specific information. So when you're a cheerleader, you're simply stepping into the role. You're noticing the places where they lose a little energy. You notice the places where they're not so confident. You notice the places where they get a little down on themselves. And I'm gonna say, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I know this is hard. I know it's gonna be challenging for you to become a slow eater, but I, I just have to tell you, I have a lot of confidence in you and I I really think you could do this. Um, and I'm gonna be there with you every step of the way, and I would just love to see you have a little bit more faith and trust in yourself. Or it just might be that you've been working with your client on their emotional eating issue and for two months they have an emotionally aid and they're so happy. And then they come back to you in a session and they quote unquote relapse. They had an emotional eating experience after they'd been free and clear for several months, and they're all down on themselves. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, let me tell you something. You know, we're never perfect. And just because you don't emotionally eat anymore doesn't mean you're not going to emotionally eat anymore. Meaning you've really learned how to regulate this. You've really learned how to take this experience and use it to understand yourself, to better yourself, to mature yourself. You've had some great success in the last bunch of months. And yeah, you relapse, stuff happens, life happens. You had a difficult week, I get it. So you know what you're gonna do. You fell off the horse and you're gonna get back on the horse Now, ta-da. That's it. You're gonna just get back on the horse and you're gonna begin again because you know something. That's what life consists of. A lot of times we fall down, you dust yourself off, you take a look around, you giggle a little bit, and you get back on the horse. That's what I wanna see you do. And I'm gonna be cheering you the whole way along. That's you being a cheerleader. Cheerleader. That's different from being a straight up mentor than being a straight up guide. You know, another role you take on as well is being a teacher in a session. There are moments in a session where I will take the opportunity to be a teacher. Okay, Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's the thing. You've been eating low fat, you've been eating low fat because you've been trying to lose weight. Here's the challenge. When we are deficient in essential fatty acids, fat is essential to the human body. When we're deficient in it, there are certain deficiency symptoms that tend to show up. You can have digestive issues, you can have immune issues, you could be fatigued, which happens for you. You can have brain fog, which happens for you. You could have dry skin or dry hair, which happens for you right now. And also, one of the signs of being low in essential fats is weight loss resistance, which you're also complaining about. So based on all that, I'm just putting one and one and one together, and it's coming up with the right answer. So we're gonna include more healthy fat in your diet, and I'm gonna bet after a couple of weeks, you're gonna see alleviation of a lot of these symptoms that you've been complaining about, and it's gonna help put you on the road to have the best probability of more reaching your natural weight. Okay? So I just stepped into the role of being a teacher. That's the teacher archetype. I'm just delivering information and I'm being a teacher and I'm standing up in front of the room. I'm not being arrogant about it. I'm just saying, oh, here's a moment in this session where I need to deliver information, and I'm delivering information as if I was a teacher. Because you know something, we like to listen to teachers sometimes. So I'm switching into that role. Now, if you were in the teacher archetype the entire time of a session and, and many people are, it, it can be a little more difficult for your client, and the work might not be as effective because sometimes your client needs a friend. Sometimes they need a mentor or a guide, or a confidant or a cheerleader. Sometimes your client needs you. If, if you're a woman and you are of mothering age, you know, some clients, if they're younger than you and you're a woman, there's moments where you could literally step into being a mother. And you're literally kind of coming, approaching, speaking to your client, holding them energetically as if you are the mother, which can be a very beautiful thing. Same thing with a man. You know, if you're with a client and you are of fathers, you're of a fatherly age or you are a father. So you know what that archetype feels like. There's times when I'm very fatherly towards a client. There's times when I'm brotherly towards a client.
So what I'm saying to you is, as you practice being in these different roles, first of all, it's fun. It's fun, it's interesting. You are more effective and your client will hear you better. They'll listen to you better. They won't even know what you are doing, but they'll just know that they like it. So we have to let go of the old model of being distant from our client better than them, and being the person who's supposed to fix them. Make it all better. We have to know everything. If you have to know everything, you're gonna be coming from the archetype of either know it all teacher, which is another archetype, the know it all teacher, whatever they say is right, or the know, know-it-all clinician. You do what I tell you to do. What I tell you to do will fix you. And if it doesn't fix you, it means you did it wrong. That happens a lot. You know, we live in an age, my friends, where we are compelled to take individual responsibility. We can no longer abuse. We the collective, we, we tend to abuse our medical professions and our medical professionals. Um, you know, there's, there's so much doctor bashing these days and practitioner bashing. And one of the reasons why we doctor Bash is we put 'em up on a pedestal. We expect them to fix everything, to cure everything. And then when they're not these perfect doctors who fix and cure everything, we sue them. And it's unfair. We're heaping a huge amount of responsibility on them and taking it away from us. So if a human being is trashing their body for a lifetime and they're disembodied and they haven't taken care of themselves and they haven't taken responsibility, and they come into a doctor, they come to a practitioner and they have heart disease, and they have diabetes, and they're checked outta their body and they expect the doctor to fix everything, they expect the medical profession to fix it all. And when the medical profession doesn't fix it all, then every, everybody grabs their lawyer. It's like, no, we're here to take personal responsibility.
We are here to empower ourselves on our healing journey and to use any practitioner, a doctor, a nutritionist, a dietician, a health coach, a psychologist, anyone. We're here to use them as our chosen experts for this part of the journey to help us get where we would like to go. You're here to walk alongside your client. You're walking alongside them on their healing journey. Visualize yourself walking alongside them, literally. And I really want to tell you this by itself has tremendous value. 'cause people feel alone and people feel alone in their health challenge. People feel alone in their eating challenge. People feel desperate oftentimes, and you can't see it, you don't recognize it, you don't know that might not notice it, but that's where they're living, especially when it comes to people who are being challenged with weight or challenged with binge eating, emotional eating, et cetera. So your value as a practitioner is not necessarily in your ability to make somebody all better, all gone. No more booboo, though. That's certainly valuable. I love that. If it happens, hallelujah. Your value ultimately lies in how you stand by your client, how you advocate for them, how you create a container for them, how you hold them with unconditional regard, how you befriend them, how you listen to them, the quality of your listening, how you reflect their gifts, their gold, their beauty back to them, and how you give them the kind of guidance information that creates discovery and perhaps even healing.
You have to remember that your client needs words of encouragement most often. They need words of positivity. That's food for us. There's nothing airy fairy about that. There's nothing unprofessional about that when you're being a cheerleader, when you're being a best friend sometimes, you know, I think of my best friends, they cheerlead me on, they give me good advice, they give me good feedback. They're willing to take a risk with me and say, Hey buddy, I think you're a little off here. Hey buddy, I think you are wrong. And he's right. Hey buddy, I think you need to look at this different. And hey, buddy, you know, you're really getting down on yourself and you don't need to do that because it's actually not as bad as you think. So when we are able to be willing to uplift our client, that my friends, so much is the value of their relationship,
I want you to consider this.
If you're only one step ahead of your client, you can help them. If you're one step ahead of anybody, in any discipline, in any experience, in any craft, in any science, in any art, if you're one step ahead of somebody, you can help them with that step.
Is your relationship with food and body perfect? Likely not. Does it need to be perfect in order for you to do this kind of work? Absolutely not. The trajectory of healing and growth and transformation isn't usually a straight line, my friends, uh, in fact, I don't think it's ever a straight line. You know, you take steps forward and then you take a step back and then you might take a quantum leap forward, and then at some point you might drop into an abyss into the dark night of the soul. How did I end up here? I thought I was on a good road. I thought I was so much better than this. Have you ever had this happen to you? Where, where it's like you're working hard and you're doing the right thing and you're making progress, and you're seeing results, and all of a sudden you, you, you, you end up in a black hole. This happens. This is part of the oddness and the strangeness and the beauty of the healing journey when you've taken some steps forward and then you end up taking a step back. So the trajectory, the graph, the flow of healing and growth and change and transformation and learning isn't straight and linear and, and just a nice upward curve. There's glitches, there's potholes that we're going to experience. Things will fall apart. That's part of it.
So our job is to simply be staying a step ahead or two, or three or four of our clients. That's what we're here to do. You don't have to be perfect, own the fact that you're still on your healing and growing journey. I'm still on my healing and growing journey for sure, and I've come far enough that there are people that I can help them in the places I understand, in the places I've transformed in my own self, in the places where I've helped walk others down a good road.
So please let go of being a know-it-all expert. Please let go of being some perfect practitioner who knows all the answers. Simply be okay being a few steps ahead of your client. Our role and our goal and our purpose is to help others. Let that help be what it is. You don't need to have the perfect body, perfect way, perfect health, or be a perfect eater to help others. We are all a work in progress. In actuality, be imperfect, be real, be human. Demonstrate to your client that there is no perfection. Let go, let go, let go, my friends, please, of your own perfectionism when it comes to being a practitioner. Because if you're living in perfection, perfectionism as a practitioner, you are emanating that and broadcasting that. You, you are, you are like perfectionism, incense in the space, and that's what's permeating the air. And your client invisibly unconsciously picks up on that. We are here to help our clients let go of perfectionism because indeed life is a little messy. You know, this life ain't always squeaky clean. There is no point that you get to where you're the perfect eater and you just do everything right and you eat exactly what you're supposed to, and your body looks exactly like what you want it to. And you can just take a deep breath and say, aha, I got here finally. Now I never have to do any more work because I'm a perfect eater with the perfect body and the perfect health. Ouch. That's a soul killer. So that is what we're looking to let go of. So we're just becoming real humans, honest humans, authentic humans, imperfect humans, humans on a journey. We're collection of characters. And each one of us oftentimes has the places where we have some gifts to give and ways that we can help others around us. Hallelujah. What a great thing. Okay, my friends, let's talk about the wounded healer. This is such a great archetype. It is a classic archetype. Google the wounded healer, and you'll find all kinds of interesting articles, stories, biographies. So the Wounded Healer is qualified to help others simply because they have been through and continue to go through their own healing journey. So the wounded healer is blessed, fortunate, charged with taking their own pain, their own suffering, their own misery, their own disease, their own healing journey, and using it to serve others. What a beautiful thing does that mean? Everybody who has a disease or a challenge or an eating issue has to be a wounded healer. No, but it, it's, it's a strange, beautiful thing of how many people when they become ill. I, I've I've known so many people, um, with eating issues of every variety, whether it's a full-blown eating disorder. What are they're binge eaters, emotional eaters, what have, they've been dealing with body image issues their entire life and they want to heal themselves. They really want to heal themselves. They really want to transcend this because, because it's killing them and it's taking over their soul and it's taking over their life. They really want to heal this for themselves. And at the same time, there's this other part of them that, that says to themselves, you know, and if I could do this, I so want to help others. I so want to help others on this journey. Now, on the one hand, you can look at that as a bargain with the universe. Okay, universe, if you help me fix this, I'm gonna help other people. That's okay. It's totally fine. Uh, what a lovely bargain. But what I've noticed for people is it's really less about that. And it's more about there's a natural altruistic place that many of us access. There's an archetype that many of us access because that's just who we are and we're on our own healing journey, but we're also keenly aware of, wow, this is more than just me. So if you're the kind of person that you're still on your healing journey and you still face an eating challenge or a body image challenge, a weight challenge that's very, um, poignant for you, that's potent for you, that has a lot of energy. And at the same time you've thought to yourself, gosh, I really want to help other people with this. If I can conquer this, what a beautiful thing. What a beautiful way to inspire yourself and what a beautiful way to be in relationship with our wounds, with our booboos, with our challenges. The beautiful way is to own it for ourselves and to say, Hey, you know something, I'm aware that other people go through this as well. So give this archetype a big hug and a kiss because it's really wonderful. You know, it's, it's certainly personally my archetype because of my challenges growing up as a stutterer, as having an immune disorder, autoimmune disorder, my challenges with body image, my challenges with my own dysfunctional relationship with food, where I was looking for nutritional perfection and eating perfection. Um, and I thought I was supposed to look like the superheroes in the comic books when I was growing up, and I couldn't understand why I didn't. Um, so you wrap that all together and I was on a search for the perfect diet and the perfect health, and I was on a search to find peace with myself and my body and my health. And I remember thinking, gosh, if I could do this, I'd love to help other people. And that made the journey for me fun. It made it juicy. It made it more interesting. It gave it more oomph, it gave it more fuel.
I have a friend, uh, Deb Steinbach. She started out as a health coach, and uh, she is a health coach, specializes in digestion. And for many years, um, she started at one point, really had some intense digestive issues. And this woman tried everything and I mean everything. And I mean, everything would get a little bit of relief here and there, and still could not quite nail it down. And one day for whatever happened, she decided to get tested for gluten sensitivity, for celiac's disease. And it turns out the woman has celiac's disease. And I remember she called me up, we're friends, and I'll never forget this conversation. So she calls me up, I answer the phone, Hey, mark, it's Deb. You are not gonna believe this. I'm so happy. And I'm expecting, wow, she pregnant, or she came into a lot of money, or she's, what's happening? She said, I have Celiac's disease. And I'm think to myself, why is she happy? Why is she celebrating this? And, and what I saw was she was so happy that she found the answer. She's so happy that she now understood where her challenges were coming from. She was so happy that she now had a road that she could take to begin to eliminate a certain substance from her diet, which she started doing. And to the day she found out, she started having relief. And granted, it has been a challenging road for her. Um, but it hasn't been that challenging on another level because the way she met that challenge, which she embraced it, and she learned so much about gluten-free cooking, gluten-free living, how to talk to people, how to help them shop, um, that she's the person that anyone who's challenged in this realm would want to see. Because not only can she teach in this realm, she can coach, she can mentor, she can guide, and she cheerleads others. So she took the boo, the booboo, the wound in her journey, and she turned it into gold.
Uh, and, and I'll always admire that because I don't know that I saw even more than five minutes of victimhood in the years that we've been connecting. And in the years that I know her, not a moment of being a victim. It's all about, okay, okay, how do I use this? How do I use this to fuel my own health? How do I use this to help others? That's the wounded healer, my friends.
Part of what we need to remember as healers, as wounded healers is that oftentimes we indeed find the light at the end of the tunnel. And what likely happens at some point is once again, we find the tunnel at the end of the light. Meaning there's always another tunnel to go through at some point. There's always another dark time that we'll go through. Meaning challenging time, time of hurt, time of despair, time of grieving, time of mourning, time of illness. These my friends, you know this, you know this, these are the eternal cycles of life that all humans go through. So, so let's get over it. Let's get over it with yourself, with your friends, your loved ones, your client. Help your client get over the fact that it's not like we're going to reach some perfect point, and we're perfectly healthy and life is great. Life is cyclical things, things return. The seasons are cyclical. The weather is cyclical. The the, your birthday is cyclical. We always come back to the same place where the sun was in the heavens in the moment that we were born. Um, so we never reach this wonderful Omega point where everything is wonderful, the wounds that we have, the wounds are beautiful. Now, it doesn't feel like that, but the wounds are beautiful. You know, when you cut a rose off of its bush and you put it on your table in a beautiful glass container, the place on the stem where you cut with the pruning scissors, that's a wound. Essentially, you've cut the rose off of its source of sustenance, that's a wound. And you put that rose, you put that stem in the water, and it's that very wound that becomes the place where that rose now takes in nutrition. It can pull in nutrients from the water, it pulls in the water, and it can sustain itself longer. Our wounds become, oddly enough, they can become a place of nourishment and sustenance. That's the ultimate goal in working with any wound is to remember that.
So the wounded healer finds the power in their booboos in their previous weaknesses. The wounded healers committed to using their journey, their hard work, their exploration, their pain, all of it. Okay, I'm gonna use this and I'm gonna be of service to those who are walking a similar healing path. That's beautiful work on self qualifies you to be of service to others. Really does. There are people who they, because of who they are, how they're built, how they're conditioned, they're only gonna go see a medical doctor. They're only gonna go see a psychiatrist. They're only gonna be, they're only gonna go see a psychologist or a dietician. Hallelujah. That's fine. There's also people who, the way they are will never go to any of those health professionals for their eating challenges. And they'll sooner go to a coach. They'll sooner go to, to the person that they see at church, or the person that they know at work that they're comfortable with, that more feels like a friend. That more feels like an advocate. That more feels to them like an equal. It's all okay. There's clients out there for everyone. So once again, in the coaching model, we're here to uplift and inspire and guide one another. You know, perhaps the nature of human existence is that we all come here to heal certain wounds within ourselves. I think that might be true by reaching out to help others. We give our healing journey and our wounds just a deeper meaning. It feels good traps around being a wounded healer. It's easy. Check this one out. It's easy for some people to use being a practitioner here to force the issue of weight loss, to force the issue of healing a challenging relationship with food, meaning I've had students before who say, well, you know, I wanna be a coach and I wanna do this and I wanna work with weight loss, but before I do this, I have to lose this 75 pounds that I'm carrying around. And, and if, and as soon as I do that, then I can make money. But if I don't lose this 75 pounds and I can't make money, because then I can't help other people. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. First things first, don't use this. So, so yes, use this training to work on self use this material, always, always, always to work on self, but don't force the issue, my friends. It's not fair. It's not fair to you, it's not fair to life, it's not fair to the process, and it doesn't work that way. You're putting an extra burden on yourself. It's kind of a righteous burden. Oh, I wanna help other people, so therefore the universe has to help me lose weight so I can help other people. And you know, yes, I understand that it makes sense,
but let's not try to twist the arm of the universe so fast. If you're sitting around going, if I don't lose weight, then I can't be a good coach.
There's a little bit of a, of, um, of a self-abuse in there. I want you to decouple those, particularly, especially when it comes to you losing weight as a practitioner and coaching. I want you to separate those. It might not be that you don't work exclusively with weight right off the bat if you don't, can't or aren't meant to lose x number of pounds that you think you need to lose to qualify you when you're coupling. Well, I have to lose weight if I'm gonna be a good coach. And really this is just about me being a good coach. No, there's a little bit of a deflection in there, and we're not purely going on our own healing journey. So we have to be realistic in how we truly wish to serve others. And it's fine, by the way. It's fine, it's okay for this to be an exploration. It is perfectly fine for you to use this training for your own healing journey
that alone and never try to help anybody. And it's okay for you to use this for your own healing journey and to help others. So I'm saying that's fine. I'm just saying heads up, heads up. If you're forcing the issue. That's all. I hope you see the distinction there and we're still acknowledging that our own healing journey is always qualifying us. The fact that you're on your healing journey and you're working on self is qualifying you. So our task is to keep staying awake and conscious. Conscious means to keep growing in our awareness, to witness our life from a higher perspective and notice the places where our actions and thoughts and behaviors are serving us and serving us in moving in a good direction. And to notice the place where our actions and our behaviors and our thoughts are not serving us.
In part, that's what being conscious is all about.
My friends a very beautiful concept. We teach what we need to learn. So this is yet another way of languaging much of what we've been saying. I I, I'm clear about that everything I teach on some level is something I need to learn. It's how we remind ourselves. Every time I work with a client, I'm reminding myself everything I say to a client, chances are I'm reminding myself that's okay. That's how we learn. So many people go into the kinds of professions, the kinds of helping professions where we are teaching what we need to learn. People go into being financial advisors because that's something that they wanna learn and they teach others. And so it makes you stay on top of it. So there's a beauty in that. What I'm saying is this is a beautiful agreement with life. I think life steps up to meet us when we're able to affirm, yeah, I do wanna help others. I do wanna coach counsel others. I do want teach others. And yeah, this is something I'm learning for me as well. That's great. That's wonderful.
I think that from now till forevermore, I'll be teaching and talking about the things that I need to learn and the things that I'm passionate about, the things that I find exciting. And yes, it's what we need to learn. And once you learn it, there's a joy, there's a feel goodness in imparting that to other, it's okay. It's okay to allow yourself to celebration of feeling good about the fact that you've assisted someone else. You've helped someone else, you've helped them along on their journey. You've actually helped them with a complaint that they've had. It's a great feeling. Okay, let's talk about some of the reasons why people still have food challenges despite so many experts and their expert advice and everything that they've done. Now, some of this might be obvious for you, but let's just state it anyway, because this happens. You will be working in a universe oftentimes where people have tried a number of different things. They've tried different diets, different strategies, they've read different books, they've listened to different experts. Sometimes they've been very dedicated. Sometimes your clients have been very, very dedicated to certain kinds of diets, healing system, ways of eating, and they're still haven't gotten where they want to go. So why is that? Some reasons. One, they just haven't been getting to the root cause, plain and simple. They're hacking away at the branches and they haven't gotten to the actual root of what's really going on. So in their weight issue, let's say, and they truly have weight to lose, and they've been trying to lose weight and they haven't lost it, and they've been exercising like crazy and dieting like crazy. And it might be for that particular person that so much of their weight is being locked in because of stress induced
calorie burning, diminishment stress, stress-induced appetite, deregulation and stress-induced biochemical changes of stress hormone, including increased insulin, increased Cortisol. So that might be the place if somebody's binge eating and binge eating and binge eating and they haven't been able to stop, it could simply be that their macronutrient balance is off. Or it could be that there's a deep aspect of life that is causing them harm. Um, there's an aspect of life, of their relationship, of a past relationship that hasn't been metabolized. And until that gets spoken into, addressed, until that's brought to the day of life, that person's gonna keep binge eating because the binge eating is just a placeholder to let us know that something else is going on somewhere else in life. So one of the reasons why people haven't transformed their eating challenge or healed is that they haven't been getting to the root cause. Other people, one of the reasons why they haven't gotten where they wanna go is because they've been on a search for information and facts. They've been looking for more information, more facts, different supplement, different diet, different acupuncturists, different herb, different food, different combination, different strategy, different gizmos. And for those people, information and facts for those people, it's just not enough. It's just not the realm for them where healing will be found. They might have only been looking for metabolic or nutritional strategies to heal their eating challenge or their health challenge. And they haven't gone into the personal domain, the spiritual domain, the realm of body, uh, the, I'm sorry, the realm of heart, mind, or soul, and all the domains of our personal life, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, work, money, career purpose, that sort of thing.
You know, one of the reasons why people don't get where they want to go is because they are subject to science and therapies that are often skewed or outdated or presented to them and offer to them in a toxic way. So they've been going to the kinds of professionals who simply don't have the tools, who are simply either outdated in their approach or they're actually contemporary in their approach. And oftentimes the contemporary approaches to things like weight loss, overeating, binge eating, they, they just don't work.
They're not happening. I am shocked at how so many of the people, the practitioners who are charged with understanding these things, they're not really trained in how to truly help somebody with binge eating. From an emotional standpoint, from a nutritional standpoint, from a metabolic standpoint, they're not trained.
And clients diligently go, diligently, go to the experts, pay the experts, their insurance pays, the experts, and they don't get where they want to go.
So some people don't heal because they are just searching in the realm of information. They're searching for another book, another expert, and they're not, their, their information seeking is far outweighing their efforts at getting into their body. There's a lot of humans out there who've just simply abandoned the body. They're, they're just not present in the body. They're kind of a life support system. The body's a life support system for the head. And once again, this is, this is not an insult. Anyone who has checked out of their body to some degree, always has a good reason, always has a good reason. There's always a hurt, an abuse, a trauma, an insult.
For some people, they've been made fun of, they've experienced weight hate, they've experienced, um, unsafety in their early environment in different ways and different reasons. Others have abandoned them. So when others have abandoned us, it is quite easy for us to abandon self. When the body becomes a place of pain and suffering, we want to check out, and then we look for information. Oh, how do I fix this? Now we have to get in the body. We have to feel the body, we have to notice the body. We have to get into s slow, relaxed eating. We have to get into taste and pleasure. We have to get into the present moment and stop living into the future when someday I will have this body that I want and then I'll be in my body knowing embodiment begins now. So that's one of the reasons why people don't heal. They, they've, they literally heard all the right information. How many times, ah, I love this one. How many times have I heard somebody say, I know everything. And they say it in a, in a, just laughing. I know everything. I've read every book I've written to every expert, and I still can't fix myself. I still can't help myself. I've done it all. I've tried it all. That was me at some point. I knew literally I knew everything, so to speak. So many people feel that they know everything. They've read every book and good for you for trying. And they get an a plus, plus plus, plus plus for effort, big hug. And it's time to embody. It's time to step outta the head and to start to occupy, occupy the body.
So another way of saying that is, many times we haven't healed, we haven't gotten where we wanted to go because we've been unduly too much focusing on the physical body and ignoring our emotional body, ignoring the emotional universe, you know, so it's time to include all of our body parts, so to speak, when it comes to food and nutrition and eating psychology. Yeah, we're gonna be working on the physical body in the metabolic realm, in the realm of nutrition. It is key. The realm of nutrition and the physical body is key. The movement of the body is key,
but also the emotional body is key in how we regulate our emotions, how we regulate our metabolism through how we feel, through how we have certain habits where we will reach for food to regulate our emotions. We will reach for certain kinds of foods to regulate our emotions. We will reach for certain kinds of substances or behaviors to regulate our emotions that don't work. So we have to look at the emotional body. When I say mental body, we're looking at the mental body as well. We're looking at our toxic thoughts and beliefs because one single toxic thought and belief food is the enemy can cause a whole cascade of behaviors that take us in the opposite direction. Where, where we want to go, food is my enemy. Well, I have to limit it. I have to not eat so much, and I have to not eat so much of this food, that food the other food. And before, you know, before you know it, we actually create a nutritional lack in the system that can not only have health consequences, but can have actual consequences in our appetite regulation, and can have actual consequences in our calorie burning capacity. If we're not working on our spiritual body, we're bringing all our bodies to bear. If we're not working on our spiritual body, your higher body, your soul body, um, your moral code body that transcends all these other bodies that we're talking about. If we're not working on that, then that might be the place where, where the action actually is. And the reason why the person hasn't healed yet or gotten where they want to go yet is because this happened to be the domain for that particular person, that particular client or some of the actionists or some of the important actionists. And that important action might be a, a soul lesson that they need to learn. And we're gonna be talking about soul lessons very soon. Um, the action might be in them reconnecting to a higher purpose that they can have in this life, a higher trust, a faith that then helps them move forward. Because if we are living in a universe that we believe is unkind, uncaring out to get us not on our side, waiting around the corner to abuse us, but at the same time waiting to give everybody else all the goodies, if you believe that you live in that spiritual universe, of course you're gonna be in stress. Any human would be in stress. Any creature would be in stress, which creates stress chemistry. And you, you, you know what that does. We, believe it or not, we have a cultural body. We share a culture depending on the country you live in, and depending on the people that you hang out with, depending on the media that you consume. And I consider media food, you consume media, you consume videos, audios, you consume the news, you consume television shows, you consume it, you take it into your eyes, your ears, you take it into your body and you let it impact you. So when some politician gets on the computer, the internet to television, and you listen to them and that politician irritates you, you have consumed them. And it just so happens that there is a lot of culture, there's a lot of media, there's a lot of music, there's a lot of images that are toxic, that is like junk food for your system. But because culture, the culture we live in tends to be very self-absorbed. It, it, it constantly congratulates itself. Our culture of fame, our culture of perfectionism, our culture of you have to have this perfect beauty and this perfect health. And everybody's having a great time. And look at me on so everybody's happy, you know, in social media. Um, and, and all the actors and all the actresses, they're fabulous. And the singers and the athletes, they're fabulous. And these are the people that we are told from a very young age that we should emulate and look up to. And they oftentimes have crazy, chaotic, selfish lives. And we're still told to look up to them and to be like them. And we're not. And we've consumed that toxicity and we've taken it into our body and our being and it impacts us. So we have to learn how to hmm, detoxify ourselves from toxic culture and to nourish ourselves with nourishing culture. Very important. Our lineage body. What do I mean by our lineage body? Well, you are, your body is not just your body. Your body is actually the product of many, many, many generations before it, my friends. And you right now are the crowning point in this moment of your lineage. You are the guy, you're the gal where your lineage has gotten to. You know, we think we're just me. So if you're sitting here and you're a woman, you think you're you and you are, but guess what? You know, you come from a mother, you come from a grandmother, a great-grandmother, a great-great-grandmother, and so on down the line, we come through a lineage. Notice the word line in lineage. We come down through a line. You are a point in that line. We don't always see. And, and we can't truly realize this in a big way because it is me sitting here. So the truth is, we're the beautiful expression of all the people that have come before us in our lineage. Especially the same sex person in your lineage. So if you're a woman, you are the beautiful expression of mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. If you're a man, you're a beautiful expression of your father, grandfather, great-grandfather. See, I'm focusing a bit on sex specific lineage, but you're a lineage of both parents as well, regardless. Oftentimes with my clients, they're really not just healing their own issue, but they're healing issues, challenges, thought forms, beliefs that come down through them, that they've inherited, that lived in their parents. And even grandparents. Sometimes the pieces that were healing are abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, feelings of inadequacy, feeling that, you know, if you're a woman, women are not equal. Because several generations ago they weren't equal. And if you have even tinges of that, then yeah, that's come through your lineage. 'cause that's what the lineage experience is. So that's what we're healing oftentimes for men. They're also living out various abuses. Poverty lacks feelings of not being good enough feelings that I'm never gonna measure up for the world. I won't be successful. You know, chances are you look back into the lineage that you've come from, and there were traumas, there were challenges. So these live in us. Sometimes we could more accurately identify them by looking at our parents and our grandparents. But it's, it's part of our story. And our story is beautiful. And going into our story is a very, very, very healing act. Okay, let's move on. More reasons for why we haven't healed yet. It's just not time yet. The universe has cosmic timing my friends. It's just the reality. The universe has its own timing and life has its own timing. Life with a capital L. If you believe in God, God has God's own timing. A higher power has its own timing. If you don't believe in any of that, then there's just timing of things. The universe, the solar system has a very precise timing. Can't argue that. So we experience time in a very real way because things are timed. Your DNA is timed. You are born and you die. There's a timing in there. The revolving of planetary bodies, it's all about precise timing. The sun going up and sun going down. It's precise timing. We could observe these things, but we don't really know why that timing is there. But it's how creation works. And sometimes it's just not the time. And that's it. That's the answer. It's just not time yet. And from that place, it's best, I think, to take a deep breath and understand that this is life. And if you can reference a higher wisdom, a deeper power, then yeah, it's not time yet. And for many people, we haven't healed yet because there's more to learn on our healing journey. There's more lessons to learn. Yeah, you've learned some hard lessons. Yeah, you've worked hard, you've worked hard. Your client has worked hard. Then they're gonna come in and tell you, I've worked really hard. Like really hard. And you listen to them and you listen to their story and you think to yourself, wow, this person's worked really hard and they still haven't gotten where they want to go.
Life isn't fair, according to our sense of fairness,
according to our sense of fairness. Life isn't particularly fair. Some people have it harder than others, my friends. It's just the way it is. Some of us have it harder than others. And if you compare ouch, what do they say? Comparison is the devil. You can't compare. You can't do it. When I notice my client doing that, gotta take a deep breath, Mr. And Mrs. Client. And comparing. You say you don't really know what other people are going through anyway. What you see on the outside, you never really know about people, what they're going through, no matter how perfect you think their life is, their body is, no matter how fabulous you think they are, all the people that you see in the movies and the TV that you might wanna be like, and the model in the picture that you might wanna be like, you have no idea what they're going through. And I've worked with a lot of these people and let me tell you something, their lives ain't any better than yours or mine necessarily. So we still have more to learn on our healing journey. And our healing journey is unique to us. Your client's healing journey is unique to them. Your journey is unique to you. Stop freaking comparing it to someone else.
We have to learn how to want ourselves. You have to learn how to want your life. Because if you don't want your life, if you don't want this body, if you don't want this journey, then you don't want yourself. And then you will be living in pain, mising suffering, and self-abuse.
You will be attacking self, you'll be escaping self. And it's never gonna feel good.
Another reason why we haven't heal. We've just been looking in the wrong places. It happens, it happens. And sometimes you gotta do the process of elimination. That's just life. One of the reasons many people haven't healed yet is because they're not as broken as they think they are. This is more common than you can imagine. Many people begin to take a quantum leap, a huge step in healing when they begin to actually realize that they're not broken. Yes, you have an issue to deal with. Yes, you wanna work with your binge eating, your emotional eating. Yes, you wanna work with this 75 pounds you've been trying to lose forever. I get it. But none of that means you are broken, you're decrepit, you are tainted, your soul is tainted, and you can't be a worthy soul, a worthy human on this planet until you're fixed for so many people. Liberation happens when they realize there's nothing to fix. There's nothing broken. Yes, there's things to work on. Yes, there's a journey to take. But when you take away the brokenness, the the, the sour taste in our being that we carry around when we're broken, we, we disempower ourselves. We act like victims. We act small. We hide from the world. We hide our light under a bushel. We contract ourselves. We don't give our gift. We walk around like we're less than. And none of us true. We just had the wrong belief in our head that we didn't invent that was placed there by the world that we've inherited. Because that's one of the challenges on planet earth, as we've seen through the perennial philosophy that so many of the great spiritual and religious traditions of the world have said that. Yes, once we were connected and we were whole. And then as so many religious traditions say there's some story of separation from the source, we get cut off. There's a wound, there's a betrayal. And from that place, we feel alone. We feel isolated. We feel not enough, we feel unlovable. And then we start to adopt behaviors that reinforce the fact that we are unlovable and un whole as we are. We adopt behaviors that reinforce the fact that we're broken and we will never be okay. And then we begin an endless search for symbolic substitutes for false gods. So instead of, you know, healing the wound of separation, we try to have the perfect body instead of healing the wound of separation from a higher power, from a greater source. We look for the perfect diet and the perfect health.
You know, one of the reasons we haven't healed yet, another way to say this is we might need to live with our food and body challenges in a different way. You know, a lot of us are cursing our challenges, and we think that we need to perfectly heal before we're healed. And oftentimes, healing doesn't mean your symptom necessarily goes away. Healing might mean you've learned how to regulate it, manage it, live with it, and listened on a daily basis to what it has to teach us. Because sometimes we live with symptoms and challenges that, uh, we're literally here to live with. Not everybody. Another reason we don't heal is maybe we have not chosen to love or forgive ourselves.
And I mean that, that's a place where we don't always like to go because it's easy to dismiss as being nons psychological, as being non-scientific, as as, no, we just need to look at, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy and behavior modification. Okay, fine. Modify your behavior about self attack. Self attacking is a behavior, self attacking thoughts as a form of behavior. So we have to expand our definition of what healing looks like and often healing looks like, believe it or not, and I really mean this, choosing to love ourselves on this journey and forgive ourselves for whatever we imagined we did wrong. Forgive ourselves for having this body. Forgive ourselves, for having this life. Forgive ourselves for whatever standard we haven't lived up to. Forgive ourselves for the errors that we've made along our journey that were errors in consciousness. We were simply learning. We were simply growing. We didn't know one of the reasons we haven't healed that despite our efforts, we've actually abandoned ourself. We still haven't truly learned to re-own self. We've abandoned self. And we believe that the method of attacking self will get us where we want to go.
Until you learn to befriend yourself, until you can start to be your best friend, until you can start to be your own best mother, your own best father, your own best friend is gonna be rough. And it just might be that we're still learning the lessons that are unwanted food and body concerns are here to teach us. There are more lessons, more lessons, more lessons, more lessons. And it's okay. You know, some of the complaints along the way of the healing journey, I did what you told me to do, therapist, practitioner, health coach. I did what you told me to do. I I I love myself and I relaxed and, and I slow and I still haven't lost weight. People do that a lot. I do what you told me to do. I love myself when I relax and I still haven't lost weight. Ooh, that's a tricky one
because when I hear that, what it says to me is, I don't know that you've really done these things, because if you were truly loving on yourself, this complaint wouldn't be there.
I get that. You wanna lose weight,
you are not loving yourself so you can lose weight.
Yes, I get that you wanna lose weight, but you're not loving yourself. So you can lose weight if you're loving yourself. So you can lose weight, then we have to transform that. We have to transcend that you're loving yourself to love yourself.
So loving yourself to lose weight is a conditional love.
Okay? Little child who's five years old and still has child fat and baby fat on you and doesn't have muscles and tight abs and buns of steel. Okay, little child, I'm only going to love you if you lose weight. That's what it's like saying. You're only loving them so they can lose weight. And if they don't lose weight, then you're gonna complain. Okay, well I, I love my child, but I haven't still don't have tight abs. It's not true love. Or once you experience true self-love, once you experience true, um, self-acceptance, unconditional acceptance, even for a moment, you wouldn't even make the statement. I did what you told me to do. I love myself and I haven't lost weight. It's conditional love. You haven't gotten there. Deep breath, Mr. And Mrs. Client, because this is a journey, and this sounds like a conditional kind of love to me. This is not about loving yourself just so you can lose weight. This is about you loving yourself. Let's, we need to take weight loss off of the table. Truly. And by the way, my friends, you're gonna hear this when we get into our conversations, direct conversations about weight loss. There are times when in order to lose weight, you have to take weight completely off the table, literally give it a vacation because the drivenness that we have of like, I lose weight, I gotta lose weight. So I'm doing all these things to lose weight. I'm loving myself to lose weight. I'm being nice to my partner so I could lose weight tends to not work like that. It's gotta be a purity in there. We have to decouple loving myself from losing weight. And then it looks completely different. Clients might say, you know, I've been eating regular meals and having healthy food and I still don't see any results. Whatever the results are, clients are complaining. Deep breath. You're on a healing journey. And what this healing journey is about, it's not about the goal. And I want you to get the goal that you want. I really do. Mr. And Ms. Kline, I want you to get where you want to go. Part of the challenge is, is you, you want immediate gratification. You really do. And I understand it. I want immediate gratification also. I want what I want when I want it. And it just so happens that you and I are adults. And at some point we have to learn that the way the world works is it doesn't always give us what we want, when we want, when we want it. And maybe Mrs or Mr. Client, maybe this is the lesson you're here to learn. You're here to learn, to learn patience. You're here to learn a deeper patience. You're here to learn a deeper maturity and learn how to stand by yourself. Learn how to not abandon yourself. Learn how to not feel a victim of life even though you're doing everything right and haven't lost weight, even though you're doing everything right and you still have this digestive issue, you're learning how to continue to love yourself. You're learning how to continue to show up in your life. You're learning how to continue to celebrate life as best as you can. Even though I still have this challenge, even though I still have this condition.
So the moment your client's complaining, I did what you said and I didn't get where I want to go, then I want you to think inside yourself. One of my clients' deeper lessons is to learn to let go of immediate gratification and to slowly learn patience, to slowly learn the kind of character maturity, growth, self evolution, where we understand that there's a timing that's beyond us. And until we're able to relax into that timing, then we will be, you know, antsy teenagers going, I did it and I didn't get what I wanted. Your client might say, well, I tried that before and it didn't work before they even try it.
And what that means is they might as well say, I'm resistant to doing what you're telling me to do. Or what they're really saying is, chances are I did this but I really didn't do it well. Or what they're saying is, I think I know what I'm doing and I'm not sure I like your strategy. Whenever my client says, well, I tried slow eating before and it didn't work, and I might ask them for a few details, I might ask them to tell me more. So once they tell me more, I have more information. And then I'm gonna say, great, you know something, I've done a lot of things that didn't work when I tried it the first time. And sometimes you have to get back to it again. Sometimes we have to begin again. So this is something, this slow eating piece is something I believe firmly is going to impact, you know, your digestion and it's gonna impact your energy level and it's gonna impact your appetite all in a very positive way. And I know you tried it before and it didn't work, and then you went back to fast eating. Um, you know, a lot of times people can temporarily force themselves to eat slow, but it's so mechanical and it's so forced that it actually is still a stressor for them. And they're in an inner sense of complaint. You know, you've mastered this when it's, it's, it's just natural to eat slow. It's natural to eat in a relaxed, nourish way, then you've truly mastered it. And then you can receive the actual physiologic benefits of it. So we're gonna come back to this in a whole new way. She always frame it in the positive. A lot of times your client's gonna come in and, Hey, I wanna see results. I didn't see results. I wanna see results.
I say to my client, I wanna see results also. I wanna see results when I wanna see them, when I wanna see them. This is a journey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, and I want you to get where you wanna go as fast as possible. I'm in your court. I'm like that in life. I wanna make money as fast as possible. I wanna be healthy as fast as possible. I want all my bad habits to go away as fast as possible, but thank you, me too. And then there's life, and then there's how the universe works. And I want to tell you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you tell me if I'm wrong, but what I've noticed is that the universe doesn't always conform to your and my humble demands. It's on its own timing, my friends, you have to learn how to catch your clients in their nonsense. You have to learn how to catch them when they're becoming instant gratification children. And you have to raise your hand and you have to uplift them, spank them a little bit with your words. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I get it. I want instant results too. But welcome to the world of adulthood.
I wanna eat sugar all the time 'cause it tastes so good. Um, can't have instant gratification whenever we want it. Sometimes clients complain is, well, I just don't have the time. Fill in the blank for whatever. It's, um, when somebody says, I just don't have the time, really what they're saying, they, they're, they're arguing for their limitations. They're arguing on behalf of their limitations. Don't argue to me about your limitations. You are the person living your life. You are the person who manages your time. You are the person who has to find more time. And I'm happy to help explore this with you. I really am. Sometimes it's about rearranging the furniture a little bit, rearranging your schedule, looking at what some of your resources might be that you haven't fully owned or accepted yet. But you know something, if we work on this together, I have a feeling that we can help you get where you wanna go in terms of finding the time for a little more self care, a little more self nourishment, having the time to sit down and eat at work or at home.
Client complaint. Well, I just want a diet. Just tell me what to eat. Now you have to make a choice, my friends. I do not work with a client who truly, truly, truly, truly, truly comes in to see me and says, just give me a diet and tell me what to eat. I don't wanna do all this other stuff. I don't wanna talk about my life. I don't wanna talk about this, I don't wanna talk about that. I just want you to gimme a diet and tell me what to eat now. So you make a choice. If you wanna work with clients who just say, give me a diet, and you sit down, ask 'em a bunch of questions, you find out what they're eating, okay? They wanna lose weight. And you give them a diet, okay, here's what you, you for breakfast. Here's what you, you for lunch. Here's what you for dinner, here's what you eat for snacks. If you wanna do that and make money doing that, do it. And I really mean that. Just do it. Um, I find that to be the most boring job on the planet. I, I did that for a time and I couldn't believe how awful that is. I'm, I'm just a machine. I, I I, I think of myself as a nutrition w***e. Like I'm, I'm just supposed to do what you want me to do, even though I don't really think it's gonna, I, I, I, come on. Um, so, so for me personally, that's not the kind of clientele I want because what I hear is that a person is not taking responsibility and they are not willing to see the world, to see their body, to see metabolism, to see nutrition, to see their relationship with food in a bigger light. So my client says that I make a choice in that moment. And usually the thing that I do is I do an intellectual intervention right then and there. I do an intellectual intervention in the hopes of pulling them out of the dark side as far as I'm concerned. Okay, Mr. And Mr. Client, I totally get what you're saying. You wanna lose weight and you just want diet. You just want me to tell you what to eat. I have a question for you. How many diets would you say you've done? How many times have you been given a diet, either that you took from a book, that you took from an expert, that you went to a particular health coach or a nutritionist, dietician, whatever it was. How many times have you just gotten a diet where someone or some expert through a book, through personal connection told you what to eat, how many times? And I wait for their answer. And usually these people, they've done it before. They've done it 4, 5, 6, 7, sometimes 27 times before. So I go, oh, so you've done this 10 times before. Great. How did that work for you? Ah, you lost weight, but then you gained it back. So in other words, you're telling me it wasn't sustainable. So it ultimately it wasn't successful. So now you are coming to me and you are wanting the same strategy that you've done 10 times that hasn't worked. Another diet. Let me tell you where you're off here. And I love you. I love you, but let me tell you where you're off here. You're off. Because all the experts or so many experts tend to be off because we've been doing the same strategies over and over again. Eat less, exercise more, go on a diet. That's the royal road to weight loss. We've been doing that since the 1960s. It hasn't worked. If it worked, the obesity rate in the world wouldn't be climbing and climbing and climbing to the degree that it is. So we know as a fact that dieting and exercise, this injunction eat more, exercise less, doesn't work. We know it even further because you have actually proved it as a scientific experiment in your own life. So for me to give you another diet is wasting my time. And it's wasting your time because we need to look at the other factors in your life that might be impacting your weight loss resistance. And that means in my training, I've learned a completely different kind of work. So if you are willing to explore that, then we have something to do together. And I imagine, based on all the information you've shared with me, that I can help you and here are some of the things that I would do to help you. But you have to be on board with that. You have to be on board with a different way. Otherwise, quite frankly, I don't wanna waste your time and money. I don't wanna waste my time. And I don't wanna be another notch on your belt that actually didn't work of another diet guy that gave you a diet. You see what I'm doing, my friends? So then you give your client a choice, you're calling them into consciousness and they make a choice. They can choose to continue the work or not. If they don't choose to work with you, hallelujah. You've just let go of an impossible client that you're not gonna be able to help. And if they choose to do the work, then you have to be clear with them. Listen, this is gonna take some time. It's taken time. How long have you been trying to lose weight? Okay, got it. 11 years, 17 years, five years, whatever it is, you have not been successful. Okay? So this is not gonna get cleared up in two or three weeks. Generally for weight loss clients, it's usually a good three to four months for us to really start to see something useful that's on average, but it's hard to predict. It could be sooner for you, it could be later. We don't know. And if anybody tells you that they know they're not telling you the truth because you've already proven that of all the systems that promised you something and you didn't get a result. So that my friends is an intellectual intervention for this kind of character. Let's move on. The health coach counselor of the future doesn't merely push facts. My friends, they convey wisdom. That's what I just did in that intellectual intervention. I wasn't just pushing facts, I was conveying wisdom as well. The wisdom is, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, look at your life. You've done this strategy and it hasn't worked. Don't you think you should try another way? That's called wisdom. The health coach counselor of the future is a consultant. They help manage all kinds of information that the clients just, it, it's just too much for them. Oh, this expert, that expert, the other expert, you help narrow things down for them and help them make good choices. So you're helping create order out of chaos. The health coach counsel, the future of today understands that the domains of work, money, career, purpose, relationship, family, love, sex, pleasure, spirituality, all of that relates to food and body and our food and body challenges. It's all connected. That's your job.
It really is your job. And it's a good job to see that they're all connected. Because when you see the connections, you can begin to act on those connections. You can actually help your client where your client has not been helped before. You know, I do a lot of teaching. I've done a lot of teaching over the years and, and I always get very specific nutritional questions. Even if I just talk about eating psychology, people come up with very specific nutritional questions and it always fascinates me. 'cause they really span the gamut. Like, well, how much water should a person drink? Or, you know, how much fiber should a person have? Or specifically, how do I get rid of inflammation or, or what do you think of this superf food? Or, okay, but what do you think of that superfood? And don't you think this superfood is more super than that superfood and huh? You know, these are fun questions and they're interesting, but there's a place where none of it is one size fits all. And you know, the superfood that works for this guy doesn't necessarily work for everybody else. So we've gotta look past the hype. We gotta look past the marketing. We have to look past sometimes all the little specifics. And we have to take a wider perspective for a moment. What I want you to consider is that there are as many bonafide nutritional systems that work as there are people on the planet.
Let me repeat that. There are as many bonafide nutritional systems that work as there are people on planet earth. In other words, the best nutritional system for you is unique to you. Are there commonalities that human beings share? Absolutely. But are there an infinite number of nuances for each individual person that makes them different from anybody else? Absolutely. And that's why we must look to help our clients. Yes, manage the flow of information. Use good information. I love information. I, it's so, you know, I am not anti-science. I am a, I am a science, nutritional science junkie. Um, I love it, but I don't let it rule me. And I understand that nutritional science is a moving target. It's a moving target, uh, in the scientific community. And it's a moving target for each individual. Meaning the diet that works for you today is going to be different from the diet slash nutritional system that worked for you, that will work for you two years from now. So the body changes. And this is why we talk about things like embodiment, because we are learning how to occupy the body to listen to the body. Because when we do that, there's a brilliance that emerges. And the nutritional scientist within you, the nutritional expert, you're the best nutritional expert for you ultimately because you know your body, your client is ultimately the best nutritional expert for them. They know their body. And a lot of it is learning to manage uncertainty. Let's eat this and see what happens. Okay, let me splurge on this 'cause I really wanna splurge and we'll see what happens. If I splurge on it, I end up feeling like garbage. Okay, I won't do that again. Forgive. Move on.
Stop beating yourself up because you did something that you said you didn't wanna do. The more you beat yourself up for doing something that you said you didn't want to do, the more you will continue to return to the scene of the crime and you will continue to do the very same thing that you said you didn't wanna do. You're gonna continue to do it, not because there's something wrong with you. But that's how body wisdom and life wisdom teaches us. Remember, we learn through repetition. So body wisdom, life wisdom will return us to the scene of the crime until we integrate things. Until you learn how to forgive yourself for overeating or binge eating or emotional eating, it will be almost necessary for life to return you there till you learn how to hold yourself there to befriend yourself there, to stand by yourself there to not self-Attack yourself there to love yourself in that place. Because then once you introduce that, which is another way of saying introducing consciousness, it's another way of saying introducing light into a place that was dark on one level, my friends is as simple as that. You are introducing light into places of darkness. You are shining a tiny little light. And you know that a tiny little candle in a dark room can actually allow you to see everything just about. So we're learning how to deliver light to the dark places. Light means love. It means self-acceptance. It means standing by ourselves. It means being our own best friend. It means stopping the self hurt, self attack, self-abuse. Whenever we do something that we said we didn't wanna do or we think we shouldn't do, don't be so mean to yourself. Don't let your clients be so mean to themselves. Exactly how I'm explaining things to you, my friends, is exactly how you will hear me communicate these things to a client. Exactly how I'm talking to you. It's how I say it to a client.
So we're talking about nutritional information, we're talking about facts. You know, of course facts are important. The challenge is many practitioners falsely believe that their professional value is given in the amount of facts that they can hurl at their client. The amount of information and data that they can deliver. Talk about a beginner, rookie mistake. And I did this, I was the king of this rookie mistake. When I first started seeing clients, I thought my value was in haha. I know a ton of facts. Why? Because I study this stuff like an obsessive nut job. And I love this information, I love it, I love it, I love it. And I'm gonna hurl all kinds of great facts at you. And you're gonna have all these great facts. And once you take all these facts, you're going to do exactly what these facts tell you to do. And you're gonna be better. And boy does that not work. You can find all the data and facts that you need on the internet. We're inundated with facts and information. We are collectively fatigued by an excess of information. I keep saying that 'cause I want you to get it. Your clients are suffering from information fatigue. Chances are, and in times of excessive information, the the value of wisdom soars. It goes through the roof. You wanna invest in something, invest in wisdom. I'm not kidding you. Invest in the wisdom in your own self. The wisdom that comes out of your own heart, your own soul, your own life experience. Invest in sharing that wisdom with your friends, your family, your loved ones, your clients.
That's a great investment. That's a great way to put yourself into the world.
Yes, I love information, but it's half the story. Wisdom is the other half.
So in many ways, again, our role as a practitioner is to be a curator of information to help our clients manage information so they can pinpoint the information that, okay, let's use this information for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client. Let's, okay, you really wanna experiment with this kind of nutritional approach. Let's do it. We're here to help our clients manage the data and target the facts that we think might best serve them.
So you are seeing your client oftentimes as a nutrition refugee, especially when they tell you they are. How do they tell you they are? Oh God, I've read every book. I don't know what to do. I try to every diet. I don't know what to do. This one says this. That one says that as soon as you hear your clients say that, just know inside yourself that they are fatigued and they are nutrition refugees. And on top of that, they feel stressed, anxious, and confused about nutrition, dieting, health and weight loss. And you know what? Stress does? Chronic low level stress living inside you because you are dealing with chaotic information that's disparate and is and makes no sense to you. Because every scientist seems to have scientific proof of their system, and their system is different from every other system and it doesn't make sense. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Talk about a major stressor for your head.
So your job is to help your client relax into the chaos. Your job is to is to be a safe haven for your client. Your job is to deliver wisdom. You know, my friends the best healers, coaches, counselors, they're following a calling.
It's a calling if you feel called in. Hallelujah. And, and a calling means that we're listening to a whole different voice. A calling means that it's an inner knowing. It's a beckoning calling is powerful. A calling has magic to it. A calling has some sacredness to it. There's a spirituality to it. And when you follow a calling, it empowers you. It infuses your practice. It infuses literally your skillsets and your capability. And I think this is so important to be a true practitioner who serves people.
So just, just, have you ever felt called? Have you ever felt called to do something? Anything? Have you ever felt called to serve someone in a certain way? Have you ever felt called to say something in the moment that might have been strange, weird, unpopular, might have been a little bit risky? Have you ever felt called, been called to move somewhere, to live somewhere? Have you ever been called to love someone or help someone?
What is that sense of calling that you've had? Can you remember it? Can you embrace it? And you might have been called to do something even though people around you thought you were a nut and they thought you were crazy, but you still felt that calling and you know something, you followed that voice and you listened to it and it was the right thing.
So if you feel a calling to help others in this way, what a good thing. I'd love for you to honor that. Um, you know, if you're just in it for the money, just in it for the cash in it, for the ego, in it, for the glory, you're likely gonna get stomped upon and you're not necessarily going to have the success you want. Maybe you will. Um, you know, there's plenty of people who have successful practices in the helping and healing professions, and they, they're not necessarily driven by a calling and they have a turns style profession. Meaning bring people in, bring people out, make money. The average, you know, medical doctor, how many, how many minutes do they spend with a human being? Something like nine to 13 minutes. Um, you know, I was in medical school for a year and I would say a majority of the 150 students I was with, they, they weren't, it wasn't a calling for them. I remember there was about a dozen of us who would hang out together. We would talk about medicine, we'd talk about healing, we would talk about nutrition. We would just talk about the, the wonders of it. Um, and you know what it's like to be with a practitioner who they're looking at you like, like you're, you're just a cash machine and you're in and out of the office. Um, so what I'm saying to you is take a look into a mirror and, and do you feel a calling here? And if you do, congratulations, there's a wonderful task that you have at hand here. You know, I have friends who, you know, friends in the professional sphere who, who I love, who I look up to, you know, amazing practitioners, you know, be it in the medical world, the counseling world, the psychology world, the dietetic world, and, and the ones that I look up to, the practitioners that I look up to, they all have something in common. And it's something very powerful in common, which is that they feel called to do what they wanna do. They they're inspired to do it. They're moved by a higher source, by a higher power. There's a certain enthusiasm. And that doesn't necessarily mean the work is going to be easy and the road is going to be easy. And the world is just gonna roll out the red carpet and say, oh, okay, well you feel a calling. Here's a big practice with 25 clients a week, and here's lots of money and here's everything you need to do to be successful. You know, the strange thing is to be a good human in this world. It doesn't mean the world rolls out the red carpet.
Just because you have the best intentions. Just because you wanna help people doesn't mean helping others is gonna be easy. The world at, as it stands right now, is not fully designed to roll out the red carpet. For those of us who just wanna serve and do the right thing in order to serve and do the right thing, you often have to work hard. You often have to be a warrior. You have to take a few hits, you have to go through the fire, you have to go through a gauntlet, you have to go through challenges. That is just the way it is, which is why I bring up this concept of calling, because it's the calling for, for me personally, when I've been able to return to that, like, oh, I, I, I feel this calling when that is moving me and guiding me and helping me, then it gives me the energy to move forward. It gives me the energy to press on even when things are not going so well. And even when there's a, a challenge. And even when I wasn't having enough clients and I wasn't having enough this, and it was too hard and I didn't get success with my client, and I don't wanna do this. You know, I've, I remember having a number of clients in a row where I, I just couldn't help them. I could not help them. I was banging my head against a wall trying to help them. It, it was a combination of clients with, with weight loss challenges and some who had digestive issues. And I pulled out at the time, every trick in the book that I knew, and I remember I was so disheartened, especially because one of my clients was very upset at me because I had been so confident that I could help them. And I was, and I didn't help them. And I remember thinking, okay, I could either quit, I could either stop or I could use this as a vehicle to inspire me to learn more. Why couldn't I help these people? What, what, what, what do I need to learn? What do I need to know? What was that client, that client and that client here to teach me? And I had to reach out to fellow professionals. I had to listen to my own inner voice. I had to look in the mirror and say, okay, what else do I need to learn? What else do I need to understand? Where else can I find answers? What kind of research do I need to do? What kind of resources do I need to tap into, uh, so I could learn more? So I'm always using my client unsuccess to inspire me to see, okay, was there, is there, excuse me, something more that I need to know that I don't know. So all that is part of following a calling because this is my craft. I want to get better at it.
My friends remember on one level we as practitioners, we don't do anything.
Yes, it's a paradox. You do all kinds of things. You're constantly doing things with your client, but on another level, there's a place, there's a paradox where you're doing things. You're, you're doing this training, you're learning, you've had other training. You've, you've, you've developed other skills. You're bringing it all, bringing it all into a client session. Everything you've learned, everything you've known all the efforts, all the books you've read, all the lectures, you listen to the audios, the videos, and you're with your client. You're asking them questions and you're piecing things together. So you're doing a lot of stuff
and there's a place where then you don't do anything. Meaning you can't make someone heal. You can't make someone change and transform and grow. That's all universal intelligence. Doing the work. At the end of the day, I am postulating that you and I are point persons in the field of universal intelligence. So when you raise your hand, when I raise my hand and say, I'm going to work with this client on one level, what I'm saying is, I am going to be a conduit for universal intelligence to come through me so I can do my best job to let that intelligence come through so I can use everything I've learned to help this person as best I can. So we are step down transformers for a greater wisdom.
Our job, tune in and listen, my friends, no one, here's the postulation. No one really knows when healing is supposed to happen, when it's supposed to look like, no one knows what healing should look like when it should happen for any given person, for anyone healing can mean healing can mean conceivably that symptom or disease or habit totally disappears, is gone. You got no more cancer, your heart is completely healed. That big cut is completely healed. It doesn't even have a scar. Congratulations. Symptom or disease or habit. The, the binge eating, the weight is gone. Goodbye. Okay? Healing could look like that. Healing could look as the condition is somewhat alleviated. And we now learn to live with the rest of what we have. Yeah, you know, something, I lost 85 pounds and I didn't lose 125 pounds and I plateaued there. And here I am. Okay? Maybe someday I'll lose more. Maybe I won't. But here's where we landed. Maybe I was binge eating once a day, seven days a week, and now I binge eat, you know, once a month. Okay? We learn to live with what we have. Sometimes the condition is somewhat alleviated and we still continue on our healing journey. We're still looking, we're still trying different ideas, practices, techniques, experts. That's fine. Sometimes nothing happens seemingly in the moment, but seeds of healing are planted and healing happens sometimes down the road. I've had clients who literally on paper we didn't get anywhere. And you'll hear some of these stories throughout the training where I'll have a client reach out to me a year later or years later and say, you know something, you had told me this, this or that, and I, you know, I, it just kind of stuck in my head, but all of a sudden, one day it just kind of hit me. And, and that person transformed years, years later, or whatever it is they learned in our work together years later then became apropos. Sometimes healing is time released and it takes the seeds that are planted. I mean, think of times when somebody told you something, somebody gave you information, somebody gave you wisdom, somebody said something to you that you didn't actually put into practical use until years later when you finally understood it. It just, it was, it was the right time. Sometimes healing looks like the person you're working with just is more open, they're more softened and they grow in some other way other than changing their weight or changing their health condition. They're still dealing with depression. But you know, something, um, they're a better person. They're a better partner. They're a better parent. They're better at communicating with people. They're more open, they're more available, they're more real. They're more authentic. That's great. That's worth the price of admission. Sometimes it's other people around that person are now more open, softened and healed because of the, some of the slight shifts that that person made that often happens. Sometimes what healing looks like is a person dies. I mean, really, you know, I'm thinking of medical conditions. I'm thinking of cancer. Sometimes the healing that people go through is the death journey. I've watched so many friends and relatives die and actually of cancer. Um, I've watched them go through their death journey and that death journey taught them so much. That death journey was in a weird way, a place of healing
and a place of healing and transformation for the people around them. A place of growth for the people around them. So we don't always know exactly what it looks like. Another way to say this is that healing is a mystery. It is a mystery with a capital M. And whatever you think your definition of healing is, what I would like to suggest is to be open and be skeptical for another way of seeing things. We have to be a little more humble in the face of this mystery. How do I know? Healing's a mystery. How do I know that?
'cause I'm looking, I'm watching study healing. My friends study the history of healing, study healing in every culture. Study the wisdom teachings from cultures throughout history. And you're always gonna hear stories of humility, stories of people appealing to a greater power, stories of miraculous healing, stories of healing not happening the way we want them to. Stories of we tried this, we tried that, we tried this strategy, that arb, that vitamin, that supplement, that exercise, that drug, that surgery, and it didn't work. Or this specific thing finally works.
We don't know what it's gonna look like. And when we're humble to that, then we can relax.
Then we can understand that our unwanted eating challenge, our unwanted symptom, it's a teacher, it's a whispering from our guardian angel. And we're constantly learning. You and I are in a classroom, we're in life's classroom, and the classroom teaches us, and it's unseen, invisible way. And it teaches us, you know, in all the ways that it teaches us through our unwanted habits, through our eating challenges. Oftentimes it's the wisdom of life. Maybe all the time. It's the wisdom of life that has put us on the healing journey.
And what I've noticed is if the healing journey is not opening up one's mind, one's heart, one's soul, then we're not getting the full benefit of the healing journey.
So you bet with my client, my friends, I'm listening for, I'm looking for, I'm holding space for the healing journey that they're on, and I'm looking to see how can I help my client conduct themselves in a more open way on this healing journey. How can I help them relax into their healing journey? How can I help them respect this healing journey? How can I help them love and honor themselves on this healing journey? How can I befriend them on this healing journey? How can I let them know? Yes, I know this is hard. This is a hard healing journey for you. You've been on a tough road, Mr. And Mr. Klein, I get it. And my job is, I'm here to walk alongside you. I'm gonna be cheerleading you. I'm gonna be coaching you, I'm gonna be doing my best to guide you, to mentor you, to give you the best advice and information and insights and suggestions that I possibly can. 'cause I wanna see you get where you want to go. I really do. I wanna see you get to the place where you can look in the mirror and smile and go, I feel so much better about myself. I feel so much better about my life. I feel like now I'm so much more of the real me and I'm on my path and I have myself.
So I'm always letting my client know through the thick and thin of it that my job is to walk alongside you. I'm here. Honestly, that's the kind of client I want. That's the kind of relationship I wish to be in.
So you help create the kinds of clients that show up by affirming to yourself the kind of relationship you wanna be in. If you just want clients that just wanna lose a bunch of pounds and you tell them what to do to lose a bunch of pounds, then hallelujah. Do that. Very frustrating, by the way. Not an easy job. Eat this, don't eat that. Exercise more and you're on your way. Um, not a very rewarding profession. So when I am in relationship with my client, such that, okay, I want to help you get where you wanna go, and we don't know what that's gonna look like, but we're gonna know more and more at each step of the way as we go along, we're gonna watch this mystery unfold. And I will do my best. I will use my best skills, my best insights to help you with this challenge.
You know, our clients often have a very clear and specific definition of what healing means for them. And usually hint, usually what it means for your client. It means the complete disappearance of their condition and a sense of living happily ever after. I don't binge eat anymore. I don't emotionally anymore. I don't overeat anymore. Uh, my appetite is always perfect. I never eat a single thing. I don't want to eat. I don't have a, a single complaint. And I got rid of every pound, every ounce from every place on every part of my body. The complete disappearance of whatever it is that I don't wanna have. And I live happily ever after. I love that story. And that is one of the worst aspects of our fairytales. And they lived happily ever after. Ouch. No, I have never met a set of humans who lived happily ever after. Doesn't happen. So one of our jobs is to help our clients redefine healing.
And when we redefine healing, that could, that can mean this, we will not look perfect. We will not always eat perfect. We might never a hundred percent eradicate our eating challenge. But you know something, we also might always have our health issues somewhere in the background to remind us to take good care of ourselves
because overeating or emotional eating or binge eating might come back to let us know, Hey, yeah, you had a stressful day and hey, yeah, you fell off the horse and hey, yeah, you're not a regular emotional eater anymore. But you know, it comes back sometimes. You're human. Congratulations, welcome to Earth. We're not perfect. Yeah, sometimes your digestive issue might clear up 75%, but you're gonna have to notice what you eat when you eat, how you eat, how fast you eat, because that's what life is asking you to do. So we're just accommodating to the wisdom of life, to the wisdom of the body, and we're doing our best to smile into our journey and say, okay, here's what I'm being tasked with with my body. Sometimes healing means we learn to live with a mind that can take us down the wrong road if we don't stay conscious. Well, yeah, you know, I, I was loving myself this week, but you know this, this last week, but then these last few days, I, I just, all of a sudden I'm just hating myself. Yeah. Okay, got it. And now we're learning how to return back to self-love. So what do we need to do? What actions do you need to take? What practices do you need to do that affirm love of self? Can you get back to now watching your mind and noticing when you start to take yourself into a bad neighborhood in your head and you start to self attack and self reject. Yeah. You fell off the horse for a number of days there and, and you were self rejecting and self attacking and self hating and now we're gonna return. So yeah, sometimes your mind's gonna go there and you're gonna have to remind your mind to come back. You have to learn to remember moments of wholeness. Remind, read dash mind means to change your mind. Sometimes we need to learn to live with a sensitive body and being, you know, something, some of us, some of you, you got a sensitive body. You got a sensitive soul. I love it. Hallelujah. Congratulations. Stop beating yourself up for that. Stop spanking yourself so hard because you have a sensitive body and a sensitive being. Celebrate it. Sensitive body and sensitive being means you are sensing things. It means you have a deep, deep, deep well of body intelligence and body wisdom and body feedback that is letting you know immediately what works for you and what doesn't. It means you are picking up on energies, feelings, thoughts, in your environment. It means you are picking up with, you're picking up on toxins in your body and you're noticing that. So yeah, would it be nice if you didn't have to deal with all that nonsense? Sure. But since you do have to deal with it, stop beating yourself up for it, celebrating it. It's actually a superpower to have a sensitive body and being, I wish more people had sensitive bodies and beings because then they would truly eat better for themselves. They would live better, they would act better, they would be aware of their energy, they would be aware of what they're broadcasting into the world.
Sometimes redefining healing. We learn to embrace our imperfections. We learn to embrace what we consider imperfections. You know, you might look at your body and judge it and sometimes healing means learning to, this is my body. This is what I look like. This is how tall I am. These are my hips, these are my breasts, these are my hands, these are my arms and legs and head. This is my hair, this is my skin, this is my shape. Sometimes that's what healing means, is just embracing that. Stop the fight. Stop the self attack. Sometimes healing means we welcome our eating or health challenge like an old friend.
Yeah. You know, it's, I occasionally overeat. I occasionally binge eat and to me it's like an old friend. Oh, there you are. Oh, why are you here today? Oh yeah, gosh, I had a lot of stress and I just used food to regulate my emotions. Wow. Looks like I ate a little too much. Ouch. That doesn't feel too good. Wow. I've been down that road before. Wow. Here it is again. Wow. Oh, a little bit of discomfort. Ugh, let me go take a walk. Let me go do a little exercise or let me just, just treat myself well and not self reject and smile and remember that this is an old friend coming back to visit and it's okay. I can still love myself and forgive myself.
Literally. You learn to do that. Your client learns to do that, and you have learned something. Oh, so powerful. You have given your clients something oh so powerful that is far worth the price of a admission times a hundred. I mean that you have to learn to see the value of what you do. The true value, the true, true, true, true, true value of what you do.
The true value of what you do is not just that you told somebody, eat this, don't eat that. The true value of what you do is not that. You just help somebody lose a bunch of pounds of body fat. There are many things you do with a client that has true value. You teach them, you help them learn how to love self more, to self accept more, to self forgive more, to stand by themselves more to re-inhabit their body and notice where they've abandoned it. Notice where they tend to abandon themselves. When you help somebody do that, you teach them a you. You are giving them a powerful life tool that, that we take into forevermore. What a great thing. So my friends, some final thoughts as we finish this conversation. As practitioners, we simply don't know when and if our client will get where they want to go. You don't know. You don't know, you don't know. It's okay. Live in that uncertainty, celebrate it. I know my client wants to get where they want to go, and they wanna know when they're gonna get where they want to go, and they wanna know how they get where, and I just let them have their their own mind and their own thoughts inside myself. I'm grounded. I'm relaxed because I know that I don't know when and if anyone will get where they wanna go because it's up to universal intelligence, you give it up to a higher power. We can't know for sure the thinking of the higher power that guides us. You don't know what life wants for us, what life has in store, what a higher wisdom has in store. We don't know for sure what healing looks like sometimes. We're simply here to help our clients take a few more steps on their journey, and that's your value. And that's okay. If you're letting go of fixing and letting go of being Superwoman or Superman, and we allow ourselves to be humble and we accept what our role is, then yeah, sometimes you're gonna hit the bullseye with a client and you're gonna be everything that they asked for and wish for, and they're gonna get everything that they wanted. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not happen. Oftentimes it does not happen. But what I want to teach my client to do, what I want to help my client at the very least do is begin to take steps in the right direction on their journey to help course correct them when they need to be course corrected. Yeah, sometimes we help them make a big leap forward. So let's just be open, let's be humble. Let's be grateful actually for the opportunity that we have to do this work and to serve others and to learn from it and to hopefully be supported by it financially, energetically, you know, in a good way that would help us, my friends. I hope this conversation was good for you. I hope it was helpful for you. Um, this is the end of architecture of healing. Part one, part two is next. Thank you. Thank you, thank you more to come.

PART 2

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, and your guide, your mentor, your friend on this journey to understand some of the beauties of eating psychology and MINDBODY Nutrition, how to use these to help other humans in the challenges that they face. And what a good time for us to continue our conversation about the architecture of healing. For most practitioners, the goal of the work with the client is to help them heal, to help relieve them of their unwanted symptom, their unwanted eating habit, their unwanted weight. This is oh, so noble, and it makes, oh, so much perfect sense. At the same time, one of the invisible roadblocks to healing and transformation is the way that both practitioners and clients define healing and success. Typically, people think of healing as the total complete absence of any disease or symptom or unwanted behavior. We tend to think of weight loss success as the loss of the precise amount or more of the weight we wanted to lose. So we will continue our redefinition and expansion of what healing and success can actually look like. You know, I am so invested and so passionate about this thing called healing, this thing called transformation, this thing called personal growth, and how they all seem to intersect and are oftentimes one in the same.
I was able to help heal my asthma, my autoimmune disease, uh, with nutrition from a very early age. Once I started realizing that I had the power, that when I started to manipulate my diet, when I started to let go of junk food, and I was learning more and more what junk food meant, and I was learning more and more, you know, in the, in the 1960s and the 1970s, what healthy food meant.
It was just a revelation for me. And I felt, oh, so empowered. And, you know, the one place where I didn't have much success with healing was with my stuttering. So, you know, close to the age of 12, 13, I was still a pretty intense stutterer. And it started to occur to me that nutrition wasn't going to do it. And I was somehow imagining that there was something wrong with my brain because that's what people were saying. And there was something, something, something in the inside of me. And if nutrition was so successful with asthma, if it was so successful with my joint pain, with my autoimmune condition, then surely I can find the right vitamins, the right minerals, or the right way to eat that would get rid of my stuttering. And, and I hit a wall. And then I started to ask myself the question, well, what else heals? And I remember when I thought about that question, it was sort of a revelatory question because I realized that I had gotten locked into thinking that nutrition alone was the healer, because I was so excited about it, because it worked for me, because I had success with it. So here I was thinking, okay, I need to think differently. And one day I had a thought, and it was a pretty interesting thought, and the thought was this, uh, once a year, my school, my high school had a big rally. So I was in junior high school, but we shared, you know, junior high school, high school, same building. So we had a big rally and there's about 1200 students, kids in the junior high school slash high school. And, you know, different speakers, different kids come up and say different things, and a few teachers and one of the football coaches, basketball coach for the rally. And I asked my guidance counselor, I'll never forget him, Mr. Wally Setoff, I asked him if I could give a talk in front of 1200 students. Now, by the way, when I asked him to do that, I stuttered every word nine times while he said off my guidance counselor I felt very comfortable with, he was a special man. He was kind of an angel for me. He was one of the very few humans outside my own family who I think understood that I was a smart kid. And he understood that there was more to me than a stutterer, uh, indeed, because I did very well in school. And indeed because I did very well at athletics. And he just, he would look at me. And even though other adults when they heard me stutter, it was very difficult for them. They would have a pained look on his, on their face. Uh, my guidance counselor would look at me with just a lot of love and a lot of compassion, and I could feel it. So I felt safe with him when I asked him. I could speak in front of the student assembly. I remember the look on his face like, you're crazy. And, but he smiled and he laughed, and he didn't say the words, you're crazy. But he sort of made those grunts and groans, uh, with a big smile. And he said, whatever you want, I think it's a fascinating idea, and I'll make it happen for you. So sure enough, I'm on the docket, I'm on the list of, you know, a small handful of students who get to get up on stage for a few minutes at the rally. And I had decided I was going to talk about, ugh, I don't even know, world peace and coming together of the different religions. And, you know, at the time, that was an interesting, edgy, unusual topic. Religions and nations getting along with each other, apparently. So, so really what I had decided to do was I was very clear. I had the notion that what's my biggest fear in life? My biggest fear wasn't of speaking. My biggest fear was speaking in public. It was fearful enough for me to speak in, speak in front of a small group of people who didn't know me. But to speak in public would be my biggest fear in the universe by far and away, because I'm increasing the amount of people who could ridicule me. Well, sure enough, here comes the day, here comes the moment. There's 1200 people assembled. And for some reason, I really was imagining that if I faced my biggest fear, that that somehow that would be good, that that's as far as I could imagine. I was compelled to do it. I was inspired to do it. And despite the, the fear that was coursing through my system, whenever I thought about it, I just knew I had to make it happen. So here I was, I had my piece of paper. I pretty much memorized the, the three, four minute speech that I'm going to make. And I think when I walked up on stage, 'cause kids and teachers at school knew I was a stutterer and people were kind of shocked. And I get up on stage and I remember I was so nervous. My legs were shaking. I thought I was gonna fall over. And the four minutes of my speech went by. I don't remember a lot of it. What I do remember was that I was thinking I wasn't stuttering and I was focused and there was a power coming through me, and I was shockingly nervous the whole time, but I was breathing and doing everything I could to not stutter and to deliver this speech and to, and to actually deliver it in a passionate way. So it was making sense to people. And when I finished, there was a ton of applause. And I remember I was walking down from the stage. Couple of my teachers, they were, they were crying, and I didn't even know why they were crying. I think they were just really moved at, at what had just happened. Uh, and from that moment on, my life was changed. From that moment on, my stuttering was changed. I would say starting the next day, I stuttered maybe an eighth of what I did. So instead of studying, studying every stuttering, every word, 8, 9, 10 times, I would stutter every sixth or seventh or eighth word, one or two times. I could now speak. I could now have a conversation. I was now an embarrass. I was no longer an embarrassment to myself. And I had pushed through, I had gotten through some, some invisible barrier. And I remember thinking, I'm healed.
I was still stuttering, but I knew I was on the road. I knew something had happened. And what I realized was that healing meant so much more than what I put into my body. That was, that was just a, it was such an unusual concept. Healing meant more than drugs. Healing meant more than surgery. I had no idea.
So my friends we're redefining what healing is, and we're ongoingly doing that.
Healing is self-love. Plain and simple. When a human being can drop into even a moment, my friends, a moment of self-love for the first time,
loving yourself in a place where you didn't love yourself before something happens.
What I believe is there's a very deep relaxation that happens in the system. There's a deep recognition, there is a deep synthesis that that deep level relaxation response brings. My postulation is just as extreme stress can cause a human being. To have post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, intense digestive issues, intense fatigue, intense mood swings, intense emotional issues, uh, intense weight issues, um, just a, a, um, intense immune issues. It's, it's, the list goes on of what post-traumatic stress could do. So just as one intense, powerful, stressful experience can damage us to the core, an intense powerful experience of self love can potentially heal us to the core.
A moment, a period, a time, a practice where we start to embrace self and we let go of the fight. You know, similar to that is, is self-acceptance. Self-acceptance by itself is healing
because it's the opposite of self attack.
Self attack equals perception of attack. Perception of attack leads to a wise stress response because we feel we are under attack. And that stress response can lock in any unwanted symptom or any unwanted eating behavior.
As we begin to self accept, we change our chemistry, we change our brain, we change our soul. Healing can mean forgiveness and forgiveness. Oftentimes it means forgiving ourselves for whatever you think you did, whatever you think you're doing wrong, whatever, however you think you're not worthy. However you think you should have been born, you should have showed up. However you think you should look like there's a part of us humans that often holds our ourself hostage.
Once again, that is a very difficult posture to hold, to hold oneself as unforgiven means. We're constantly holding the keys to the prison. We're constantly sentencing ourselves and judging ourselves and punishing ourselves and enacting out the punishment. Because if you are holding yourself or another as unforgiven, then punishment lives inside of us. We'll have to punish self or other in some way. When we live in punishment, once again, we live in stress chemistry, beginning to see that there's no one to hold hostage creates a shift. Healing is seeing a bigger perspective.
Literally changing your mind and seeing your life from a bigger perspective. Oh, there's a bigger per perspective for me for healing. Healing doesn't just happen by me manipulating my diet. Healing might mean me facing a deeper fear that I hadn't even thought about facing because it was so fearful to me, that's a bigger perspective. A bigger perspective might be that, oh, my parents were just people too, and they were trying their best and their best wasn't quite good enough for me and it harmed me. And now perhaps it might be time to let that go and move out of my parents' house, metaphorically speaking and move forward. A bigger perspective on healing can mean that
this disease, this symptom, this challenge is here to teach me. It's here to help me grow.
A bigger perspective might mean that my food issue is more than just about food.
A bigger perspective might be that I need to
Tap into my creativity In order For me to help heal my body. So there's any number of possibilities. Healing is claiming life. Healing is claiming your right to be here. Healing is claiming that I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna live in this world. I'm not gonna abandon myself. I'm not gonna walk around half asleep. I'm not going to just sit on the sidelines of my own life.
I'm not going to wait until I lose weight, eat better, feel better, look different
to be who I truly am.
That's claiming life, healing my friends is speaking the truth.
Truth really does set us free. It really truly sets us free.
Now, as we know, the truth isn't really the truth unless it's spoken with some love.
You know, if my kid is learning how to read and my kid's not reading very well and my kid's falling behind, I wouldn't say to my kid, you're falling behind all the other kids. You are not reading. Well, this isn't working. I can't believe what a dumb kid you are. Well, I'm kind of speaking the truth. You're falling behind in your reading, but man, there's no love there.
Speaking the truth with love would sound like, wow, reading is magic. And this is coming as a little bit of a challenge for you. But you know what? We're gonna meet this challenge. We're gonna work even harder because you're gonna be able to do this. You're gonna be a great reader and I'm gonna help you, and your teacher's gonna help you, and we're gonna work on this. And there's gonna be so much fun. A little bit work, but it's gonna be some fun.
So learning to speak the truth with love in it, some truths are very difficult.
We can still speak the truth with love. Another way of saying that is speaking the truth without love ain't quite the truth. Takes away from it. Speaking the truth with love. And consciousness can be very healing
because the world wants truth. Humans want truth. The heart wants truth. The soul wants truth. Honey, what are you really? What are you really feeling? What are you really thinking? What's really happening for you in relationship? We really want to know the truth. Even when it hurts, it's a part of us that wants to know the truth.
Sometimes we're feeling how we feel and we're afraid to feel how we feel because we are afraid that other people will reject us or not like us for feeling how we feel. And if we can speak the truth, that by itself is healing. And if we can speak the truth and still be loved, that's even more healing.
You know, closely related to speaking, the truth is being authentic, being the real you, not the pretend you, not the pretend you who you think people want to see and hear. You know, we often learn at a young age that, okay, if I act like this and be like this, people like me.
If I present myself in a certain way, if I'm super funny, then everybody likes me, even though I don't actually care to be that funny. Uh, if I'm really nice to everyone, then they're going to overlook the fact that they're telling me how fat I am and I need to lose weight.
If I show up as being an overachiever and I'm pushing through, then my parents will love me and they'll stop judging me.
So we often learn to be somebody different from who we are and being our authentic self. Hmm, that's a, that's a beautiful one. Who are you Really Authenticity. Vitamin A is a power. Healing is reconnecting to a greater source. Healing is reconnecting to that which created you. Healing is reconnecting to a greater power. Healing is reconnecting to a higher code and remembering the truth that we're not alone, we're not unlovable. And indeed we are lovable as we are.
That's healing. Healing is letting go of anything that long, no longer serves us. It's hard 'cause we get attached. You could be in a relationship that you know ought to end. It's no longer serving you. But it's hard oftentimes to leave a relationship, even if it's toxic and it's difficult. It's kind of like pulling out a splinter. When you have a splinter, ouch, it hurts. And there's a moment when you pull out the splinter. It actually hurts even more than leaving the splinter in. But once that puppy is out, you feel a lot better. And the healing process can truly start to happen. So letting go of anything that no no longer serves us. It could be a relationship, it could be a job, it could be a habit, it could be a way of life. It could be people that we hang out with a person.
It could be a way that we eat. It could be a food that we eat. It could be a drug that we do.
It could be a thought that we think healing is letting go of anything that no longer serves us. Healing is relaxing more into life. I get that your life is stressful. I get that there's things to be afraid of. I get that there's things to worry about. I get that there's some challenges and sometimes there's even some damn hard challenges.
And I get that you've probably had to overcome a lot of challenges and you'd love to be on cruise control a little bit, but you can't because of work, because of kids, because of relationship, because of money, because of responsibilities,
because of the people that you're taking care of.
It's hard to relax into that. But we can. And when we can relax more into life, even a little, that's a little bit more relaxation response. That's a little bit more parasympathetic. Nervous system dominance, which is the state where all literal healing, maintenance, and repair of body tissue actually happens.
There is a empathetic nervous system dominance, my friends, please remember that this should be headline news in every medical textbook. Here's where healing happens. You never hear that. I had to dig into just physiology textbooks like, oh my God, you'll learn about disease in a medical education, you don't really learn about the healing system of the body, the healing process of the body. You don't learn much about that. Pound for pound, the majority of medical textbooks are, are looking at the disease state.
We haven't gone into the healing journey because it takes us to some interesting places. Healing is loving ourselves into changing transformation rather than hating ourselves into it. You know this, by now, I'm reminding you of this. I'm reminding you to remind your clients of this. This is an intellectual and intervention that you're going to do with them. Because I'm going to guess that a vast majority of the clients that you see tend to be
disliking themselves into change and transformation.
They might be hating themselves where they are right now, but they're gonna love themselves when they're different. I, I hate you now, but I'm gonna love you when you're different. Imagine saying that to your partner. You say that to yourself. Imagine saying that to your kid. It's awful. Loving ourselves and to change relaxes the body. You know what happens? Healing is learning to create and claim good, good boundaries. My friends, a lot of my clients are learning how to create good boundaries. Good boundaries at work, boundaries around their time. Boundaries around being able to say no. Some of us are yes people. We constantly say yes to everything when we don't really wanna do it. 'cause you wanna be a good boy and you wanna be a good girl, and you say yes, and then you end up resenting the person you said yes to. You end up resenting the situation you said yes to. 'cause you realize you really didn't wanna say yes, but you said yes because you wanted to be liked or loved or accepted, or you said yes because that's your habit. Because if I'm a yes guy or a yes gal, then people love me.
And that might make up for all the ways I don't love myself and all the ways I judge myself and my body.
So a lot of times healing happens when we're able to better use the word no or no thank you or not today, or No, I don't wanna do that, or No, I don't want to go out with you, or No, I don't want to eat that meal with you because that's not so good for me to eat.
Or no, I don't wanna talk about this particular subject. Whatever it's healing is. Seeing our past through the eyes of love and consciousness. Ouch. We don't always do that. So much of my work with a client is helping them fall in love with their story and fall in love with their journey at the very least to start to honor it and respect it at the very least, to start to see the goodness in it, at the very least, to start to see how it has been the muck and the fertilizer that has helped them become the person they are today in the positive. Because no matter how much my client isn't liking themselves based on their body or their shape, or their weight, or their eating challenge, no matter how much they're self rejecting, there are the places where they're doing something right? There's the places where they excel, there's the places where they have their gifts.
And I wanna do my best to notice what those are and point it out to my client and let them know that those gifts are oftentimes a product of the very challenges that they've been going through.
So much of what we're here to do with a client is to help them. Story healing is being more accepting of life on life's own terms. I got my terms. I know how I want life to be. I know what I want the universe to deliver. I know what I want and I want what I want when I want it. I know how I want people to act.
I know how I want the universe to deliver the goodies for me. And when I can finally let go of my demands on life and my demands on the universe, and when I can finally let go of being a victim because the universe has not met my demands, healing is possible, my friends, just the simple act of growing and maturing and aging like a fine wine. So you begin to use your years and extract the wisdom from it and learn from every single challenge you faced. That's healing. Let's talk about some common healing fallacies. I think this is very important. There's a lot of healing fallacies out there. Number one, healing happens to the person who is sick. Believe it or not, that's a healing fallacy. Healing happens to the person who is sick. So if somebody's sick and they come to see me, then healing happens to that person. And that may very well be true. So, so, so, so many times it's far more than that. So, so many times when my client heals, their partner heals When my client heals, their child heals. When my client heals their relationship with their husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend heals. So many times when my client heals their relationship with their mother or father or, or both parents heals
and who knows how we are impacting the other people in our environment who we may not be as close and intimate with, but they still orbit in our field and they can feel us. So yes, healing happens to the person who is sick, but it also happens. People transform when the person they're closely connected to transforms. It's a beautiful thing to watch.
Yet another common healing fallacy is that healing is the absence of pain or discomfort. You know, my friend, sometimes healing means living to learn with the pain. It means living to learn with living. Learning to live with the discomfort doesn't mean giving up. Sometimes there are certain pains and discomforts that life is just asking us to hang with for a while. Maybe not forever, but for right now it's here. So it's time to be with it.
I remember when I was growing up, I had a friend, um, a boy who lived in my apartment building. He had cerebral palsy and he walked on crutches and he was, he, he had a very hard time really walking on crutches because his feet didn't have much strength or much mobility, but he was doing everything he could to learn how to walk on these crutches. And we would, all the kids would be playing in the playground and he would be out there on his crutches, just kind of hanging out, watching the kids cheering us on. And, and, uh, pretty much every day at some point he would be walking with his crutches from point A to point B and he would just collapse and fall on the ground. And there was a rule that he had told us that his parents had told us, which is, whenever Ira falls on the ground, you can't help him get up. He has to learn how to get up himself. And what would happen was all the kids would gather around him in a circle when he fell down. And we would watch him struggle and I mean struggle. And it was uncomfortable to watch. A lot of times we'd watch him struggle to get up and we would urge him on and we would cheerlead him on it was the sweetest thing. And he'd be crying and he'd be laughing at the same time. And I look back on it and it was such a healing experience because everybody was rooting for him. Uh, it was this beautiful moment, you know, kids could be pretty mean, but wow, would we pull for this kid? Uh, and we would urge him and we'd all be laughing with him. And, and, and healing doesn't just mean the absence of pain. Sometimes healing means being with that pain and that discomfort because something can come out of that when we be with that. He was, he was learning how to help himself get up.
You know, we often think that the person who is sick has to do the healing. And you know, that makes sense. I really believe that the person who is sick as best as possible, you know, should do whatever they can to do the healing.
But many times when we look around and we understand that our health conditions, there are health constellations and these things are shared. Wouldn't it be interesting when we begin to look at, okay, somebody in my sphere is ill, they have an eating challenge or they're sick. What do I do? What's my responsibility in that? Meaning, how do I respond to that?
Because oftentimes it's the people around us who it's their job to step up. It's their job to follow their calling and their guidance. It's their job to look at where they need to be more responsible, where they need to make a shift, whatever that might be. Because it just might so be that when another person in the field starts to do their work, the person who is sick, the person who has the eating challenge, uh, can begin to heal in a whole different way.
I was once working with a client, a young woman who had a very intense eating disorder. She was quite bulimic and it was a very deep struggle she'd been needing in and out of rehab and nothing was really helping. She intensely hated her body. And when I started to see her, I of course want to know about her family system. She's now in college, but it's her, you know, freshman year in college. So she's fresh out of the house and as it turns out, she's been mostly raised by her mother. And her mother is quite the professional and, um, quite well-known or successful in her field. And the mom's a wonderful lady and she travels around the world and is hardly around for her daughter. And when they are around each other, the mother is very clear and specific about how her daughter, my client needs to show up how she needs to do this, that, and the other thing to step into her greatness and how as she wants to follow in her mother's footsteps and her mother is, is quite the accomplished woman she wants to follow in her mother's footsteps. Here's what you need to do. And I began to see that my client didn't want to follow in her mother's footsteps. What she wanted was for her mother to be her mother and just love on her and just support her and just love her for who she was. She didn't want to focus on what she needed to accomplish in the world. She didn't, she truly didn't wanna follow in her mother's footsteps. And she didn't quite wanna say that to her mother. 'cause she didn't wanna disappoint her mother. She would say it in ways that she would think her mom would hear her, but her mom wouldn't. And I started working with the mother and I was able to bring that to the front of things and tell her, Hey, here's where I think the action is for your daughter. And I said, I think you can make a huge difference in her life by just showing up for her and letting go of designing her career, letting go of designing her intellectual and her financial life and letting go of her follow in your footsteps. Who knows, maybe that'll happen someday. But what would it be like if, for you mother of client, what would it be like for you if you can take six months and just pretend that your job with your daughter is just to love her and spend time with her and see what she wants to do. See what would be fun for her? See what would be nurturing for her. Well, in that six months, this young woman who had intense bulimia, it was dramatically transformed dramatically.
And honestly, she didn't do, my client didn't do a heck of a lot of work. It was the mom who did the work,
and the client was dramatically healed. She still was bulimic, but it was instead of 25 times a week, it's now down to once a week. That's phenomenal. And that was because the mother did work.
Another common healing fallacy. I cause my illness and I am therefore to blame ouchies, my friends. That's a hard one. I cause my illness and I am therefore to blame. There's a lot of this that goes on. Um, it, it's a challenging one because we do need to take responsibility for our illness. Our dis-ease our symptom, our unwanted eating challenge. Taking responsibility isn't about blame. Taking responsibility doesn't mean I did this,
my friends, you could be living in a polluted area and come down with asthma or lung cancer because you live in a polluted environment. You didn't cause your issue.
You can have cancer and yeah, maybe you were stressed out. Yeah, maybe you were in sleep and yeah, maybe you worked hard. Yeah, maybe you didn't eat perfect. I don't know that you caused your cancer, but we can be responsible for it. We can respond to it. When we start to blame, we bring ourselves down. When we start to blame, that's another form of self attack. It disempowers us. It is not fair. It is not fair to you if you're self-blaming, if your client is self-blaming. It is not fair. Now, sometimes we do need to look back at our habits and we do need to see, okay, how might I have contributed to this?
How might I change my behaviors, habits, ways of thinking into the future that is different than I cause this,
I don't know that anyone sits around waiting to cause their illness.
We can do things that contribute to it and and we can respond once we have it.
But if you and your client, if all of us can let go of the self blame, then we can get some work done, then we can move forward, then we can move forward without draining any more energy. Self-blame drains energy. Self-blame takes the wind out of our wings. It doesn't do anybody any good. Another healing fallacy is, somebody else caused my illness. My mother did this to me. My father did this to me.
These people who fed me all this junk did this to me. Whatever it is, the person who hurt me did this to me. And you know, sometimes there might be a truth in that, that someone else had a hand in causing my illness. You can be in a hospital and something happens where a medical profession, medical professional does the wrong thing and they might cause an issue out of their mistake. And still at some point we need to let go of blame. And still at some point we need to take responsibility. Another common healing fallacy is just fix me. Just let me find the right doctor, the right practitioner who's just gonna fix me. And you know something, sometimes you just might find the right practitioner who diagnoses you correctly and helps get you where you need to go. So sometimes that does happen for sure. But when we come from the place with whatever illness or challenge we have is just fix me. Just fix me. Please. Just fix me. Please just fix me. We lose power. We let go of responsibility, our ability to respond to the condition that we have and therefore we are not truly growing. And when we don't truly grow, we don't fulfill our end of the equation called personal power equals metabolic power. So the more you infuse yourself with personal growth, self evolution, insight, consciousness, awareness, taking responsibility, that's personal power. The more you put yourself into the sweetest part of the probability curve for the other part of the equation, metabolic power. Another healing fallacy is that healing happens exclusively inside the body. So if you want to heal that which is going on in the body, you have to do something in the body. So, okay, so if the body has cancer, then we need to do the chemotherapy, the radiation, the diet, the operation. And that all may be true, might very well be true. And there are some cases, and there are probably millions of stories out there when healing happens through some other means, healing happens because we had a shift. We see the world different. We forgive someone. Healing happens because we have an epiphany.
People will literally have spontaneous remissions of cancer and other dis diseases. They're inexplicable.
It's good to respect that. It's good to expand our awareness of what is really possible when it comes to healing
more common healing fallacies. Healing requires an expert or a specialist. If I could just find the smartest guy or the smartest gal out there, they're gonna know what to do. I just need to find Mr. And Mrs. Smarty. And once again, sometimes that is true, but it doesn't mean it is true all the time. Healing does not necessarily require that you find an expert or specialist. It doesn't mean you don't look for them, it doesn't mean you don't take your advice. It doesn't mean you don't try out 20 different ones. But once again, healing might come from somewhere else. I'm sure you've had healing stories in your own life or you know, people who healed without an expert or a specialist.
My grandparents, they did that. You know, my grandparents lived into their eighties and their nineties. Um, they did a lot of healing on their own and not a lot of experts. Um, here's another one that I see oftentimes in the, in the spiritual communities that people who are quote unquote enlightened, don't experience disease. If you're a perfect master, if you're a guru, if you meditate enough and you purify yourself and you get rid of all your, I don't know, your bad karma and you become enlightened, you don't get disease. Hmm, interesting. Every guru I know is dead.
And the ones that aren't dead will die. So, and they'll die of something. So no matter how enlightened we are, no matter how special we are, no matter how much we meditate or do yoga or eat the most enlightened diet, the end result is likely death.
It's good to remember that. So people who are enlightened surely experience dis-ease and discomfort and harm. It's okay. It's just the way it is. Another healing fallacy is healing means somehow fixing and overcoming my, my past. There are some people who are fixated on fixing their past. They're focused on their past in large part correctly, because they understand that there was a booboo and a wound and a harm that happened in the past.
So it makes sense that we kind of do our best to metabolize the past. And, you know, something, my friends, sometimes that's a great, a great healing strategy. Sometimes we do have to do a little bit of time travel and, and understand our past history and overcome something to heal. But not always. 'cause the thing that happened in the past for many, many, many, many, many people, healing happens in the present.
I had a client who had chronic digestive disorders, uh, chronic digestive discomfort, she had irritable bowel syndrome. She had on and off issues with weight gain and emotional eating. And she had gone through a lot of medical intervention and she had gone through years of psychotherapy. And it was very clear to her and her practitioners that it was her past history of being raped when symptomology first began. And here she is, she's in her early forties, and the rape happened when she was a teenager, and it was very traumatic for her. And that's when her digestive issues started, and that's when her emotional eating started, and that's when her weight gain started to happen. And after many years of psychotherapy, she still hasn't been able to overcome her past. And when I first started working with her, so I was one of those people that she's trying out to see if she could do something different, whatever different is, she had no idea what that was. And quite frankly, neither did I. And what I learned briefly over, you know, the first three or four sessions with her was she was so focused on fixing this past event and she'd already spent 20 plus years, oh, close to 20 plus years, trying to do that in a therapeutic way. And is she a better person? Oh, for sure. Um, but she hasn't gotten the healing that she's been looking for because she's still somehow trying to make that event. I don't know what to, to, to somehow det traumatize from that event. And what I started suggesting to her was, well, let's try a different way now just for the heck of it, just because this way that you've been doing hasn't been working. Instead of focusing on the past, let's take the past for the next year. For the next year, let's put your past aside and let's just focus on the present. And literally, let's just focus on the present. Let's focus on you healing and transforming yourself in the now. So in order for you to start to heal this, let's start to explore that. What does that mean? You're extremely uncomfortable with men. You don't trust men. Okay? How do we start trusting men? Now, how do you date? How do you have a conversation? How do you set boundaries? How do you find men who would be suitable for you to date? How do you determine who is safe for you? Oh, you're not ready to do that. Okay. How do we introduce you to healing touch? Oh, you've never had healing and transformational body work. You can afford psychotherapy, then you can afford transformational body work where if you're comfortable, you have a woman work on you and start to take in touch. And and this was huge for her.
So yes, the offense happened in the past for her, but the healing for her had to happen in the now, at least the next phase. Another common healing fallacy is that every ailment has a biological cause that needs to be uncovered. We have to figure out the cellular mechanism, the genetic way that this is impacting you. We just need to alter the gene, find the right drug, find the right treatment, and you will be healed. Yep, that's true. When it's true, it's not. When it's not. For some reason I'm being punished. That's another healing strategy. Another healing fallacy. Excuse me. For some reason I'm being punished. A lot of people think that a lot of people walk around with that. It is in part the reasoning of the child's mind within us. Because yeah, when you were indeed punished by parents or adults, it didn't feel good. And usually there's a reason that you got punished whether it was a justifiable reason or not. So if I'm male, if I'm sick, if I have an eating challenge, if I have a body that I don't want, it is easy to think this is a punishment. And what I would like to say to you is that it, that is completely erroneous thinking. To think that is a punishment is an interesting religion. That's a religion you are believing in a hidden architecture of the universe that's punishing you. It's time for a different religion. And perhaps a better religion would be this experience, this disease, this unwanted eating challenge is here to teach me. I'm here to use this for my personal growth. I'm here to use this muck as fertilizer to help me become a better person.
Another healing fallacy. Healing means I need to be more balanced. Balanced is an interesting word. A lot of people say, oh, I just wanna be more balanced usually, and this might be strange to you, usually the people that use the word balance a lot, I often find are too balanced. And they're too hooked on being balanced. And oftentimes what they need is to go a little while. Um, but in general, yes, many of us need to be more balanced in our lives. Balanced is a tricky word.
I would prefer you use the word more conscious. I would prefer to use the word more aware. I would prefer one uses the term. I need to be more tapped into my body wisdom. Because body wisdom will ask you to do what body wisdom wants. Sometimes body wisdom wants balance. Sometimes it does not healing fallacy. Someday there will be a drug for this. I wanna bang myself, bang my head against the wall. Every time I hear this and I hear, someday science will figure this out.
And I've been hearing that honestly since the early 1960s when I was a kid reading kid science magazines. There will be a drug for this. Science will figure this out. And, and sure, we wanna believe that. And that's okay. And that's fine. Healing happens in the now. We worship drugs as, and we're taught to worship drugs. You didn't invent that. The world invented that. The media invented that. We, the drug companies spend a lot of money asserting their authority and their brilliance and their genius. And I think it's a little bit unfounded. I don't want you to wait for a drug or wait for a genetic breakthrough in order for you to continue on your healing journey in order for your client to continue on their healing journey. Let's move on my friends. Let's talk about you and your client. A lot of times our clients are demanding. A lot of times our clients are strong. A lot of times our client knows what they know and they want what they want. And if you find yourself getting pulled into your client's stress and their demands for a fix, I want you to sound the internal alarm. If you find yourself being bullied in any way by your client, and if you're getting smaller in relation to their demand, your job is to grow. Your job is to get bigger. Your job is to reclaim your power. Your job is to stop being bullied. And your job is to be become an empowered practitioner.
You have to be in a seat of power with your client. You have to stay in your queen's chair or your king's chair. Don't get pulled into your client's anxiety and their fear and their demands for a fix. I know you wanna help them. I know they want help, but there are clients out there who will be happy to bully you because they're paying you. It's kind of like somebody in a restaurant who is just an impossible client in a restaurant and they complain about everything and they send everything back and they're never happy. And they, and they make everybody else at the dinner table. It just makes it an uncomfortable affair because they always do that and they're bullying the waiter and they're bullying the kitchen. And indeed, there are clients out there who actually do have a stronger ego than you and me. They might even have more money than you and me, and they're clear I'm paying you. They don't necessarily say that, but that's the energy that they're coming forward with. So don't worry about losing a client because you can actually serve your client in a big way. Whenever my client is making a demand, first of all, inside myself, I don't tighten up. I don't resist them. I don't fight them back. I don't see it as a fight. And when I tell you to grow, get bigger and reclaim your power, that doesn't mean you are asserting yourself against them. It's the opposite. I'm actually getting closer to my client. By me getting bigger and I mean bigger in my energy and claiming my power, I'm being more intimate with them.
Bullies need a lot of intimacy.
Bullies actually need some closeness because that's why oftentimes, oftentimes they're bullied. They're a little wounded, they're insecure, and they're afraid, and they don't want you to see that. So what mask do they put on? They put on the mask of a bully. And your client is freaked out about, chances are they're overeating, their binge eating, and they're emotion eating their weight, their hate of their own body. They're coming to see you. They're paying you, they want results.
So you have to learn how to notice that, and you have to learn how to first intervene inside your own skin and then to do an intellectual intervention with your client. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, listen, I totally get it. I totally get it. I totally get it. You wanna know something? I've been in your shoes. I've been in your shoe before where I'm going to see a practitioner. And quite frankly, I want what I want. And if I'm paying somebody money, I want results. If I'm paying somebody money, I want help. I want the fix. So I'm with you here. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Mr. And Mrs. Client, you can't force the hand of the universe. You can't force the hand of life, you can't force the hand of biology. I am going to do my best to help you. Life has its own agenda as to when we heal, when we lose weight, when our eating issue is transformed. So I'm gonna work with you and I'm gonna do everything I know I'm gonna give you my best stuff. But if you are standing here over me with a big stick, wanting to hit me over the head or hit someone else over the head or hit life over the head, and if you're trying to make the universe conform To your humble demands, I don't know that that's the best strategy because it hasn't gotten you where you wanna go, because here you are. I think in a way what needs to happen is you need to relax more around this challenge. Because right now what I'm sensing is you want this to happen yesterday. You want this weight off yesterday, you want this emotional leaning gone yesterday. You wanna get fixed yesterday. And I totally get it. But the more you push and the more you force, the more stress you're in. And stress means stress chemistry. That means sympathetic nervous system dominance. And when you are in sympathetic nervous system dominance, a low level stress response, you're changing your biochemistry, you're increasing your cortisol and insulin, those are signaling your body likely to store weight, store fat and not build muscle, which is the opposite of what you want. Those same stress hormones caused by you running outta time and wanting this thing to happen right now really fast and trying to twist the arm of the universe that that that same stress response is also deregulating your appetite. Because that's what it does. Because in a True re stress response in the jungle, you don't need to be in touch with your appetite. You need to have all your energy going into fighting or fleeing and survival. So we need to change your body chemistry. And in order to change your body chemistry, you need to change your brain. In order to change your brain, you need to change how you're seeing things. That's how I see it. So if this relationship is gonna be successful, and I want it to be, I want it to be, and I'm confident I can help you, but we need to be partners in this. I'm gonna need you to follow my lead. I'm gonna need you to not be a bully. I'm gonna need you to be a little more patient. It doesn't mean you don't ask questions, it doesn't mean you don't tell me what you want. What it means is that I might rave my hand when I see you not staying in your lane. And the lane I want you to stay in is you relaxing into this challenge. Because if you relax into this challenge, you know what that does? It puts you more in parasympathetic nervous system dominance. That is the state under which we optimally digest, assimilate, and calorie burn on a day in, day out basis. That's the state under which you have, I have all humans have their most natural appetite regulation. So that's my little intervention. An example of that with a client. And I'm real easy, I'm real cool about it. They wanna walk out. They will. Has that ever happened To me? Eh, not really. I, I, I've seen a lot Of clients and I've confronted a lot of clients because I've probably mentioned to you at some point, um, actually early on in my profession, and for many years I had a high-end clientele who had money. And people with money have demands, people with money, uh, they want to spend it wisely and they want what they want and that's totally their prerogative as they should.
And I want them to have what they want. And I know that being a bully and bullying me, a practitioner who's here to help them isn't gonna get them where they want to go, that's for sure. So I've had this conversation, oh, so many times, okay? So for so many clients who are bullying, that's the attitude and the worldview that needs to be healed. That's the immaturity. That needs to be matured. That's the part of their character that needs to grow. So really, I'm looking at that as one of the contributors to their, their attitude about I'm in control and I'm paying you and you need to make this happen. You need to make me lose weight. You need to make me do this. You need to make this happen. You need to come up with the right diet, you need to do this, Mr. Practitioner. It's that very attitude on some level, on some level that's likely contributing to whatever condition they're dealing with. So you have to be very clear about your role.
You are calling people into consciousness. You're calling people into maturity. You need to help disabuse your client of the notion that they are entitled to have it exactly the way they want things from the universe. You didn't make up that rule that they're not entitled life made up that rule. None of us are entitled to anything. It's the sense of entitlement that oftentimes locks us into suffering. Do you ever have somebody in your life that they're, that, that they just act entitled, it's hard to be around them and their world gets a little small and they spin a lot of people off, meaning they have a lot of people that it's like there's entitlement is like spraying yourself with people repellent. It doesn't attract others, it sends them away. So in other words, feel free and don't be afraid to lose a client who is not a match for you. It's totally okay because you are teaching yourself and you are making an agreement with the universe about how you wish to be and how you wish to work. Okay? For many people, the healing that wants to happen. So here we are redefining healing. For many people, the healing that wants to happen comes from patience, is healing. I mean that it is literally a medicine for so many people to learn Patience. Patience is a virtue, virtues heal. Patience, I I I'm calling, it's literally like a medicine for your system. It's like a drug that you can't go wrong with for so many people, patients, in a lot of ways, it's a higher level relaxation. It is truly a virtue. Humility is truly a virtue.
We are so, so many people are so freaked out and so upset about their body shape and their body weight
that they haven't taken the opportunity to let it humble them.
And humble, humbling oneself doesn't mean you are less than. Uh, humility happens in the eyes of the universe. It, it's, it's, it's, that's an experience between you and a greater power between you and a higher power between you and God, you and a higher code. Humility is something you do in the privacy of your own skin and inside your own heart and soul where you realize, I'm not always gonna get what I want. I'm not entitled. This is the body I have, this is what I'm given.
Can we embrace that with humility? That's a virtue and it's healing.
Healing is letting go of the false notion of control, which means relaxing into life, letting go of the idea that we could control persons, places, things, et cetera. Healing is listening and honoring the disease or the symptom or unwanted habit.
Healing is listening to and honoring the disease or the symptom or the unwanted habit that by itself is healing. Instead of fighting it, instead of attacking it, instead of beating it over the head with a stick, we stop and we listen. We stop and we embrace. We stop and we notice, we call a cease fire and we begin a dialogue. That's how peace happens. That's how peace happens between warring tribes. Somebody calls a ceasefire and then people start listening to each other. You gotta do that in the comfort of your own brain. You know, sometimes your job, my job as practitioners is to be a Trojan horse of healing. Can you be clear enough about your role and your mission? When I say a Trojan horse of healing, meaning people are gonna come to see you to lose weight. People are gonna come to see you, to stop binge eating, stop emotional eating, stop overeating, and they think you are gonna give them just a way to eat. They think you are going to do something to them and tell them some secret, and they're gonna go home and do something and they're gonna be better.
They don't necessarily know that you're gonna ask them to grow. They don't necessarily know that you're gonna ask them to step into consciousness. They don't necessarily know that you're gonna ask them to examine their toxic beliefs. They don't know that you're gonna guide them into an exploration of learning to see how they've been regulating unconsciously, unconsciously regulating their emotions with food, and that they actually have to learn how to manage their own emotional metabolism and be more intimate with themselves. They don't know that you're gonna ask them to put aside dieting for two or three months and forget about weight loss as a weight to lose weight. They don't know that you're gonna ask them to love themselves into the healing journey instead of hating themselves. If they knew that stuff, they would never come to see you. Chances are ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. So you're gonna be a Trojan horse, you're gonna be a little patient. You're not gonna hit people with, well, here's how I work. And you need to see everything totally different. No, my friends, you need to be patient. You bring people along slowly. You bring people along slowly. You be bold enough to follow your own inner guidance and intuition. You work with people where they're at. So yes, you're gonna be truthful with your clients, but you're gonna do it in a time released way so that your clients can hear what you say and they could absorb what you say. You don't wanna hit your clients with too much.
And at the same time, day in and day out with every client, you have to be clear about who you are. And what you represent in your mind, that might mean losing a client. That's okay. But the clearer you are about who you are and what you represent, and that doesn't mean you smack over somebody over the head with it, it doesn't mean you shove it down their throat. Because I'm very patient with my clients before I necessarily tell them something that will be difficult for them. Why? Because I want to create connection, intimacy, confidence in the relationship. I want to ground the relationship before I start to rock the boat a little bit. That's all. That's all. So we're learning to be effective in that way.
So this is not something we'd advertise, but in so many ways, we are here to help teach our clients consciousness. That's the hidden work. You're here to help teach your clients consciousness. You are here to help them step into an expanded awareness of self world and others. Because when they do that, their unwanted eating challenges will slowly start to self regulate back into healing. Consciousness is healing. Awareness by itself heals, awakening to your life, heals. Have you ever had moments in life where like all of a sudden you, your awareness expands, your eyes opened up and you just see yourself different? You see people different. You see the world different, and you, you see a relationship different. You see a person different. Previously you saw them this way and now like you really see them, or you really see a situation for what it is, and, and you think to yourself, oh my God, how did I miss that?
Well, this keeps happening in life and it, it can keep happening in life from now until the time you die. We can expand in consciousness and awareness. The game will change. We will see things through fresh eyes, through expanded eyes, through more conscious eyes. And that will heal us, and that will transform our world.
Now, your clients don't wanna necessarily hear that, oh, I'm here to teach you consciousness. Client doesn't wanna hear that. Client wants to hear. You're gonna help them take away their issue and their challenge. So that's what I focus on, on the outer level. But on the inner level, everything I'm doing is in service to my client stepping into growth and maturity and personal development consciousness. I'm helping them take responsibility to respond to their situation. I'm helping them let go of outdated, toxic beliefs. I am helping them see where they need to practice more. I'm helping them see where they need to work more to not give up more. So yeah, sometimes I'm, I'm, I'm urging them a little. I'm pushing them a little. I'm being their coach. Come on, this is the work you gotta do. This is the drill you have to do. This is the exercise you have to do for you to get where you wanna go, for you to be better at the thing you say you wanna be better at.
We are here, my friends, to help our clients wake up. They think their issue is with food. They think if they can only change their food, their eating, their diet, their body, their shape, their weight, everything will be great. They think if only their eating will be perfect or their body would be perfect, then everything will be great. Look around you. Is there someone in your life that you notice or that you've known or that you've known of who has the perfect body, the perfect weight, the perfect shape, perfect situation, whatever it is by Hollywood standards, that kind of story. And they ain't happy and they're miserable. That's what I'm talking about. So all this body weight hell stuff guarantees people nothing.
So the person who's more conscious, the person who's woken up first, generally speaking, it's your responsibility to help wake up those around you. If you're more awake than your client in certain ways, it's your responsibility to wake them up. Now, once again, it doesn't mean you have to be a nasty alarm clock. Waking up can sometimes be a little stroking on the head. Waking up could be you singing sweet music to them. Yep. Waking up sometimes means a hard spank if that's what it's gonna take. So, however, the moment is calling me to help my client wake up and step into greater awareness and consciousness. That's what I'm looking to do.
It's as simple as that.
You know, oftentimes when we're dealing with unwanted weight or eating behaviors, we step into teenage or childhood archetypes. We've mentioned this, meaning we unknowingly become immature. We literally step into a different persona. You, you time shift, you time travel back into a different place. This is a very helpful distinction and it's a very helpful trick tool that you can use to turbocharge your work and make it happen faster. So yes, your client is an adult, but oftentimes they are functioning from a different persona, a different age. Once again, children want immediate gratification. Teenagers want somewhat immediate gratification. They want what they want, what they want, and they get cranky and complain when they don't get it. So I want you to notice your client's real age, and I want you to notice the moment when they time shift into what I'm gonna call their presenting age. So what age are they acting in the moment? And I have fun with this one. So when I notice my client, my adult client who's talking, they're being responsible, they're explaining their situation, and all of a sudden, oh, I don't know, let's say they start talking about their parents and how my mother this, my father that, and this is what happened. You know? And I totally understand, okay, there was some abuse, some something mommy and daddy did or said. I got it. Um, and I noticed my client time shift. I noticed their voice change, their demeanor changes, their facial expresses changed. I'll do something like this. Sometimes I'll say, Hey, hey, hey, Mr. And Mr. Klein, time out for a second time out. How old are you right now? I mean, I know how actually old you are. I know you're 43. I know you're 33. How old are you right now though? How old do you feel right now? Be honest. And they'll think for a moment. And usually they'll guess the age or close that, I guess. And if, and if they don't get it, and usually they do, quite frankly, I'll say, you know, it feels like you just time shifted back to being like a, like a 13-year-old.
But I make light of it. I make, I I I make it fun.
'cause it is kind of interesting. We do that. You do that in certain things. You might do that when you go play sports. You might do that when you watch certain TV shows. You definitely do that when you hear certain kinds of music, especially when you hear music from your younger years. You will time shift, you will start to feel like that teenager again. You will start to feel like that kid again. So we do that, but we do that with our relationship with food. We do that when certain things trigger us around eating, around food, around body, around health. We go back to that age.
So the work becomes helping my client become more aware and conscious in those moments
because then they're sitting at the table and they're acting like a 12-year-old and they're eating like a 12-year-old. So even though they're 40 something years old, it's really a 12-year-old sitting there eating with 12-year-old consciousness and 12-year-old emotionality and 12-year-old strategies, which means they might be rebellious or they might feel completely disempowered, or they might feel really cranky and nobody understands them and nobody listens to them. Or they might feel really alone and hurt because nobody really is caring for me and I'm not getting the love that I want, and therefore I am going to reach for food, whatever it might be.
So it's a great place to play.
So simply you can ask yourself, how old is my client right now in terms of how they're showing up?
Ask them, check it out with them. Be totally honest with me, Mr. And Mrs. Client, how old you feel right now.
It's a great tool when it comes to helping your clients. See where they step into immediate gratification mode, where they lose a sense of maturity and responsibility where they lose their king hood, where they lose their queen hood, where they lose their, their mature prince or princess and they go down a rabbit hole where they might be going into unconsciousness. Okay, let's move on my friends. Here's an approach that never fails. I want you to think about always meeting your client where they're at, no less, and maybe just a little more. Meet your client where they're at. Don't push them too hard.
Um, meeting your client where they're at. Well, where are they at? You know, you can't tell your client, oh, I want you to eat this, this, and this. When they're not really ready. You can just say to your client, I need you to love your body more. It's not happening when they're clearly hitting. You just can't tell somebody to do something and they're gonna go and do it. Um, oh, I want you to talk to your husband differently, your wife differently when that's not what's really happening right now. Your client might not be ready to get rid of nine cups of coffee a day right now. That's okay. But if you meet your client where they're at, they will notice it, they'll feel it, they'll get it. And then you have a client to work with, then they're gonna be more willing to work with you. Um, in other words, the client is doing nine cups of coffee a day and you notice that they have mood issues. They have, you know, very intense mood swings. They have energy drops, um, and they're in, uh, chronic joint pain and they have weight loss resistance. Um, they're doing too much caffeine. Chances are caffeine's not bad, but you can overdo it. So I wanna cut down my client's coffee. Okay. You know, I'll give them a little bit of explanation about coffee, how excess caffeine can mimic the stress response in the body. I'll detail that. I'll explain that. I'd love for you to cut down. You're doing nine cups of coffee a day. Is it possible for you to do three? Oh my God, no. Okay. How about six? Um, seven. You could definitely cut it down to seven. Okay, I could do seven. So I just negotiated. I met my client where they're at. Are you sure you could do seven? Is are you sure that's doable for you between now and the next time I see you? Yes, I can do that. Great. 'cause we're gonna gradually cut down, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna, we're gonna go at a pace that feels right for you.
So I just negotiated. I didn't push too hard. I met my client where he, she's at. I remember one client, it was a phone client. I worked with her for a couple of years. The first six months that we worked together was once a week. And probably for the first eight sessions, the first eight sessions, I would say much of the time in these phone sessions, she would just be complaining. Um, now, normally after a little while, I will stop my client from complaining, uh, because I don't want them to take up the whole session complaining. But here I was tuning into my intuition. And here's what I knew about this client. Based on what she had told me. She never, a lot of friends, she didn't have a lot of go-to people. She is the boss at work. She is single. She's in a high powered position and she doesn't have a lot of peers. So consequently she has no one to complain to. I I mean, really, in fact, every day, because she manages a large team, she's the one that everybody comes and complains. Like people are coming to complain to her about this thing, that thing, the other thing. So she has no one to complain to. So instead of me making dietary changes, uh, for what she came to see me for, I realized I needed to let her download her complaints for a while. Like, that's what I had to do. You know, sometimes our clients just need to talk and they need to get out their words. And I met her where she was at, and there was this natural place. After about eight sessions, which was a few months, she kind talked out her complaints and she was sort of ready now to go somewhere else. But, but she had to do a lot of unloading. You know, she had come to see me for, for weight loss and intense bloating and intense digestive issues, you know, and she knew in advance that we were gonna work from a more personal level, from an eating psychology perspective, because that's how I came advertised. And I had worked with, uh, some people that she knew. So in a lot of ways, she almost took that as a liberty of, oh, I can talk. And that was a wise move on her part. On her part. She needed to talk. Um, but just in those two months, her digestive issues started getting better. She, she needed to clear out, she needed to unload. She was, she was carrying so much that was work related that she had no one else to go to with, I've had weight loss clients who are eating a minimalistic diet and they're doing a decent amount of exercise and they're not seeing any weight loss. And then I look at their life and I look at everything and I notice that they're drinking, uh, four glasses of wine at night. And this was a fairly common client for me, uh, when I had a practice on Wall Street, because in New York City, the Wall Street culture oftentimes works late. And then they go out late and they eat dinner and they drink till 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night. Uh, and it's a, it's a lifestyle. It's a ritual. It's part of the culture. And a lot of people don't realize that alcohol can be very caloric. So anyway, one particular client, I said to her, listen, you know, I would love to, to get you to get rid of the alcohol at night. I have a feeling in a couple of months you're gonna see some weight loss. And she was shocked that I said that. There's no way. She said, that's what helps me relax at night. She says, I, I am a stressed human being that there is, there is no possible way that I'm giving up alcohol. And I thought, huh, oh, okay. 'cause I'm the kind of guy I could not drink alcohol for, for years or drink. It doesn't matter to me. So, oh, oh, so I have to meet you where you are at. So let's see. Okay, can you knock it down to three glasses a night? And that was a little bit of a hard negotiation. But she agreed. And then I realized, okay, after a few weeks of doing that, I said, Hey, you know something, I want you to start to drink before you eat. So the alcohol gets into your system quicker. It's a great strategy for a lot of people who drink too much and they're looking to lose weight. And alcohol might be a factor for them. Um, and by and by we kept negotiating downwards. And the point is, meeting somebody where they are at. I would've lost this lady if I told her, I'm not gonna see you unless you cut out alcohol. This is borderline alcoholism. Could it be alcoholism? I don't know. I don't think so. She was pretty functional. But those four glasses, five days a week, or actually six days a week, were pretty essential for her. Um, so there was probably a little bit of concern around that that she wasn't even voicing to me. But nonetheless, meeting your clients where they're at.
This can mean don't ask them to do more than they seem Capable of. This can mean don't try to take them someplace. They're not ready to go, my friends. And you're gonna learn this is, this is you being in relationship. This is you being on a date with somebody. It's, it's this is this trial and error, trial and success. Well, how do you know if they're not ready? Don't ask me that. You have to determine that based on your skills as a human being, you're gonna learn on the job. You're gonna learn because you already know in certain situations with certain people, with certain partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, friends, kids, whoops, better not say this 'cause they're not gonna be able to hear it. Or better not say this like that. Otherwise, they're not gonna be able to hear. So you already have that skill. You just have to learn how to translate that into the professional realm. Don't impose your will on anybody without you feeling into somebody's world first. You really need, we need to put ourselves in our client shoes. What do I mean by that? I want you to develop the skill to determine what would it be like and feel like to be my client.
Ask yourself that question in every client session. What would it be like and feel like to be my client? It's a great question to ask. I mean that it really is because you're putting yourself in their shoes. And when you can put yourself in yourself in their shoes, you learn so much about them. You are morphing into them. You're doing a little alchemy. You're doing a little magic. So I allow my client to be who they are. I don't push them too hard, nutritionally, emotionally, lifestyle or habit wise. And that being said, there are times when I push my client hard. But you know something, when those times happen, I can just feel it. I know it. It's time to push hard here. It's intuition. It's being in relationship, it's listening, it's being present. It's being aware, it's being conscious. It's tuning in. It's being a conduit for the higher wisdom of the universe. Sometimes information, ideas, they come through us. They come through you trust it. I'll often speak to my client in a way that matches them. If my clients are real strong personality, I will speak strongly. If my client tends to talk a little fast, I'll match their speed just a little more, just to let them know I'm a similar species to them. If my client is a little more soft spoken, I might be a little bit more soft spoken just to match them, because that's a little NLP trick. When you entrain with your client's pace and their voice, they like you 'cause you're like them and they're like you, and we like each other. So there's an unconscious simpatico that happens when you entrain to their rhythm and their voice. And with that said, once you begin to establish rapport with your client, that's when you can start to step outside the box and invite them more into a new place. Or maybe get a little more challenging with them. Okay, my friends, people complain. You complain. I complain. I got complaints. Some of us can complain all day. And it's understandable 'cause there's a lot to complain about. Definition of a complaint, an objection to what is.
It's an objection to what is. And it's understandable. Sometimes we have objections to the way things are. Okay, I could live with that. I could deal with it. Complaints are often absolutely reasonable and justified that your clients have sometimes their complaints are overblown. Always, always, always. I'm gonna suggest that complaints in some way, shape or form are beautiful doorways into the psyche. Because what my client is complaining about, I take notice because I know that that complaint is a doorway. It's a doorway into the psyche, into the soul, into the mind. And ultimately it is most likely a doorway into healing.
So your task is to begin to listen deeply into your client's complaints and ask yourself, what are the complaints that my client has that seem to have a lot of energy?
You will notice when your client is talking to you. This is, this isn't, this is a, I don't even wanna call it a basic technique. It is a fundamental technique. This is like a, a like, like a necessary nutrient in your practice. You have to notice where your clients have energy. In this case, which complaints have a lot of energy, some something they complain about. My mother, my father, my partner work, my dog, my kids. Some complaints, have a lot of energy. You could just see it comes out, their voice changes, their energy changes, some complaints. You notice when your client says them, their energy actually starts to drop. So that's the kind of complaint that really drains your client's energy. If your client has a complaint and, and they're getting really angry, that's a complaint where, okay, this really has them activated and energized and they're thinking about it a lot and it's taking a lot of, uh, you know, of their mind power.
And I'm always wondering, okay, where's this complaint going? Where is it going? What do I mean by that? What I mean is, my ultimate goal is for my client to not stay locked in complaint. Because ultimately part of the work of healing is to begin to deconstruct your client's core complaints and see what they're all about. I'm looking to deconstruct, I'm looking to dissect to do some archeology on my client's complaints. And what's inside this? Let me excavate this. Oftentimes the very complaint that they have oftentimes not always is locking in the issue that they're complaining about.
So my complaint, my client's complaint might be, my body's not good enough, my body's too fat. And it's a complaint. And oftentimes that complaint energy is the very stress that locks it in. 'cause we're resisting the very weight that we have on our body. We're resisting the body that we have. Whatever you resist will persist. Whether it's something physical, whether it's something energetic. So I'm looking to take things out of the realm of complaint and move it into the realm of doing some work. And I want to turn that complaint into a doorway. I get that you don't want this body, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, I get that this doesn't work for you. I get that you want to shift it. I understand why you wanna do that. I get that you think this is gonna make you happy.
But until this moves for you out of the realm of complaint into a place where you can just take a deep breath and say, whoa, okay, this is what's happening, then it's gonna be difficult to shift what's going on.
At the same time, my client might have various other kinds of complaints that point to their eating challenge that don't seem directly related, but that might point to their eating challenge. Such complaints might be fill in the blank. All women are, and there's some negative thing. You know, all men are, all men are jerks. All women are b*****s. You know, until I get rid of this weight, you know, I'm never gonna meet anyone until I get rid of this sugar habit. I'm just not gonna like myself. You know, until I stop overeating. I, I just don't even want to go out socially. I just don't wanna be around people, you know, until I have more energy, I just, I just can't be the real me. I can't be creative. I can't express myself, you know, until my boss does this, this, this and that. I'm gonna do like work is gonna be miserable for me. Um, and, and hey, another complaint. It's impossible to not wanna be thin and skinny because everywhere you look in the media and it's the media's fault. And so, yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree with all of that on a certain level. So I'm never gonna try to take away my client's complaint. I'm gonna acknowledge it. I'm gonna notice it. I'm gonna put a check mark next to it. And the bottom line is we often drain energy when, when we live in complaint, you and I begin to liberate energy and we have the possibility to heal, to change or transform. When we begin to take responsibility,
that means we begin to enter the physiologic relaxation response. When we slowly accept what is as a way to transmute what is, when we notice how complaint drains our energy, we step more out of the stress response. We step into the prefrontal cortex, executive decision making function, wisdom. In other words, we literally begin to get smarter.
Your clients have complaints as they ought to have complaints.
We're a complaining world. Oftentimes we're a complaining culture. So I want to hear my client out, I want to give them the space. Sometimes our clients need to vent. Sometimes that's what you're here to do for a little bit, is let them vent. Let them say what they need to say. And then at some point we move from complaint to action. We move from complaint to responsibility. We alert our client and let them know where they need to start shifting. You're gonna see how I do this as we move forward, okay? Part of our task is healers, counselors, teachers, is culture change. Whew, this is important my friends, because we inherit our eating challenges. I'm going to postulate largely from culture. You might think you got it from your parents, but your parents, whatever they did, they got it from culture. And when I say culture, I mean the world, the media, how we talk to one another, how we communicate with one another, how you are educated. I'm talking about our music, our art, our images. And I'm putting religion in there as well, side by side with culture, because religion is, is is, it exists within a culture, different religions. And what I wanna suggest again, is that we inherit so many of our eating challenges from culture. I'm not blaming culture, there's parts of culture I don't like. There's parts of media I don't like. I object. And if you don't like culture, if your client doesn't like the culture, if you don't like the world, if you have objections to whatever you see going on around you change it. And all culture change starts with one single individual person. We indeed are that powerful. I'm asking you right now as a practitioner, as a professional, as a human being to stop buying into cynicism, powerlessness, and apathy. Not only that, I want you to stop buying into draining your energy in complaint about what any cultural leader says or does.
You think it's good, you think it gets you somewhere fine. Complain for a minute or two or three or 10. But after that, stop wasting your energy and then go about the business of you changing the world. Empower yourself to do something positive and begin to create the world that you want to live in. So instead of living in complaint about the world, about culture, about religion, about politics, about the media, about this powerful person or that powerful person, you be the powerful person in your own life. Change your family environment. Change your relationship environment, change your personal environment. Change your creative environment. Change how you change how you talk to yourself. Change how you nourish your body. Create the world that you want to create. Empower your client to do the same when it comes to any complaint, particularly about how the world is and how the culture is. Now, culture influences us deeply, particularly body image.
And working with body image really means doing work on culture change. It's a hero or heroin's journey. It's a D programming. A lot of work that you're doing with your client is deprogramming them, is brainwashing them in a positive direction from how they've been previously brainwashed. You're helping your client wake up from a form of programming that has not served them well. It's like surgically removing a toxic belief. It's a strategic strike against darkness and unconsciousness. It's bringing in the light, it's reclaiming our power. You have to notice where we inherit toxic messages from the world. It's not about blame. Now I get angry for sure, but I take that anger and I use it. I take that anger and I do something positive. I teach, I counsel, I write, I put out information that I think is transformational and helps people. And when it does help people, I give myself a little pat on the back and I say, congratulations, I've taken my complaint and I've taken my anger and I've put it into something good. I put it to good use. Toxic messages that we get from culture. You're not thin enough, you're not pretty enough, you're not desirable, you're not lovable as you are. Just turn on a tv, you'll get this. You're not rich enough, you're not muscular enough. You're abs are not toned enough. You eat too many calories. Big one, you're not cool enough. Everything, especially for young people is about being cool. Who decides what cool is? You're not famous enough. Watch out. Health coaches, health practitioners, practitioners of all kinds that there's a fame bug that goes around that you have to be famous somehow. You have to be out there. Don't buy into it. It's, it's, it's a bad vibe. It's a bad meme. You are not young anymore with kind of a negative connotation. Or you'll be much happier if you buy things. It's the promise of all advertising. You're gonna be happier if you buy this. And sometimes you are happier if you buy certain things. But let me tell you, there's a lot of nonsense that's advertised at us that you would have no money left if you bought everything that was supposed to make you and me happy. So we are receiving toxic messages from culture. I will often have my clients go on a media diet. I might have them go on a social media diet for a little while. Um, if I determine based on our conversation that they get, they go into comparison mode whenever they're on Instagram and they're looking at pictures of this one, that one or the other one. Don't consume foods that bring your energy down. Why do it? Don't consume foods that bring your health down. Why do it? Don't consume media and images and songs and TV shows that bring you down. Like why do it? So in closing, my friends, so much of this training, much of the work is in accentuating the best of the feminine, nourishment, embodiment, pleasure, naturalness, rhythm, forgiveness, loving what is loving the body, joyful movement, embracing all symptoms and inner voices, embracing all of who we are, loving ourselves into change and transformation that I'm calling the feminine archetype of things. That doesn't mean woman, it means the feminine polarity. Much of the work is also masculine. The higher masculine, which means challenging and removing toxic beliefs. It means using awareness, using simple, clear science, redefining what success is, challenging cultural beliefs. Embracing paradox, using the mind in a very skillful way. So I could have used the words right brain and left brain to describe this. And you're gonna be hearing more about masculine and feminine psychology. You know, Carl Young said something very interesting. The father of, uh, archetypal psychology, he said, the goal of therapy is to become friends with your client. First time I heard that I was a graduate student, and I said to myself, what took me a number of years to get this? It doesn't mean the goal of therapy is to, you know, go out for coffee with your client every day afterwards forevermore. But it is to help your client get to the place where they don't need you anymore. And they've gotten what they need to get from you. They've gotten their greatest gifts from you and they're now whole enough. They've remembered their wholeness in relation to the expertise that you've had to share with them. They've remembered their wholeness around food, around body, around weight, around eating, around self-love, around self-care. They've remembered their wholeness. And now it's just two friends talking to each other because the work is complete.
So that's my goal with a client, that at some point that work is complete. And even if it's not complete between the two of us, my goal is that at some point that the work becomes complete for my client. That's the space that I'm looking to hold. That's the energy that I look to bring to bear on the relationship. So my friends, I hope this conversation for you was helpful. And next we'll be talking about masculine and feminine psychology. I love that topic. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention. Thanks for hanging in there with me. As always, always, always, I want you to remember to empower yourself to be a good student. And to me what that means is always be willing to let go of what doesn't work for you. If I say anything that, that, that doesn't land right, it doesn't stick right. Don't worry about it, let it go. Don't get hung up on it. Just excrete it. Don't use it, don't bother with it. And the things that land and the things that impact or the things that you're not so sure or that you need to play with and be patient. And I ask you to be patient in this journey because we're still laying a foundation and I know you wanna learn how to help people and figure out how to do this and figure out how to do that. And that's going to come. That'll all come. We're laying the groundwork. Thanks for hanging in there. Thanks my friends.

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