MODULE 1

EATING PSYCHOLOGY & MIND BODY NUTRITION

Section 7

This Training is grounded in science, psychology and soul. Here we learn about a soul-based approach to eating and health challenges that is both practical and meaningful.

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PART 1

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Greetings once again, friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Today's conversation is about the psychobiology of soul lessons. So this is a part one of three and soul lessons. We're gonna, we're we're learning counseling skills, coaching skills, and this is all about listening for what I'm going to call nine key soul lessons. I love this topic. I think it's oh, so important. And what a great opportunity for us to explore and play in the realm of how something larger and unseen might be impacting who we are as human beings might be impacting our biology, might be impacting our nutrition, might be impacting our relationship with food. So, as always, I am so glad you're on this journey with me. I hope you are treating yourself well today. And allow me to say that one of the great ways to work with our clients is to be able to look at the big picture of their life's journey. Now, in order to understand the small picture, my friends, we gotta understand the big picture. Yes, we look at nutritional details, yes, we look at the specifics of someone's diet. Yes, we look at what they eat, how much when they eat it, but honestly, the nuances and the specifics and the small details of a person's diet, nutrition, and relationship with food lives within a larger context. So we're looking at the big picture of our client's life journey. And when I say life, I mean from the moment they're born till the moment they die. Now, the reality is, we, the collective, we, we don't always include the soul or spiritual dimensions when it comes to looking at our food, body and health concerns. And on one level, why should we? That sounds like it belongs in a completely different universe, in a completely different realm. The spiritual or the religious or the soul goes in one bucket, and food, body and health go in another. But as we're learning, everything is connected to everything else. And because of that, it's time to change things. It's time to change the conversation. It's time to acknowledge that you, I, our clients, we're multidimensional beings, my friends, and our biology is impacted by all of who we are. So looking at and working with soul lessons
can be extremely powerful. It can be effective, and it could be very, very, very productive work. And indeed, what I wanna say is it's often the place soul lessons, these things I'm calling soul lessons. I'm gonna explain in a minute. Soul lessons are often the place where the real action is and where the true healing wants to happen. So once again, with any client, everyone is different. And somebody's emotional eating issue, binge eating issue, their lifetime chronic dieting issue, their weight challenges, their immune challenge, whatever it is, you know, sometimes the solution is in the realm of nutrition. It might be in the realm of identifying and dealing with a food allergy or food sensitivity. And then a person is able to have a dramatic shift. Sometimes the action is in a person's soul or spiritual dimension. And why not have all the tools available at your disposal to help others, to help yourself, to help friends, clients, students, loved ones, whatever it is, that's the name of the game. You wanna have a highly diversified toolkit. And really what that means is we wanna see human beings for the fullness of who we are, definition of a soul lesson,
lifelong learnings that are profound, powerful, epic and worthy of our achievement lessons that are worthy of our achievement. Learning. These lessons are a victory on a higher plane, and they, in many ways transcend all other earthly lessons. I wanna say that all again. And then we're gonna break this down, my friends soul lessons a definition, lifelong learnings that are profound, powerful, epic and worthy of our achievement, worthy of our attainment. And when we learn such lessons, when we learn the soul lesson that we're here to learn, the soul lessons that we're here to learn, it's a victory on a higher plane. And these transcend so many of our other earthly challenges. So my friends, when I say soul lessons, I am speaking about the unseen. I'm speaking about the beyond. I'm speaking about the in the invisibles. I'm speaking about the kinds of lessons that we're here to learn that just might take a long time, it might take a lifetime. I'm talking about lessons that are indeed epic. I'm talking about the type of lessons that when you and I are on our deathbed, when you're a hundred years old and you're looking back on your life, the soul lessons, where the big victories that we learned, the soul lessons were the big challenges that we overcame as a human being, as a soul, uh, on planet earth.
So in my view, I am suggesting that we are kind of looking at earth like a classroom. We're looking at life as a classroom. Our relationship with food and body and health is a great teacher within that classroom. We're looking at earth as the proper workshop experience. We're here to learn starts when you're a child, starts when you're in school, you've been in so many different institutions of education, chances are, and we're learning all the time. We learn through relationship. We learn through love, we learn through pain. We learn through suffering, through work, through money, through sexuality, through marriage, kids, families, life, death, disease, discomfort, all of it. We learn. We're always learning. And when we forget that we're learning, it's easy to begin to resist life because who wants to learn this lesson or that lesson? So when we're resisting what life is asking us to learn life with a capital L, what will likely happen is that resistance to the larger life lessons will often reveal itself, will often come out as unwanted symptom, unwanted be, uh, habits, unwanted behaviors, unwanted disease. So soul lessons are a place that we don't always listen for and look for simply because we haven't been taught to look and see in this realm. We haven't been taught to listen to the larger life challenges that are pretty timeless, and to see how they connect with everything else that's going on for us. Now, again, I'm gonna talk about nine soul lessons in this presentation. There are probably 99 more, but I'm covering the ones that I think are powerful and that I've seen are very useful. So that when you're listening for these nine key soul lessons and wondering to yourself, huh, what, what are the bigger lessons my client is here to learn in this lifetime? Um, you're listening for that because, you know, there's certain things we can only explain when we bump things up to a higher perspective.
So here we are, we're inquiring, we're playing, we're exploring, we're postulating. That's what I'm doing, what this realm might look like. So I'm delivering you information based on my experience, based on working with a heck of a lot of people over the years, and always asking the question, what helps? What serves, what moves the needle? How might the soul realm interpenetrate my human life, my lifetime, my experience, my birth, my challenges, the family I'm born into, the sufferings, the pains, the diseases, the obstacles I face. My challenging relationship with food, body and health. You know, of all these challenges we face, if there's no reason for it, if the universe is just here to, to p**s you off and to make your life miserable and to victimize you and, and, and bury you in a hole, if there's no easy, if there's no higher purpose, it's, it's easy to become apathetic, my friends, it's easy to fall apart, it's easy to stay sick. It's easy to wanna stay in darkness. It's easy to wanna stay unconscious. It's easy to wanna stay in bed and not get up and have your cup of coffee when we're hurt, when we're wounded, when we're in suffering, unless we have the kind of compass that can point to true north, and it's the true north of the soul of, of a higher place within us, our spirituality, our religion, whatever it is, unless our soul's compass can point there, it keeps pointing to the earthly dimension where the suffering is happening. And, and, and we end up in a spin cycle. You know, I've heard it said that in actuality, human love, the way humans love other humans is inherently imperfect. And a higher love, a divine love is far superior. So when we start to see our life from a divine perspective, we have the ability to begin to heal and transform and grow in ways that we couldn't have possibly imagined. So I also wanna remind you that if you are the kind of person who doesn't believe in a higher power, in some way, shape, or form, a higher intelligence that created us, when you hear the term soul lessons, I want you to simply replace it with the term larger life lessons, deeper life lessons, epic life lessons, whatever works for you that says, these are huge lessons that when we learn them, something powerful can happen. So don't let languaging get in the way. Don't let belief system get in the way. And at the same time, I'm inviting us all to explore this realm because I think there's gold there. Now, before I dive into the specific soul lessons, I wanna say a few more things. Health. This thing you and I called health. I wanna be healthy, I wanna be, I don't wanna have disease, I don't wanna get sick so much. I don't wanna have aches and pains. I, I just, I wanna be healthy. Woo. And at some point, we as humans realize that how important that is. I wanna say that health is a long game. Health is a long game. What does that mean? It means a lot of people, they don't deal with their health until something goes wrong, and then they try to get a quick fix. Oh my God, um, oh, I'm, um, there's something wrong with my digestion. Maybe I need to go to the hel food store and take some digestive aids. Um, when we start to see health as something that starts the moment, we're aware of the concept of health and the moment we're aware of the importance of health, it's useful to think of health as a game that we play for the rest of our lives, meaning the things that we do. We're thinking in terms of how does this impact me in the long range?
A lot of times we don't see the big picture, my friends. So soul lessons are asking us to see the big picture. This, this, I'm, I'm, I'm not even talking in the soul realm anymore. I'm talking about being smart. If you wanna be a good business person and you're setting up a business that you want this business to work for many, many moons to come, then you're thinking to yourself, this business is a long game. So you are making decisions that will put your business in the best position to succeed in the long run, as opposed to making choices that might boost your business up and make it look like it's really big and successful the first five months because you spent all your money advertising and blasting yourself out there. But if you didn't play a long game, if you didn't pace yourself, if you didn't budget yourself, if you didn't have some kind of growth plan that looks into the future, you're not playing a long game. You're playing a short game. So what I'm saying is, you as a person, you as a practitioner have to begin to see your client in terms of their health as a long game. And equally important, personal growth as a long game. You know, a lot of times, you and I, us humans, we don't grow, we don't change, we don't transform until there's a lot of, a lot of pain and suffering and misery, quite frankly. We'll stay with the same bad habits, we'll stay with the same sloppy habits in terms of how we communicate, in terms of how we relate with others, in terms of how we conduct ourselves. We'll stay with the sloppy habits until the world gives us feedback and causes us some kind of lost pain or suffering. And then all of a sudden we're faced with, oh my God, I gotta grow personally. And, and that's okay. That's how it happens oftentimes. But if you think in terms of my growth as a human being, my growth as a person, my growth in character, my growth in maturity, my growth as a soul, that's a long game. Then every day you do something that supports that long game for your personal growth. Then every day you do the little things, little things, little things that, you know, support your health for the long term.
Personal power equals metabolic power. This is just another way of saying that. Okay? So the more we're in alignment with what we're here to learn, here's my postulation. The more you and I are in alignment with what we are here on earth to learn and how we're here to grow, the greater is the probability that we can reach our metabolic potential. That's another way of saying personal power equals metabolic power. Our, some of our greatest personal power comes from us learning our biggest lessons, our biggest life challenges, our biggest soul lessons. I'm using those terms interchangeably. And if you wanna state this in another way, the more we resist what we're here to learn, the more we hide from the imperative to grow personally and spiritually and in character, the greater the likelihood of unwanted symptoms and habits.
I'm convinced of that I've seen it. To me it's a fact. I'm postulating it to you as a possibility that I want you to consider as you move forward. So, soul lessons assumes this concept assumes a higher power, a greater intelligence, a deeper wisdom that guides our destiny and unfoldment. And if you believe in that in any way, shape or form, I don't care what your religion is, and, and, and use your own religious beliefs and the way you language things to slightly re language these in a way that better works for you, I really mean that. So again, the soul lesson concept assumes a higher power, greater intelligence, a deeper wisdom to the universe that guides our destiny and unfoldment. Here we are, we're talking about nutrition and eating psychology and, and we're embracing something bigger. And again, for atheists, just think of these as deeper lessons, larger life lessons, significant lifelong lessons. You, my friends, must be great students from the standpoint of not throwing out the baby with the bath water and learning how to reish things in your own mind so that they work for you. Okay, let me name the nine key soul lessons that I would like to talk about, and then we're gonna start breaking 'em down.
First, soul lesson number one. And I put it number one in many ways because I consider it key and I consider it most important. I'm calling agreeing to be here. I'm not even gonna try to describe that in a sentence. I'm gonna break that one down shortly. Agreeing to be here is soul lesson number one. Number two is forgiveness. When I say forgiveness, it's forgiveness of self, forgiveness of others. Learning how to tap into that. Number three, learning how to slow down in life. Learning how to reclaim time, learning how to reclaim pace. Learning how to reclaim really your nervous system soul. Lesson number four is reclaiming the deeper feminine in one's life. Soul lesson number five is reclaiming the deeper masculine in one's life. We already started breaking these down in terms of masculine and feminine psychology. I think these are powerful and important soul lessons. Number six, while we're on the topic of soul lessons, is learning to embrace a positive spirituality. The kind of spirituality, the kind of belief system about existence that works for us. That's honest, that's authentic, and that empowers and infuses us. I think that's a deep soul lesson because we live in a world that is at war with itself when it comes to spiritual, religious, otherworldly reality. Soul lesson number seven, speaking the truth, which closely connected to that is learning how to be the real you. Learning how to be authentic soul. Lesson number eight, healing our sexuality. Chances are, if you're alive on planet earth, you're here in some way to grow, evolve, heal or better understand what sexuality means for you. Number nine, soul lesson. Learning to claim our power. Learning to claim our birthright. Learning to claim our gifts. Learning to claim we come in with a potential. And this is all about claiming that potential. So this is a list, my friends. I'm gonna dive into each one of these and talk about, you know, a case study for most of these to help ground you in it and understand it better. And again, when you're with a client, here's what I'm asking you to do. Here's the whole point of soul lessons. I'm asking you to have a silent running commentary in the back of your mind scanning. What are the bigger, larger life lessons that my client's here to learn? Hmm, I wonder. I want you to be able to see through the eyes of the divine. I want your vision to get bigger. That's what I'm asking of you. I want the scope of how you see your client to ever widen, to become ever big enough to embrace all of who we are. Yes, understand the body, understand its nutrition, but we're a mind. We have an emotional body, we have a heart, we have a soul. However you wish to define soul. And I'm defining soul for my, for myself here is that which is timeless that in us, which survives the body. So I'm considering the body, your space suit. Yes, the body you're in. Hopefully you like your spacesuit. It's a pretty space suit. Maybe you don't like the spacesuit, maybe you hate the spacesuit. Maybe you want the spacesuit to be a little bigger, a little smaller, taller, whiter, black or fat or thinner. I don't know. Um, but a lot of us just wanna change the spacesuit. Well, you're gonna get the opportunity one day to let go of the space suit, and you might not be so happy about that. You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you get to the end of the journey, you say bye-bye to the space suit. We call that death. Um, you know, we want it to be a younger version spacesuit. That's what happens when we get old. And by the way, when you're young, a lot of people wish they had an older space suit. They can't wait till they're grownups. You know, when you're a kid, you can't wait to be a grownup. It's kind of funny. Um, so we're not always happy with the space suit, and yet here's our biology, and we learn the lessons of the soul through the biology and the psychology of having a body. So it ain't easy having a body. I can sit down with anyone, I don't care whether they have a challenge or not, and get into a conversation of what's it like for you to have a body, to be in a body, to exist in a body, to exist in this body. Your body, people have their challenges, and if they don't, they eventually will. And part of how we learn is through the psychology and the biology of just bodily existence. So that's why you and I are talking with each other, commiserating with, with each other, and committing together to learn new ways, interesting ways, useful ways to help each other in the earth space suit journey to help others. And having a relationship with food, with body that elevates us, exalts us. And that helps us reach our full potential so we can be the best of who we're meant to be in this life. Because most people intuitively know, wow, if I had the health I want. Now, this is an interesting one. Most people intuitively know, if I had the health I want, if I had the body I want, I would be so happy. A lot of people believe that. I kind of believe that's true. That if we had the health we want, and if we had the body we want, we would be so happy. And, and, and that's true. But what might be more true or, or a truth that, um, supersedes that, is that my body and my soul were in greater alignment. There's where true health and beauty and creative expression and power can express itself. When body and soul are in alignment, something beautiful happens. You know, when so many psychological disciplines, we tend to stay stuck in the realm of the mind. And that's okay. I love learning about the mind. It, it's, it's 90% of what I help people do. Well close to that. And you know, it, it's fascinating. It's incredible. You can spend probably 15 lifetimes studying the operational system of how the mind works. Um, different kinds of minds, nationalities, different upbringings, different groups, young people, old people, ages, sexes. It, it's, it's, you know, the truth is, everybody has a distinct psychology. Yes, we all have psychological commonalities because we're human. We all have biological commonalities because we're human psychology, oddly enough, is not a one size fits all phenomenon. The psychology of each human is extremely different. Every human has a very different operating system. There are so many nuances to learn. And, and we're here to kind of take it up to a higher level.
So are you willing to tune into a higher dimension with your clients? Are you even willing to go there? Are you willing to go there with yourself? Are you open to letting the soul or spiritual realm speak to you? You know, the coaching and counseling fields, I just wanna say this one more time, have been largely devoid of the spiritual or soul or religious dimensions. And this has been an understandable professional omission. It's understandable because we don't know how to talk about this topic. It, it's, it's, it's just been a little bit of a black hole. And we live in a time when it's imperative that we use everything at our disposal as people, as humans, as professionals to help ourselves and others move forward. So I really want you please, my friend, to consider strongly getting more comfortable with including the soul, spiritual, religious realms in your practice. And, and you'll see you, you'll see, you're gonna be introducing this to your client in an easygoing, inquisitive, and inspired manner. It, it is, honestly, on one level, it's so not a big deal. I open up a conversation and if the conversation's not welcome, then it's done, and we move on to the next thing. You know, Mr. Mrs. Client, I'm, I'm just, I'm wondering where you stand in your spiritual or religious life. You know, how, how would you describe yourself here? Do you believe in something greater just like that? I wanna know that about my client. You know, who was it? Um, rabbi Salman Shachter ha had a wonderful line. I heard him say this at a public lecture. He said, you know, and, and this is a guy when he, when he said this, he is, he's as you know, a spiritual leader. He was in his eighties, I think when he, when he said this, he said, I'm a spiritual voyeur. I'm a spiritual voyeur. He says, I love to peek into people's private personal lives and see what they really believe. And I love the term spiritual voyeur because it, you know, there's this, there's this sensual sexual connotation to it because for so many of us, our religious and personal beliefs are, are so intimate to us. It's not something you just show anyone. You know, your naked body is just not something you show anyone. Well, your naked soul is not something you just show anyone either. But it's a beautiful thing when you start to understand that part of another human being, and you're asking that question or opening up the conversation in a truly, um, unconditionally accepting, curious way. You know, Mr. Ms. Klein, I, I ask about, you know, your spiritual religious life, because I really love exploring the distinction called soul lessons. And I think this could be very useful here in helping you with your concerns around whatever their concern is. Fill in the blank. For atheists, it might be, Hey, I would love to, um, talk to you about deeper life lessons, because I think it be, it could be very helpful for you. You know, think of these as, as the larger life learnings that we're here to really grapple with that far surpass others and their power and in their importance.
Simple as that. You know, our soul lessons, and I'm gonna get to the first one in a minute. Our soul lessons are asking us to heal deeply, my friends, which means to grow and evolve more fully. So I'm saying our soul lessons are powerful doorways to healing. They will impact every single aspect of our lives. Another way of saying all this, and I really mean this, is that evolving spiritually equals evolving metabolically.
So is this formula working perfect every time? No. Does the formula, you know, hit the nail on the head exactly for each person? Well, you know, um, sometimes you'll evolve spiritually and it's time to die. Sometimes evolving spiritually might actually mean it's time to get a little sick and deal with it. Uh, you could evolve metabolically, and it doesn't mean you're going to evolve spiritually. You could evolve metabolically, you can uplift your body through food, diet, and exercise, and you could still be a jerk. Um, but for our purposes, I'm going to assume, and I'm asking you to assume that as you help yourself, as you help your clients grow spiritually, whatever that means, they are going to likely in some way evolve their biochemistry, evolve their physiology, they're going to move more and more in the direction of reaching their metabolic potential. You know, the yogis, the taoists, the Tibetan Buddhist shamans from different traditions have been aware of this and saying this in different ways for eons of times. You know, that, that when we cleanse and purify ourselves spiritually, as we evolve, as the body sheds its toxins, the body sheds its old skin like a snake. As we evolve spiritually, we have to let go of that which is holding us back. And sometimes it's what's going on in the body is holding us back. It's a poor diet that will hold us back. It's poor lifestyle practices that hold us back. It's hostile invaders like bacteria, parasites, virus, that yeah, when that's overcoming us, that that's what you're dealing with. You're not necessarily evolving yourself personally. So whatever holds the body back tends to keep us locked in stress. And whatever holds the body back tends to, uh, build up toxicity. What holds the body back is genetic pressure from the past that strangely enough, in so many conditions, you know, oh, you inherited this genetically, there's probably a lot more, you know, that we can do for what seems like genetic conditions than we are aware of. But either way,
perhaps at the simplest level of biology, there's a place where as we evolve spiritually, which could mean we become more loving, more innocent, more clear, more truthful, more happy, more peaceful, more accepting, less judgmental, more present. All of that is synonymous with this thing called the relaxation response. It's synonymous with relaxation, chemistry, and physiology, which once again is the place where all healing and maintenance and repair of body tissue happens. It's the place where you are most empowered to digest, metabolize, assimilate and calorie burn a meal and regulate your appetite. So, amazingly enough, many of our soul lessons have powerful, direct and distinct connections with our concerns around food and our nutrition link symptoms. That's the reality of it. And how might the soul lessons impact the body? Again, it's via stress and relaxation physiology. It's via our emotional metabolism. If I'm emotional metabolism, meaning if I'm self hating, if I'm self attacking, if that's the emotional universe I'm creating, then that is creating a physiology. It's creating a chemistry that holds me back. If I am in refusal to open my heart in a place where it needs to open, if I'm in refusal to grow, if I'm in refusal to let go of anger or judgment that will affect my, it's not just my emotional metabolism. Metabolism, it's my literal physical metabolism. Um, soul lessons impact the body via the innate wisdom of symptoms. If we're not learning the lessons, we're here to learn. Symptoms shows up to help us be alert. The symptoms raise their hand and say, yo, look over here. Soul lessons. Sometimes when we have a powerful soul lesson to learn, uh, we've been traumatically stressed at some point, or there's a stress that lives in us undigested as post-traumatic stress, which can be reproducing itself year after year, decade after decade until we begin to unwind it. And sometimes that unwinding is really about growth. And of course, soul lessons are impacting the body through traditional mind, body connection pathways, hormonal signals, direct nerve pathways in the central nervous system by the immune system, digestive system, other chemical pathways.
I wanna remind you again, and you, you probably know this, but for a long time, the conversation around spirituality just was a no-no in the public realm. You know, in corporate America, in my early twenties and thirties, I was doing a lot of corporate health work, consulting presentations, and I quickly learned there were a number of words which were absolutely taboo. You couldn't say love in a corporate setting. You couldn't say God in a corporate setting. You couldn't say spirituality in a corporate setting. You couldn't say religion, you couldn't say sex. These are off limits, my friends. And in a weird way, the history of the world is the history of religions kind of being at odds with each other, beaten up on each other, ideologies attacking each other, and, and it's time to grow beyond that as best as we can. One of the ways to do that is to begin to make right our own relationship inside of us with a higher power, with the deeper, larger soul lessons that we're here to learn. Okay, let us dive in, my friends, and we're gonna talk about soul lesson. Numero Una agreeing to be here.
Before I explain exactly what it is, let me say that this is all likely, likely the most profound and far-reaching soul lesson. It's also one of the most overlooked and under-recognized psychospiritual human challenges for me in the field of psychology. This concept, understanding it and learning about it just in the field of psychology, forget around spirituality, should be at the top of the list. It's a fundamental soul lesson life lesson that very few people have, um, consciously and intentionally grappled with and addressed head on. So for many people, embracing and recognizing this soul lesson is a huge game train, huge game changer. So your job is to try this soul lesson on for yourself, get curious about it and begin to notice its power. So allow me to explain. Many of us are here. We're here. You and I are here, I'm here, you're here. We're listening. We're alive, we're doing life. And we have not actually fully agreed to be here. We're actually walking through this life, this world, this incarnation in a silent or not so silent resistance and protest. Now, we might be mildly depressed, low mood. We might be a little apathetic here and there. We might be partially here. We might be partially in our body. Yeah, you have your job. Yeah, you have your family. Yeah, you're raising your kids. Yeah, you're doing what you're supposed to do. Yes, you're going to school. But, uh, I don't quite like this world. I don't really know if I wanna be here. And consequently, we're not fully here and we don't even realize that we're, I don't like this place. So we aren't suicidal. So the ultimate, I don't agree to be here, the ultimate act, the ultimate statement that says, I don't freaking agree to any of this. This is awful. Life is bad. In fact, it's so bad that I am done and I'm gonna off myself. I'm gonna shoo myself, I'm gonna kill myself. I'm gonna jump off a bridge, whatever it is. So that's the ultimate. I don't agree to be here. I'm talking about everybody else who hasn't killed themselves and has no intentions really to kill themselves, even though, you know, it's not unusual for normal human beings to have suicidal thoughts at different times in life. But the result is we kind of sleep, walk through life to some degree because we don't quite like it. We don't quite enjoy it. We don't quite agree to it. You might not like war, you might not like violence. You might not like mean people. You might not like your upbringing. You might not like your body. In fact, you might have a list. And most people I know have one. Or here's the things that I don't approve of in this world. This ain't good. And if you watch enough news, it's easy to think to yourself, woo, this is, this is not a fun existence. This is not a fun planet. There's so much hardship. If you read the history books and study what has happened in the past, it doesn't always look so pretty.
You might be angry at religion, you might be angry at certain people. You might be angry at women, men, this person, that person. We might have suffered physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse. We might be dealing with a honest to goodness physical limitation, a disease condition. Who's gonna wanna wake up in the morning and go, yeah, I'm so happy to be here, everybody, this is such a great life. I can't wait to get outta bed. Get this thing off me and let me start my day. Um, so oftentimes we're here, but we're not here. And on a fundamental core, deep human soul level, there's a lot of us who are walking around. And that was me for many years. Kinda half alive, half dead. Well, I really don't wanna be here. I really don't wanna, I, I, I don't approve of this world. I don't approve it, this, this, this, this, and this. I can't really do anything about that. I can't change the world. I can't save the world. And you know, I gotta make money and I gotta take care of myself and I gotta feed myself. But once again, we're walking through life with a heaviness, with a sourness, with a part of us that, ugh, just doesn't approve for so many of your clients. Some of this revolves around the body that they have, the looks that they have, the shape that they have, the upbringing that they have, the circumstances that they live in, the relationship challenges and disappointments, the life disappointments that they've gone through. When you wrap it all up, who, who wants to stay at the party? Why would you wanna be at the party if the party's not fun? In fact, the party's painful. The party causes causes a lot of suffering, causes physical and emotional discomfort. It cau it's the party might be abusive, the party might be hurtful, the party might have kind of stuck a dagger in us energetically or emotionally. So, so of course we don't agree to be here. And the net result is what I'm suggesting in our internal world. We got one foot in the door of life and one foot out of the door of life from that place. Why the heck would you wanna take care of your body? Why the heck would you wanna love yourself into change and transformation? Why the heck would you wanna eat good and exercise good and be happy? Because it's a tough existence. So agreeing to be here stated in the positive means that we accept that this is my life. This is my life. You wake up in the morning, look around you, look at the place where you live, your house, your apartment, your condo. Look at the people around you. Look at the things you have. Look at your hands. Look in the mirror, look at your face, look at yourself. This is my life. This is my body. These are my circumstances. This is my age. This is my sex, this is my bank account, this is my income. These are the numbers. These are my parents. These were my parents. These are my children. This was my past. This whole story about my past. Yep, this was my past. These are the dramas I've lived through. The challenges I face. This is the craziness that I've had to deal with. The pains, the joys, the ups and downs. It means that we simply accept what is.
It doesn't mean you need to love all this stuff, even though that would be nice. It doesn't mean you need to approve of the behaviors of the people that have harmed you. I'm not saying it means you have to approve of these things and the wrongs in the world and the wrongs that have been done for you. It doesn't mean that you sanction the betrayals or the harms that have committed, that have been committed against you or your loved ones. I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying that you look at the story of your life and you say, this is the story of my life. It just means that we simply agree, okay, this has been my journey and this continues to be my journey. Simply because it is so simply because this is what life with a capital L, the universe with a capital U, a higher power with a capital P, uh, an invisible code has given me. So instead of living in protest of your life, silent or otherwise, we begin to embrace the fullness of the journey. You embrace the entire catastrophe you own and acknowledge that yes, this has been my journey, this has been my past. And yes, stop cursing it. And you slowly start to bless it because look around you, my friends. You will find plenty of people if you really look hard, if it was your job, you can find tens of thousands of people who have it far worse off than you do.
So we look back on our journey and we begin to bless our existence.
Let's say this in more ways. Agreeing to be here means we look at the world for what it is. What is the world? The world is what it is. And we agree that as long as we are alive, here's the punchline. As long as we're alive, we will participate to the best of our abilities. Despite the challenges and the harshness and the disapprovals, you and I have about the world that I agree, we got some disapprovals. You and I probably have a lot of similar disapprovals about the world. We have some dissimilar ones, but we can probably all, you know, agree that yeah, there's some things here. Ain't fun, ain't good. But we look at our life, we look at the big picture, we look at history, we look at humanity, we look to the heavens. And why am I here? There's something I'm here to learn. There's some ways I'm here to participate. And we agree that this is the world. We agree that there is indeed suffering. I agree that there is suffering. I agree that there is harm, there is war, there is poverty, there is injustice, there is a lot of unfairness, there's a lot of nastiness to it. I'm not sanctioning it, but I'm agreeing that this exists because it exists. Simply because it's there.
Agreeing to be here means check it out. My friends, here's a big one. Agreeing to be here means we choose to agree to the body that we are in and the life we are living in, this body and the life we have lived in this body. Because if not, we are in deep and primal negation of self and of our very existence. And that is the ultimate autoimmune condition where we attack our own existence, yet disapprove of your own existence. Would you say that to a kid? Would you say that to your child? I disapprove of the essence of your existence. I don't even want you to be here. Young little child, ouchies that hurts.
If we don't consciously in our mind, in a very thoughtful, aware, present, conscious way. If we don't consciously agree to be here, we might constantly feel like we self-sabotage.
One of the reasons we, one of the main reasons we self-sabotage is we haven't agreed to be here.
We may be deeply driven by apathy, by loneliness. We may feel lost, we will may feel confused. We will certainly feel not at peace. We may feel this constant need to fix ourselves or change our body as a way to feel better about being here, as if that's gonna make it better.
There's a big one, my friends.
Have you ever thought, or have you ever heard somebody say, you know, this wasn't supposed to be the life I was supposed to live. This is not my life. This is not the life I wanted.
And that might be true.
I could think of way better lives that I could have lived growing up. And my assumption is that the life you're supposed to live is this one. It's the one you've lived because you're living it and you have lived it. And I'm looking to the heavens, I'm looking to true north. I'm looking to a higher power and saying, okay, there's a greater wisdom here that I don't understand. Yeah, life is not easy, okay? And life hasn't been easy for me and for my ancestors and for a lot of people that came before us. You're born and you die and you get diseased. And that sucks. So life might suck, it might be hurtful, it might be painful, it might be hard granted. And some of us have harder lives than others. Some of some of us have extremely hard lives. Some of us have insane nonsense that we have to put up with, whether it comes to health, whether it comes to family, whether it comes to money. And again, all I'm saying is that many of us are walking around not fully agreeing to be here and be alive. We don't have the wherewithal or the urge to kill ourselves, but we might be slowly, unconsciously, subversively, pulling the air out of our balloon, pulling the air out of our life. So it's a slow death through bad food, bad diet, not exercise, not taking care of myself. Um, and just walking around half here, half not here.
You know, how many times has a client said when it comes to food or body or health, you know, I know what I'm supposed to do. I know what you told me. I know what's healthy for me. You know, I, I I just couldn't do it.
Here's a big reason why that often happens is because we haven't really fully agreed to be here. So if we haven't fully agreed to, to be here, this is my body, this is my life, this is my situation, this is what I have to contend with, grapple with, be with deal with. This is my weight challenge. This is my overeating, my binge eating challenge. This is my relationship with food and body. I gotta deal with this. And we don't want to.
So it might look like self-sabotage. It might look like being stuck because there's a bigger choice that hasn't been made.
So again, by not agreeing to be here, we are wide open to unwanted symptoms, unwanted thoughts, unwanted eating challenges. In fact, it's almost predictable that you're gonna have some kind of unwanted behaviors and symptoms in life.
Because the reality is life wants us here. That's why it puts you here for goodness sake.
Part and parcel of agreeing to be here is to understand that you came here, perhaps on some level you chose to be here.
And if you haven't chosen to be here consciously, then it is time. Guess what? To make a choice. It's time to actually choose. It's time to sit down at that gambling table and wager.
It's time to look in the mirror. It's time to look at the stars. It's time to go to temple. Go to church, go into nature wherever you go, where you can connect with something bigger, higher, deeper, and make a choice about choosing to be here. Our eating challenges, my friends, are often, often the soul's way of raising its hand and letting us know, yo yo yo, something's off. Something deeper needs our attention.
So with my clients, I'm just kind of wondering, in the back of my mind as I'm listening it, it, it is just, has this person agreed to be here?
They're constantly complaining about this and that. And, and life is one big complaint. And they feel defeated by life, and they feel like victims and everything seems like a chore. And why does this happen to me? And oh yeah, I want to take care of myself, but I just don't do it. And I wanna, you know, learn this, learn that. Go here, go there. But I just don't do it. So, uh, it, it's really simple. On one level, if we, you and I don't consciously agree to be here, we'll never fully quite feel here. And in fact, we will feel as if we don't belong.
We will feel alone. We will feel that we don't deserve.
And somehow we'll never tap into our potential if we don't consciously agree here. Because fulfilling your potential means you do the workshop. The program called you life called Your Life's Journey. So from the time you're born to this moment, what I am suggesting when I am postulating is everything has been your brilliantly designed workshop. I know it's hard. Everything has been the brilliantly designed workshop that life designed just for you and you alone to help you reach your potential. So you have to take all of the nonsense, all the pain, all the suffering, all the craziness, and you have to turn that into fertilizer. You have to suck the nutrition out of it so your oak tree can grow. Mighty, my friends, agreeing to be here is a huge action. It's a huge choice. It's a spiritual choice. It's a spiritual experience. It's a powerful form. If you don't believe in the spiritual dimension, it is a powerful, powerful form of character development. And I'm gonna tell you, if you pay attention, it will tend to confront you with the deepest parts of who you really are and why you're here. So this is a reckoning. This is a powerful life moment. So many of the initiations that you have in life, when I say initiation, means, you know, when you're young, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever it is, years old, you have a birthday, and each birthday you get congratulated, you get celebrated. Somebody throws you the party to celebrate your life. That's very nice. Um, you might have had a, it's, it's your confirmation or your bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah. You, you might have had that. So at age 13 ish, there's this ritual that's given by certain religions to help us step into young adulthood. Uh, when you learn how to drive a car, I don't know whatever age you are, 16, 17, 18. That's, that's, that's a ritual that's given to us that helps us step up.
It's a graduating experience that the world bestows upon us. When you turn 21 and you can start to have all kinds of legal privileges and own a gun or go to war, whatever it is, uh, you know, these are privileges that humanity grants us because we've reached a certain age. Well, what I wanna say is that there are certain initiations that are self initiations. Nobody's gonna do it for you. Certain initiations are self initiations. Nobody's gonna show up and say, yo, hey, I'm gonna now make you choose to be here. And when you make this choice to be here, you're gonna be a lot healthier and a lot happier and a lot more powerful. And life is gonna work a heck of a lot better for you. It's still gonna have challenges. There's still gonna be pains and sufferings, but it's gonna all look and feel different. Nobody's gonna do that for you, but we're kind of doing it together in a certain way because I am raising my hand. I'm calling this to your attention. I'm suggesting it's a place to look. And then, and, and then what do you do?
So the self-initiation is a powerful way to heal our connection to the spiritual source, to a higher source, to a higher power. Choosing to be here is being born again. It's a rebirth.
It's a powerful act.
So again, you're looking at your life, you're acknowledging your owning. Yes, there's been hardships, there's been pain, there's been sufferings. It might have been awful, it might have been a challenging life up to this point. And it continues to be challenging. And you choose your life. You agree to be here. You want your life. I want this life. I want these challenges. I want to take this on. I take responsibility, meaning I choose to respond to the circumstances that I have found myself in. Taking responsibility doesn't mean that you made all this nonsense happen, though you certainly contributed to some of it or much of it. Taking responsibility means we are responding to how life presents to us. We are now choosing to be responsible for my challenging relationship with food and body, or choosing to be responsible for that. We are choosing to notice where we are holding others in unforgiveness. We are choosing to notice where we check out. We are choosing to notice where we take ourselves off of the playing field of life, and we sit on the sidelines and we don't participate, and we mope and we groan and we feel sorry for ourselves. All for understandable reasons. If you're on the sidelines, if you don't feel that you want to participate in life, if your client is on the sidelines, if there, if they're, if they're, if they're not confident, if they just don't want to be out there, they've been hurt too much, they've been hurt in relationship, they have a struggle, some relationship with food, and they just don't know what to do. And, and we isolate a little bit more, we might not have love in our life to the degree that we want it. We might not have the intimacy or the connection or the relationships or the kinds of friendships that we want, or the kinds of gifts and, and work that we can give to the world. You know, if we're sitting on the sidelines, we always have a good reason. This is always a good reason. So if you're thinking to myself, oh my God, this is me. I haven't agreed to be here, I am clear that you have a good reason. Many good reasons. Like truly, truly, truly, truly many good reasons.
I, I have a friend of, of many, many, many, many years who, um, committed suicide and given what she had gone through, part of me understands now our whole social circle was devastated, absolutely devastated when she killed herself, devastated that she made that choice. Because silently, I think there's a place where we want each other to be here silently. We have a deeper understanding somewhere that if you're here, then you're meant to be here.
So again, agreeing to be here is a amazing, easing, powerful choice. And to get to that place, to even consider agreeing to be here, we have to look at our life in a whole different way. We have to look at how we show up in a whole different way. And this is a huge course correction. You know, think for a moment about you've, you've watched people age watch people in their seventies, their eighties, their nineties. As we age, we slowly start to leave the body.
We might withdraw from food a little bit more. Appetite gets a little bit less. We lose energy, we lose a little bit of luster, we lose some life force, we lose some mojo, we get a little more tired. It just, what happens? We are slowly withdrawing on a physiologic level, but also on an emotional level. Um, and, and gradually, by and by the body loses its capacity to be here. So, so that is what any human would observe watching the aging process. So what I'm asking you is, is it such a far leap to make when I say, you know, when we check out, when you and I check out when we're not fully present, when we're not fully here, meaning when we haven't fully agreed to be here, when you haven't made the full profound, huge commitment, okay, this is my life, this is my body, this is me, this is my looks, this is my eye color, this is my hair. These are the people, these were my parents. This was the whole enchilada. When we haven't said that part of us is indeed checked out. And when a part of us checks out, doesn't it make sense that metabolism weakens accordingly in some way, shape, or form?
So the questions I'm asking in the back of my mind, once again, has my client agreed to be here and fully alive? Because I'm knowing in the back of my mind that without agreement to be here, poor health habits, unwanted behaviors, unwanted eating behaviors, a challenging relationship with food, are predictable. So my friends, this is about you, the practitioner, learning to listen more deeply to your client in this way,
because again, if you haven't agreed to be here, then who cares about practicing healthy habits? I don't wanna be here. If we haven't agreed, if haven't agreed to be here, then why waste time taking care of ourselves with good food, good nourishment, good movement? Why be happy? Oh no. But if I have the perfect body, then I'll be happy. No, when you agree to be here,
when you agree to the life you've been given and the story that you've lived, and I'm not asking, I'm, I'm not saying to do something out of the ordinary here, because this has been your life. Your life has been your life. You could disown it and distance yourself from it as much as you want. You can curse it as much as you want. But that's like cursing the sun, showing up every morning. It's like cursing the air. The air just is, life just is what it is, is what it is. And it's what it's been. So if we haven't agreed to be here, really, then why work hard on our unwanted eating challenges? Because it's hard. It is hard work to transform an unwanted eating challenge. And it's totally doable. It is totally doable, especially when we know how to do it. When we have the right kind of help, and especially when we start to let go of the quick and easy fix. And if you haven't agreed to be here definitionally, you're gonna look for quick fixes.
Because everything is moment to moment when we haven't agreed to be here. You're actually not playing a longer game. You're living in reaction moment to moment, and you're reacting to your life in each moment. Oh, this is happening now I react this way, that's happening now. I react that way. And, and that's, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that because you must respond, react to your life on a moment to moment basis. But if we haven't taken the time to make the big agreement, then we will have not seen the big picture. And our day in, day out behaviors will oftentimes be chosen from an ineffective place and they will be ineffective simply because we're not looking at the big picture and we haven't agreed to be here. And that disagreement, that cursing of our own life then has us having all kinds of behaviors and challenges and symptoms and beliefs that reinforce the fact that I shouldn't be here.
If you and I haven't agreed to be here, then why fully show up and express who we truly are? Why would we say what we truly think and feel?
Because you know something, if you fully agree to be here, guess what? You're not always gonna get what you want. If you and I fully agree here, sometimes we're gonna save things and people don't like it. If you and I, you know, fully agree to be here, sometimes agreeing to be here means, yeah, things are not always gonna go my way. I might get married and end up getting divorced. Uh, I might make money and then I might lose it. I might not make a lot of money, so I have no money to lose. Um, I'm gonna have hardship. I might have heartbreak, I might have had heartbreak. I might have another heartbreak to agree to be here knowing that this is the world. So I'm not saying the world is easy, but, and when we start to connect to who am I and why am I here and what's really going on, and ask the question, do I fully agree to be here. And what are the implications of not agreeing to be here? And can I see the places in my life where I haven't fully chosen to be here?
And can you think about times in your life when you were happy to be here? You were, you were choosing, choosing to be here. I like this. This is good. Think of how great that was.
So agreeing to be here is a, um, it's a quantum leap in maturity. It's a quantum leap in character. It's acknowledging that the world is full of paradoxes, it's full of opposites. It has pleasure and pain. It has good and evil. It has, you know, health and disease. It has love and it has hate, it has success, and then has failure.
And when we can start to embrace that and let go of some of our resistance to it, something magic happens.
Life meets us in a whole different way. Life looks different. The color of your day looks like, uh, it is, it's a lot prettier. The tone of your day is different. When challenging situations present themselves, it looks different. Okay? I agree to this. Doesn't mean you approve of it and you love it. It means, I agree because this is happening, this is my life and I agree to respond to this. I agree to measure up to this. I agree to take this on. I agree to meet this challenge. I agree that I might need help. I agree that there's days when I'm not gonna wanna get out of bed. It doesn't mean that every day you're this wonderful go-getter. No, you agree that some days you're not gonna be a wonderful go-getter. That's okay too. That's part of agreeing to be here. I'm gonna have my ups and downs. But if you truly agree to be here, there's a part of you that's gonna pull yourself up when you're down a little faster and sometimes a lot faster. There's a part of yourself that's not even gonna allow yourself to go down. Because oftentimes the ways that we self abandon
is direct related to the fact that I don't wanna approve of this world. I don't wanna approve of this life. I don't approve of my own soul. I don't wanna approve of my own existence. I don't wanna approve of this body. I don't wanna approve of who I am. I don't wanna approve of how I all, how I've grown up. Ouch.
When you agree to be here, all of a sudden we're not busy fighting and cursing our existence, our past, our story, our history, our body. And then all of a sudden our chemistry changes from one of day in, day out, ongoing low level stress chemistry. And it starts to shift. Your brain chemistry will literally start to change. You will have a more positive outlook. Okay, let's tell a story.
This is a client, I'm gonna call her Sally. When I first saw her, she was 40, 44 years old librarian for many years. She said to me, I am 55 pounds overweight. She wants to lose that weight. And indeed, she has been dieting since her twenties to lose that 55 pounds. Uh, Sally has come to see me. She has been down every road. She has tried everything. And she's been working for a good 30 years to lose approximately 55 pounds, not 50, not 60, 55. I love these numbers. Um, Sally lives alone. She has a very small social circle. She acknowledges straight up that she tends to isolate. Sally is extremely intelligent. Uh, she has a wicked sarcastic sense of humor. She loves to complain and she has a lot of complaints. And she is not afraid to let it all hang out in terms of a, her intelligence, b, her sarcasm, and c her complaints. Um, medically, she suffers from hypothyroid, which by the way can lead to weight gain or inability to lose it. Um, she dislikes exercise tremendously. Uh, she's extremely tired of diets. So she's hating diets. And one of the reasons she's coming to see me is because she heard from whoever else recommended me to her that I'm not the diet guy. Um, Sally's also very clear to me that she resents certain things. She resents that she has to eat healthy. She doesn't like eating healthy. Um, she has a extreme junk food diet and she occasionally has healthy meals, but she likes what she likes, what she likes. And uh, I don't wanna do that. Sally wants a fix. So even though she doesn't wanna be on a diet, you know, I asked her, I said, what, what do you think I'm gonna do? She says, oh, part of me thinks you're gonna gimme some magic diet, even though I don't wanna diet. And to her, a magic diet means eat all this junk and you're gonna lose 55 pounds. Um, you know, I dig deeper and it turns out Sally really wants to get married. She seldom dates. In fact, there's only been one guy that she occasionally dates over the last handful of years, only one guy. And he is, uh, not interested in her. It's more like, uh, um, it's more like a friends with benefits sort of thing. He calls her up when he's a little lonely and and wants intimacy. And there's a part of her that is very convinced that she'll never find a man if she can't shed the pounds. Sally admits that she has given up on taking good care of herself and she really wants the easy way out. You know something, I love an honest client.
She's really honest. She's saying, I don't, I don't wanna take care of myself. I want the easy way out. And by the way, that's the kid in her talking. It really is. And it's the adult in her making fun of herself, but at the same time owning that indeed this is who she is and this is what's been happening.
Okay, so let me fast track this case study with Sally for a moment, and I'm gonna get to some bottom line pieces. Sally referred to herself as the ugly duckling in her family. Sally is one of five sisters, and she's the ugly duckling of the five sisters in her languaging. Not only that, Sally was bold enough. She brought in a picture to our session of her and her four sisters and to prove to me that she's the ugly duckling. And you know, something, if you look at it from the typical Hollywood perspective, it's probably true on the level of attractiveness. And I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I also want to be able to be honest and say, she has made this assessment of herself because this is the world we live in. These are our measuring tools. And, and, and I said to her, okay, yeah, your other sisters, they got the looks. Got it. And you know, she's able to laugh at it. But at the same time, you know, she, she's 55, she's been dealing with this for approximately forever. Um, and it's kind of shocking, you know, to see the difference. And she kept telling me, you know, how her sisters, you know, they're the lucky ones. Sally has, you know, probably has what, what we would consider, you know, some type of deformity in her face, in her spine. She has very intense scoliosis of her back. So she's a bit hunched over and she always felt like she needed to hide her looks and hide herself. And she became a librarian because she feels most accepted in that environment. Um, and here she is living her whole life in resentment, which quite frankly, I get it. So for Sally's entire existence, she's living in jealousy. She feels ripped off, she feels angry at the universe. Um, and she, she can't believe that she drew the wrong straw in life. I, I mean, really that's, that's her worldview. That's her religion that I have been dealt the worst hand of all these pretty girls that I grew up with. Now she's been with a handful of men in her life who, in her words, just used her for sex. And she has tried all kinds of strategies, as I mentioned, over the years, to lose weight. And nothing really works. By the way. All her sisters are married, they all have kids. Uh, and in her perspective, they're all living these picture perfect lives, which makes it even worse for her. You know, at least if they were prettier, but they didn't necessarily, you know, have happy marriages or kids, she might feel a little bit better about herself. But, but she is in, in, in disbelief and, and she's really great at the way she kind of talks about it. She laughs at herself at the same time she complains. Um, fascinating woman. What's also fascinating is this is one of the few clients I've had over the years who really kind of overpowered me in a certain way. She convinced me in our first session that there's no way out of her misery. And I'm thinking, wow, huh, this is a tough one. You're kind of, I didn't say this, but I'm thinking, wow, you, you have, she was like a great lawyer laying out a case before the jury of why she should be miserable and why she should be unhappy and why life sucks. And I'm thinking, okay, I get it. There was a level where I agreed with her, and here I am, she's not gonna die, she's not gonna exercise. Eating food, honestly is her only pleasure in life other than reading. She loves reading and she actually loves her job. Um, but she loves food more. And I'm thinking to myself, damn, how could I take food away from this woman? How could I convince her to eat less drunk as a way to lose weight and go on this really nourishing diet when this is the pleasure she gets in life and I'm not gonna force her to exercise. This is a 55-year-old woman who's very clear to me. She doesn't like exercise, but she wants to lose weight. And why does she wants to lose weight? Because she is clear that she could never get a guy unless she's skinnier.
So here's what I came up with. My friend Shey was looking for the magic fix. And she was shocked when I said to her
in a subsequent session, 'cause I was exploring with her. I said, listen, I'm gonna be with you and we're gonna, we're gonna see if we can find a doorway for you to help you get where you wanna go. So I did a lot of thinking about her and a lot of meditating and a lot of praying and a lot of meandering in my mind and wondering and wondering and wondering. And it's, I kept bumping this up to the spiritual realm and I was clear that, okay, she didn't wanna be here, she didn't accept her life. And I said to her, listen, I don't think you even wanna be alive. Forget about this whole losing weight, getting married thing. Um, you just don't wanna be here. There's a part of you that's, that's kind of done. It feels life. And, and you know, it's easier to say, I'm the ugly duckling. I feel ripped off. It's actually harder to say, I don't want to be alive. This life sucks. I want a do over. This isn't right. I want to get outta here.
I said, you know, if I was you, I might feel the same way.
I might feel like I don't want to be here on planet earth in such an unfair freaking place.
And remember I told you she had a very sarcastic sense of humor. So I said to her, you sure you just don't wanna end this. You sure you just don't wanna like say, okay, I'm done. I'm outta here. She laughed at me. She got it. She said, you're, you're crazy. She said, I can't believe you said that. And I said, well, kind of. Um, but you're kind of a crazy lady too. And I said, you're the kind of person who can handle a suggestion like that. I said, because I get that you're not gonna shoot yourself. But also I think that that's what you are contending with. In a way, Sally was actually relieved to know why she had self-sabotage for years. Self-sabotage. We, we really broke it down, um, to a spiritual challenge. I said, you're just in deep protest of your own existence. Um, and I said, is it even possible? Just lemme ask you, is it even possible in your, in your mind? By the way, this was the first time with any client that I ever had this conversation about agreeing to be here. Um, said, is it even possible in your mind that you can do something? Say something to yourself, do some ritual, do something, go, go to some meditation retreat, some religious retreat where you could come out and say, okay, this is the hand I've been dealt. This is me. This is my looks, this is my situation. These are my hot sisters. And I just, I I agree to be here. I agree to say, okay, this is my life. This is what it is, and let me start to embrace it. And let me start to see how I can take all these challenges that suck and start to use it for my own personal development. And a little bit of a light came on and she said, you know something? She said, I've really been attracted to Buddhism lately, and I've been going to these series of lectures with this monks. And we've had a few conversations. And the monk kind of said something similar to me. He said that I need to see my life from a more karmic perspective and that I have to stop focusing so much on my looks and just focus on my spiritual development. And I said, well, you got two guys in your life now who care about you. And they're both saying the same thing.
I said, I don't think your work is dietary. I, I think it is more spiritual. So, and, and I pulled out the old line from her. I said, okay, time out a second. Do you know anyone who has the same body weight that you have? Or more and bigger, who's in a relationship, who's married, who has kids who's happy with their relationship?
She laughed. And she said, yeah, I can name a lot of people. I said, okay, so the weight guarantees you nothing. This is just this toxic belief that is stuck in your mind because that's now become your religion, that if only you can lose this weight, then that's magically going to fix everything. And I said, that's a toxic belief that you didn't invent that a lot of people have. And we use it to distract ourselves from the actual work. It's, it's magical thinking. It's the child's way of saying, if I just tap my shoes together 10 times, it's all going to be better. If I just lose this weight, I will then find the perfect guy. Because the perfect guy will show up and say, oh, you weigh exactly how much I need the woman I fall in love with to weigh. Has any guy ever ever said that? And if they did, did the relationship even last? I don't know any guy who's ever fallen in love with a woman because she lost 55 pounds. It's such nonsense. So we were in a very honest and powerful conversation, and she was really relieved to know why she'd been self-sabotaging for years. I say, it's very simple. If you don't agree to be here, you're not gonna play by rules that serve you because you're constantly gonna be in the game, but out of the game.
So I suggested to her that her path was an unsexy path. She just needs to let go of this being the sexy life that she imagines whatever sexy is for her, that her definition of sexy doesn't work anymore. And she has to come up with a new definition of sexy. And if she truly wants marriage, wants connection, wants an authentic sexual sexual relationship, intimate relationship, loving relationship, then for goodness sake, stop seeing your body as a commodity and a thing and a billboard. And that the only way you're going to attract someone is if you have a body that weighs less. Well, who are you going to attract then if you're putting out, okay, here's the body you want, here's the body you want, you're gonna attract somebody who, who who fits that description. Um, we actually worked together for only three sessions and it, that's really all we needed. There wasn't any other work to do, uh, because she already had her place where she could start to explore, um, the spiritual dimension in her life that she was really getting that it's time for me. And by the third session, I'm gonna tell you, the woman had shape shifted a bit. She didn't lose any weight. You know, her face was more relaxed, it had more color to it. She was softer. And I gotta tell you, her beauty came out. She was so convinced of her unat attractiveness that she radiated unat attractiveness, you know? And I asked her, I said, have you looked in the mirror recently? You know, I asked her to go into the bathroom during our session and look at herself. And I said, look at your face. Look at how much it's lightened up. Look at how much it's let go. Look at how much your natural beauty is coming out. Look at how much your light is coming out. I said, you know, a little bit of self love here. Um, you know, there are times when our face morphs. It's really true. Our face is gonna morph a hundred times during the day. Our face will morph when we love, when we relax, when we feel pleasure, when we feel pressure, when we feel relief, when we feel attacked. Um, you know, beauty was coming into her life because she was adopting a higher perspective. Uh, you know, she was now on a path to learning the soul lesson of agreeing to be here. And for her, part of agreeing to be here at this point in life was to put energy into her own spiritual growth. And, and something that she never thought about and dreamed about. And in her word, she said, I'm the least spiritual person I know. And I said, well, I don't even know what being a spiritual person means, but that's now up for you to decide and for you to go on that journey. You know, my friends, it, it's, it's, I prefer to work with clients for, you know, at least three, four months. And, you know, this was a time in my career that sometimes it, it's, it might be one session and you realize you're done. Two sessions, you're done, three sessions you're done. Um, so yeah, you know, it's fine to have a client package of 10 sessions. You can, and there's all different ways to work with all different kinds of clients. And the reality is, the truest reality is that there's a natural timeline that has nothing to do with any numbers we invent. And there's been plenty of times when I signed somebody up for 10 sessions or for four months and the work was completed before then, and we both knew it and or I knew it. And there's times when the work goes far beyond that time. So you don't know how long you're supposed to see a client. We're here to respect the journey. This was a breakthrough client for me because I started looking at the world. I started looking for myself. I started looking at other clients for the places where I, we, they have not fully agreed to be here.
My friends, if we are checked out of life, we are definitionally checked out of the body.
If you haven't agreed to be here, that's another way of saying you're somewhat, to some degree checked out of life. We're not fully here, we're not fully noticing. We're not fully present, we're not fully engaged. We're not fully with pleasure, pain, feelings, emotions. We're not fully with the body. We're not fully with sensation. Why? Because we're instructing our soul to slowly die. And one of the ways the soul dies is it removes itself slowly from the body. And the less you inhabit the body, the less metabolic power your body will have. The more we embody, the more we get into it and get present in it. The more you can put your foot on the gas, on the brake, the more you can turn the wheel. The more control, the more power, the more ability, the more choice we have.
Presence equals metabolism. My friends, do you wanna hang out with people who are distracted? They're not there. They're not present. No, it is,
it's a lame experience to be with somebody. And they're not present to you. They're checked out. So the experience that you have in that relationship is weak. It's a weak experience. It doesn't have a lot of punch, it doesn't have a lot of power. It doesn't have a lot of life. It doesn't have a lot of love. It doesn't have a lot of creativity. It doesn't have a lot of color. It doesn't uplift you when you're with someone who's not present well, when you don't have presence in your own life, then the same thing happens. There's less color, there's less mojo, there's less action, there's less activity, there's less juice, there's less intimacy, there's less love. There's less metabolism.
So let's go into a few more details here about agreeing to be here. Let's talk about men for a second. Many men, especially men I've noticed, who have no sense of purpose, no sense of mission. Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing for the masculine mind? Remember, in masculine psychology, the masculine in us, in men especially, and in women as well, for many women as well. Um, but the masculine inno wants is, is goal oriented. It's directed. It needs a purpose, it needs a linear direction. It needs to know, here's what I'm doing, here's the plan. That's the masculine mode, the left brain mode, the masculine archetype. But in this case, I'm raising my hand and telling you that majority of men have have a strong masculine component to their psyche and to their nervous system. So without a sense of purpose and mission, they're often stuck in unhealthy eating patterns and poor self-care, meaning they don't have a reason to be here. And they go on automatic pilot. So many men who come to see me in the, especially in their forties, fifties, sixties, they've let their body go. And younger guys, I've seen this. If they don't have a reason to be here, they're not gonna wanna take care of their health. And then they have these health issues. And yeah, you can give them the right herbs, vitamins, medicines, diet. But why would they do the diet? Why would they clean things up? Why would they cook a meal? Why would they go organic? Why, why, why, why, why? If they don't wanna be here, really, and they don't wanna be here 'cause they don't have a reason to be here. As soon as you have a reason to be here, especially for the masculine mind, something shifts, something changes, something happens. When you have that reason for being here. Many people, especially women, are in protest of the body they live in. This happens to men too, but I've seen this far too often in women. They're in protest of the body. They live in the looks, the weight, the shape that they have, which means on a deeper level, they're refusing to be here. I don't wanna be here because the world has been telling them, this is the body You're supposed to have this, I supposed to look, you don't even know that the world's been telling you that. Or maybe you do, but you've interjected it, you've ingrained it into your own mind. You've taken on that belief as your own religion. And because you see apparently everywhere around you that only the happy people have the Hollywood looks and feels and shapes and whatever.
Then we have several generations of women who
have not agreed to be here. Hence they're partially here. Hence they're checked out. Hence, it's difficult to get where they want to go. Many teenagers, my friends, and this is natural for teenagers, they're in a natural, intelligent reaction to the world. Why? Because teenagers are brilliant observers. They look around and they go, what the hell's going on here? What have these adults created for me? What is going on? How am I gonna earn money? How am I gonna have a good life? They're so, they're subjected to so much craziness, so much stimulation, so much nonsense. They're learning where they fit in and they're getting that the journey is hard. And a part of them doesn't wanna be here. They might turn to drugs to escape. They might turn to food to escape. They might turn to an eating disorder to distract themselves. They might turn into body perfectionism to distract themselves, or they might find a place where they can fit in. There might be athletics. It, it might be art, it might be be moon, it might be dance. It, it, it might be a hobby, an interest, uh, a profession that they wanna pursue. Whatever it is, whoever and is not fully agreeing to be here. Once again, my friends has a very, very good reason. Very, very good reasons for not wanting to be here. Life is challenging and each and every one of us has a good reason. If you wanna check out and if you don't wanna be here, there are great reasons for it. So agreeing to be here, well, how do you do it? Have you been thinking that along the lines as, as we've been talking, even though it's me talking, but it's you listening, but you know, you're talking in your head as I'm talking. So I'm gonna assume in a strange way that this is a conversation. How do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it? And it's a great question and I'm gonna give you a number of different answers because I think there are a number of different answers. On the one hand, my friends, what I wanna say is agreeing to be here is not something we necessarily do overnight. It's not necessarily something that you make the choice and it happens. But then again, it surely can be. And I mean that you can be born again. Literally you can
find a way, find a place. Where's your power spot? Where's your sacred spot? Where's your religious spot? Where could you go and talk to yourself? Where could you go and talk to God? Where could you go and talk to Jesus? Where could you go and talk to a higher power? Where can you go talk to Allah, whatever the word is for you. Where do you go? Where can you go? So you can create the kind of surroundings. For me, it's nature. Uh, for me it's a power spot. It'll be by a river, by an ocean. And take stock and look at your life and look at what it's been.
And then ask yourself the question, do I choose to be here? And then make the choice to be here. And notice that if you don't make the choice to be here, the alternative is you're choosing to not be here. Which means you're resisting your own life, which means you will create behaviors that curse your own life. You will create thoughts that curse and diminish your own life because your life is not worth living and you are not worth wanting even by yourself. Here we are. We want people to want us. I wanna be attractive. I want, I want the girls and the guys to love me and go after me and find me sexually appealing because of this body or this shape that I have. You want people to want you, but you don't want yourself.
How does that work? Gotta want yourselves, my friends. Your client has to want themselves. By the way, you're gonna learn how to do this with your client as you begin to do this with yourself.
So I'm introducing to you what I consider a very PhD concept. I am considering this the, uh, one of the key missing pieces in the fields of psychology. We don't go here. I think it's time to go here. So at the very least, the agreement to be here is an ongoing agreement and commitment. I have to remind myself, um, periodically,
literally just a week ago I had a conversation with my coach who I've known for many, many, many moons. And he slammed me hard with this one. Uh, 'cause I was moaning and groaning and complaining. And he said, you're not wanting yourself. You are not choosing to be here. He said, if you don't want yourself, who will?
And I, I know this so I laugh. So it's a practice. A practice is something you do continuously that you return to again and again. So I'll catch myself in a moment where I'm being resistant to life. I'm being resistant to my body. I'm being resistant to my circumstance. I'm complaining, I'm moaning, I'm groaning, I'm being pissy. I'm not liking my body, liking my, this, liking my dad, liking my health, liking my energy, liking the world around me, liking the circumstance. And then I take a deep breath. And I remember my commitment to be here and agreeing to be here means I'm agreeing to the workshop, uh, that a higher power, that a greater wisdom than an unseen intelligence that the hidden architecture of the universe has designed just for me. And I take a deep breath and I relax into trust. And I remember that when I come from that place, something good happens.
So am I agreeing to be here is a question we can continuously propose to ourselves. Am I agreeing to be here alive on earth with all that? That means do I agree to participate in and live this life as best as I can? Am I willing to embrace the reality of my past, which is my past was my past, it happened. It's already etched in stone. It's in the book of life. This is what happened. Am I going to continue to say no, that shouldn't have happened? Would you wake up today and say the sun shouldn't have gotten up yesterday and the day before and the day before that and the stars shouldn't have been in the sky? Would you really waste your time with that? No, you wouldn't. So am i, am I willing to embrace that the past was so it happened? Am I willing to choose the journey that I've already lived to make my story right? Meaning to make it righteous, to make it okay to make it just to even bless it and say just, okay, wow, that was hard, man. I'm glad I don't have to go through that childhood again. Man, I'm glad I don't have to do that again. Deal with those people, deal with those parents, deal with this, that the other thing. Whatever it was the you didn't like, man, glad I don't have to do that again. And oh yes, here I am still in this challenging relationship with food, with my body, with health, with whatever it is. Am I willing to embrace that and agree to be here? Because agreeing to be here means I agree to this body and the challenges that it presents to me. And I agree to do my best
in taking this challenge and taking this self-attack and taking this self-hate and turning it into something different.
So it's a self-initiation into higher growth. This is something you can just as well journal if you like, and you pull out your journal and you put at the top of the page agreeing to be here. Make a list of all the ways you don't agree to be here. All the reasons why you shouldn't be here. All the things you protest, persons, places, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, foods, situations, all the things about your body that you protest, all the things about your life that's happened in the past that you protest. And then after you get all those protests down on paper, the things you don't agree to, it's happened. Can you agree to it? Can you embrace it? Can you bless it as part of your journey?
It may be true. And and when I say the words blessing and cursing, I almost want you to think of it. If you don't like the religious connotation in it, think of it as you know, you, you hear all these fairy tales and the evil witch or warlock puts a curse on somebody, haha. And they wave their little magic wand and they turn 'em into a tote or whatever it is. So they curse them. Uh, and you know, then the good guy or the good witch or the prince or the princess comes and they give you the kiss or whatever it is. And that's the blessing that changes everything. So what I wanna say is oftentimes if we're not blessing our life, chances are on some level we're cursing it on some level. So do I choose life?
And really what that is asking is, do I choose me? It's about choosing yourself. No one else can choose you but you, until you choose you,
you are wasting your time. If you want somebody else to choose you better than you're choosing yourself. When you're a child, when you're growing up, you know something. You know what we need? We need our parents to, to choose us. If we don't feel chosen by our parents, you know, I know that's not a good experience. That doesn't land well in the system. If I don't feel loved and accepted and wanted by my parents for goodness sake, ouchies, that's a big boo boo that happens to human beings. It's a big booboo that often happens if one is adopted, like I wasn't chosen and I wasn't wanted. That is a deep core hurt that needs a lot of love. If you are in a relationship and you were whew, you were clearly choosing that other person, I am choosing you. And that person wasn't choosing you, not even close to the degree that you were choosing them. That hurts. That's a pain.
What we don't realize is that when we're not choosing ourself, the pain is far bigger, far worse, far deeper. We just don't notice it all the time. Because that pain comes out in a challenging, painful, dysfunctional, upsetting relationship with food and body. And it can show up as other life issues. It could show up as we will end up choosing the wrong people, as friends, as partners, as loved ones, as husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, because we're not fully choosing ourself
or we're not even thinking in that direction.
So your job is to affirm to your client that they have a good reason for not wanting to be here. If indeed you start this conversation about agreeing to be here and you could give your client the homework assignment, you can have them journal, what would it be like for me to agree to be here? So first you're letting them know you have a good reason for not wanting to be here. It's fully understandable. It's totally okay. And you know what, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, it's time to revisit things. I'm thinking it's time to move forward in a whole new way. You wanna lose weight, you wanna get rid of this binge eating issue. You wanna love your body more. You wanna fill in the blank? Get rid of this unwanted eating challenge eating behavior. I wouldn't it be great Mr. And Mrs. Client, if there was a reset button in life, how cool would that be? You push the reset button and all of a sudden you start again. Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be great reset button? You know something? This is like a reset button. It might be the closest thing we have to a reset button.
So what would it be like for you to agree to be here? What would that look like? How would your inner world change? How might your outer world change? How would your day look different if you were agreeing to be here fully?
So write down all the ways you don't agree to be here, all the things you protest. And then I want you to start to consider how can I begin to accept what is and what has been? And it's a journaling exercise. And then you come back and you talk about it.
And I'm being very clear with you, my friends, if you don't want yourself, if you don't want your life, then who will? You're the only person left really at this stage who can give you truly what you want.
Yes, we need help. Yes, it's nice to have love and intimacy outside of us. Yes, we want the gifts in the goodies of the world. You do. I do. That's okay, that's great. And until we agree to be here,
how can life fully give us its gifts if we're not even present to it? If our hands are closed to the gift, if our hearts and minds are closed to the gift because our heart and mind and our soul is closed to our own life, is closed to life itself. And I'm half here and I'm half not, and some days I'm completely absent and I completely don't want to be here. So it's a choice. And what I'm saying to you is it's a soul choice. It's a deeper choice. It comes from perhaps a deeper place than you and I have ever accessed before.
This is about making your life right. No matter what went wrong, no matter what wasn't good, no matter what was yucky, this is about making your life right. It is on one level the deepest, deepest, deepest form of self approval.
You know, this is the kind of conversation that's best had after you have established some rapport. Rapport and trust with your clients. So not in a first session, my friends, not in a necessarily a second or a third session. Even now, once you feel like you and your client can have a deeper conversation, that's when it might come up. There is no cookie cutter way to figure out when you bring up this conversation with a client.
So this is about you learning how to be in relationship with your client, with the unique person before you and assess intuit guesstimate. When would be the right time to bring this conversation up? Because I feel that this could be really juicy. See, again, have your client write or journal an agreement to be here. Contract. That's the goal here. Agreement to be here. Contract. So ask them to write an inspire creative agreement to themselves about how and why they are choosing to be here. The the complaints that they're leaving behind and how they will use this agreement to be here to create for themselves a life that's worth living.
It doesn't mean that it's gonna be perfect forevermore agreeing to be here doesn't mean all the problems go away. It just means the problems look different. It means we speak to those problems differently. We dance with them differently. We address them differently, we hold them differently. We hold ourselves differently because we realize that we are not our problems, actually, that we're a soul that's come here to learn and to grow and evolve. And while we're here, we might as well be here.
So while you're listening to any conversation in this training, you might as well listen to the conversation and take it all in while you're eating your lunch. You might as well eat your lunch while you're in a conversation with your friend. You might as well be in that conversation with your friend
while you're having a challenging relationship with food. You might as well be present to it because that helps us to best extract experience and life and juice and positivity and learning and wisdom and insight from the moment because we're agreeing to be a participant in the moment that we're in anyway. So this is your life and this is about you agreeing to be in the life you've been given anyway and in the life you've been living. Anyway, stop the protest. That's what this is all about.
So my friends, I don't know about you, but for me this has been a powerful conversation. It's not a typical conversation, but I believe that it is a conversation that truly matters.
And I'm simply asking you to start to notice in your own life, have you agreed to be here? Where are the places you don't? I'm asking you to notice, might there be, are there, could there be connections between the fact that I haven't fully agreed to be here and by the way most people haven't that I speak to? Um, might there be connections between this and my eating challenge, my health challenge, my unwanted habits, my quote unquote self-sabotage my difficulty in quote unquote motivating myself or inspiring myself to do something. If you haven't agreed to be here, what often happens is then people look for motivation.
And you've probably heard me say this before, I don't love the word motivation. I prefer inspiration, especially in a client session. When a client tells me, I, I need to be motivated to do this diet. I need you to motivate me. As soon as somebody says I need you to motivate me secretly what I wanna do is roll up a magazine and smack 'em on the head. Um, and the reason I want to do that is because that will motivate them to consider that being motivated by someone else is not the key to helping them get where they want to go. For sure, for sure, for sure. There are times, plenty of times in life where we get motivated by certain persons situations and stuff gets done. Hallelujah. That's great. I'm not saying motivation is something negative, but often when we say the term highly motivated people, that often means highly stressed people. Motivation is short term. So when somebody says, I need you to motivate me, I need me to be motivated, really what they're saying is, I need a short burst of energy that will help me control my diet or eat this food that I don't really want to eat or do this exercise that I don't really wanna do. So I need you to be screaming at me. Come on, you could do this, you could eat this. I need you to punish me. That's kind of what people are saying. This is about inspiration. Inspiration. When you're motivated, you get about 15 miles to the gallon of motivation. When you're inspired, you get about 15,000 miles to the gallon of energy. When you're inspired, inspired, taking in a breath,
breath oxygen. Life is living inside of us. Inspiration comes from a deeper place. When you choose to be here, when you agree to be here, when you choose your life, when you bless your life,
you become more inspired. And that inspired ness has an energy that carries us in a whole different way.
My friends, I hope this was helpful for you. I hope you've gotten something out of this. I hope you get to play with this. And as always, I appreciate your time and your energy. This is the end of, um, part one of Psychobiology of Soul Lessons, and we got another couple of conversations where we're gonna finish out the rest of the soul lessons, so there's more to come. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

PART 2

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are continuing our conversation about the psychobiology of soul lessons. So these are counseling skills, and we're listening for nine key soul lessons. We've already talked about soul lesson numero uno number one, agreeing to be here. Let's dive right in. Are you ready? Let's do this. Let's dive right in and talk about Soul lesson number two, which is forgiveness.
Now, here we are, we're learning eating psychology. We're learning about nutrition. We're learning about how to deal with eating challenges such as endless dieting and weight challenges and body eating cha, body image challenges and binge eating, emotional eating, overeating, weight, and various health challenges. And how did we get to forgiveness? And how we get to forgiveness is the same way we've gotten essentially to soul lessons, which we are embracing, holding, considering knowing, intuiting that everything in our lives is connected to everything else. And as we work on some of the most important learnings, lessons that you and I as human beings have come here to learn, that can have a powerful impact on our unwanted food, body, and health challenges. That's the name of the game here. And at the very least, even if it doesn't, when we learn the lessons of agreeing to be here and forgiveness and more, we just become better people. So the reality is, in the work that you do with clients, we're going to have success on some level. And the success might look exactly like they lose the weight, they get rid of the eating challenge, for the most part, their health gets better and or, and a swirl of all possibilities. They become a better person. They step into more of who they're meant to be as a human being. They begin to step into their highest goal more and more and more. And of course, our highest goal is to be the most fully expressed versions of who we could possibly be in this lifetime. So forgiveness might be, might be the second most important and potent soul lesson. And the reality is, when we live in unforgiveness,
I'm holding somebody as Unforgiven, you did this. I'm mad at you. And for understandable reasons. If you are holding someone as unforgiven, eh, 99% of the time, you and I have a darn good reason. And the reality is, when we're holding somebody in unforgiveness, we are living in protests, we're living in dispute, and we hold this energy within our own body. Forgive, this is a little tricky. This is not so easy. Forgiveness doesn't mean we approve of somebody's poor behavior towards us. And we go, yes, that was okay. I sanction that I agree to it. It doesn't mean that we kiss and make up though it can. It simply means that some how somewhere inside of ourself we have moved on. We have given our pain, our anger, our hurt over to a higher power, or we've begun to simply let it go and learn the lessons that we can best extract from a difficult situation. We are liberating ourself from needing to hold onto someone else's mistakes or offenses on another level, my friends, forgiveness means that on in some way, we recognize that people are generally doing the best that they are capable of doing, even though that may feel that may fall far short of good or healthy. And, and, and, you know, forgiveness is a process. It often takes time. It might take a few hours. It might take a moment. It might take years or decades or a lifetime. You know, in an ideal universe, forgiveness, whoever you need to forgive happens before you die. And I wanna suggest that forgiving is one of the most metabolically powerful acts we can do. Have you ever, ever, ever had the experience, think back for a moment where you somehow, in some way, you forgave somebody for something, clearly they were not forgiven by you and for good reason, and then you forgave them. And when you forgave them, there was a big deep breath. You lightened up, there was a let go. That is what I'm talking about. If you can reference such an experience. Now, who might we be interested in forgiving? Number one on the top of the list is parents.
Uh, we're gonna dive into that in a moment. We might be looking to forgive anyone who has sexually abused us physically, emotionally, or otherwise. We're looking to forgive all men, all women, certain men, certain women. We're looking to forgive the world. We're looking to forgive self for whatever you think you've done wrong.
We're looking to forgive in general. Whoever betrayed us, whoever, whoever abandoned us, whatever past partner you had that you still have a complaint about, that's living in your system, that's living in your brain, that's living in your thoughts, that's living in your dreams, that they're, they're living there and in a not so good way. Yeah, we might wanna consider forgiveness. We're forgiving life, which is all about agreeing to be here. We're forgiving God. A lot of us are mad at the universe. We're mad at a higher power. We're mad at God. Um, you know,
I put parents on the list around forgiveness. And what I wanna suggest to you is many people who are faced with eating challenges and body image concerns. What I've noticed over the years, just in noticing, I'm just raising my hand and saying, Hmm, because I'm, I'm a scientist by nature. I have an obsessive need to observe. I love observing. I love gathering data. By the way, the most egregious insult that one scientist can hurl at another is your study. Your evidence is just anecdotal, meaning it's a bunch of story. Well, that's actually a huge compliment because that's the only evidence worth noting, is what happens in real life. Life is not a study in homogenizing everybody and doing a double blind placebo controlled study. So everybody is equal, and every, every factor is even, and it's aseptic and clean. No life is hurled at us in the way that it's hurled at us. And your experience, your life experience, our life experience is what ends up proving out. So all science starts as observation. So anyway, I've noticed a lot of people with eating challenges. So it seems have not forgiven their parents. We are holding them responsible. Oftentimes not saying you're doing this, you have to determine that we're often holding our parents responsible for our woes, our conditions. We're holding them accountable for their bad parenting. And maybe they were bad parents,
but at some point you gotta move out their house, especially if you're not living in that house anymore. And once again, rightfully so, perhaps. And yet my friends, what I'm suggesting to you is you, I, our clients at some point must graduate, graduate from blame and judgment and unforgiveness towards parents. Why? Once again, you come from them. We have half of their DNA, you are half the mama and half the papa. We're connected to them deeply, energetically. Whether we like it or not attacking them strangely enough is ultimately attacking self. So forgiving parents in, in a strange way, is something that we do for ourselves first and foremost. Now, again, I wanna remind you one of my favorite questions to ask a client. One of my favorite, uh, and I mean this, it's a favorite, and it might be the, if I can only ask one psychology related client. Uh, uh, one question, one question about somebody's past. I only have one question to get to know them best. This would probably be the question, have you forgiven your parents? Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I've got a question for you. Just, just, just roll with it. I'm gonna ask you, and I want you to come up with a first answer for me that comes to your mind. Have you forgiven your parents? Now, I'm gonna tell you, the people who've done work on forgiving their parents or have forgiven their parents, or have never had the need to forgiven their parents, they'll go, oh, yeah, yes, absolutely. It'll come out pretty quick. So if the person doesn't answer an immediate yes, then the answer is no. If they start to go, well, um, um, the answer is no.
Yeah, I don't wanna be like my mother. I don't wanna be like my father. And when we're living from that place, I mean, think of the message we're giving to life. I don't want to be this. I don't want to be that. I don't wanna be them. I don't wanna be them. I don't wanna be them. Well, frame it in the positive. Who do you wanna be? Forget about what you don't want to be. Forget about who you don't want to emulate. State it in the positive for yourself. I want to be this kind of person. I want to be this kind of parent to my children. Let them off the hook. Because the more we hold them on the hook, the more pressure we put on ourselves, we put on our own DNAI just gotta say, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm serious about this topic. Many people will take their anger and rage at their parents to the grave. And when you do that, if you haven't forgiven your parents, you haven't learned a soul lesson that will help you mature. It'll help your life be better. It'll open up just invisible gobs of energy. It'll allow you to start stepping into your power to be more independent, to be more free, because you're no longer being the child to your parent. I get it. My father did this, my mother did that. They said this, they said that. And you're right. And there's a part of us that cannot reach our full, healthy, creative expression of who we're meant to be on planet earth. If we hold the two humans that we came through,
if we hold them responsible into the future for our pains, our sufferings, our misery. So strangely enough, our biology, I believe, evolves as our soul evolves, as our character evolves. And as you learn your soul lessons, your biology will rise accordingly. You'll be more free. You'll be more in relaxation response.
We never know the story, truly, truly, truly, of the person that has harmed us. The person that we are holding as unforgiven, we don't know what they went through. This isn't about making the action right. It's not about making the other person right. At some point, the chain of hate, violence, offense must be broken. Violence does not stop violence. Distrust does not stop distrust. Silent negativity doesn't stop negativity. It's all about stepping into our humanity. You know, there's a very powerful and interesting line that's been attributed to the Buddha in Buddhism. Uh, he, he said, the first time I heard this, it really caught my attention. He said, never ever chase an offender unless you wish to show them the way. Never chase an offender unless you wish, and are committed to showing them the way. Think about that. Somebody did you wrong? Somebody committed a crime against you. What do you want to do? You want to, you want to catch 'em? You want to throw 'em in jail and throw away the key, or you wanna call the police and have them handle it and it's, hey, it's understandable. That's what I would do. But there's something about understanding that we are bizarrely connected to the person who is offending us.
And if we're better than them, if we're more conscious than them, if we have a larger outlook on life than them, such that we would not do the kind of offense that they did. In an odd way, in an odd way, at some point, the responsibility falls on us to be that bigger person. Talk about a higher perspective.
Crimes and offenses on in some way are always often calling out for help. They're calling for attention. They're calling for consciousness. They're calling for the light.
You know, criminals get thrown into jail. And, uh, we have one of the highest incarceration rates here in the United States on the planet. And, uh, the prison industry is considered the fastest growing industry. Um, the recidivism rate people who are released from jail and end up back in jail is extremely high. So all I'm saying is the ways we're doing planet earth in terms of punishment, uh, doesn't always work. So it's, it's, it's just good to take a deeper look at things.
You know, when we have not forgiven our parents, getting back to parents, we have not fully approved of our own existence, our own self. You're not thinking that consciously if you haven't forgiven your parents. But that's actually what's going on, because we come from them, because we are extensions of them energetically, emotionally, psychologically, the way the mind works. Attack parents, attack self hold parents hostage, hold self hostage.
And what I'm saying is we will find it very difficult to graduate from our own eating concerns. Once again, you haven't forgiven them. You are living in their house, meaning you're interacting with them, you're struggling with them. You're trying to grow beyond them. You're trying to find yourself. You're trying to find your independence so you can be an adult in the world. This parenting thing for many humans is not easy.
Now, by the way, is this true for everyone? What I'm saying? No, not necessarily. But it might be true for many people or for a particular client. By the way, you don't need to forgive people directly to their face, though that can often be very powerful. They don't have to be alive. Though forgiving someone who is still alive can be oh, so powerful. You can forgive someone who's already passed on. So the forgiveness, what I'm suggesting, it happens within us. You know, chances are, if you're alive on planet Earth, you've been wounded by someone of the opposite sex,
uh, or you've been wounded by a lover and a partner of the same sex, meaning the kinds of humans that we are romantically involved in, chances are you've been hurt by one.
All women are this, all men are that they do this, they do that. And at some point, we have to forgive the sex that we haven't forgiven the males, the females, whatever it may be. It might be the world, my friends, it might be God, it might be whatever it is. It doesn't matter.
You know, consider doing a forgiveness inventory with your client. What does that mean? Okay, Mr. And Mrs. Kline, I just want you to go home and I want you to write down all the people that you're holding as Unforgiven. And, and why. And this is, this is just like a ledger sheet. Who are the people that you still haven't forgiven? Boyfriends, girlfriends, exes, parents, relatives, friends, kids, whatever people you work with. Answer this question. Mr. And Mr. Alein, for each person, what is the benefit of not forgiving each of these people? How does that actually benefit me? 'cause sometimes there is a benefit. What's a benefit in not forgiving somebody? Oh, well, it keeps me safer. It makes me aware to not interact with that person. It makes me aware to not be with that person. Um, it makes me alert to similar people, and it helps me feel my anger, because for the longest time that person had did this to me and did that to me. And I just let it happen and happen. And finally I just realized, wow, you've been a meanie to me. Uh, so holding somebody as unforgiven, um, sometimes we need to do that. We need to feel our rage, our anger, our hurt. We need to protect ourselves. We need to create boundaries. Good for us. Good for them. Good for you. Um, what is the drawback of not forgiving each person? Yeah. Well, there's this constant sourness that lives in me. There's, I, I'm, I just think of them a lot or whenever I see them, I just wanna ring their neck or I wanna run in the other direction, or whatever that might be. What would it look like if you forgave each one of these people and you go through each person, they have to answer this question for each person. What would it look like if you would forgive each person? Who would you be? What would happen? What might be the result? And ask your client, just like I asked you in the beginning of this conversation, uh, by the way, Mr. And Mrs. Client, have you ever had the experience of being hurt, abused, betrayed somebody clearly done you wrong, and you eventually had an experience However it happened, maybe it was just over time where somehow you forgave them and moved on. And if your client says, oh yeah, you might even ask them to describe it briefly. And then you say, well, that's the experience you are looking to create by forgiving your ex-wife, your ex-husband, your mother, your father, whoever it is that they are holding as Unforgiven.
The state of unforgiveness generally exists as some combination of anger, resentment, rage, disappointment, blame, and a deeper sadness. And all of these emotional experiences, except maybe the deeper sadness, can create some degree of physiologic stress response. And you know, what happens in a low level day in, day out, physiologic stress response, we are literally creating a chemistry that signals the body that we are in sympathetic nervous system dominance. This creates low level stress chemistry, which inevitably and generally looks like increased levels, elevated levels, slightly elevated of insulin, of cortisol, stress hormones that signal the body to store weight, store fat, not build muscle in an ongoing chronic low level stress response. It will impact digestion. IE it will increase negative digestive symptoms, it will deregulate appetite, and it will have all kinds of health consequences.
So by who we are and how we are relating with the world, once again, we are creating a chemistry.
And once again, I'm asking you to see how stress and relaxation c chemistry theology are fundamental to how we can look at the world, the body life, somebody's eating strategies, their unwanted eating patterns.
Because once again, until my clients steps out of that place of unforgiveness, they're going to be writing, they're going to be phoning in a prescription into their brain, into their physiology for a certain kind of body chemistry. And it's the exact opposite kind of body chemistry of what most people are looking for.
I have a lot of compassion for people, for clients who might have been going from practitioner to practitioner to practitioner because they can't seem to deal with their emotional overeating, binge eating issue, or they can't seem to get away from endless dieting. They can't seem to get away from their body image woes. And they've tweaked their nutrition and they've done so many diets and they've rearranged the food on their plate so many times and they don't get anywhere and they think there's something wrong with them. Ugh, that's terrible. They think there's something wrong with them. And what's wrong is that the help that they've gotten hasn't pointed them in the right directions. It hasn't been full, it hasn't been complete, and they haven't explored all possible avenues. There are some people, my friends, who this is where the action is, where there are some people where this is where a significant amount of the action is. IE in learning how to forgive. And oftentimes it's a parent or it's a partner because they are living in swimming in upset or grief or anger and it doesn't go away. And then our eating challenge actually becomes a placeholder, a bookmark that is pointing to this deeper life lesson that we need to learn.
I really want to remind you that this is how the psyche works. This is how the mind works. The mind will often attempt to symbolically speak to us as a way to help regulate itself as a way to help us grow, as a way to help us better survive.
So just as you are pre-programmed to grow biologically,
we are programmed to grow intellectually, cognitively, emotionally. And I believe spiritually when we've gotten off track, the brain will often create unwanted behaviors, unwanted thoughts, unwanted habits, unwanted symptoms, unwanted relationship with food as a way to get our attention.
It's as simple as that. So just as a reminder, the physiologic stress response can be present in any soul lesson that we're gonna be talking about. So for example, it's a literal stress, or to hold on to resentment. It's a stressor to hold, hold on to anger. I don't say it's a, it's a stressor to be resentful or to be angry, even though it is. But that's good because there are times when you ought to be resenting someone. You ought to be angry, you ought to feel hurt, you ought to be betrayed. There are times when you ought to be feeling like a victim because you have truly been victimized. There are times when the human being that done you wrong does not deserve your forgiveness.
And there is a point where holding onto it past the point that we need to, as a person, as a being, as a character, as a soul, holding onto it past the point that we need to hang onto it. It just starts to fester a little bit. It starts to rot a little bit. It starts to petrify inside of us, and it turns into a low level stress response that is nagging
with all the attendant challenges potentially available from a stress response. So whenever I'm listing these things that happen during a stress response, does that mean they will happen? No. But it means they can happen. And that's what we're looking out for my friends. Weight gain, weight loss, resistance, deregulated appetite, inability to build muscle, decreased calorie burning capacity, increased fat deposition, increased inflammation in the body. Nutrient wasting. That means you're excreting nutrients, decreased immunity, decreased energy, mitochondrial function, thyroid growth, hormone, all of it.
You know, forgiveness is, in many ways it just Defies logic. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense to the logical mind, it doesn't make sense to the ego mind, somebody hurts you. Why in the universe would you forgive them?
The only reason to do so is it is it's, it's about our growth. It's our growth as a human, our growth as a soul, our emotional growth, our spiritual growth. It's about expanding the capacity of our heart, our mind. It's about stretching. And ultimately it's worth doing when it seems like it might be connected to a complaint that we have. The health challenge, the unwanted eating challenge, the body image challenge.
Remember, for women, oftentimes their relationship with food and body will track their relationship with their mother. Chances are, if you are hating on your mother, then you're gonna be hating on your own body. Believe it or not, chances are, if you have a discordant relationship with mother, that's all over the place, you're gonna have a discordant relationship with food. With minutes a little bit different. I just haven't seen it so much with their dads tied into relationship with food. But for sure, when a man is holding his father as unforgiven, uh, let's talk about men for a moment. It will hold him back from his own manhood. Because essentially what he's doing is he is holding men as unforgiven, and he is holding the representative, his father, who is supposed to represent that which he should aspire to as a man. Ideally, he's holding that ideal, that archetype of a good man, a good king, a good father. He's holding that as incorrect, bad, hurtful, harmful, not worthy of forgiveness. So what will happen is that man will have difficulty claiming his own king hood, claiming his own evolved prince hood. He will be mistrustful of other men. Yeah, it doesn't mean he won't have some close male relationships, but when we hold our father as men, as Unforgiven, it will impact not necessarily our relationship with food and body, but it'll impact our own experience of being a man in the world, our relationship to our purpose, our relationship to getting things done in the world. It can dramatically impact our relationship with women or a significant other and how we show up for them.
Let's talk about a case story, not about men, but about forgiveness. And this is indeed a woman, I'm gonna call her Diane. When I first saw her, she was age 36, administrative assistant. Diane has a live-in boyfriend and they enjoy, she enjoys skiing, hiking, movies, very outgoing person. She says she's dealing with approximately 20 extra pounds of weight since age 15, so 21 years. She has been aware that I have 20 pounds extra. Um, she does extreme dieting and exercise and for a short term that can work, do that for a month or two. And she loses the weight and then she gains it right back. So it turns out she's coming to see me because she's a little freaked because she says it's becoming harder and harder for her to lose weight no matter what she does. And she wants the weight off permanently. Now just let me say something about weight before I move on to the forgiveness aspect, uh, of this story, which is, um, it is true by the way that when one is younger, when a human is younger, it will be naturally easier to morph the body. It just is so on and off. Chronic, endless dieters can definitely for X number of years, lose weight, gain it, lose weight, gain it, lose weight, gain it. They could literally lose it, gain it right back, but then they could lose it again if they do the diet and exercise and gain it right back. So it's common to see, um, once women start to hit or men start to hit their thirties, particularly their late thirties, and especially when a time they hit 40, everybody notices, man, that's getting harder now.
Uh, yeah, because your body's getting older and the body also, it's not just getting older. As humans get older, we are technically designed to and ought to get smarter. As you get older, you have to get smarter because you're not a young buck anymore and you can't easily fight and flee and be out in the environment and be a killer and be a hunter and a gatherer. So you gotta use your, your na and you gotta use your brain, you gotta use your smarts. So what happens is we need to get smarter and jerking the body in extreme directions with extreme dieting and exercise and then gain it back. Extreme dieting and exercise, gain it back. That is not a smart strategy in which to be in relationship with one's body. It puts too much stress on one's physiology. It puts too much stress on the mind, and it's a waste of time.
That's like, that's like you constantly earn money and then you gamble it right away and then you work hard to earn that money and then you gamble it right away, you get nothing for it. That's, we're losing weight and gaining it back and losing weight and gaining it back. And that's what it does. So yeah, as you get older, it becomes much more difficult to do extreme dieting and exercise. Okay, so she wants this weight off permanently, she's getting it, her metabolism is quote unquote slowing down. So let's do a deeper dive with Diane. Uh, growing up, her dad was in the military and she seldom saw him. What came out and what her family discovered at some point was that in the many years that dad was in the military traveling around the world, he had a number of affairs. Now Diane happens to idolize her father. 'cause he is a great guy. He's a powerful man. He's done this for her. That for her, she has her father up on a pedestal, um, and in a good way. And at the same time, she's not liking him because he has clearly caused her mother so much pain. And the mother is in a lot of pain and Diane is aware of that growing up. So Diane is extremely angry at her dad. And at this stage of the game at age 36, you know, her mom died of cancer number of years back and Diane basically blames her dad for her mom's long-term depression, which ended up, she got really depressed, and then she got cancer and then she died. And there was a part of her mom that did not wanna live that did not take good care of herself, that was kind of resigned when she got cancer. So I was pretty angry at her dad. And I get it understandable reasons. You know, here you are, you're a kid growing up, kids want to naturally love their parents. Kids naturally want their parents to love each other. When children observe parents not loving each other, they will generally take it on as their responsibility, as the child responsibility for somehow, you know, I'm involved in this somehow I've gotta fix this. Uh, and then as you get older, it's easier to start laying blame because you start to get more psychologically sophisticated and you see how things played out.
You know, this is interesting. Previously we talked about one of the listening distinctions, which was health constellations. So is it possible that
Diane's dad somehow caused her mother's, um, illness? Well, I don't wanna say the word cause, but was he a participant? You bet. Had to be, had to be a player in all of that. And it's not about blame, but yes, his behavior, we regulate each other's metabolism. So it makes perfect sense that if somebody in a relationship betrays someone else, that the person who's been betrayed, yeah, they're the one that's taken the hit. So they're the one that can get angry. They're the one that can get depressed. They're the one that could be immune challenged. They're the one that can potentially get sick. So here is her mom's depression and cancer being shared, and ultimately death being shared by the entire family system. It's impacting everyone.
And I believe on a deeper level that her relationship with her own body is tied into her being in the middle of this emotional mess that's still not cleared up for her, despite the fact that she's 36 and living with her own partner. And she doesn't live in her mother or father's house anymore. So before her mom died, she shared that she felt she wasn't good enough, attracted enough insecure about her body, her weight, and associated that with her husband cheating on her. And Diane knew this very well. So on a certain level, she's playing out a symbolic version of her mother's experience. She feels the need to lose weight to be truly lovable. That's what I believe. She needs to feel that I can lose weight, because then when I lose weight, I am safe. This happens so much. Um, and by the way, this not only saves Diane, but this in a weird way saves her mother and saves the marriage. It symbolically does that. And yet she can't keep the weight off because she's caught in a trap of which parent to identify with.
When she has the weight on, she's identifying with her mother. When she has the weight off, she's identifying with her father. So in an odd way, by forgiving her father, she can set herself free of being a child in her parents' house, who's still trying to save everybody and make it all. Okay? She allows her parents to have their story, their journey, without trying to save them. She can now begin to mature. She can now begin to set herself free. She can set her father free, she can set her mother free. You know, as strange as this is, there is research that shows that technically a human can die of a quote unquote broken heart. And it, it, it, it so makes sense. I've seen this happen, you know, just in my personal sphere and in just collecting stories of people who suffer intense heartbreak for whatever reason. And they get very sick soon after and oftentimes die soon after. So we are sensitive human beings, hearts get broken and hearts need to be mended, especially for those of us that are still here and those of us that are left behind. Life is not squeaky clean. We can't necessarily go back in time and change everything, but we can grow from this moment forward. We can begin to understand the human drama that so many of us live out. That is so difficult. You know, for Diane, the work really, I told her it's, it's just time to forgive. And literally for the next three months, we gave up all conversation about weight loss, dieting, exercise, food. Um, the only thing we focused on food wise was I told her I wanted her on a two month no diet. Diet. You're gonna learn about that. So for two months, we're gonna just put dieting aside. We're gonna put weight loss aside. I know you wanna lose weight. You haven't been able to lose weight for 21 years. Your way doesn't work. That's okay. You didn't invent your way. You've been trying hard, you've been doing your best. Let's try my way now, which is a very different way from yours. We're gonna put it aside. We're gonna give it a rest. We're gonna give weight loss a vacation. We're gonna focus on some other things. And then we're gonna circle back to the weight loss just for the heck of it, just to mix things up. And because we're gonna do some elegant tricks here that actually have the great potential to help you get where you want go.
So again, for three months we focused on this, this issue alone. Journaling, forgiveness letters, talks with her dad, talks with her brothers and sisters. Um, and I won't go into the details of that, but it was really playing with that. It's exploring that. It's her having honest conversations. It's her grappling with this. And it's us gathering once a week and saying, okay, what happened? How did that conversation with your dad go? How did that forgiveness letter that you wrote that I asked you not to send, but that's just for yourself. How did that go? Your talk with your older sister, what's her experience of your mom and dad's relationship and all of that? What is your brother's experience? Where's he at with that? So just gathering information, being conversational, exploring this.
She had a 10 pound weight loss after a total of five months without any dieting. Now granted, the young woman wants to lose 20. Quite frankly. She was happy, she was very happy with his weight loss. 'cause there was, there, there was no effort in terms of dieting or exercise. In fact, she was exercising less. I took her off of extreme exercise. I got her on movement that she enjoyed. This is such a typical story. Um, and I also want you to notice, notice, notice, notice that once again, we have an example where somebody's target weight. I wanna lose 20 pounds. I wanna lose 50 pounds, I wanna lose 112. Whatever it is, is a number. It's arbitrary. And when you are doing what's right with a client, when you're helping somebody rediscover their natural appetite, their naturalness as a person, when you're helping them get on the personal growth train and look at the places where they meet, might need to be looking in the mirror about how they're treating themselves, treating the world, what needs to be in terms of inner shift, then we begin potentially to reach our natural weight. And our natural weight is what it is. And it has nothing to do with the number in our mind. Bottom line was Diane was lighter. And I mean that, like our face looked different. Her energy was different. Um, it it, it, it looked like she lost a million pounds just energetically. She was actually closer to her family. It got her closer to her brothers and sisters. She learned a lot more about her dad, what he was going through. Um, because he had his own story and his own experience, he was carrying a tremendous amount of guilt, a tremendous amount of grief that he didn't know how to process. So he wasn't just the bad guy per se. So she was able to start to see him in a new light. And fascinatingly enough, we ended up in a lot of conversation, Diana and I, about her own relationship, even though that was not a function. What's, uh, uh, a um, wasn't an interest of hers whatsoever, but as she saw her, her parents' relationship, as she saw her dad in a new light, she was seeing her boyfriend and her relationship completely different. And, um, so this, so, so that led to some really juicy conversation. So the bottom line is, we're here to help our clients, not just with their smaller goals, lose a bunch of body pounds, not just with their smaller goals. Stop putting this amount of food in my mouth and put lesser amount of food in my mouth. Those are smaller goals. Who cares? Of course, we care. Of course I want my client to have a happy, well-regulated relationship with food, body, and health. Absolutely a hundred percent. But your client did not come here in this life, in this world to lose a bunch of pounds of body fat. They didn't come here to learn how to not eat so much at lunch or dinner or a snack or before bed. We came here to learn bigger lessons. And as we learn those bigger lessons, it just so happens that some of these nagging complaints that we have, they start to fall into line. They begin to more naturally take care of themselves. And then when we do little tricks, little tweaks around food, body and health that are appropriate for our client, we turbocharge the work. So our clients begin to get where they need to go. So my friends, forgiveness is a conversation that you have with your client. Once you begin to notice, basically from your conversations with them, from their story. You begin to listen to when you hear about parents, when you hear about ex-partners, when you hear about, you know, the challenges that they faced in life, I'm always listening for where the action is, where the energy is. And do I bring up forgiveness in a first session? Never. And a second or third session, probably not. It's a conversation that comes up once we are more comfortable, once there's some familiarity, once there is some trust, and then it's a process. It's a journey, it's a conversation, it's an exploration. Can one forgive somebody in a moment? Absolutely. And it's often a journey and it's often a process. So let's move on. Let's talk about soul lesson number three, which is slowing down.
You know, this is particularly important for people who live in the quote unquote western world industrial nations, uh, in cities. This is particularly important for the highly stressed, highly motivated people who are constantly busy and constantly moving fast. 'cause the reality is, the pace of much of the world is getting faster and faster and faster. And we haven't quite caught up to the fact that it might be moving too fast, which I'm saying it is, by the way. Um, you know, these days we're looking at high speed living as normal. We look at rushing around like crazy maniacs as normal. Uh, you know, you've heard the beautiful story of the frog. You take a frog and you pull it out of the pond and you toss it in a pot of boiling water. Don't try this at home, by the way. Um, you know, frogs are smart when it comes from going from pond water to a pot of boiling water. You throw 'em in a pot of boiling water, they're gonna jump right out. Smart froggy. Well, next, as the experiment, you take a frog out of its pond, but then you put it in a pot of pond water on your stove, and it's gonna hang out in the pot, in the pond, water on the stove because nothing's changed. It's nice pond water. But now if you take that same frog in that same pot of pond water, and you slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly turn up the heat, what happens is the frog will adapt to that increase in temperature. It will think every one degree increment of increase in temperature is normal. And the frog's body will say, oh, this is normal. This is normal. So you essentially fool the frog. If you up the temperature slowly enough and essentially the frog will boil and die. Woo, poor frog, don't do that. Um, but more important, don't do it to self. And more important, that's often done to self because it's not our fault because we live in a world where the heat is slowly getting turned up and we don't always realize it. We're staying in the pot and we haven't jumped out, and the pot is getting hotter and hotter. IE we're moving faster and faster. We're rushing through our day. We don't notice our kids, we don't notice our loved ones. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough time to take care ourself. We're attached to our machines, our computers, our phones, and things have to happen fast. If I don't have my fast internet speed, if I don't, I get mad. If I gotta wait a minute for my webpage to load, God forbid that should happen. You know, I get all upset. You know, we, we need, we, our kids want fast. They wanna go from this to that. They want this experience, that experience. They want this stimulation, that stimulation. And we're constantly stimulating one another with electronics, with imagery. By the way, the images and the media that is hurled at us and our children, it is so fast moving. It is chaotic. It causes A-D-D-A-D-H-D. It causes a literal immune response in our central nervous system, in our mind, in our psyche, in our soul, because we are not meant to process that kind of fast information moment to moment, day in and day out. Especially the images that we're subjected to in some of these videos and music videos and some of the nonsense you see on YouTube. It's disturbing. It harms the mind, the mind cannot grasp some of the, um, the harmfulness, the hurtfulness, uh, the paradox of just a lot of the violence and a lot of the subtle put downs that are coming through our media, put downs towards women, towards men, towards sexuality, towards children, towards animals, you name it.
So we're moving pretty fast in this world.
And many people have a speed and a pace that unbeknownst to them is actually gotten beyond their control. And simply put my friends, high speed living generally means stress, physiology, plain and simple. High speed living equals stress physiology. So we're often addressing the problem where it's not, we're looking to control our appetite better, but if you're constantly moving at a fast pace in your life from here to there, you gotta get the kids there. Gotta get to work, gotta do this, gotta do that. All of a sudden you find yourself eating fast. Why? Because you almost have to. And then when you're eating fast, you are not registering the information that cephalic phase digestive response needs, tastes pleasure and aroma satisfaction in the visuals of a meal, which means your brain will not have a full experience of that meal, which means head brainin and gut brain, the enteric nervous system, do not have enough time to communicate with each other, to properly scan the meal to see if we have indeed gotten what we needed from that food, the necessary nutritional requirements and necessary caloric requirements, necessary water, fiber, ancillary nutrients. So the bottom line is the brain isn't smart enough to say, Hey, you were moving too fast. Hey, you were eating too fast. Hey, you know something. By the way, your entire life is outta control a little bit, and it's moving too fast. The brain just screams hungry.
And then we eat, and then we think we have a willpower problem.
And remember my friends, that cortisol speeds up time. And our perception of time, especially, it doesn't actually speed up actual time, but for our purposes of our brain, it does. Because when you're in a true survival response and the lion is chasing you, it is a reality that you do not have enough time. Lions chasing you. You have about two to three minutes, something's gonna happen. You'll either get away or you will be eaten. So you brain, your survival brain knows that it has to be prepared. Your nervous system has to be prepared to think time is running out. Every decision has to be made in the moment when you're in a survival situation. 'cause time is running out, time is running out, time is running out. You can't sit there and think, oh, this lion's chasing me. Let me call a friend and see what I should do. Let me, let me journal about my fears about this moment. No, you're not gonna do that. You need to make a fast decision. Cortisol is bathing just about every cell in your brain, and it's saying speed up time speed up time. So you think quick and you act quick. But in a day in day out, stress response, when you're actually time is actually not running out, but your body thinks it is, your brain thinks it is. We start to think in the back of our mind, there's not enough time. There's not enough time, and I don't have enough time to do my life.
When we're thinking there's not enough time to do our life, we are in a stress response and we're locked in stress chemistry, and we're locked in everything that stress chemistry can mean to us.
Now, I just wanna say, at first glance, this might not seem like a significant life lesson or soul lesson. And for many people this notion might even seem a little trite. So I just wanna acknowledge that. But I do wanna say our pace of living is often far more toxic to body and being than we realize body and being your mind, your heart, your soul. So my assertion here is that we live in a world that increasingly demands of us, programs us and conditions us to move at an artificially fast pace. It's too fast. The world has put on a high speed. It is breaking the speed limit. It should get a ticket, it should get a traffic ticket. And this artificially fast pace often has us moving through life in some version of the physiologic stress response. The alarm response. So my friends fast living, pushing too hard, not smelling the roses, not having enough time, the busyness of having a family, a job, and taking care of all life's necessities. We're, we're in the same boat. Chances are, it's simply not easy. It is a challenge. So if you're in high speed living, what I wanna say is it's not about fault. It's not about you're doing something wrong. It's not about that. You need to get spanked. It's simply about we need to take stock, we need to look at the world, and we need to be responsible. Meaning we need to respond to this in a way that better works for us. So the point that I'm making is that we're living in an atmosphere of speed and push. And so many cultures have adopted this frenetic pace of life. So the result is we're eating fast, moving fast, parenting fast, vacationing fast, think fast, drive fast, move fast, we think is normal, but it takes us out of alignment with who we are. And it becomes impossible. When you are in a low level physiologic stress response, it is impossible to heal fully from whatever condition you're trying to heal from physiologically. And it is impossible to have a natural appetite regulation virtually. And it is oftentimes extremely difficult from that place of low level stress chemistry, which is impacting our metabolism. It makes it very difficult to transform our unwanted eating habits.
Yet, another way of saying this, my friends, is that in such a state we are losing our connection with body wisdom.
You're losing connection with the executive function of the brain, the free frontal prefrontal cortex. That's where the action's happening, that's where the wisdom is happening. So we have a choice. Now, you might only have 15 minutes to get to work, but there's a way to slow down within that 15 minutes. Oftentimes it's a sense of perception. It is relaxing into the rush, believe it or not. It's a mental gymnastic where you take a deep breath and you breathe in a little bit more timelessness even when you don't have enough time. So it's us learning, it's us learning to help our clients relax more into the timeframe that they have to check their mind. Can I breathe to actually check their schedule? Can I really, truly, can I rearrange schedule? Can I tweak things so that there is more time for this meal so that there is more time in the morning so that there is more time for myself during the day so that I am not functioning if time is running out,
you know, it's kind of like being in an airplane and running up and down the aisle trying to get there faster. Wherever the airplane is going, you can run up and down the aisle as fast as you want, the airplane goes at the pace that it goes, and you're just gonna be running yourself silly. And, and, and that's what I think it looks like. And that's what happens when we live in an artificially high pace. We think we're getting somewhere. By the way, I, I try to correct my own language around this, around the word busy. Um, I notice so many people, they're busy and they will describe themselves. Oh yeah, I'm a really busy person. I'm very busy. I'm very busy. I talk to my friends. I'm very busy. And oftentimes we use busy as a compliment. We're complimenting ourselves. Oh, I'm busy because busy carries with it a sense of importance. It's like, yeah, I got things to do. I'm not gonna just sit around. I'm busy. And yeah, I get it. You know, I'm a busy guy. But I also notice that when we say I'm busy, oftentimes busy is a code word for highly stressed. Oftentimes, oh, I'm busy, is a code word for I am having trouble paying attention oftentimes, oh, I'm busy, is a code word for I really don't want to stop. Because if I do, I'm gonna start to feel. And if I start to feel it might not feel so nice saying I'm busy. Oftentimes is an intimacy killer. It means that we don't have intimacy or we don't want intimacy or we're pushing it away. Oftentimes we're saying, well, I'm busy. I'm busy. It's saying I don't have time to notice my children or the people around me. I don't have time for you because I'm busy.
So we can, I'm not saying we always do this, but watch out for this. We can use busy as an excuse. And I, I see this time and again with clients because a lot of our clients are busy and for good reason, they got a lot to handle. They got a lot to do when they're coming to you because you're gonna give them answers quickly, then they could find it on, on their own. That makes perfect sense. I like that. That's a good thing. But once again, busy often is a false sense of self-importance.
And people who are busy, busy, busy are on an like, like it's a self-created caffeine, and it becomes a state addiction. We become addicted to, oh, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And this is my life. And we don't know how to be with self. We don't know how to stop. We don't know how to relax. So
the more we're in survival thinking and survival based living, the faster we move,
the more the wisdom of life will speak to us through symptom. That's what tends to happen. Unwanted symptom will show up
as we keep moving fast and as we keep moving fast and as we keep moving fast.
So the soul lesson called slowing down is about you, us, our client, finding our natural pace, letting go of the push and the force and the shove when we can. Maybe it just means claiming your Sunday, it means finding your natural pace. It means going nowhere. It means taking a walk to nowhere. It means how do I let go? It means how do I slow down my mind? It means how do I let go of being busy, stressed out, freaked out, wired up amped, you know? Because guess what? If you have heartburn, if you have digestive upset, it might be your high speed living. If you have an out of control appetite, it might be your high speed living. If you have weight loss resistance, it might be, might be high speed living, you know, in another way, slow. And I mean this is the new sexy
slow in this day and age I think is a spiritual lesson. You know, as we've left the countryside for the city, as we've left the natural world for the artificial world of buildings and machines and cars and trains and planes and computers, we've left the jungle. We're still figuring it out. My friends, we're figuring out how to make this all work.
So slowing down is about reclaiming time. It doesn't mean you're gonna take your client and you're gonna make their life so easy and you're gonna take away their busyness and their stress. No, but we're looking for places. You're noticing the person who is sitting before you, who is amped up, who can't slow down because their life can't slow down. And you are noticing that, huh? The complaint that they're coming here to see me with may be connected to high speed living, may, may be connected to the soul lesson called slowing down.
How do we reclaim time? Can you get help? Can you get a babysitter? Can you get someone to take over some of your tasks at work? So it gives you more time. Can you delegate better? Can you be more efficient with your time such that you have more downtime? Slowing down is about reclaiming relaxation is claiming moments that are conducive to slowing down. Putting yourself in environments that help you relax. Putting yourself with people that help you relax. Putting on music that helps you relax, even if it's for five minutes, to have that experience slowing down really is about feeling. So many people don't wanna slow down because they don't wanna feel, how many times have I heard a human say to me, oh my God, if I slow down, I'm gonna just, I know I'm gonna feel I don't even wanna do it. Wow. And and you know something, it makes perfect sense because a lot of times we don't have time to feel that's actually, it's kind of a reality for some people. We gotta keep going because if we felt what we needed to feel, we might fall apart for a little while and we can't afford to fall apart. So that's understandable. And at some point we have to feel, we must feel what we're feeling because if we're not feeling what we're feeling, we have a constipated emotional metabolism. And when you have a constipated emotional metabolism that will impact your physiology, most likely, it'll certainly impact your mind. It'll certainly impact your experience of life and it will very likely impact one's relationship with food and body.
Slowing down is about listening and noticing. It's about taking in your world, it's about observing, it's about the nuances. It's about seeing people and the looks on their face and the hearing, the intonation in their voice.
It's about noticing everything. It's noticing the world around you. It's noticing the sun, it's noticing the wind
slowing down is about letting go of living in survival. A lot of people are living in survival in their mind.
Some people are literally living in survival. Chances are they might not be your client because people living in survival can't always afford to see a coach or a counselor in this way. Or you might be clients who are living in survival and they're living paycheck to paycheck and it's rough. And sometimes with those clients, the best you can do is to be a good listener for them, to be a good cheerleader for them and to look for the little ways that you can help them claim a little time, claim a little relaxation. Slowing down is about embodiment. Slowing down is about living in one's body. Slowing down is about being fully human, whatever that means. It's about being all of who we are. It's, it's being in our ups, it's being in our downs, it's connecting, it's being alone, it's celebrating, it's feeling the pain, it's all of it. Slowing down ultimately is about trusting life. In part. We move fast because we don't trust life. In part, some of us, we don't trust that we're gonna be okay. We don't trust that we're gonna survive. We don't trust that things will fall into place.
So we constantly have to manage the universe. We kinda have to do things, do things, do things, do things. And where are the places in your life where you need to relax a little more and slow down?
Where are the places in my client's life where they need to relax a little more and slow down?
That's what I'm asking. That's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm listening for.
Slow is natural. Slow is true. Slow is what's usual. And slow always comes before, or it follows speed. Speed is fine. I love speed. Speed is great. Let's speed be where speed needs to be. Sometimes you need to be really speedy. Great. But once again, you'll notice in nature, the fastest creatures aren't running fast all the time. They do it when they need to,
and then they're going slow. There's a great line by attributed to the Chinese philosopher of Taoism Lao too. He said, the serene and tranquil set the rhythm of the world. The serene and the tranquil set the rhythm of the world. So it's all about the rhythm I within you. The tranquil set the rhythm of the world. It's, it's so funny, my phone came on because it thought I was asking it a question. Good old Siri. You know, when you become more serene and tranquil, you reset your own rhythm. When you become more serene and tranquil, you begin to recalibrate your life. You recalibrate yourself.
Any amount of time where we can step into timelessness is very powerful. Any amount of time where we can let go and be in a relaxation response is very, very powerful.
You know, listen to your clients. Listen to your friends. Listen to your loved ones. Who are the ones who have a pace that's more natural? And what does that natural pace do for them? And who are the ones in your life that you can say, oh my goodness, this person has a high fast pace. Tell me about their life. Are they happy? Are there accidents happening around them? Is their world falling apart? Do people around them fall apart? You know, I know a lot of people, by the way, who are very successful and they're moving really fast, and I mean fast, and they are very successful. And you look at them and you go, wow, that person's successful. I want what she has. I want what he has. And then you dive into their life and the people around them are suffering them. The people closest to them are suffering. The husbands, the wives, the kids, the friends, the lovers. Um, just because somebody has outward success doesn't mean that they have inward success. Doesn't mean that the, that they have success in love, in relationship, in family. And oftentimes we celebrate outer success at the expense of inner success. Our high-speed life might benefit us on paper, but how is it doing for the rest of my world, for my client's world? So these are the things I just wanna notice. And it doesn't mean you're gonna change someone's life overnight, my friends, but you know, sometimes when somebody just makes a baby step in this direction, somebody who truly needs to slow down and you help them do it, they could have a shift in their digestive issues and their immune issues and their energy level. They can have a shift in their overeating, their binge eating, their emotional eating. They could have a shift in their relationship. They could have a shift with their children at work. It it, it's really endless the goodies that can come out of that.
So I want you to study your client. My friends really, really, really, really study them. And I want you to ask, are they trapped in a higher speed? Is life overwhelming them? Do they feel burdened by too much to do? Do they talk fast, eat fast, move abruptly? Do they drop in with you? Can they focus with you? Do they have downtime in their life? Do they have quiet time? Now, if they have come to you with a food body or health challenge, then they may likely be locked into some degree of physiologic stress response and all its attendance symptoms. If they're burdened by a high speed life, meaning they cannot truly heal or transform their unwanted eating challenge until they begin to access more slow
accessing, more slow. You know, sometimes if we don't wanna learn the lesson of slow life delivers it, life will slow us down. You know, has life with a capital L ever slowed you down? Did it slow you down by giving you a dis-ease? Did it slow you down by giving, getting you sick? Did it slow you down by breaking a bone? By breaking a leg? Um, did it slow you down by, I don't know, your car breaks down and all of a sudden you can't go here, you can't go there. Did it slow you down because somebody around you got sick and you needed to attend to them? Uh, did some project that was about to take all your energy, somehow fall apart? You know, sometimes the wisdom of life is talking to us, and we don't listen. A lot of times the wisdom of life, wisdom with a capital W and life with a capital L, a greater wisdom, a higher wisdom, a deeper code, whatever you wanna call it. Sometimes it's gonna do the work for us. Let's respect that.
I just wanna respect that, huh? This might be life's way, because life is always teaching us. You're always in a workshop. Your life is not random. Consider that. I'm saying that as a postulation, even though I a thousand percent believe it's true. I think our belief in the randomness and the chaoticness of the universe of biology, of evolution, um, that we are just the product of random molecules slamming together and somehow making us humans. Um, it's, it's, it's mathematically impossible. But regardless, if you go around thinking that you live in a random universe, you're gonna miss a lot of wisdom. You're gonna miss a lot of clues. You're gonna miss all the ways that life might be teaching you. Your client's gonna miss that.
So life will teach us by slowing us down oftentimes. And when I see that, I, I don't feel sorry for my client, I think good for you, life is delivering a lesson. How can we learn this?
We cannot give our times. Uh, we, we cannot give our clients more time and less stress. And people are gonna be very clear with you about why they don't have the time to slow down or why they can't relax. They're and given all their life challenges that's on their plate. And they're gonna be right. Everything they tell you about why they cannot slow down, they are right. But I want you to know my friends, every single one of us, I don't care what your story is, I don't care what your client's story is. Every single one of us can learn how to slow down, relax, breathe, and find a bit more peace within all the chaos.
And that's valuable. Oftentimes it means creating moments of wholeness, just moments, minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, whether it's meditating, whether it's playing a song and putting on your headphones and dancing around the room. Whether it's stepping outside for five minutes and putting your face in the sun. We can create moments of wholeness.
And for a lot of people, even though they complain to you and they complain, they complain, they actually do have the ability and the wherewithal to slow down. They just don't know it. And they haven't played around with it.
You know, clients who present as overwhelmed must learn how to access other states without that. Your work with them, I'm promising you, is gonna be unrewarding the client who is overwhelmed. Like this is their basic presentation. This is their vibe. This is their energy. Trust me, they have good reason to be overwhelmed. However, they're overwhelmed. Why They're overwhelmed. Good reason. They've got good reasons that client must learn relative to whatever eating challenge they have to regulate themselves different. We are learning how to regulate our emotional metabolism. We are learning how to regulate discomfort. We are learning how to regulate all of the responsibilities and the craziness and the noise of life such that we don't go crazy or such, that we don't negatively impact our body. Its health and our relationship with food, with unwanted eating challenges. Someone who is overwhelmed is in a panic on a certain level, and they are in an ongoing stress state, and they cannot think clearly and they cannot make good decisions. So at the very least, my job is to help them slow down. That person is in a state addiction. They get addicted to their overwhelm because it's stress chemistry. And stress chemistry is, is, is, um, it's, it's empowering in a certain way. It gives you energy, it makes you alert. Um, but we can get addicted to all kinds of different states attached to it. Humans can get addicted to stress. You can be addicted to being, you know, spaced out. Literally. People get addicted to complaining. People get addicted to being high from different drugs or substances. You can get addicted to depression, to apathy. You can get addicted to romance. You can get addicted to the excitement of jumping out of a plane. You can get addicted or habituated or attached to any particular mind state. So when one level slowing down is about letting go of a state addiction, it's not forever eradicating the state. You know, you're gonna get stressed, you're gonna be moving fast. But it's just about learning to access other states. So from this place, slowing down is a practice. Slowing down our life, our mind, our inner world for so many people is such an important soul lesson. Uh, let me just give you another example here. Um, this was a New York City client many moons ago. Um, was arguably one of my first clients who I was able to help in, in, in just like several sessions. Um, she was working for, you know, a big financial institution. Probably a company that you've heard of on Wall Street. Uh, when I saw her, she was in her early forties. She was reaching what she described as the pinnacle of her career. Um, strangely enough, as she moved further and further up to corporate ladder, you know, the food chain in her company, uh, she was making way more money. She didn't have less responsibility. She had more, she didn't have less working hours. She had more working hours. So this is a lady that as she becomes more successful, she's actually under more stress. She has more people to manage. She has more responsibility. More, more, more, more, more. So, why is this client coming to see me? She has a combination of heartburn, bloating, she's got gas after most meals, um, really is not a single meal that she doesn't feel some kind of digestive distress. Um, she's also, for the first time in her life, experiencing bouts of constipation. Um, and then all of a sudden for a few weeks, she'll get diarrhea. So it's very embarrassing for her. Uh, she's already seen a nutritionist. She's tried a bunch of different strategies. Nothing worked. She's been to a gastroenterologist. She's been told that there's nothing wrong with her. So the lady's got wherewithal money, best access to the best healthcare in New York City. And nobody can find anything to do my perfect client. So when I listened to her and listen to her life, you know, she's a typical high-paced, New York City, wall Street client who's smart, successful, intelligent, and moving at a high pace. So I asked her this question, listen to this question. When don't you have digestive issues? Are there any times during the week, the day, the month, the year that you don't have digestive issues? She thinks she thinks she thinks. And she says, you know, something. A couple months back, I was on nantec on Nantucket Island for a vacation and my digestion was fine. So what does that say to me? Immediately? I think, Hmm, vacation relaxation, digestion's fine. Yeah, most likely your issues are related to a physiologic stress response. So what we did was we began to practice slowing down. And even though her life was demanding speed from her, it wasn't demanding. She'd be a fast eater. 'cause she was eating all her meals fast. And even when she got home to eat a dinner, she was still eating fast. So we focused on slowing down with meals. Really, that was it. And taking a little bit more time at work, she's the boss, takes some extra minutes, do some simple breathing exercises, focus on the food, focus on feeling nourished, focus on getting a little bit of pleasure. It's not just about chewing and eating slow. And, you know, that was all we needed. A couple of sessions. And her digestive distress went from a nine outta 10 to about a three or a four outta 10. And that was in a couple of weeks. So that was tremendous. Now, one could say my work was done. But what was fascinating was by our fourth and last session, uh, she came in and she said to me, you know, I'm seeing how this speed thing is not just affecting my digestion. She said, it's, it's really my whole life. You know, it's really about my relationships. It's, it's really about how I feel about myself when I'm looking in the mirror. She said, I'm so happy about where I'm at professionally, but I'm not happy in my life. Uh, and this was a person who was not accustomed to reexamining her life and her career path because she's been so brilliantly focused on getting to where she is. Coincidentally, she has a friend in the same company that she works at who left the company and started her own company and became a consultant. So now she all of a sudden started exploring joining her friend in her friend's business 'cause she wanted to change her life. And all of this was spurred by asking her to slow down with food. And she started making the connections. She started putting one and one together. You know that that's the way we can often impact and affect our clients. What a beautiful thing. Let's move on. Let's talk about soul lesson number four, reclaiming the higher feminine in our world, in our life, whether you're male or female, and especially if you're female, but especially if you're male too, reclaiming a higher feminine also means how you're looking at the feminine. Let's kind of break this down. Let's acknowledge that we tend to live in a world of ever-changing definitions of genders, the role of women, the role of men changing beliefs around sexuality and more. And you know, with all this change, I think, uh, there's often a collective confusion around what does it mean to be a woman, a man, a boy, a girl, or changing culture around the masculine feminine. Polarities often goes unexamined and unquestioned. We don't really dive in and say, how might this be impacting us? And I believe that as a consequence, there are many people in suffering and pain when it comes to food, body, and life. And it's directly tied to their uncertainty and confusion around masculine and feminine energies and archetypes. So once again, in our collective efforts to make the sexes equal in the eyes of the law of society, of religion, of the world, we often end up neutering both sexes and making them equal in their essence and nature and character and their expression. And they ain't so masculine and feminine are equal in the eyes of the universe. They ought to be equal in the eyes of all laws. But those energies are surely different when we're not noticing and respecting the differences in these nuances. Unwanted eating behaviors and symptoms are often the result. I have noticed that many women have exiled a part of their feminine archetype as a way to comply with trying to be quote unquote equal with men.
Consider that. Do you know anyone like that? Women who've exiled a certain part of their feminine archetype as a way to try to be equal to men? I could do what a man does, and that's fine. And when it happens at the expense of another part of us that begins to impact us, then let's take note observationally. I wanna say that many women have been taught to overemphasize their masculine polarity. While many men have been taught by the world to overemphasize their feminine polarity, it's un noticing.
So speaking about the women of the world, for many women, their soul lesson is to reclaim the feminine, whatever that might mean for them, it means a higher and fuller definition of the feminine. It means noticing in the, noticing the places where they have not fully nurtured the qualities of the feminine in their daily life and in their inner world.
This is no fault of any woman because we live in a world that the messages that we get, the media that we see, the images that are bombarded at us. And I mean that you gotta get how programmed you are, my friends. You gotta get how the world deeply conditions, programs like a computer, the brain, um, and it doesn't always do so in a good way. So in many ways, the message that people get women and men about the feminine is that the feminine means, I don't know, skinny and pretty.
That's what a lot of young girls are exposed to. This is what feminine means, skinny and pretty.
And of course, if you dive into various cultures, various traditions, you go into history, you're gonna get a whole different view of what the feminine actually is. And once again, when we say feminine, it's nourishment. It's the body, it's the earth, it's the flow, it's our naturalness, our connectedness. It's body wisdom, it's emotions, it's sensuality, it's softness, it's surrender, it's care for the world. It's beauty in all things. It's love, it's cooperation, it's harmony, it's rhythm, it's tuning in, it's ial.
This is the feminine as it exists in humans. And that is often particularly emphasized in the kind of human called a woman. So the feminine, it, it covers a lot of turf. The feminine is the ocean. The ocean can be calm, the ocean can be stormy. The ocean can swallow you up. The ocean could feed you with a bounty of fish. So the feminine can be very unpredictable, it can be chaotic, it can give birth, it can destroy. It is so many different aspects.
So every bit of feminine within us, particularly in women, has the potential to be expressing the side of itself, the side of the feminine that's nourishing, that's connected to the body, that's connected to naturalness, that's connected to body wisdom that doesn't need to operate from logic and figure things out and push the body and force the body and push the mind and be perfect. The feminine has the potential to be in its flow and to trust itself in a very central, sensual, natural, easeful way. When our young women are constantly bombarded with the message of, here is how you are supposed to look, here is what it's supposed to be like. They start to lose their connection to their body. They start to lose their connection to the body, to their body wisdom, to their naturalness, to their inherent flow, to their inherent power. Because all of a sudden they're in their head and they think they have to reshape their body and change things, which of course must mean diet and exercise. So they can be acceptable to the world. So what the world is defining for them as lovable and acceptable, they can now be because as humans, we want to feel loved and accepted and included.
And when the feminine feels as if it is not enough, it is not okay with who it is, it will honestly and eagerly do its best to do what it needs to do to feel lovable. Unfortunately, what that looks like is a disordered relationship with food. Unfortunately, what that looks like is unwanted eating behaviors. Unfortunately, what that turns into is self attack around the body, around body weight, around body shape. So reclaiming the feminine means letting go of forcing the body. Reclaiming the feminine means letting go of fighting the body, dieting it, punishing it with exercise, holding down its emotions.
Reclaiming the feminine means you relax more, you be open and surrender to a gentler flow you trust.
Do you ever know a woman who was giving birth for the first time and she's nervous and she doesn't know what's gonna happen. She doesn't know if she's gonna be okay because we hear we're taught, we know that this could be painful, this could be difficult. I might have to have a c-section. You know, am I gonna be able to do this? Am I gonna lose the weight afterwards? How much weight am I gonna gain in pregnancy? And, and, and, and, and at some point we need to trust in the body, particularly the female body requires a lot of extra trust because of the, some of the powerful transformations it goes through, particularly when it's pregnant, and particularly when it's giving birth, and particularly after it's given birth. That is one of the most intense physiologic experiences that a human body can undergo.
When the feminine cannot trust in its own body. We have on issue, we got a problem. So what happens is there's a lot of women walking around in this world who don't trust their body and they don't trust it, not from a standpoint of childbirth so much, but they don't trust it because, oh my God, if I eat this, I'm gonna gain weight. And if I gain weight, you know what that means? I won't be loved, I won't find true love. People won't like me. I'll be weight hated against, and I'll live a life of misery because we are swimming in an invisible liquid of weight hate.
So young women and women wisely look around and they see what's going on in the world and they say, oh my God, I have to change my body, but at the same time, I can't trust my body. So it makes perfect sense that they would be living in confusion, that they would have a confused relationship with food and body.
So even though this training is not about working with eating disorders, traditional clinical eating disorders, you know, some of you are qualified by a previous, you know, uh, previous study, previous degree to work with eating disorders. So for those of you who work in this realm already, uh, or who are just interested, I wanna tell you the quick way, the fast way to really understand eating disorders and working with eating disorders. So every young woman and man who has a true bonafide eating disorder, it comes from culture. It's collective, it comes from the world and it individualizes in that particular person. Yet it's a disease of the world. And in so many ways, it's because we have lost our connection to the feminine. And what it truly means, we are not honoring the feminine, we are not honoring the female body. We are attacking it with images. We are attacking it with words. We are overvaluing a certain kind of look and the feminine mind, prove me wrong if you think I'm wrong, but the feminine mind is highly susceptible to criticisms of looks, weight, and shape.
Now remember, there are many men who have a very well aspected and well developed feminine side. There are many men with eating disorders, and there are many men who are their feminine mind is very sensitive to criticism and critique about weight and shape and looks. So it is the feminine in us, and particularly it plays out in women who have a higher percentage of eating disorders and eating challenges. In general, it is the female of the species that tends to bear the brunt of our dysfunctional and unenlightened relationship with the feminine. It just tends to play out in that way.
So you and I as practitioners need to learn to see beyond the body. And we need to see the feminine archetype as it moves and lives and breathes and expresses itself in your client and especially in your female client. We need to learn to look beyond whatever space spacesuit the person is wearing in this moment. The spacesuit, meaning their body, the size of it, the shape of it. We need to look at them beyond their complaints. We need to look at them beyond our personal complaints about our body, their body, or anybody. We need to see the person within the body. We need to see the soul within the body. We need to see the feminine within the body and to see how that feminine is more than happy to fully express itself through any female body.
When the eyes of the world are looking at the feminine and looking at females in particular in a limited way, we pick up on that, we feel what it feels like to be looked at in a certain way. So it begins with you, it begins with me in how we start to see. And it is learning to see beyond your client's self-hate self attack and self-judgment. And to see the feminine in them with a capital F, to see the beautiful feminine within them.
Reclaiming the feminine means letting go of self-assessment via numbers.
Oh, my value is given by the amount on the scale. The number of calories I eat, the number of calories I just burned, the number of fat grams I consumed.
It is destroying souls across the planet. Self-assessment by a number on the scale, number calories, portion size, fat grams. Like its nonsense. It is a killer. It is a form of insanity. It does not work. Am I saying that weighing yourself is bad? No. Am I saying that noticing the number of grams or galleries you eat, is that inherently bad? No, it's the way we use it and we overuse it and we abuse the heck out of it, which really means we're abusing the heck out of ourselves. You're gonna hear more about that in a future conversation about our over-reliance on numbers and how that kills the feminine soul. Reclaiming the higher feminine means letting go of perfectionism and just being in our body, inhabiting it rather than standing outside of the body and critiquing it and judging. And my body says, my body's that. No, stop talking about it. Just be in it.
Just be in your body. Once you start to get in your body, then you're here, then you're alive, then you're on planet earth. And then you can start to move it, and then you can start to breathe it, and then you can start to nourish it, and then you can start to shapeshift it much better when you're occupying it, when you're judging your body, you're abandoning it. When you're seeking perfection in your body or in your diet, you are actually abandoning your body. You are abandoning self, you are going into a hidden self-attack mode. So reclaim that. Reclaiming the higher feminine means self care. It means letting go of self attack. My friends, you know, there's an old Broadway play called My Fair Lady. And in this play there's a famous song that the lead male character changed. And the song is basically, why can't a woman be more like a man? That's the song. Why can't a woman be more like a man? And he's lamenting this because he figures, well, if a woman's more like a man, then men would get along better with women. Men would get along better with women if a woman could be more like a man. So it's an interesting cultural message. We're asking our women to be more like men, which would then be logical, linear, unemotional. Don't be a drama queen. Don't have needs, don't have moods that change. Be specific every time. Know exactly what you want. When you wanna be logical, be linear.
But that is not the feminine in us, and it's not the feminine in women. The feminine is beautifully emotional. It is unpredictable. It does have a deep heart. It doesn't always express itself clearly and perfectly in any given moment. The feminine is changing waters, the feminine is in a flow. The feminine is unpredictable, and the feminine often has its own language. When we masculinize the feminine, when we over masculinize our women, we're wanting them to measure themselves, weigh themselves, weigh their food, measure their food, measure their calories, count their fat grams. And this is all masculine mind, linear left brain strategies that work when they work.
But gosh, that's been the only game in town. And when that's the only game in town, and if a woman hasn't tried another game, IE experimenting and dropping into her feminine and the feminine mode when it comes to being in relationship with a body and being in relationship with food, if she hasn't tried that out, then she's missing something.
So are you beginning to hear, think about this, that when your client comes to see you, and she's been complaining that I have not been, been able to lose weight for the longest time, and they constantly weigh themselves and they're constantly on a diet and they're over exercising, and they're, and they're undereating and they're controlling their calories and their fat grams, and they're this and they're that. I guarantee you that person is an unhappy human and they've been unhappy a long time. And not only are they unhappy, but they're completely befuddled because they've done what they've been told to do. The women of the world and the men of the world, they, they've done it. You know, I don't know why people say, especially when it comes to Americans, a lot of cultures like to say, Americans are lazy. It's not my experience at all. Uh, Americans work hard. And when it comes to diet, Americans diet hard when it comes to diet, a lot of people, a lot of people of all cultures, of all ilks work hard. They follow the diet, they do the exercise, they do everything, and it's logical and it's linear and it's specific. And I'm calling that the masculine mode and it doesn't always work. And then especially doesn't always work for women.
I hope you're beginning to see the direction I'm moving in here. I'm not telling you, you should be more like this as a woman, be however you wanna be. Do whatever you wanna do. When my client comes into my office with a complaint, it is now my job to look at everything that's gonna help them get where they want to go. Looking at the soul lessons called reclaiming the higher feminine, reclaiming the higher masculine, especially learning how to see masculine and feminine psychology differently. Learning how to see the psychology of an actual woman differently, the psychology of an actual male differently and noticing where they, where they intersect, makes us smarter and gives us more tools in our toolkit.
So if I know a woman who's following a very quote unquote masculine strategy when it comes to food, body, and weight, and she counts her calories and counts her fat cramps, and notices how many calories she burns and wastes herself every day. And if she's happy, big hug, hallelujah. I love you. Great, no problem, keep going. It is working for you, but if it ain't working for you, then you bet I'm gonna raise my hand in a big way. And I see this as a deep need, my friends, I see this as something that has been dramatically overlooked.
Something about the feminine. The feminine needs to express itself to be happy. The feminine wants to say what it needs to say. The feminine tends to do what it really truly wants to do. The feminine needs to feel what the feminine is feeling without having to justify why it's feeling.
The moment your woman client shares her feeling the moment any woman shares a feeling and, and it feels like she has to justify that feeling. Um, no, you don't have to justify the feeling, just just how you're feeling. No need to justify, no need to go into your head. Well, here's, here's why I should be feeling this feeling. No, just feel your feeling. The feminine wants to know what it knows, it wants to share what it wants to share. The f the feminine needs to simply express itself. Its flow, moment to moment in a real truthful, honest way.
The feminine is okay with covering a lot of moods and a lot of turf. The feminine tends to enjoy being noticed and seen and praised.
If you want to move the masculine in a certain direction, if the masculine ain't doing something that you want it to do or if it's off course. The way to help get the masculine on course is you critique it, you assess it, you give it feedback.
Masculine mind likes that the feminine mind doesn't thrive on intense criticism. I can't believe you did that wrong. I can't believe you went down the wrong road. The feminine will more likely proceed with success when it is praised.
Gosh, when you do it this way, when you move in that direction, wow, does it work for you? Wow. Does it put a smile on your face? Wow. Do you relax and the whole room lights up?
That's more how you help the feminine move in the direction where it truly wants to go.
So that's something about your feminine client or your oftentimes female client,
um, that the feminine in us needs to be honored, praised loved, oftentimes adored, especially in the princess stage. In the princess stage, the feminine wants to be noticed. Look at me. That is the feminine of the world. Flowers are feminine. Nature is the feminine nature. Just nature explodes in front of you with beauty. It wants to be noticed. It's not messing around. You know, when you come across a beautiful natural scene, it demands your attention. It grabs it. That's what the feminine does. It calls out to be noticed. That's a beautiful thing. But when the world is telling the feminine a woman, a girl, you don't deserve to be noticed. You don't deserve to be seen. You don't deserve to be praised. That's a dagger in the heart. That's a dagger in the soul. That person cannot relax. That person cannot let go. That person cannot trust that person's gonna have a hard time feeling loved. And that person is likely going to reach for all kinds of strategies that will help them reshape and tweak the body in a whole different direction so they can feel loved and accepted by the universe and by the world, which is creating a very narrow definition for them of what the feminine ought to be. So for the women listening in and for the men as well, let, let me speak for a moment. Let take away my teacher hat and just put on my best friend hat for a moment. So now speaking to the women listening in here, just as if you're a best friend. So what I'm saying might not be, you might not consider it scientific. You might not consider it provable, but I'm raising my hand and saying that I strongly believe that we're living in a time where women have been conditioned and brainwashed in such a way that they end up self attacking and debilitating themselves. And that ain't their fault because they've adopted definitions of the feminine that simply are toxic, they're inaccurate, they're limited, they're harmful, they're hurtful, and it takes a woman away from her power. It takes a woman away from her destiny. It takes a woman away from who she truly is and has her absolutely occupied exclusively with the surface of things. I need to change my surface. I need to change my billboard. I need to change my body, my shape, this body fat, this muscle tissue in order to be loved and accepted and to be okay in this world and to be the real me in this world.
Ladies, man, your your body's gonna change a lot of times throughout this life. It's gonna morph in different ways. You gotta go with that flow.
We, you have to learn how to start to find your power and find your beauty and find your self dignity in the feminine that you are.
And you have to let go of the masculine strategies that have not been working for you. And you have to notice if you're looking to help others in this realm, you have to notice where they are trapped and brainwashed in a way of going about the business of being a woman in this world that just has them self attacking, self hating and living in misery and living in I'm not good enough and living in I'm not lovable. That is a curse put upon our women. That is a curse by the world, that is put upon our women from a young age and increasingly put upon our young men from a young age. And then it ends up reproducing itself in us. So we take those voices that we hear from the outside and we keep repeating it and repeating it and repeating the offense to ourselves. Okay, let me give you a case story. I'm gonna talk about Porsche. Porsche's a lovely black lady, 45, mother of three, divorced, outgoing, outspoken, quick thinker, very dedicated mom, works in the corporate world and sales. Why is she coming to see me? She binge eats at night, she's gaining weight, she can't lose it. She tired of dieting. She exercises regularly, but forces herself to do so. Uh, Portia is extremely proud of her accomplishments. And at the same time, workwise lifewise, she's, she's deserves to be proud. She knows what she's accomplished. She's also tired of the work grind in the corporate world. Um, she has an opportunity to step into a higher managerial role in her company. And she's not sure what to do. Isn't interesting. It's coming up again. She's gonna make more money, but she knows it's gonna be more work. And, and bottom line is she's coming to see me to get help in getting rid of binge eating and she'd like to lose 30 pounds. It, it, it, it is not her main focus. It's truly not her main focus. But hey, if this happens, great, interesting client.
And when we talked about her being tired of the corporate world, it's on the one hand she would admit it, but then she would take it back and she would admit, and she would take it back. She was kind of at a change point here. It was re it's really hard for her because she's been really focused on elevating her career and she's been really focused on elevating herself into a d different, uh, economic stratosphere. She has been, you know, she, she set out to prove years ago that she could raise her kids on her own and support them and mother them and father them simply because she had to. So she actually took on the challenge, uh, and she was clear that I'm gonna raise my kids well on my own. I'm gonna support them. I'm gonna give them what they need. I gotta mother them. I gotta father them because the dad's outta the picture. So she also set out to prove in that process that she could be as good and better than any of the men in her sales team. And she did it. Um, so here's what I wanna say. My friends good for her. And on one level, Porsche has been emphasizing a highly masculine archetype and existence. Please, my friends, I want you to be able to think archetypally. That's not an insult. That is not an insult. If you want to mother a child, that's a certain archetype. If you want to father a child, that's another archetype.
If you want to kill it in a business world, that's a certain archetype. If you want to be a loving person in your community who is just a support for people, that's another archetype. So what I'm saying is Porsche has been emphasizing a highly masculine archetype. She has been competitive, she has been a hero, she has been one pointed, she has been uber focused. She has been very diligently in following a numbers game. Being a sales professional and being at the top of your game, it's all about numbers. It's all about how many, how many leads did you generate? How many leads did you convert? You know, it is a numbers game.
And what I'm thinking in the back of my mind, my friends, is perhaps it is time for a change. That's what I'm thinking. So in our conversations, I started moving in the direction of her considering the possibility of, yeah, letting go of your job, slowing down, taking a new and far less demanding opportunity. And your friend, small business, and just even saying that made her glow. She took a deep breath. Literally, uh, you've seen how people do this. You're in a conversation with somebody and you go to a place in the conversation that is so rare, that is so that the person was hungry for and didn't even know it. And, and they, they they just morphed. They changed before your eyes. That's what happened when I brought this up and I brought it up from a place of this is an achievement for you to do that. This is not a defeat.
So I was looking at her binge eating and her weight from a larger perspective. Um, to me the binge eating was ladies under a lot of stress. And binge eating as we're going to learn, can be a powerful de-Stresser really does. It will de-stress you. It's a moment where you are elevating your stress response by going into a frenzied binge. So you emphasize the stress through the binge, and then the body will eventually relax because it has to digest a large amount of food. So it's a symbolic way of relaxing. But the binge eating is also at the same time pointing to, Hey, why do you even need to do that? Huh? What's, what else is going on in your life? For me, the extra weight, possibly, possibly was she needed it. You know, she needed to be more grounded in the world. She needed to be stronger in the world. She needed to get bigger in the world. She needed to be a powerful person. She needed to be a mother and a father. That takes a lot. Um, she needed to support, what did I say? Three kids that takes a lot without any other help. And to be there for him, them, and to be there, like, wow. Like, wow. So just started the conversation. What would it be like to welcome a feminine mode of existence back into your life? You, you've worked hard, you've worn the pants in the family and you've worn the skirt, but you've really had to wear the pants.
The conversation itself was a big breath of fresh air. It was a let go. It was a release. It was an opening into honestly, something that she knew deep inside she'd been missing. She got it. She got it immediately and the work became just a big juicy course correction in her life. How do we start to bring the feminine into your world? How can you start to slow down? And she was set up in a very practical way to be able to let go of her job and go into something else. And the money would not be as great, but she was okay. She was financially okay. It would not have been a burden.
And this, for her was a soul lesson. It's not like she did something wrong. There was nothing wrong. Being in the masculine archetype for a while was what this woman had to do. And now stepping into the feminine archetype was what Porsche had to do. So I brought up the con the the conversation and watched and listened. Where does this go? How does this land for you?
Actually, let me go in another direction right now. I actually wanna give you one more case story that also I think captures some of what I wanna say here. Uh, I wanna talk about a client I had, um, I'm gonna call her Barbara. Barbara was working for big company, uh, when I saw her, she was in her mid forties. She was accustomed to being about 130 pounds for most of her life. She considers herself attractive. She's fit, she watches her diet, she's interested in health. She's a mother of two. Um, she's actually the breadwinner in the family. Uh, she makes a lot more money than her husband does. Her husband has a labor job. So it's interesting because she already kind of wears the pants in the family. She sort of holds the masculine from a traditional sense in the relationship. So traditionally, and I'm quoting, you know, it's the man who takes care of the family. The man does the hunting and, and the man brings back the bounty. The masculine protects the masculine is the dude that, that makes it all happen. So she's the one who's, you know, bringing home the food for, for the most part. She's bringing in the money and she's the one that has to be a killer in the business world. So Barbara's coming to see me to lose about 30 pounds. And she's straight up honest. She's beside herself because what, whenever she used to gain weight, she was able to exercise and diet it off. And all of a sudden exercising and dieting does absolutely nothing. She doesn't even lose the weight anymore. Remember we talked about this as you get older, as we get older, ah, the body gets tired of that nonsense. It doesn't wanna lose weight, gain it, lose it, gain it. So the same strategies that worked in your twenties worked in your thirties. They don't work into the forties and fifties necessarily. So Barbara can't lose weight through diet and exercise. And the more intense she exercises, um, still doesn't see weight loss. So she's really upset because there's no other option. Like, how am I gonna lose weight? Um, I would say she's in the top 10% of clients that I've seen who were, um, how do I say it? Just deeply unhappy with where she was with her body. She could barely contain her anxiety. Um, she just overthinks her issue. She's, she just feels like she is stuck and she is shocked to think that she has to live in this body for the rest of her life. So the lady's kind of in a panic. So of course, okay, let me look at your diet. Excuse me. And she's trying the best to limit her diet. So she's eating approximately 1400 calories per day. She eats low fat. Um, and so, okay, I'm noticing that there's places to work with diet, but I'm also thinking in the back of my mind, my goodness, you've been training your body to eat very little food and your metabolism has adjusted downwards. She's probably the kind of client she does need to eat more food and does need to eat more fat. And she's probably also the kind of person that she will gain a little weight before her metabolism readjusts and she starts to lose it again. You'll hear more about that in another conversation. So here's what I did. I said to her, this was an intuitive kind of question. I said, you know, this might seem a little strange, but can you just tell me what's your definition of feminine?
And without hesitating, without hesitating and without a smile on her face, she said, skinny and pretty. And, and I always remembered that term skinny and pretty came right out. It really stuck in my head. Uh, and she looked at me right in the eyes when she said it. So I said, got it. Um, I said to her, you know, you're a smart lady. You earn a lot of money. You work in a corporation, you've worked yourself up the ladder of life. You're a successful woman. Don't you think that definition's a little limited? Like, do you know women who aren't technically skinny and pretty? Does that mean they're not feminine?
She didn't have an answer for me. So I knew from our earlier conversation that she has a couple of girls. So I said, tell me about your girls. She said, what do you wanna know? I said, are they skinny? And she said, no. I said, well, how would you describe them? And she said, well, I'd call them average. I said, okay, got it. So does that mean they're not feminine?
And the look on her face was complete befuddlement. And she said, she said, I hadn't even thought of these questions. I said to her, so I really wanna know, just be honest with me. I'm your friend here. Like, how do you see your girls? So you said feminine means skinny and pretty. Your girls are technically, they're not skinny, so how do you view them?
And it turns out she's judging her own girls. And she said, you know, well I silently, I kind of wish they would lose weight. I said, wow, that's pretty intense, quite honestly. And she immediately defended herself. She says, I don't criticize them. I've never said a single thing to them. I don't say anything about that. I said, yeah, I get it, but don't you think, come on, we're all people we pick up on that you don't think they pick up on that, that you're disapproving of them, you're disapproving of your own body. What do you think they're gonna pick up from you? Wow, was this a this was a heavy duty conversation. My client was at her edge. I was, I was pushing her to the limit, uh, in terms of what she can handle and good for her. She was hanging in there, she really was. Um, and by the way, I will often use my client's relationship with their children to inspire them and or motivate them to make a change and to look at your, and to look at themselves. Um, and I just was really open with her. I said, listen, you know what you're doing, what you're thinking. It's affecting the people around you. I don't have to tell you that. You know, when you're hanging around somebody that doesn't like you, they're judging you. They think you should be different. They think you should look different. Um, and you are basically beaming this message at them that my daughters are not true feminine. And they need to lose weight in order for them to be acceptable. Which means in order for you to accept them, they have to be picking that up on some level.
You know, I, and and I tell my clients, I understand you wanna lose the weight. I want you to lose the weight. And I get that you don't wanna be 30 pounds overweight or whatever it is. But look, diet and exercise is not working for you anymore. It sounds like you're becoming anxious about this. And, and for her, you know, I went into stress, stress chemistry, stress physiology. We talked a lot about that. And I said, one of the ways you're stressing yourself out is that you have a definition of the feminine of being a woman, of being a girl that is causing stress chemistry in your system.
And it is creating the opposite chemistry of which you want in order to have the body that you say you want to get to. So you need to start changing in a lot of ways the way you are thinking. So I gave her a bunch of exercises to do and, but more importantly, I asked her, okay, so you're married. How does your husband feel about your body? And she big smile on her face. She says, well, he loves my body no matter what it is, he loves me. If I'm one 30, he loves me if I'm one 60. I said, wow. So why do you wanna lose the weight? And she says, well, I'm gonna feel sexier. I said, got it. So lemme ask you this question. When you're 130 pounds, do you actually feel sexier? Well, think, think to times when you've lost the weight, you hit your target weight. Did you feel sexier? And she thought about it for a second and she said, well, you know, my sex life, honestly, it wasn't any better. Um, in fact, she's a little more uptight. She, she acknowledges, she said, I'm more uptight when I'm 130 because I'm afraid I'm gonna lose it. I'm like, wow, this is an honest woman. She's really just laying it out there. So here I am, I'm working with my client in a larger definition of the feminine. And you know, oftentimes the action where you work with a client is what they, with you work with what they already have and what she already has. Check it out. She's in a relationship with a man who loves her, who's crazy about her, who could care less about how much she weighs. And I said to her, if he was sitting here right now, and I was talking to him and I said, how's your wife with all this body stuff in this, in this weight stuff and this sexuality stuff, what would you recommend husband? Like, what would he say to me? And she didn't miss a beach, he said very clearly, oh, he would say, she just needs to relax and let go. She said, he just, he just wants to love me. He just wants to play. He wants to have fun. He treats me really well. He adores me. I couldn't ask for anything more. So I said, well, it's kind of like you have a winning lottery ticket in your pocket and you're not using it. Um, I suggested you're gonna be sexier when you feel sexier. And that means you start to act sexier. And that means you start to play. And that means you start to explore your edge and you know, where you start to play more with your husband and use the relationship. Because, you know, sometimes if you can't love your own body and there's somebody else that's out there who does, Hey, why not get a little help? You know, that might sound simplistic to you, my friends, but you know, here we are. We have a person who has a limited view of the feminine, a limited definition of the feminine. And her job was to learn how to relax. And here she was thinking, she's gonna be more sexy if she loses a bunch of weight. And really, let's start to expand your definition now. So I want to tell you the bottom line, you know, and this is her whole life, that she's been living in this definition and she's never really enjoyed the body that she's had. She's always waited to enjoy the body that she wants. And even when she gets the body that she wants, she still wasn't enjoying it. And she wasn't even conscious that she wasn't enjoying it. This client and I worked together for about, we worked together for six months and it was beautiful. It was wonderful work. Um, she didn't lose 30 pounds, she lost eight. Um, and more to the point, she was far more embodied, more to the point. She was far more confident, more to the point. Um, she had a different relationship with her husband. She had a more inspired relationship with her girls. That was the big thing for her was she really changed as a mom. She changed in her conversation with her girls because she noticed she would constantly berate her own self in front of her girls when it came to her weight and her shape. And she realized that she wasn't sending a good example for them. So, you know, here I am giving my client strategies to help her step into the feminine to a bigger definition of the feminine.
Notice that in your world, notice that for yourself. Notice how the people around you, the women around you, express their feminine. How does it work for them? What do you see? This is how we learn about these things. My friends, you know, there's still more to happen in this conversation, but what I wanna say is when we put this into a metabolic perspective, the stress long-term, low level, ongoing physiologic stress response of overemphasizing an archetype, or limiting our definition of that archetype in such a way that it doesn't match who we are, that stress can powerfully impact the body. Conversely, a adopting an archetype that is longing to be expressed in us. When we adopt the feminine in a deeper way, we adopt the masculine. If we need it in a deeper way, there's a big relaxation response, a physiologic relaxation response. And that's when things change. That's when they start to heal. That's when we can go into a whole new metabolic state because we've done the inner work. We're exploring, we're experimenting. My friends, I hope this was helpful for you. Take what works, let go of what doesn't work. This is the conclusion of part two of psychobiology of Soul Lessons. One more part to come. Part three. Thanks for your time and attention. I really appreciate it.

PART 3

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Greetings once again, friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in the psychobiology of Soul Lessons,
and this is the last, in our installment of three parts around this conversation where learning about nine key soul lessons that I think are useful to look into. Of course, there are many more. And as you remember, the soul lessons, the concept of soul lessons assumes that there's a hidden architecture to life, a higher perspective, a bigger picture, and a greater destiny for each one of us. That quite frankly, it's not always easily noticed until we look under the hood, until you and I start to dive a little deeper and notice. So here we are, we're taking the time to notice, we're taking the time to postulate, to consider, to educate ourselves once again, for many people with eating challenges and health concerns, the place where movement and healing wants to happen is oftentimes in, uh, let's call it our soul curriculum. The workshop that we're in that is larger than so many of the smaller goals we have. So what I'm suggesting when I'm postulating is not living in alignment with our souls code will tend to cause stress in our system, my friends. And stress naturally leads to unwanted behaviors, thoughts, symptoms, stress, chemistry changes our physiology. You know, I mean, think about it from the simplest standpoint. Life has a way for us of helping us use the body and the wisdom of the body to kind of navigate how we're doing in this world. You know, if you're not taking good care of yourself with food straight up, your body's gonna let you know if you are not taking good care of yourself, if you're exercising in the wrong way, if you're moving in the wrong way, if you're constantly bending with your back and picking things up in the wrong way, your body's gonna let you know. Life through the body lets us know when we need to wake up a little bit, look around, check things out. Well, it's not just on the gross physical level that the body will give us feedback about life, but the body will sense when the soul is a little bit off course. So tuning into your client's soul lessons is all about listening, listening, listening, deepening, intuiting, practicing. And the way you do this, you do it with clients. You examine These soul lessons for yourself. You notice the people around you, the people closest to you that you can, that you can really study. Your friends, your partners, your children, whoever's in your world that you can notice, just start to see. So here we are in soul Lesson number five. We recently talked about reclaiming the higher feminine soul. Lesson number five is indeed about reclaiming the higher masculine. So ladies went first. Now for the masculine, we live in a world of ever-changing definitions. Remember, of gender, the roles of women, the roles of men. We live in a world of changing beliefs around sexuality and more. Now, with all this change, there's often a collective confusion around what it means to be a man, a woman, a boy, a girl. I heard somebody say this, that if our grandparents or great parents were great grandparents, if we could bring them back for a moment today and they could see what you and I are exposed to on YouTube, on television, in the media, in terms of sexuality and how it's presented, they would have heart attacks. Their, their, their minds would be blown. I mean, think about it for a moment. You know, uh, there are many, many people because of changing roles, changing definitions because of confusion around gender, confusion around who am I as a man, a woman, a boy or girl. There are many people and suffering and pain around food, body, and health. And it's directly tied to the uncertainty and confusion around masculine and feminine archetypes. And in this case, we're gonna be emphasizing the masculine. So let's have a deeper, honest and real conversation around masculine and feminine energies and archetypes and how they operate within us. So perhaps we can think a little bit better in this realm. So my friends, when I say higher masculine, I'm talking about the energies of the masculine within all of us men and women. And I'm also particularly pointing to men because it is the male of the species that will tend to emphasize the masculine polarity or the masculine archetype. You know, a lot of times women will say that men are a little bit behind in growth and maturity. And indeed, in a number of different religious and spiritual traditions, it is actually considered that women mature faster, the female, the species matures faster. That might be true. And when we're tapped in as men, when we're more tapped into the higher masculine, we start to embody a sense of stewardship or responsibility for the world, for the earth, for the people around us, for our environment. We start to feel a sense of purpose that's more guided, and that comes from a higher place. We feel more of a courage to speak the truth, even when that truth might get us into a little trouble. So it seems, uh, when we're connected to the higher masculine, we are often connected to a greater sense of spirit, a greater sense of religion, a greater sense of a higher power guiding us. When we're connected to the higher masculine, we will use our mind and our will in a good way. You know, there's a lot of men that are very brilliant and intelligent and willful, but intelligence and will are tools. They're not good or bad in themselves. Um, because you can, you can use your intelligence to create weapons of mass destruction. Uh, you can use your intelligence to create highly, um, structured businesses that rip people off. So it's all a matter of how we aim that intelligence. Intelligence does not mean character development per se. When we're in touch with a higher masculine, we become good princes, good kings, we have a clear direction, we're committed. Men become more committed to life as opposed to death. Look at so much of the imagery that you see around the masculine, uh, men wearing tattoos with skulls and knives and evil looking creatures. You know, it's interesting, it's fun, it's entertaining, but seems a little bit overdone. When the masculine doesn't evolve, we become a little bit overly obsessed with the death polarity and death imagery and destruction, imagery and blood and gore, imagery and horror. So the higher masculine is for sure committed to life and understands death, exists even welcome death, but it's committed to life, not to destruction.
The higher masculine is willing to mentor, the higher masculine is willing to bring the younger ones along. You know, in ancient times, in the Arthurian legends, there was a beautiful line. And the line is this, as goes the king, so goes the kingdom. By the way, you could also say, as goes the queen, so goes the queendom. So as goes the king, so goes the kingdom. Meaning, if you wanna understand why a particular kingdom is the way it is, look at the leader, look at the king. The kingdom will be a reflection of the king. So in the Arthurian legends, when King Arthur becomes depressed, you know, the crops don't grow and his subjects become depressed. The kingdom becomes dark. Nothing works. When he pulls himself out of his depression, the sun comes out, things grow, the crops are growing, the people are happier. Kingdom is a reflection of the kingdom. So, so kingdom is a reflection of the kingdom. Now, that's all a metaphoric way of looking at things, but true it is. Think about it. When the king is in right alignment with himself, when the king is connected to a higher power, a higher king, a divine king, uh, to the power that created us all, then the kingdom will flourish.
And what's interesting is if we look around us, we don't necessarily live in a time of good kings. Um, you know, especially the kings that you will see ruling the various nations on earth, the kings that show up in the newsfeed as the leaders of the world, as the leaders of industry, we have a lot of bad kings. We have a lot of bad princes. Um, when you become a bad king, you just want the kingdom to keep producing for you. You don't care about life. You're willing to go to war. You are willing to posture, you are willing to puff up your chest and just be a big ego.
Toxic king energy is just looking to collect the most toys and wins. Toxic prince energy in the young male. It just wants things for me, me, me. I want more things. I want more girls. I want more power. I want more money. I want more and more and more. I wanna conquer. I wanna own everything. Whoever has the most toys wins. I'm gonna attack, I'm gonna steal. So we live in a time when our kings are living in a place of ego. And so many of the men that were taught to worship are valued simply because they have money. So the men that are hurled in front of you in the media, oftentimes they're the wealthiest ones, the billionaires who we worship them. And I don't know that they're truly good kings per se. I don't know that they're uplifting those around them.
So many men. Observation, observation. Many men have exiled a part of their masculine archetype as a way to comply with trying to be more equal and sensitive to women. And good for them. I include myself among them and observationally. Many men have been taught to overemphasize their feminine polarity. What that means, the result can look like men who don't have a sense of purpose, a sense of present. Men who are not directive, they're not confident, they're not effective. They have a fear of commitment or responsibility, and they want their woman or their partner to be their mother.
If they're a heterosexual male, they, they want their wife or girlfriend to be their mommy. Uh, if not, they Just want their partner to be their parent to, to make everything happen. So, so when men overemphasize the feminine, it's actually hard for them to step into manhood or adulthood and to mature and to be the ruler of their kingdom. And from this place, unwanted symptoms, behaviors, and eating challenges can easily arise.
So once again, some of the qualities I'm suggesting of the masculine archetype, a stewardship of the earth, a a sense of guided purpose directive. In other words, the male in the traditional dance leads.
Can the male lead, can he be directed The courage of truth that's part of the higher masculine archetype, connection to spirit and mission, a sense of strength, the right use of mind and will. The higher masculine includes good kings and good princes, clear goals, commitment to life, mentorship ability to regulate emotions such that emotions don't rule over the person alignment with higher values.
Now, what I've noticed is that culture often reduces the masculine, just as we've talked about how culture will reduce the feminine to skinny and pretty, and give us this nonsense narrow bandwidth definition of what the feminine is that ends up crushing our girls, ends up crushing our women culture often. And now, now culture is as toxic, can be as toxic to the males as it can, the females. It's not always as obvious, my friends. So I'm raising my hand, I'm going, me too here. Um, the masculine takes a beating. So culture often reduces the masculine to rough unfeeling. You must be battle ready and you must be a money machine. So whereas the women of the world are often trained to be seen as sex objects, the men of the world are often trained to be seen as success objects, sex objects, and success objects, meaning as long as you pump out the money, then we, like you, we train boys and men to be highly domesticated and highly obedient.
And we often want the masculine to be more feminine, which is understandable. But then we get upset when the masculine isn't more masculine. We training boys are meant to be soldiers, to not question, to follow the rules no matter what they are to kill and destroy on order. As a male, you're taught you need to sacrifice your body to the tribe no matter what. Um, We take advantage the collective. We, we've taken advantage of this aspect of the masculine because true it is that there's a natural tendency within the masculine to wanna protect the masculine. There's a natural tendency to be very loyal. There's a natural masculine tendency to just wanna work, to wanna be useful, to wanna do things in that way. The masculine is often like a good dog. Just tell it what to do, go get the bone, the masculine gets the bone, comes back wagging its tail, and then you give it a treat and it's all happy.
Men like to have a task, do it, know that it's well done, get a pat on the head and a big hug and kiss and great, I've done my job. I've been effective. So males want that in a very natural way. Again, they're willing to protect. They have some hunter DNA in them. So the higher masculine wants to protect the world. It wants to protect the kingdom, it wants to protect the loved ones. It wants to protect the feminine, the masculine, the children. You see this in movies, the heroes who are willing to risk it all. By the way, don't just take my word for all this, you notice what the story makers, the biggest story makers on the planet is the movie industry, because everybody watches the movies. And the movies are stories. And the stories are based on archetypes. I've worked in the Hollywood universe, I've met so many of the characters who write the scripts, and you must be extremely well versed to be a script writer in Hollywood. Extremely, very well educated in mythology and an archetypal psychology because everything, every Disney movie that you want is based on that, because that's what's gonna capture your brain. That's what's gonna make you wanna watch. So again, because the masculine is naturally loyal, we'll often train the masculine to not question, we'll train the masculine to be a good producer at work, but actually, how are we making this money? Is it honest? Is it legitimate? Is the way we're doing business harming other people? Is it harming the environment? Is this corporation's profit based on sweatshop labor somewhere? Is it based on fair or unfair practices? Um, are we going into other nations and, and taking resources that don't truly belong to us? So our men are not trained to question, they are trained to fall in line. And consequently, there's a lot of males walking around who have a lot of depression, apathy, and suppressed rage, and they have depression, apathy, and suppressed rage because they're not actually stepping into The truest expression of their archetype because the world doesn't quite like that. If you start sticking out, if you start questioning, um, so many of it seems our great male leaders, they end up getting assassinated, they end up getting killed, our civil rights leaders, they end up getting killed. Civil rights leaders in other countries, they end up getting killed. So there's a very subtle or not so subtle message that says, Hey, if you stand for truth, if you stand for justice, if you stand for fairness, um, you just might not live so long. We see that, we notice that, and it impacts us. By the way, you've heard me say that the feminine and particularly girls are tremendously susceptible to negativity and critique about looks, beauty and body. And it is true. The boys of our universe are also extremely vulnerable. When a boy quickly looks around and sees that it's not safe for him to feel, it's not safe to be vulnerable, that's a big problem. Uh, boys will often shut down, close off their hearts, become more unfit, unfeeling, and become more willing to be attackers and abusers, because that's what happens when the masculine shuts off its heart. It can attack, it can abuse, it can hoard, it can steal, it can look the other way. It can lose track of the truth of divine truth. It plays very, very, very small. It just wants to get mine. I just want to get mine. And all the while that is coming from a wounded place, because the masculine sees that it isn't even safe to be vulnerable. So it has to show up oftentimes as invulnerable. And when we train our men to be overly feminine, they become overly vulnerable and they go in the other direction. So men are being pulled, the masculine is being pulled in some interesting ways these days. So for men, I wanna suggest that reclaiming the masculine means allowing men to have the space to find a sense of purpose, to find a sense of mission, to explore what freedom is. Freedom not, not freedom to do whatever the heck I wanna do. No, but what does freedom mean to authentically express yourself, the freedom to speak the truth, the freedom to be authentic, the freedom to call it as you see it and not be afraid. You're gonna lose your job, lose this, lose that, and you're gonna get cut off the world because you're actually standing for the good many to be able to feel their rage. When the masculine is being Suppressed, what will often happen is anger. And when the masculine is suppressed enough, that anger becomes turbocharged and it becomes rage.
And it'll either show up as an angry rageful man, or it'll show up as its opposite, which is a depressed man. And oftentimes, men who experience depression on the other side of that, if you dig deep enough, there's a bucket full of rage and anger. And it's all justified because men in the masculine mind and the boys, they look around the world from a young age and they see what's going on. They see that people aren't truthful. They see the challenges of the world. They see how the adult world is often shut down and disconnected, and it makes them angry. Men also have to discover their masculine heart. What does it mean for a man to have feelings? What does it mean for a man to be vulnerable? Uh, because as much as we want them to be vulnerable, we then make fun of it when it happens. So we are giving our males a difficult task these days to be a true male, whatever that means, to tap into their higher masculine. It is just simply not so easy.
You know, I've noticed even in my circle of men, men will often get joked upon or ridiculed if they get together with other men, share their feeling, have a men's group, people make fun of that. Um, it's, it, it's, it's, there's a strange way where it's okay to insult the masculine.
This happens so much in our media where our images of the masculine, think of all the cartoon characters. Dads always occur. The Homer Simpson, the dads are dumb.
We're making men out to be dumb, and we ridicule them. Um, and, and that's seeping into our culture. It's a programming that comes from media. So bottom line is, a majority of men I find, haven't really even asked themselves the question, what does it mean for me, me personally, to be a man?
So oftentimes what you're given as a man by culture, the message that you get is, well, what it means to be a man is just to screw a lot of women and have a lot of notches on your belt and make a lot of money. And there it is, there's a man's bandwidth. So promiscuity and wealth is oftentimes what you're told or have some amount of power.
And if you don't have that, well somehow you're not the masculine. So quite a narrow definition. My friends brief example, I'd love to share with you a bit of a story. Uh, client I worked with a number of years ago, he came to see me for weight gain and fatigue. So he's gained about 25, 30 pounds. He's suffering from chronic fatigue, yet he's working full-time. So I'm gonna call him Doug. He's a lawyer. He works for a big law firm, uh, makes good money, hates his job, truly hates his job. He's happy to tell me that. Uh, he lives in a big city and he doesn't like the big city anymore. And it's, it's kind of grading on his nerves. And nor does he like the kind of law he's been practicing, which is corporate law. And at his law firm, he's actually assigned to one particular large client. So he's the main lawyer for this large client from that firm. And he, he's, he's going through the motions. He's going through the motions. He's making good money and going through the motions. Um, Doug is right up front and telling me he's lost touch with his body. He's working long hours. He doesn't exercise anymore. He used to be himself a personal trainer when he was in college. Um, and he's just completely divorced from his body. Um, he feels embarrassed that he's gained weight. He looks at pictures of himself. Uh, you know, he's 41 now. When he looks back to pictures when he was in his twenties, he can't believe the dramatic change of how he's lost the body that he had, the, the life force, the luster. Um, he's shocked at how much his face has changed. Um, so he wants to lose weight, he wants to get fit, and at the same time, he has no motivation. He's chronically fatigued, and he's coming to see me. And a lot of men will say this. He's, he's just trying to get himself motivated. It's shocking how many times I hear this. Um, now, once again, oftentimes when a person say they need motivation, what they really need is inspiration. Because quite frankly, he is depressed. In fact, he's on an antidepressant, and to his admission, it doesn't really do that much. His doctor has switched up the antidepressants several times. Um, they're trying different ones. He hasn't quite hit on the right one. So he's trying to get relief, he's trying to lose weight. He, he's making efforts. He's doing the best he can. So the bottom line is, I'm sitting across from a man who hates his job. He hates his life, he hates his body. He's not happy how he's ended up. Now, I just wanna tell you, my friends, when I'm sitting with a human being who's hating his body, hating his life, and he's not happy, how things have gone for me to just focus on restructuring his body is a waste of time. I know that in my mind. Now, he doesn't know that, but I know that.
So here's some of the conversation that we had. I said, listen, I can't possibly help you get motivated and inspired around your body if you're not inspired about your life. So oftentimes with the masculine, with a man, with a man who emphasizes more than masculine polarity or with a woman who's very much emphasized in their masculine, I'll be extremely direct. Um, you know, I said, if you're not inspired about your life, you're not gonna be inspired about your body. I said, that's hard to do for a man. I told him, you're gonna need to get in touch with a whole different sense of who you are. And that means a purpose. Because the purpose that you're living from what you've told me right now, your purpose is corporate law, and you've made good money in it. You're making a killing, but is killing your soul and is killing your body. Isn't that an interesting choice? And, and trust me, I understand, I've seen this a thousand times and I've been down that road myself. Um, so I asked the question, what would you be doing if you weren't doing this job and you had all the money in the world? If you had all the money in the world, you had billions of dollars, but you wanted to do something with your time, what would you be doing? You know, that's a question I'll often ask a client, a male client, any client really? If you had all the money in the world, money was not an object. You're rich, you're taking care of for the rest of your life. How would you wanna spend your time just to play? It's a playful question. It's an exploratory question. Couldn't answer my question really. And, and, and, but it is a beautiful question. It's a powerful question. I consider a powerful question. The kind of question that, wow, that's worth thinking about, even though I don't have an answer to that. And a powerful question. You don't need to have an answer to it right away, but it it marinates inside of us. Who are you? Who do you, who, who do you wanna be in this world? You know, that led to the discussion of, okay, all things being equal. Where would you wanna live? He's tired of this particular big city. Um, he wants to have a backyard. He's living in an apartment, in an apartment. It's noisy, it's the city. And it was expensive. And it just, it, it just doesn't make sense for him. So we actually started an interesting conversation. He, he, his energy picked up. I always remember, I'm watching my clients watch your clients. Where, where's the energy? Where when does energy get drained in the conversation? When does energy get revealed? Just comes out. As soon as we started talking about exploring to exploring places to live, he, he perked up. Um, okay, let me fast track this. The bottom line was, we worked together for about five months. And my message to him ongoingly, was very clear, you're not going to reclaim your health. You're not gonna reclaim your body until you either transform your experience of the job you're working at now, or quite frankly, leave it. And I said, that's my opinion. That's my belief based on everything you've shared with me in my observation of you. That's what I think. If I'm advocating for you, if I'm being in your court, if I'm being your advocate, if I'm being your best friend, this is what I said to him. So I'm talking to him like I'm his best friend. Why? Because I just said I am. If you were my best friend, here's what I would tell you. So again, with the masculine, you can be direct. 'cause the left brain, the masculine in us, in men and women, loves to get to the freaking point. Now, that doesn't mean with men, you do that in every single moment, but you're alert that that's, that's part of the flow here. So bottom line is, um, he was into the conversation and most of the time that we worked together in that five months, yeah, we talked about health. Yes, I tweaked his diet a little bit, but honestly, in, in, in five months of work, you know, i I would say less than 5% of the conversation was around diet and health. And the rest was me just being his life coach around looking at his job, looking at where he lives, exploring options. What is possible for you here? Um, you know, interesting, one of the things I did, um, he wasn't taking any supplements. I noticed he was very interested because he asked me a few questions. So I gave him some supplements to take, um, for his health, basic stuff, essential fatty acid supplement. I gave him a probiotic. I might have given him a multi herbal supplement. You know, things that wouldn't hurt. Um, and, and why do I even mention that? Because oftentimes taking a supplement, especially when the client wants to, is symbolically an affirmation. I am taking care of myself two or three times per day, morning, afternoon, night. I am remembering, take your supplement, take care of self. So it's a very interesting ritual. It's a very interesting affirmation. Um, I started asking him, who can you, who are the people in your world that you can use as career advisors, career counselors? You know, I don't know how to fully advocate for you in terms of looking around and finding out what else is available to you in terms of your profession and your career, but I know there's people out there who do that. Um, so in the time we worked together from a health perspective, you know, his fatigue improved about 20%, not so bad. And honestly, just because he was more inspired, we didn't, it, it, it, trust me, it wasn't the supplements and it wasn't any dietary tweaks necessarily. His weight didn't change a bit. But in our time that we worked together, or, or actually after we finished, um, he left his job, moved to the suburbs, went into private practice on his own. So he decided to just open up private practice. And within a year after he went into private practice, his weight came off. He got onto a natural, and I wasn't even working with him at this point. He ended up getting on a natural exercise regimen. He did it himself. Um, by the way, just a hint here. I love to stay in touch with former clients. Um, email makes that really easy. You know, I'll follow up with an email three months after we finish working six months. Uh, some clients, I, I just, I'll have an intuition about, I'll shoot a shoot an email a year later, find out how they're doing. Because oftentimes you'll notice I've noticed that the work I did a year ago create changes down the line. Even after you finish working with a client, you plant seeds. I know that the work I did with Doug set him up for success into the future. He needed to make a move. He needed to uproot himself from a career that was killing his soul. And from a career that was crushing his body from a mindset that was harming him. So yes, he had a change of environment and a change of job, but he made that choice. He made the choice to save himself. He took a risk. He ended up making less money for the first few years of his private practice because it takes time to build a private practice. And because he had connections from his previous job, he actually did pretty well for himself. So for the higher masculine, we're always noticing purpose, mission, a reason to be here in this world. If a man doesn't have that, the masculine doesn't have that, he gets depressed. When boys, young men don't have a direction, they don't have something to do, they will either get lethargic or they start to do stupid nonsense. They get into trouble, they make poor choices. They will not attend to the people around them. They will generally not go to a higher bar. They might let their body go, their eating habits go, um, they'll trash themselves. They'll turn to drugs because that's what's available to them. Because there's so much of that in the culture here. You wanna trash your body here, you wanna pull out of society. Um, there's plenty of opportunity to do that. So our task is to observe our male client, particularly talking about men here, listen to their life stage, their story, their history. Listen to their primary complaint, their reason for seeing you. Okay, you're with a male, they have a complaint. What is it? Is it weight? Is it body image? Is it overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, energy, digestion, mood? Are they, here's what I'm asking. Are they in alignment with a sense of mission and purpose? Are they apathetic and shrinking From being here, being present, being in the driver's seat of their own life? Are they feeling victimized by life rather than taking responsibility? Are they taking steps in a good direction? Are they getting good advice?
Are they stepping into some of the higher masculine traits? If not, if so, their soul lesson, their life direction just might be to more consciously and deliberately and thoughtfully begin to embrace the higher masculine. Think about it this way, my friends, you and I, there's some questions we need to be asking. Who am I as a human being in this world? What are my values? How do I choose to express myself in this world? What is important to me? If you are a mother, who am I as a mother? What does mothering mean to me? If you're a father, who am I as a father? What does fathering mean to me? If you are working at a job, if you're a boss, who am I as a boss or a team leader? What does that mean for me? If you are working in any career or any profession, what does it mean for me to be a nurse, to be an accountant? What are my values? What are what is important to me? If you are born as a woman, then it's a great question to ask, who am I as a woman? What does it mean to me, me, me, me? It's personal to be a woman. If you're a man, what does it mean for me to be a man? So you have to come up with those answers yourself. I am suggesting here that when we look to the ancient tried and true traditional archetypes of the masculine of the feminine, they can give us more information of directions that we might want to go in.
I believe that very strongly. And quite frankly, I see the results of the good results of when humans start to explore the higher masculine for men, the higher feminine for females. When we truly start to explore that and notice what we might need to embrace more of, include more of from those timeless archetypes, good things happen. Good things happen for self. Good things happen in our energy. Good things happen in terms of choosing to be here. Good things happen in terms of beginning to unwind our challenging relationship with food, body, and health. Okay, next conversation, my friends. Let's move on to soul lesson number six, embracing a positive spirituality or religion.
So for many people, their soul lesson, one of their soul lessons, by the way, it's not like you just have one soul lesson. We have many soul lessons, and perhaps some of those, or one of those soul lessons might be more important at a particular time or several. So for many people, their soul lesson to focus on is to find a healthy relationship to a higher power, to find a way to relate with a greater wisdom that feels right for them, that feels rejuvenating, and that helps them navigate life in a good way. I mean this, if we have a religion now, it could be a one of the main religions that you follow. And many people are living in their own religion, which is fine, but that religion that they live in is often unexamined and doesn't always serve the person. So if we have a religion, whether it's traditional one or the one we create for ourselves, or a swirl of both, and we have a religion that results in a sense of shame, guilt, aloneness, confusion, doubt, suffering, or isolation, then I would like to say that eating challenges, symptoms, and unwanted behaviors are unpredictable in a big way. Whew, I see this time and time again. I have worked with a lot of people in several different orthodox religions who are heaped upon with a such a sense of shame and guilt and confusion and suffering, and they have some pretty dramatic eating challenges. So I believe that this is a vastly underrated and unexamined aspect of psychology and health and life. So very simply put, it's time to take spirituality and religion off of the no-fly list, off of the don't go there list. And really to be willing to have an honest and open conversation with our clients, with ourselves. Many people, my friends, are living with an experience of toxic religion, meaning the religious system they were brought up in, somehow left them feeling traumatized, angry, or hurt. I am not blaming religion. I am not anti-religion. In fact, I am pro religion. I am pro spirituality, especially if it's the kind of religion and spirituality that uplifts one that makes the world a better place. And that has us connecting with each other rather than beating each other up. Now, in such cases, when we've been exposed to toxic religion, we often throw out the baby with the bath water, and we give up on a belief in a higher power altogether. I see a lot of religious refugees, spiritual refugees, who their religious upbringing simply didn't speak to them, or it spoke to them in a negative way or whatever harms or in insults they've suffered because of that religion or the way their religion was presented to them. Therefore, they have a very strong immunity and allergy to anything religious or spiritual. And again, we end up throwing out the baby with the bath water. Just 'cause you've been bitten by a dog doesn't mean all dogs are bad. And you should never pet a dog and never have a dog, and think all dogs are bad living in a world, my friends, that has no meaning, no purpose. And it's a random creation of impersonal, random evolutionary forces that leaves us alone and helpless and without hope.
I'm sorry, but that's inherently stressful. And you know what stressful means to the human body? You know what stressful means to digestion, assimilation, calorie burning, weight loss, weight loss, resistance,
appetite, regulation, health. Woo. So we have an interesting task in front of us. You know, furthermore, the stress of a random existence or of a toxic experience of religion can leave us
with a large variety of challenges. You've seen them, you heard them. So it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense, perfect sense. I want you to hear this, that we might turn to food and to perfectionism about the body as our substitute religion as a way to medicate a confusing existence that's kind of hopeless. That doesn't give us a good religion. For many people, their religion is food. But, but when I say that, it doesn't, I mean that, that's what's always on the altar. And it's not so much a good altar. They're thinking about food, worrying about food, uh, obsessing about food, weighing themselves, obsessing about weight, obsessing about body, obsessing about doing this religion perfectly. Because if I worship this religion of weighing myself and calorie counting and exercising and doing this and doing that, if I keep worshiping this religion, then, then I'm gonna get enlightened. IE I'm gonna have the perfect health and the perfect body, and everything's going to be okay. So what I am suggesting to you is if you know someone, or if you yourself, have been or are burdened by a constant worry about food, body, and health, if you're living there all the time thinking about the meal you had, the meal you shouldn't have had, what you ate, what you didn't ate, how much, how much you shouldn't eat, of how much you ate, whatever it is,
I am suggesting that that's actually your spiritual system. It's a substitute and it's not such a Good substitute. It's what you're worshiping. It's what you are giving your attention. It's what you're putting on your altar. It's what you are praying to. And it's not a worthy religion. There's a bigger religion than that sometimes. We also simply need to help our client remember and practice their own. Well-accepted religious and spiritual beliefs. So I have clients who clearly have a strong sense of their religion and a strong sense of their spiritual beliefs, but they just don't always practice it. And they don't necessarily practice it in relationship to food and body. So if as part of your religious belief, you believe in forgiveness, but you're constantly attacking self and you're holding yourself hostage for looking like this or weighing that much, or having eaten this or not eaten that, and you're attacking yourself and attacking yourself and attacking yourself, and you're not giving yourself self love, you are going against your own religious belief, you are breaking the 10 commandments that you say you live by. I'll look for that. I'll listen for that with my client.
So once again, if you find yourself in confusion around this, if this is a new topic for you or it's a new topic for your client, I I, I say this to them, Hey, forget about religion for a moment. Forget about how you've been brought up. Forget about what you think you believe. What do you actually believe? What do you actually practice?
You know, religion for a lot of people is not well examined, you know? 'cause people say, well, I'm not a religious person. I'm not really a spiritual person. Um, but then you start to look at actually, well, what are your beliefs? And they have beliefs. Their belief might be, you know, you're born and then you die and, and life is meaningless. Well, that's a belief about the world. Life is meaningless. That is in its own way, a religion. It doesn't necessarily include a higher power, but it's its own version of an operating system to believe by, because a religion is simply a higher perspective on who we are, why we're here, and where we might be going, and what's the purpose of all this. So traditional religions give us a sense of, okay, well here's what's going on in the big picture, and here's where you're going or here's where you might be going. And we might choose to reject that. But then we have a religion, our own inner religion that says, okay, well, you know, you're born, you eat, you die. So is your religious system, is it, is it positive? Is it life affirming? Is it negative and judgmental? Who or what does it exclude or judge? Does your religion include trust and cooperation and oneness and love and healing and transformation? And quite frankly, if it doesn't, we might wanna reexamine it. So I'm gonna let my client know you have 10 commandments in your mind. Maybe it's five, maybe it's four, maybe it's 24, I don't know. But people have an operating system, a philosophy, a religion, a spirituality, a code that they live by. And that's a good thing. You know, sometimes I'll hear very non-religious people say, you know, Hey man, what goes around comes around. That's a religious belief, my friends, I'm calling that a spiritual belief. Right or wrong, whe whether you choose to believe that or not, I'm calling that one of our 10 commandments, if that's what you believe. So in the big picture, what I'm suggesting here is that embracing a positive spirituality is an evolutionary step forward. It's a metabolic step forward. We must, I'm as making an assertion ha here, a postulation. We must get out of the ancient and toxic ways that our religious or spiritual upbringing or our chosen religious and spiritual beliefs are causing us harm our self-harming.
We must examine that and invent something different for ourselves.
You know, my friends, just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. This is one of the challenges of the scientific model. We think that you have to be able to see something and measure something to prove its scientific existence. While oxygen existed long before we discovered it, and there were postulations long before we discovered it, that somehow there was something in the atmosphere that was helping sustain life. You can't see it. We couldn't measure it. Does that mean it doesn't exist? Um, you know, if you found, I don't know, a radio in the middle of the jungle and you lived in the jungle and you never had seen a machine before, and you're looking at this box and you know, if you knew how to work the box, you can turn it on and access all these frequencies. You can hear all different kinds of music conversations, sports, interviews, infomercials, there's a lot of frequencies available. Just because you can't see those frequencies and hear that music doesn't mean it's not there. So, you know, love is not a thing. You can't measure it. And yet we all want it and we all worshiping it, and we're all sad when we don't have it, and we're enthused when we do have it. So essentially, I'm suggesting that
this is a juicy conversation and, and, and I I just love having this conversation with my client. So I'm gonna be asking my Client, Hey, you know, I love to peek behind the curtain with you. What do you believe about the universe? What's your religion? Uh, just tell me about what you truly believe. I wanna know, I'm thinking to myself, have they examined their religious or spiritual beliefs? Is it positive in life? Affirming? Who are they judging? I'm wondering on behalf of my client, if it's time for them to update and explore a new relationship with a higher power. Because if that's what I'm sniffing out, I will be the first person to raise my hand. And if this for you personally, my friend, as a practitioner or as a person, is the kind of conversation that you find interesting, then it's a worthy conversation to have with your client because you already know how to talk about it. You are exploring with your client as if you are a friend. You don't have to teach them your religion. I'm not asking you to do that. In fact, I'm asking you not to do that. But what I'm asking you to do is to help them explore in a way that really gets them looking in the mirror so they can start to examine these questions. Because exploring our religion slash spirituality, um, our belief in how the world works, even if you're an atheist, exploring that and coming up with your own code, your own belief system, being able to articulate that and then test it out is a very powerful act that can change us. And that which changes us as people, as souls, as intellects, as a human being with emotions and a heart. If something is changing me personal power, then it has the ability to change my body. Metabolic power. Personal power, once again, is equal to metabolic power in many ways. My friends, religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs are simply beliefs that we hold strongly and dearly. And guess what? A lot of us have some very strong and dear religious beliefs that sound like I'm fat. I'm no good, I'm ugly. I hate my body. I am not worthy of having a good body. I am not worthy of having love. I am not worthy of whatever my father did this, my mother did that. I hate the world. The world can't be trusted. These people can't be trusted. These men, these women, whatever that is. So those are strongly held beliefs. They become religious in nature, hating oneself becomes religious in nature for so many people,
our beliefs are powerful. We put them on our altar and we repeat them as mantras. You know, in so many different religious and spiritual traditions, you have mantras, you have chance, you have things that you say, um, thy will be done.
And we say these things over. We say the Lord's Prayer over, um, we say certain spiritual words over and over again because we know that on some level they are helping us reach for something higher. They're helping call us forward. That's why we, we repeat them. But when we are constantly repeating, I hate myself, I'm no good, that is literally religion We're making that our God. We're making that our all and our everything. And that's what we are affirming. So once again, I'm suggesting that there are certain clients who this is a key part of the work, and I actually can't help my client get where they want to go with their food body or health challenge. If this is a place where it seems like the action really is, and it's an ongoing conversation, it's, it's about slowly incorporating positive, nourishing, loving, compassionate, kind, funny, interesting, challenging baby steps that ask my client to step into an exploration of what
a higher spiritual or religious relationship with the world, with life could mean for them.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. And actually this connects up several different soul lessons. So this might be helpful. Client comes to see me, she's in her late thirties. Her name is Joy. Uh, she was raised Catholic, and she's coming to see me first and foremost for digestive issues. She has constant bloating. She also wants to lose 15 pounds. She claims that most of that 15 pounds is around her midsection. And quite frankly, just getting an initial kind of look at her, I probably agree that she has some amount of weight to lose around her midsection relative to her shape and size. And I'm looking at her thinking, wow. Um, looks, yeah, you might be carrying extra weight around your midsection. I'm wondering if it's bloating. I'm wondering if it's stress related. So I'm just wondering. So, so weight issues, bloating, digestive issues. Now she's been on a lot of diets. Like so many of my clients, diets don't work for her. She lose a few pounds, gains it right back. She exercises, Exercising actually doesn't move the needle for her. Um, she'll get a little more toned in her arms and legs, but her gut doesn't go away. So she's pretty upset and she wants to know what else can I do? So I get down to business with her, and when I start to realize about joy, is she, as a person in our conversation, she's walking around with a lot of guilt and a lot of shame. Uh, just constant throwaway comments that she makes. Oh, I feel bad about this. I feel bad about that. She feels bad about her former marriage. She feels bad about how she was treated by her recent boyfriend. She feels bad that she's not a better daughter to her parents. She just carries around a lot of guilt. Uh, she feels guilty that this is her body. She can't change it. And just looking at her and listening to her, she feels so weighted down by guilt. And, you know, I pointed this out to her and she kind laughed at me. She said, you know, of course, isn't it obvious I have a lot of guilt? And she joked, she said, you know, I'm Catholic. Um, and and it's interesting because when she shared that, and she kind of smiled, I said, you know, oftentimes when we're talking about guilt and we're talking about a Catholic upbringing, it, it makes me wonder about your relationship with sex and sexuality. Like, how's that been for you? Um, and she was very upfront. She was very conversational. She told me she's had a rough sexual history. Basically, my friend, she was abused when she was younger. She was told that she needed to be a virgin until she got married. By the way, the abuse that happened, um, she couldn't share it with anyone. She never did because she had known other friends of hers who were abused that when they told their parents they got into trouble. So she's kept this a secret. Um, again, she was told she needed to be a virgin until she got married. But unbeknownst to the adults in her world, she started having sex in her late teens. So she kept it from her parents. She was living at home and she was loving it. And she had a ton of shame and guilt around it. Her mother kind of suspected her father didn't, and she was constantly trying to hide, you know, her sexual activity. Interestingly enough, her weight issues and her digestive issues started around the same time when she became sexually active. By the way, my friends, that's why it's always good to ask a client, so when did your problem start? When did your weight issue start? When did your fatigue issue start? When did your digestive issue start? When did your overeating binge eating? When did it start? And then I'm going to get a sense of what else in your life really was happening at that time. I wanna get a snapshot of my client's life at that time, because oftentimes there's a, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes there's a connection between when something started and what was going on. So when I asked her about her current sex life, um, she told me that in all her relationships, all of them, sexuality in some way has been an issue. Her boyfriend, so many of them want more. She doesn't really enjoy sex that much. She says, I want to enjoy it. I should enjoy it, but I don't enjoy it. Um, and in fact, it was a factor in her failed marriage, which she has a ton of guilt around being divorced and having been married. Um, so I'm gonna get right to the core of this, my friends and tell you here and now there's the issue, the issue for her as far as I can identify it. And sometimes we can indeed go back to the past and say, here it is. To me, the issue is, I, I said, you know, because of whatever happened in your life, your programming, the way your religion was presented to you and put into your brain, and this is not your fault. You got a lot of mixed messages. Sex is bad, sexuality is bad, the body's bad, desire is bad. And she admitted that the reason why she was having sex when she was a teenager was it felt good. Um, so imagine you've been brought up that this is bad, but it feels good, but you're told that is bad, but it feels good, but it's bad, but it's good, but it's bad. Gosh, that would cause me digestive upset. Now, if you're listening to this, I want you to hear that this is not an indictment against any religion. It's not an indictment against Catholicism, Christianity, whatever. I'm not saying that I'm, I'm saying that however, these things were presented to her by the people in her world, it wasn't communicated in such a way that it ended up a positive. So messages around sexuality and learning how to develop that in a healthy way, um, I'm not saying people should or shouldn't be virgins up until the time that they're married, honestly, both sound like, like great options. Both can work, both can be worthy. It's just how we go about doing that and what's created around that. So the ladies living in a lot of stress, um, and our digestive Rey system, remember, is fantastically sensitive to stress. And oftentimes we do have stress induced weight gain. And stress induced weight gain will often occur around the midsection, where fat cells are very, very, very sensitive to cortisol. Um, so, and she was likely carrying around bloating once again as well. But it's a chronic low level stress response because of a religion that has her confused, that still lives in her mind. A religion that has her confused around what's right, what's wrong. Her sexuality, pleasure, pain, ouch. It's just a lot of confusion. So my friends, the work with Joy became just revisiting her upbringing, examining her religion, and really articulating, um, okay, here's what you're taught. What do you believe now? What would you like to believe now? What would be healthy for you to believe? Now, journal about your sexual experiences. Write it all down. Let's get a sexual audio autobiography. Let's get a religious autobiography. And we're gonna notice them. We're gonna compare them, we're gonna track them. Um, I gave her assignments. You're gonna hear these things around mirror work. Um, just getting in touch with her body, more about getting professional healing massage to help her feel safe in her body, to experience nonsexual touch, to just invite her in. She was carrying a little bit of trauma around just having a body.
She never really thought in terms of her sexuality developing into something healthy for her. She never really thought in terms of her religion or her spirituality developing in something healthy for her. And she's the kind of person she threw out her religion. She threw out the baby with the bath water because she was so hurt by it. And yet she was lacking in the kind of religious and spiritual center in herself that I think was actually natural for her. And that would help guide her and move her through life. So her job was really to begin to slowly empower herself around her own sexual, her own sexuality, to empower herself around her religion and her religious beliefs. And to begin to really consciously let go of the aspects of her religious upbringing that did not work, but remember to embrace the aspects of her religion that did work and that do work for her. You know, in the time we worked together, she lost about 10 pounds, and that was with minor dietary changes. You know, I, I ended up asking her to get off, you know, wheat and gluten for a couple of weeks. And turns out she was a bit gluten sensitive and that knocked out actually a lot of her bloating. Um, so her, her belly really flattened. She was thrilled about that, you know, and over the time that we worked together. She was slowly embracing a more positive religion, a more positive spirituality. She started to entertain the fact that it's okay to have a body, to be in a body to explore my body. Um, it's okay. And this was, uh, it was a bit of a revelation for her, the way she was brought up in the religion that was presented to her in the way it was presented to her. She had somehow come out with the message that your body is somehow tainted. It's evil and it's bad, therefore, sexuality is bad. And here's what you need to do to be a good girl. And now, here she is, reexamining that. She's updating her belief system and adopting the kind of religion that works for her. So what I'm saying to you, my friends, is that creating a positive spirituality for many, many, many people is an absolute tremendous soul victory. It's a beautiful exploration. It's a beautiful exercise. Let's move on, my friends and look at soul lesson numeral seven. Speaking the truth. I'm calling that for many people a soul lesson, speaking the truth, using your throat chakra, your voice and saying, what is, so
many people are conditioned to not show their truth, self, their real feelings, their honest desires, their actual personality, their authentic self, their conditioned to not sharing the words and the thoughts and the stories that want to come out.
There's so many things that want to come out when we are suppressing words, stories, experiences that want to come out through our voice, through our communication. What happens is we can often resort to eating challenges. We stuff our values faced with food. We could become bulimic. We can end up using an eating challenge as a way to medicate ourselves, as a way to distract ourself from where the real issue is. You know, we often hide our authentic self from the world, our truth from the world in fear of the imagined consequences. And sometimes the consequences we imagine are very real, and sometimes they're not. And sometimes we just don't know. So we're holding back from saying what we really want to say. And that is a stressful state. Holding back from saying what you want to say in many ways is a holding back. If, if you have to take a pee, it's, it's just unnatural. It gets uncomfortable. And at some point it gets weird. And at some point it gets stressful, and you go into stress chemistry. And once again, think of the metabolic consequences of the intense stressor called not being the real me, not speaking what really wants to come out, not being my authentic self, pretending to be someone else. When you pretend to be someone else, and you actually even do a good job at it, all the people in your life who are around you will now be relating to the person you are pretending to be, inevitably when you're pretending to be someone else. And people end up liking that pretend person falling in love with that pretend person, or just being in relationship in any way, shape, or form with that pretend person, you will eventually resent that person and or that person will eventually resent you because it's not an authentic relationship. You're not actually being the person who you are. You've actually seduced someone, perhaps not purposely, but you've actually seduced someone by putting on a mask that's not you. And it might get us a short term benefit, but in the long run, I don't know that it's serves us.
Now, I wanna suggest you something that I consider very important. You've heard me say this before. I wanna remind you again that the truth isn't really the truth unless there's some love in it. I think this is an important concept. A lot of people are walking around, oh, you're fat. Oh, you're an idiot. Oh, you're useless. Oh, I can't believe you did this. Oh, I can't believe you did that. And in a lot of ways, those are throw away words, and they're harmful words, because if there's not love in it, if there's not consciousness in it, then it doesn't further the action for us humans. And it doesn't call us into a higher place. The truth is the truth. If it's calling us into a higher place, now, person you're talking to might be overweight, might have some weight to lose. But once again, you don't look at a child and say, you're fat. I don't love you. You're useless. You got baby fat. You not gonna love you. Until that all changes, we're not gonna go there. Um, yes, a child might be overweight, a lot of overweight children, but guess what? That might be the issue of the parents, what they're feeding the kids. It might be they're not paying attention to the child. It might be that they're letting their child sit in front of nonsense television all day and not helping their child engage with their own body. Um, the child might not have even been taught how to be in their body for whatever reason that that kid isn't getting the upbringing it needs, the love, whatever, who knows? But again, the truth isn't the truth unless there's love in it. There's some light in it, there's some consciousness in it. Truth has a hidden power, my friends. The truth has a fantastic power. When we begin to acknowledge the truth that lives inside of our own skin.
You know, before one can speak the truth, we have to feel the truth inside of ourselves. Truth is oftentimes a feeling.
You know, oftentimes, we're just not speaking the truth in our significant relationship with our partner, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever it is, Hey, here's how I really feel. Here's what I want. Here's what works for me. Here's what pleasures me. Here's what turns me off. Here's what I need more of in this relationship. Here's where I feel like I need more attention. Here's where I'm drowning a bit. Instead, we might hold it in. We might end up attacking our partner or cutting them off or hurting them or cheating on them, or diminishing them or diminishing ourselves because we haven't been able to speak the truth and bring things into the light of day for whatever reason. If we're not able to speak the truth in a relationship, we have a good reason. It's usually fear for on some level.
You know, sometimes we need to say, I'm not getting what I need. I'm not feeling seen, I'm not feeling appreciated. I'm not feeling loved. You know, sometimes the challenge is, we're not speaking truth. To power somebody who's in a position of authority, you often hear the comments speak truth to power. Because when you speak the truth to somebody that has quote unquote more power, who is abusing that power or not using that power in a rightful way, or is using that power in a harmful way, it is our job as a human being, as a soul. It is our responsibility, oftentimes to speak truth to power. And for many of us, when we don't speak truth to the power around us, in our media environment at work, in life,
that often becomes unwanted symptom. We collapse on ourselves. We hold back, we start to fester. We can be apathetic. We can be angry. We can get into a tremendous amount of discomfort. And goodness gracious, ouch. I know I wanna say something, but I can't because I might get fired. I might get this, I might get that. All these horrible things might happen. If I speak the truth in my relationship, she might leave me. He might leave me. But meanwhile, I, I feel terrible in the relationship anyway. So we're living in a place of unhappiness and stagnation. So of course, we would turn to food. For goodness sakes, I'm gonna turn to food as a symbolic substitute, as a way to get the thing the closest approximation of what I really want. Food makes me feel good. Food gives me pleasure. Food gives me a sense of love. So of course, I'm going to turn to that. There's a perfectly good reason. And when that's not serving me, when that's not serving my client, then it's time to look a little bit closer.
Truth, my friends, it pierces darkness. It pierces the unconsciousness. It, it, it pierces, untruth
the truth, can cut through anything. And you've heard it said that the truth sets us free. It's really true. It really, really is true. It does set us free. Think about your own life. Think of a time when you were withholding a truth. Withholding, withholding, withholding. You wanted to say something, you knew it was important to say, but you just couldn't say it because of fear of this, that the other thing, the repercussions, what might happen. You finally said it and it actually turned out okay. And you felt a relief. You took a deep breath. Oh, I finally said that, you know, you're arguing with your partner and you finally said something true that was a deeper truth. And there's a relaxation that happens. That's what I'm talking about. Your body literally relaxes because holding in that truth is like trying not to pee when you have to. Pee is too hard when you finally pee. Excuse this, this gross analogy. But when you finally pee, it feels good. When you finally speak the truth, it feels good because of course, on a soul level, on a heart level, on a human level, we've done the right thing. And life rewards us when we do the right thing with good feelings, oftentimes. But on a more scientific level, what happens is when we speak the truth, a truth that's been withheld, a truth that's been wanting to come out of us, a truth that we have been holding down that we have to put energy to and force into, to suppress. We're in a slight or moderate stress state. And when we finally let go, there's a deep breath, there's a relaxation, there's a parasympathetic nervous system dominance, and it's a game changer. So please notice, please remember that speaking the truth. Energy is lib, energy is liberated, energy is released, and it's a beautiful thing.
We have to be more authentic and honest in our relationships, our loving relationships, our marriage, our intimate relationship with parents, with kids, with family, with loved ones, the people we work with, with anyone anywhere. Oftentimes doesn't mean dumping on people, it doesn't mean attacking them because we can use quote unquote truth. If it's not spoken with love and consciousness, there's a way to beat people over the head with it. So we have to check it out first. We have to run it by our higher wisdom inside of us. So I'm thinking to myself, I'm thinking about my client. You know, where do I, where does my client shut down? Where do they avoid conflict? This is oftentimes a place where people go, they don't want to be in conflict 'cause they don't like conflict. So they won't speak the truth. Where do you play it safe? Where do you let injustice happen? Where do you let unconsciousness happen because you didn't speak up? Where is my client not speaking up? People do this all the time. We're human. There's a good reason for it. We don't speak up because we're afraid of the consequences. There's places where we shut down in relationship. We're afraid of the consequences. Where pla there's places where we shut down at work. We're afraid of the consequences. So I'm listening for my client. I'm wondering where is my client when it comes to her, his relationship with the truth? Okay, let's talk about a story, a case story. I'm gonna call her Kay. She's 28 years old, a graduate student photographer. She speaks five languages. Well traveled young woman, very active, very sincere, very grounded. Comes from a good family. She has strong social ties, really strong sense of self. Five four, she's gained seven pounds. Okay, here's a specific girl, seven pounds around her belly. So this is disturbing for her. Now, by the way, um, if you're listening to some of these case studies and you hear a case study like this about a person who is really agitated about a five pound weight gain, seven pound weight gain around her belly, and you go into judgment around that, I want you to, I want you to call time out for yourself because you might, why? So why would you judge that you're judging that? Because you might think, well, that's nothing people need. Some people need to lose 107 pounds. What right does this person have? We all have all the right in the world to be obsessed and damaged by, and hurt by, and made crazy by one pound, two pounds, 200 pounds. It doesn't matter. You need to expand your mind, expand your heart, and let go of the judgment, my friends, because there's people out there who you might look at and you go, what Right does he what? Right does she have to be obsessed and to be upset that they wanna lose five pounds because that person is hot, beautiful looks perfect, and I just wish I had the body like that. I wouldn't complain if I look like that. Um, you gotta realize that humans come in all different, all different flavors. And you have to understand that there are people who weigh a hundred pounds and 60 pounds who die because they keep getting thinner and thinner. We call that anorexia. And that could lead to death. So all, all I'm saying is, is expand your mind and understand that the, the number almost truly doesn't matter. And that was spec. I had a client, I kid you not, this one blew my mind. 'cause I've only had one, had one client who wanted to lose one pound. I thought, I truly thought in the first two or three minutes that she wasn't serious. I, I, I mean that I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. Somebody hired her to come into my office and just mess with my mind. But truly she wanted to lose one pound. Um, and she was freaked about it. Okay, so Kay wants to lose seven pounds. It's very disturbing for her. She's never had a weight issue. So she starts dieting. And dieting literally does nothing at the same time. She's also developed ongoing digestive discomfort after meals and she's binge eating at night. So this is all new for her outta nowhere.
So let's get to the bottom line for Kay. Weight gain, binge eating and digestive issues started happening about a year ago. So remember we're beginning to look into time. Okay, miss client a year ago. I'm gonna note that in the back of my mind. Let me start to gather more information and more things about time. Okay? Tell me about your life yourself. Work relationships. So she's been living with her boyfriend for about two and a half years. How's that going? What's that like? Oh, okay. Something's going on there. So she confided in me that she's felt done with her boyfriend for a while Now what does that mean, felt done with your boyfriend for a while now? Well, I, I just, I know that this is not a forever relationship for me. And he wants more. And I, I just, I, I love him, but I don't wanna hurt him and I feel trapped. Well, how long have you felt done with him? About a year. Hmm. So I'm doing the math in my mind. Weight gain, binge eating and digestive issues happened, started happening about a year ago. And she has felt done with him for over a year. So she's been living with somebody for over a year. Sweet girl doesn't wanna hurt his feelings, uh, 'cause she loves him, but not a forever love, not a I wanna marry you and happily ever after love. So here she is and she's feeling trapped. So it is perfectly reasonable for me to draw the conclusion that these experiences might be quite connected.
So here's the work I said to her. Okay, okay, okay. Here's what I wanna suggest. And I laid it out for her. I said, in my understanding of the way the world works and the body works, one thing that happens is that oftentimes when we're withholding a truth, oftentimes when we're not being who we really are, oftentimes when we're living inauthentically, that results as a stressor for the body. It is a stress to be someone that you are not. It is a stress to be living with someone who you don't wanna live with anymore. But you haven't said anything and you're living with that person for a year. That's a year long stress. Well, what happens in the stress response is a number of interesting things. Your body, Mrs. Klein, is optimally designed to digest and assimilate in a relaxation response, parasympathetic nervous system, dominance. Notice I'm giving her a scientific mind. Cookies, my friends. So that's when you digest and assimilate your meal best when we're in any degree of stress response. That's a survival response. When, when a lion's chasing you on a full blown stress response, your digestion shuts down. But you and I, when we're in mild or moderate stress will be in some degree of digestive shutdown, which could lead to bloating. It could lead to just gas, it could lead to just a sour stomach, irritability. A sense that I can't digest my meal. A sense that food is sitting in my stomach. Equally important, when we're under stress, that can elevate insulin and cortisol levels and that can signal the body to store weight and store fat and not build muscle on top of that. Oftentimes when we're under stress, the result is we will overeat or we will binge eat. Because putting extra food in the body, believe it or not, is a symbolic way to enact the stress. And then to de-stress. That, stress, stress, I wanna speak the truth. I don't wanna live with this person. I don't wanna live with this person, but I can't say it. I can't say it. Oh, all this tension is building up and I eat a ton of food. I binge. And then at some point, two minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes after that binge body goes, wow, there's a lot of food in the system. I better relax quickly. 'cause we need to digest this meal. And all of a sudden you actually relax and your body starts digesting the meal, and there's a strange level of pleasure and relief.
So the work was for her to speak a painful truth and to begin to mature into authenticity. Um, so what she decided to do was to not break up with him, but to bring up the conversation that she needed more time to explore herself, be with herself. They're not gonna break up just yet, but she needs to live alone. And that was a very difficult, it was a conversation. And long story short, the boyfriend moved out within a few weeks after he moved out, she stopped binge eating.
Interesting. They were still dating her digestive complaints subsided. The less and less time she was spending with him,
she finally broke up. About four months later, after he moved out, they broke up fully. And that's when her weight came off. Not all of it. I think she lost five pounds, whatever, it's all the same. So our extra weight came off when they finally broke up four months later. Isn't that fascinating? This, this was, this was such a, for me, a wonderfully educational client. Like, wow, did the work really work with this client?
So my friends, listen for where your client is holding back in their life. Where are they not being real honest and upfront? What are the secrets they're carrying that might be a burden to them? What are their undelivered communications? What are they afraid to speak? And to whom?
Once again, my friends giving voice to that which we withhold, yet our soul knows. Our heart knows we must speak. That's a powerful soul lesson that can yield some very, very literal metabolic benefits. Let's move on. So lesson number eight. Here we are back again, healing our sexuality. What a great topic
for many people. Our relationship with sexuality is a key place for learning growth and healing. For some people, it's not a big deal for a lot of people, it is. So I'm not saying this is a topic for everyone. I'm saying it's a topic for the people. It's a topic for sexuality is a highly unexplored and unacknowledged domain when it comes to working with our food and body concerns, our fears, past hurts, wounds, confusions, upsets, abuses or unexpressed energy when it comes to sex and sexuality can have a profound impact on our relationship with food, on body image, on weight, on any unwanted behaviors with food and eating. Again, I wanna remind you that in the research, a past history of sexual abuse or sexual trauma correlates oftentimes directly with present day eating disorders, weight gain, digestive disorders, mood disorders, and more. So we've talked about sexuality before. Here we are elevating it and saying that for many people is not just a place to look. That this is so where the action is, that it's a deeper life lesson. It's a soul lesson that as we begin to put our awareness and our attention there in a deeper way, we see that for us, there's a power here. That when we can start to heal this part of our life, when we can start to evolve this part of our life, when we can grow out of whatever pains or sufferings or hurts and metabolize all that, then that is a soul victory. It's something that we came here to do.
So healing our sexuality means
understanding our lifelong journey around sexuality. Just giving it some understanding, exploring it from the past in the present, being curious about it, embracing the places where we feel hurt. Literally these, the places I feel hurt, just owning it, acknowledging it, and, and, and giving a self hug for it. Um, understanding and embracing the places where we feel confused, ashamed, lonely, unexpressed, desirous, owning the places where we might feel locked in and untapped potential where this is a part of ourselves that we wanna explore, but we just don't know how to get there. So sometimes it is a powerful act to simply acknowledge where we are in this part of our life. Acknowledge the challenge, acknowledge the ouchies and love ourselves in that place.
Healing our sexuality means we begin to turn our relationship with our sexuality into something positive. Whatever that means for you or your client, it means our sexuality becomes more embodied and lived rather than a mask or an act that we put on for the world, for people, for men, for women, for our partner, our boyfriend, our girlfriend. So the sexuality becomes something that's actually interesting to us, and it's embodied, it's lived rather than being this performance rather than this thing that you do where you're in your head and you're checked out and you don't know what's going on, but you know this is important and you're supposed to make the other person feel good, but what does that even mean? So yeah, there's a lot of action here.
Unexpressed sexual energy as well as emotional, physical, sexual abuse can live in the body as symptom disease, weight, and unwanted eating challenges. So for many people, food becomes a substitute for sex. Food becomes a substitute for sensuality, food becomes a substitute for physical intimacy. And that can lead to weight gain, that can lead to body image issues over bingeing, emotional eating. And then we think, okay, let me work on my food issue. Let me try to lose this weight. Let me try to stop over eating. Oh my God, I'm eating some. No, the action in this case for some people means, wow, if we're using food as substitute sex, then we need to look in the area of sexuality. It doesn't mean you have to go out and have more sex. It means there's a conversation here that needs to be had. There's an exploration, at least in an internal level, at least in a dialogue. Like, what, what is this for me? What's happening? So for many people, the right body, the perfect body once again, means I'll be more sexually desirable. Being sexually desired is often equated with I'll be loved and wanted and taken care of. But if we don't have such a perfect body, then ah, I have the answer. I can control that through diet and exercise so I can change my life and be a happy person through diet and exercise and my friends, until we decouple food and sex, we will continue to see an epidemic and body hate and dieting and perfectionism and self-rejection and attack, and an lack of self-worth. That's the bottom line. We have to see where we've coupled food and sex and made them weirdly dependent on each other. By the way, I wanna remind you, there are plenty and plenty of people who've never been physically or sexually abused. How, once again, I want to point out that we can still be, quote unquote abused, harmed, hurt, poisoned through media, through culture, through images, through that which we've learned from the world about sexuality. And we can be walking around with toxic beliefs such as, I am not lovable as a sexual being until I look a certain way. I am not lovable as a sexual being unless I do this, that, and the other thing for you, I am not lovable as a sexual being unless my body is shaped exactly like this. And until I'm lovable as a sexual being, I will not be lovable as a human being or as a man or as a woman. So these are all toxic beliefs that we can inherit from life and inherit from the world. And this is what I'm listening for with my client.
So some bigger questions, ultimately to ask self to wonder with your client about your client. Who, who are we as sexual beings? Who am I as a sexual being? What, what's up on planet earth around sex? Why all the nonsense? Why all the craziness? Why all the pain and suffering? Why so much shame and judgment and fear and unconsciousness? Have we, I, my client, explored sexuality and asked good questions. Have we even made it okay to be in curiosity in conversation around this powerful energy and existence?
Oftentimes, not always. Oftentimes the way we relate with sexuality is the way we relate with food. I'll say it again. The way we relate with sexuality, with our sexuality is oftentimes the way we relate with food. So in other words, you show me how a person eats, and I can probably tell you about their relationship with their sexuality, how they do sex and vice versa. Is it an absolute one-to-one mapping? No. But chances are, chances are, if I am tight and controlling around food, I can easily be tight and controlling around sexuality. Chances are, if I'm tight and controlling around getting pleasure from food, you know, there's a good chance that there's tightness and controlling around pleasure from sex and vice versa. If I'm more free with food, if I let food circulate in me, if I nourish myself with it, if I give myself pleasure with it, chances are, uh, there's gonna be more ease in my relationship with sexual pleasure because it's all oftentimes so connected. Sexuality and food are two of the human activities that we do that arguably engage all five senses. All five senses are engaged in both acts. I'll let you figure that one out for yourself. Um, and it's powerful. So those are two very powerful experiences that are hardwired into our physiology.
Both eating and procreating are driven by the most primitive part of our brain.
The most primal part of the human nervous system is driving us to eat and driving us to procreate so we could continue a, our own life, our own life through eating. And b, we can continue the species through procreating. This is an imperative, a biological imperative. Let's even call it a spiritual imperative that is built into the hard wiring of our physiology. Now, I could take my drive to eat and let it run all over me and just mess myself up with a crazy relationship with food. I can let my natural drive to procreate to have sex run all over me, mess up my life and make me make dumb decisions. So the beauty of this is yes, food and sex are serving a base level function. Food keeps me alive, sex continues the species, but also these relationships with food and sexuality can be elevated, wheat can turn. We turn our drive for food into cooking. We turn it into growing and farming and creating food in a very powerful way. We turn it into cuisine. We turn, we can turn it into fine dining, we can turn it into healthy eating. You can turn your drive into procreating, into sexual play or sensual play or just fun, or being aware of your sexual energy and letting it animate you and move through you. It doesn't mean you have to constantly be having sex, it just means that energy is accepted in your own system.
So when sexual energy flows, metabolism tends to glow. That doesn't mean one has to have sex, it means your sexual energy is flowing through you. You're accepting it, you're feeling it, you're owning it, you're acknowledging it. You're walking down the street, you're attracted to someone. You're not judging yourself because you're attracted to someone even though you're married, or even though that person is this, or even though you're that. We have attractions, we have energies that don't make sense. Sometimes they're not logical to us, and it would be easy for us to self judge. And when we start to self judge, we are going into self attack, which is yet again, a form of stress. So it's about learning to let the universe of sexual energy inside of us circulate so we can notice it, identify it, examine it, be curious about it, question it, let it animate us. Have you ever had a time in your life when you weren't necessarily having sex, but your sexual energy inside you was okay? You were making it right, you were free, you didn't have to do it, you didn't have to not do it. And somehow that energy was increasing you, it was giving, giving you more, it was giving you, giving you a glow. That's kind of what I'm trying to say. So we're getting comfortable with this topic in our own lives. It is fine for you to inquire of your client about their sex life and ask curiosity questions or not for many people. Once again, you might be the first person or the only person who's ever really cared to ask and explore here. It is not about fixing your client because you can't, you can't fix your client. You can't know what's right for them. In this realm, you can only be in dialogue. You're here to learn about your client. And when you're in this conversation, step into the best friend archetype. That's the best suggestion I can give you. To be the most comfortable in this realm. Step into your best friend archetype. Once again, consider having your client write their sexual autobiography. And then you ask them, what did you learn from that? What did you experience? What did you notice? What happened? What's juicy for us to talk about? My friends? Let's talk about the last soul lesson number nine, claiming our power.
You know, power is an interesting word. We often want power, but we're afraid of it. Power can have some negative connotations. Power can have positive connotations. We're not always quite sure you've heard lines like absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, that's not good. Uh, you know, that's an old saying. Yet in a lot of ways, we are designed to be powerful. You know, no matter what your body is like, I don't care if it's strong, if it's frail. Some of the most frail human beings have the most unbelievably powerful minds, hearts, or souls. So there's all different kinds of power. My friends, there's electrical power, there's nuclear power, there's personal power. When we talk about the realm of a human being, uh, the various kinds of powers, you know, you can have the power of money, financial power. Some people don't have a lot of money, but they might have the power of influence because of their position in life, because of who they know. Some people literally have the power of influence. Oh, I can connect you with this person and that person. I know friends who don't have a lot of money, but they know everybody and they connect this person with that person and that person with this person, and that's their power. Um, some people have the power of charisma. Some people just naturally have charisma. It's, they might be deficient in so many other places, but wow, are they charismatic? That's their power. Some people have a lot of sexual energy and that's their power. Um, a woman could have the power of being a woman. Um, a man could have the power of being a man. We have the power oftentimes to make the opposite sex or the same sex, so happy just by the attention that we give them. We often have the power to bestow things on people. We, a lot of us have the power of love. We have our heart power. The way we love is very powerful. And people feel that for some people they have very powerful mind. They have a powerful intellect, and that's a power. Um, woo, the list goes on and on. My friends, some people have musical power, artistic power, athletic power. They literally have a, a lot of physical power. And we oftentimes respect and enjoy and like people who are big and have a lot of strength.
You know, many of us move through different kinds of power domains and expressions in our life. At different times in life, you have different powers. So claiming our power means answering the question of who am I? What am I here to express? What voltage is inside me that wants to come out?
You know, many people spend a lifetime trying to fix their unwanted eating concern, trying to make their body look different so they can feel better about themselves. Okay? You, you know that we are trained and conditioned to handle our problems by focusing on our problems. And on one level that makes sense and end and end end. It's extremely helpful to include a different approach to focus on finding and unleashing our strengths, our hopes, our talents, our passions, our potential. I'm using those as uh, metaphors for power. Oftentimes just focusing on claiming our power is the most effective remedy for a long-term food and body challenge.
I wanna suggest that the personal growth universe tends to overlook this simple yet powerful distinction for some people. Really the conversation about my way, my body image, my this issue, my that issue. Okay? It's interesting. You can talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. But you know, the focus for so many clients is about, let's put that aside for a second. We're gonna go on a two month, no diet, diet for a couple of months. We're not gonna focus on changing your body, changing your overeating, changing your binge eating. I get that you want to change that, I want you to change that. I want you to get where you want to go and you haven't been able to. So we're gonna try something different. We're gonna put it aside. And because I've listened to my client, I've gotten to know them, we're going to focus on
you stepping into your power in the realm that you are wanting to, and that life is calling you to step up.
Once again, my friends, so often our work is not to fix a symptom, but to simply acknowledge it, notice it, talk about it, and then promptly discover our power and our gift. And from there, symptoms for many people tend to relax.
Oftentimes, our eating issues are here to act as a stimulus to help us find our gold, our gold meaning our power, our gold meaning our gifts, our power, meaning our gifts,
living a life my friends, where we are not stepping into our passion, power and potential can be inherently stressful. And you think physiologic stress response and all of the long term and short term metabolic disadvantages of that. Conversely, discovering and claiming our gifts, claiming our power, claiming our passions, and living them more, more. You don't have to be this perfect, powerful, impassioned gift giving human being. Step into it a little bit more. A little baby steps. That's what we're talking about when we begin to do that. You know what it's like? Think of any time that you started giving your gift more. You started discovering what you were passionate about more. You started claiming your personal power, you started claiming the truth, your ability to speak, your ability to help people, your ability to whatever it was part of us relaxes. And when you hear that, my friends think physiologic relaxation response with all its attendant, long-term and short-term metabolic benefits. You know, so many people go through life unfulfilled, unexpressed. We're living a survival existence. We go to work, we make money, we come home, we watch tv, we drink, we abuse, we raise the kids. We feel sorry for ourselves. We feel victimized by the world. We try to get up. We, we keep moving, but there's not a sense of hope. There's no future. We might get apathetic, we might not be good enough. And, and it's understandable that that becomes the pattern. That's the pattern of a lot of our clients. They're stuck in a grind. And many times we need to go a little bit inward and discover what is it in me that has value? What power in me, what gift in me, what passion in me wants to come out?
So it's not about obsessing, obsessing, obsessing about my problem, it's not about attacking my problem all the time. Sometimes we need to yeah, address the problem, head on, talk about the problem, talk about the overriding talk about the binge eating. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm not denying that. And oftentimes what we need to do is defocus on the very thing that we've been focusing forever on. Let's defocus on this for a while. Why? Just to do something different, just to see if we can possibly get a different result of better result. And what I'm suggesting here is for many people, our soul lesson is learning how to step into our potential in this life
and stop playing small in the way we've played small. Now, you know, that might not be the best term because, and then a lot of people think, oh, I gotta play big now I gotta write a bestseller and I have to reach millions of people. No, that, that's not playing big. Oftentimes, that's playing not so bright. Um, playing big means you play bigger than how you've been showing up in yourself. It doesn't mean the ego hit of I need to reach millions of people, I need to accomplish this. I need to make X amount of money and then I will claim my power. No, it's an inner game and it's oftentimes baby steps. And it doesn't have to mean you make this big splash in the world whatsoever. In fact, 99% chance is it's not about you making some big splash in the world. What it means is you learning about your gifts, you learning about your passions, you asking the question, what is it in me that wants to come out in this life? What's the gift? What's the energy? What's the special parts of me? What are my powers? What do I want to cultivate?
Ultimately, my friends, I don't care that much. What a human being eats, you know, I care in so far that I think, you know, healthy, good, natural, organic, real conscientiously prepared food and grown food, great for the planet, absolutely. But at the end of the B day, what a person eats, I don't wanna walk around changing people's diets. Um, what I find most interesting is what somebody's greatest potential. What's somebody's greatest self-expression? Who is the magnificent you that is meant to flower and explode in this life? Who, who do you wanna grow into? How is life wanting you to flower? That's what I'm interested in. And darn, if healthy eating is gonna help get us there, then great. Then let's do healthy eating. If great exercise gonna help get us there, great, let's do healthy exercise. Um, those have a purpose. But if you're just eating just to eat, so you could just say, I'm healthy. So you could just say, oh, I've lost this weight. Look, I'm fit, I'm healthy. Great. Who cares? If you're super fit and super healthy, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Like what are you doing with all that health? What are you doing with all that fitness? Like, what are you doing? How, okay, it's making you feel good, fine, but if it's that's your only goal, health and fitness, health and fitness, health and fitness, that's your only goal. I'm, I'm suggesting to you that might be a small goal because then at the end of the day, yes, you're healthy and fit, but how is it impacting you? Does it make you a better person? Does it give you more energy? And if it does give you more energy, how are you using that energy? Are you using that energy in a good way? Are you using that energy to be a better person in this world? Are you using that energy to serve other others? Are you using that energy to create otherwise? There's a lot of people walking around and they're healthy and they've worked hard to be healthy and have the perfect body. And okay, now what? Now what? Like, do something make the world a better place. Make the people around you better uplift them. Like take that healthy energy, good for you, that you're healthy, good for you, that you're fit. What are you gonna do with that energy? So even before you get super healthy and super fit, what do you do with the energy you have now? How do you wanna best express it? Once again, the more we claim our inherent gifts and powers, the more we are in body. Personal power equals metabolic power, my friends. So claiming our power. Can you see the contents? Can you notice the contents of your client's? Acorn inside that acorn is the blueprint of your client to be a mighty oak. Let's open up to acorn. Can you focus on your client's highest a aspirations as well as their diet, their exercise, their eating habits, their eating patterns. Can you point your client away from their weaknesses? Okay, we know your weaknesses, we've heard about 'em and I hope them focus for a little bit on their strengths or their destin strengths. Where is life calling my client? How is life asking my client to step into his, to step into her power? We all have a different expression of what our power is.
We all have a different expression of what our gifts are. Somebody's power might be just being an amazing mother in this life, an amazing father in this life, a great friend in this life. Somebody's power might be that they just walk through this world very lightly and they don't cause harm. And they go about their business and they do their work in a good way and they treat others in a good way that could be somebody's greatest gifts. And quite frankly, that's pretty powerful. So again, I want you to take away this sense of, oh, I have to accomplish something big in the eyes of the world as meaning claiming our power, our power. Again, it could be just the power of love. It could be the power of living a simple good life and treating other humans in a good way.
So I'm suggesting that yes, your client's coming to see you for their eating challenge, their food and body challenge. And one of the soul lessons you're listening to in the back of your mind is, where is this person's gold? Where is this person's gift? What is their power? What are they here to express? So yes, you're going to be looking at their eating. Yes, you're going to be focusing on that, but we're also looking deeper. We're also learning how to use our x-ray eyes to peer into our client's acorn and to help them discover what they are here to grow into.
Your job is not to fix your clients. We're here to lift each other up. That's a big part of our job. We're here to lift each other up. By lifting your client up, you lift you up by helping your client heal and grow you help you heal and grow by loving your client more, you love you more. By seeing your client's highest potential, you start to step into your own highest potential. So my friends, this concludes our conversation about soul lessons. I hope this was helpful. I'm gonna quote Carl Young again. He had an interesting line. He's talking about free will. Do humans have free will? Do we not have free will? Are things destined for us? Are they not destined for us? So he said free will is choosing the choice that's been chosen for you. I'll say that again. Free will Is oftentimes choosing the choice that's been chosen for you. So sometimes yes, there is a destiny within us, but we have to choose that destiny. And when we begin to choose that destiny, we step into a freedom, we step into a power. So I hope you can see that this conversation around soul lessons, we're taking these life domains and we're looking at how they can have a big meaning for us throughout the course of a lifetime. That on our deathbed, when we can say that, yes, I've stepped into my potential, I claim my power, that that's a soul victory. That on our deathbed, if we can say yes, I chose to be here and I live my life as fully as I possibly could. And, and I was present. I was here, I was aware I didn't go to sleep. I did the best I could to participate in life and just do what was in front of me and do what I was supposed to do. That's a soul victory.
Claiming our power as a man or a woman who we are as a man or woman. That's a soul victory, my friend. Thank you once again for your time and your attention. Uh, this is the completion of all of our foundational concepts and principles. And soon we're gonna be diving into the actual challenges that human beings face, uh, around food and body and health. And start to detail out how we are going to work with clients in very specific ways. Good for you for hanging in there in this process, in this part of the journey. I really appreciate you. I appreciate the opportunity to be a guide, a mentor, a teacher for you on this journey. Um, it's a very humbling experience for me. So grateful for it. Thanks my friends. All lots more to come.

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