MODULE 2

WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE

Section 6

Learn the cutting edge distinctions around this hard-to-work-in challenge that will enable you to have a clear path with clients.

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PART 1

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Greetings, as always, friends, this is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in a conversation about body image, and what a great topic. Let's just pause for a moment before we dive in. And I wanna say that this is a challenging topic, but at the same time, it's a beautiful topic, and at the same time, it's a confusing one, and it's, and at the same time, it's a juicy one. And at the same time, it's a conversation that truly deserves our attention. In fact, it's calling for our attention. And I think this is a conversation that's calling for our attention in a more evolved, deeper conscious, deliberate aware way. So I just want you to know, of course, that's my intention for everything that we're talking about in this training. I'm always wanting to do my absolute best to come from the high road. I'm wanting to do my absolute best to shine the light of awareness and consciousness and intelligence on topics that don't always get that. So if you are like a lot of people on planet Earth, chances are now or at some point in your life or at various points in your life, you've been on a journey with this thing called body image. This way we see our body this way, we conceive of our body, and that we attach thoughts and judgements and emotions to, and as you and I know it, challenging body image can be very, very difficult. So the good news is we have a lot of tools and awarenesses to address this subject in a fresh way, and that's what I want to do. So here's my observation. You tell me if you see a different, we live in a time when our experience of the body is shockingly problematic. I just want to state that it might be obvious to you, but from a collective level, our experience of the body, when you're born into planet Earth and you were raised from childhood to teenagehood, to young adulthood, to a personhood, ha, it's not so easy being in relationship with the body in a loving, inspired way. Okay? So that's been my observation for a heck of a long time. Now, you can start to poke around and find some statistics and what you're going to hear in various polls. Nine outta 10 women will say that they dislike or extremely dislike their own body. 81% of 10-year-old girls are experiencing a fear of being fat. Makes me wanna scream. Nearly 50% of girls age three to six are already concerned about their weight. Three to six years old. Where the heck did they get that? 90% of girls age, 15 to 17 want to change their physical appearance. 25% of teenage boys report being teased about their weight. And this is just my way of giving some numbers to we are experiencing an epidemic of body hate. Come on people. Let's just call it like it is. Let's say it like it is. We're experiencing an epidemic of body hate. I'm, I'm, I'm smiling as I'm saying that. It's, it's just because it's a simple truth that honestly should be headline news every day. It should be on CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times. But instead, what you're gonna see in there about this topic is you're gonna see all the advertisements for all the things that you can buy to put a tiny little bandaid on the booboo called body hate.
Body hate is a big business
on top of that body hate when there's an epidemic of it amongst humans. It keeps us small. And by small, I mean small in spirit. By small, I mean small in consciousness. By small, I mean small in character. By small, I mean in a state of disempowerment where we're not owning the truth of who we are, and we're not stepping into our potential, that is literally right there just waiting to happen. Because body hate, once that lands in us, is a nasty disease. And it takes over and it's hard to deal with.
So by the way, in this conversation right now, I'm gonna be just, hmm, how can I say? Um, laying some of the foundation, just describing the terrain. So in this particular conversation, we're not gonna be fixing things, so to speak. We're not gonna be technique. We're not gonna be learning how to change body image that's gonna follow. Right now we're just kind of describing the turf.
You know, our collective challenge with a problematic body image is, is coupled with it's, uh, synonymous with
it comes together with a tremendous amount of specific weight hate, body shaming, the feeling of feeling shame about the body and emotional and verbal bullying that tends to come from the outside if you really pay attention to it. There's oftentimes, there's a not so subtle bullying IE when somebody is directly harming you with their words and their thoughts around how a person's body looks. Um, but the emotional and verbal bullying is coming from everywhere, and it's subtle oftentimes. So we live in a time when there's a powerful and often silent and invisible force field of weight shaming. Now, talk about an unfreaking scientific concept. And I have a scientific mind. What's the unscientific concept? And I put unscientific in quotes. I just said that we live in a time when there's a powerful and often silent and invisible force field of weight shaming. Okay? I can't show you that force field. I can't prove it to you through scientific experimentation and instrumentation. It cannot be measured. But just because you cannot hold something in your hand and see it with your eyes doesn't mean it's not there like oxygen. Yeah, for the longest time we couldn't see it. Notice it, touch it, feel it, but it's there. Love.
You can't quantify it. You can't put it in a test tube. We all know it exists. So I just want to be real clear with you that we are living in a silent and invisible force, field of body hate and weight shaming, and we're surrounded by it, always. The question is, are we immune to it? Are we susceptible to it? To what degree? In some places that invisible force field is far, far stronger. You live in certain places in the world, you live in certain cities, you work in a certain work environment, you're in a certain industry, you hang out with certain people. Sometimes that force field is so strong of invisible hate.
You know, I, I think simply, I've had a lot of clients over the years who work in the clothing and fashion industry and talk about the invisible force field of weight shaming. Um, I have, I, I have to tell you, some of my most tortured clients that I've had over the years work in the fashion industry in, in a weird way. That's the belly of the beast. Nobody has to say anything because everybody knows what everybody is thinking about everybody.
Now, when this force field is not silent and invisible, meaning when it starts to bark and speak and rear itself, it can be alarming in its darkness and in its hurtfulness.
You know, we try to sweep it under the rug. We're constantly being exposed to it. You see it everywhere. And I simply wanna raise my hand and say, what you already know, or what you've already probably observed, is that this silent force field, particularly when it's not silent, it's dark and it's hurtful. Uh, it's, how else can I say it? It's not good for the human condition doesn't serve anyone. Now, people, humans, me and you, especially children and young ones, and especially the women of the world, and especially all the humans who have a strong, smart, aware feminine, can feel these invisibles and are often flooded by it. And such hate and shaming is impossible for a young mind to successfully process and mount an immune response against
the young mind. Young people, little people growing humans, children, toddlers, infants, children, kids in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, into their teens. The young mind will invariably take these outside messages and interject them. Interject them means we take things, we hear from the outside and we own them. We assume the message,
we put it on in a little tape recorder inside the mind, and we play it back as if we're saying it to ourselves. So it's no different than if somebody told you when you were young, you're no good, you're no good, you're no good. And at some point, the young mind takes that and says, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'm no good. Long after the adult or the other human who said that to them disappears off the face of the planet.
Somebody can tell somebody one time when they're young, you're not lovable, you're not okay. You're fat. You're this, you're that. One time is enough for many humans, for us to take that curse, to take those words, to take that mantra, interject it, meaning eat it, take it inside our body, put it inside our brain, and own that message such that we are now repeating it to ourself. Talk about a curse. Talk about the old fairy tales. You think putting a curse on someone is, uh, it's um, it's not so metaphoric in a strange way. Words and intentions behind words have power. Words can bless. We can give people blessings. You look great today. You look beautiful. I love you. You are wonderful. You're amazing. I really care about you. I'm so glad to see you today. You're a special person. Those are blessings. There's millions of ways to bless a human, and there's millions of ways to curse them. Each are equally effective.
Sometimes it seems like the curses have this weird kind of extra oomph and power to them.
So again, I wanna say, and here's the challenge, because we're stepping into the realm of non-science, and we're talking about the invisibles. And when I say the invisibles, it's that which we can feel, but not necessarily see what we, the collective we doesn't always acknowledge and own is that many, many, many humans in particularly young humans, IE children in particular, the feminine mind, and in particular, anyone who's sensitive, is gonna be picking up on these invisibles in a big way.
They're gonna be feeling it, sensing it, and constantly being bathed by the negative messages coming from the world. That's overwhelming. If you've ever been overwhelmed by that or if you know someone who's been overwhelmed by that,
you and others, we have every right to feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed does not truly describe the magnitude of it.
It destroys us in many ways, or it can, or it takes us over in many ways. Or it can, and it does.
So I just wanna own that there's a power in the invisible force field of attack against the human body. And the net result are individuals who are harmed and wounded by such messages.
Now there's gonna be good news along the way. My friends, you know what I wanna say is, and I've really looked at this over the years, and for those of you who've worked in this realm, you know this, a negative body image is not something we heal overnight, quite honestly. You can heal more quickly for some people. Some, some, some. You can more easily heal digestive issues. You can more easily heal fatigue. You can more easily heal someone's brain fog. Nutritional shifts, a negative body image. It takes time. It's a journey. This is so important. It's so important. It's so important. Why is this important? Because for you, the practitioner, for you, the human being, you have to know that I am embarking on a journey to heal body image. If you're doing that with your client, you're going on a journey. What does a journey mean? You're, you're packing the bags, you're seeing what you're taking. You're looking at everything. You're seeing how you're carrying it.
You close up the luggage, you walk outside, you start your travels, it's raining, it's cold, it's sunny, it's hot. And we move and we take steps and it takes time. We're going on a trip. You don't just push a button and get to your destination in life. So body image is something that we go on a journey in order to expand it, heal it, transform it. Now, what I wanna say to you is that in my experience, in my opinion, it takes a conscious awareness on the part of the client that this is actually something worth working on and transforming. Otherwise, they will be underwater.
I wanna say that again. It takes conscious awareness on the part of the client that this my challenging body image where I'm self attacking and self-hating, and I don't love myself, and I wake up every freaking single day and look in the mirror and have something bad to say.
Your client has to get at some point that this is something worth working on and transforming. In other words, it takes effort, really does.
It takes effort on the part of the world to flood you with all the messages from a million different angles.
It takes effort on the part of the individual to unwind that, to unravel it, to pull all the little splinters out, and to start to find self-love and self-empowerment.
A person who has a negative body image, a difficult body image, a person who's carrying around self-hate, self shame, self-attack around the body. They have been exposed to millions upon millions of messages reaffirming body hate. It's kind of like getting a little paper cut every day.
The world paper cuts us to death around body image. We're getting all these little cuts, all these little messages that constantly reinforce, you're not good enough, you're not good enough, you don't look like this. You need to look like that. So ultimately, healing a
body image that is calling for healing and transformation takes baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, my friends. And that's where you and I as practitioners, you and I as people, really need to get our priorities in order. What do I mean by that? I mean that we live in a world of quick fixes. We live in a world where everybody, it seems wants to win the lottery. Everybody wants the windfall. Everybody wants the one thing, the one pill, the one magic bullet, the one whatever. That's gonna do it all for me. We are being conditioned to look for the quick fix. A quick fix is sexy, and it's freaking easy to sell and make money off of
a poor body image is healed by taking baby steps no other way. You find another way. If you find the pill, if you find the supplement, if you find the button to push that heals somebody's body image overnight, I wanna know about it. You're gonna be rich and don't waste your time. It takes baby steps and baby steps is okay because you took baby steps at one point when you're a baby. And look where you are now. There was a point where you are a fumbling mess on the floor and you couldn't walk and you took baby steps, and now walking ain't an issue.
Baby steps are very powerful in this regard, and we disregard them, particularly in the professional realm. So I'm just letting you know right up front, you have to put on your seatbelt, relax, and understand that any client who has a challenging body image is gonna take time. It's a journey. And it's always about baby steps.
And chances are they're not gonna hit the lottery with you. They're not gonna heal it all with you. And they might because it's ongoing.
We get better and better and better the more we put in the work and the time and the effort and the consciousness.
Simple definition. Ah, there's so many definitions. My definition, body image is how you imagine your body, body image. Image, imagine. Body image is how you particularly imagine your body is how anyone imagines their body. I can imagine my body's the hottest body in the world. That's my body image. I could imagine my body is the worst, ugliest, nastiest body that nobody's gonna like ever. That's how I'm imagining my body. Okay? That's my body image.
How we imagine changes, imagination. It's interesting, many years ago, the Disney company came up with a, with a word imagineering. They liked imagineering so much that they named a whole department at the Disney company after it and put all their brightest people in that department. Meaning you're engineering how the imagination works in such a way that you really capture the imagination.
The entertainment industry wants to capture your imagination. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna learn to capture our own imagination. You're gonna help your client recapture, reclaim their imagination so they have the right and the ability and the choice and the possibility. Just the possibility of imagining their body in a different way. It's all in the mind, my friends.
There's a battle going on for the human mind and what people wanted to believe. When you're being advertised at by industry day and night, you're constantly being advertised at, they're, they're trying to grab your mind, they're trying to grab your attention, they're trying to convince you to buy something. And that's, that's okay. Okay, that's fine.
And the question is, are the people who are trying to grab your mind, are they giving you something good in return that's truly valuable to you? So if you're gonna offer someone your imagination, if you're gonna buy something, is this truly taking me in the direction of where I want to go?
So of course, how we imagine the body is very subjective.
However, that subjective imagining can create some very concrete perceptions and experiences. Meaning, if I imagine my body to be completely undesirable and unlovable, then all of a sudden I'm work walking around the planet going, I'm undesirable and unlovable and I will never have intimacy, love and connection.
A lot of people walking around with that belief.
And that becomes life. That actually becomes the concrete operating system of our day.
We imagine the body to be a certain way, to have a certain value, and then we go about believing and improving it.
In other words, we believe what we imagine,
We believe what we imagine. If I imagine my body to be lovable, then I believe that
I will live a life of feeling the body's lovable. I will love my body. Others will love it. Why? Because that's what I'm putting out. If somebody was unlovable towards my body, I noticed that right away. That wouldn't feel good. That would be like eating food that just didn't sit well in my body.
If I imagine my body to be something that is,
oh, untouchable, un wantable, it's so easy to create that experience of life and to set up my whole day, my week, my month, my year, my existence, that that's my fate.
But then again, you can diet the body and exercise it and then you'll be lovable. And all of a sudden we go down that awful rabbit hole because we believe the body's unlovable. So a lot of us wanna do something about that. Who wants to walk through life feeling unlovable, unwanted, and not good enough. So we try to get out of that conundrum, but our efforts to get out of that conundrum only drop us further into the conundrum. Let just diet and exercise. So then we diet and exercise and the body changes. But meanwhile, what still lives inside of us is I'm unlovable. Meanwhile, 98, 90 9% of all humans who lose weight on a weight loss diet are gaining it back within a year to two years. Something's up there people.
Imagination is beautiful. We imagine the world, the world you see before you houses, cars, stores, art, music, literature, architecture. It all exists because of the human imagination is a beautiful thing. And here we are when it comes to body image, the human imagination can become a little problematic. And a problematic body image is where our ideal, this is my definitions, our ideal of what we want the body to be leaves us in suffering. And disembodiment, let me say that again. I'm saying a problematic body image. A negative body image is where our ideal, our idea of what we want the body to be, leaves us in suffering. And disembodiment,
soon as you want the body to be something that it's not, and you want it to be something that it's not from a place of, I won't be good enough or lovable. If it's not like this, we automatically, to some degree disembodied, we automatically check out of the body. Nobody wants to inhabit a body that is unlovable. Who the hell wants to do that? Why would you want to inhabit a body that is unlovable? Why would you wanna live in, I don't know, a place that everybody hates, including you. It's unlivable.
Nobody wants to inhabit a body that's unlovable. So as soon as we, as soon as a human declares
to itself, this body is unlovable. The first natural step is to get the hell out. It's only logical and sensible. It's a smart thing to do. If a situation is untenable, if a location is untenable, if a state of being is untenable, it doesn't, it's not good. It's not working for me, I don't like it is painful, then extract yourself, get out.
Whether it's a situation in a, in a, a social scene where you don't wanna be there, it's not safe, it's not comfortable, an environment, you're not safe, you're not comfortable. Well, as soon as you label the body as bad, unlovable, uninhabitable, we start to escape it. We start to disembody. And from there we go down a nasty rabbit hole. Because from there, everything we do is ineffective. And I mean everything.
We're trying to get outta the body. And we do leave the body, we abandon it energetically. We abandon it emotionally. We're not going to sense it, feel it. Notice it when we abandon the body energetically or emotionally. And again, we're stepping into the quote unquote unscientific realms. But I'm reporting to you what I've noticed. I'm reporting to you what others have noticed. I'm stepping out onto what I consider a more leading edge understanding, a more fresh understanding
that when we emotionally, personally, energetically shame our own body, curse our own body, we will naturally want to leave it. And part of us does. And when we do, there's a something that happens.
It's literally if there's a soul, it's not fully inhabiting the body. If there's an energy body, it's not fully inhabiting the body. We're not fully in it and therefore the body will not function as well as it could. Had we been fully occupying it and said, okay, this is where I wanna be. This is where I wanna live.
In order to shapeshift the body, you have to be in it.
In order to really be in the body, you have to wanna be in the body. In order to really be in the body, you have to start to love it. 'cause the reason why we jumped out of it to begin with is because we hated it. And we said, this body is no good.
I hope that's all making sense to you. Healthy body image. What's the definition there? Well, healthy body image is where you and I accept and rejoice in the body as it is. And as it looks, that's a healthy body image where you wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror and you go, okay, okay, where we accept and rejoice in the body as it is and as it looks where we allow ourselves to love our body.
That's it. I'm open to other definitions. There's probably lots more back to a negative body image, an unwanted body image, an unfortunate body image. Ah, you know, where does it come from? Negative body image. Where does that imagination come from? My friends? It is invariably inherited negative body image. I don't love my body. This body's awful. It needs to look different. Where does that come from? You get it from the culture of the world. That means media, that means movies, that means television. That means every image you see, that means everything on the internet. Perhaps we get it from karma. You know, it's something we come in with. I don't know. Clearly a negative body image is also influenced oftentimes by family, by peers, by religion,
culture, media, movies, television, images, internet, family, peers, religion. You're swimming in it.
And again, we cannot and must not underestimate the power of distorted and misleading messages that bombard us from these domains. We get used to it. Who wants to walk around fighting that nonsense all day? At some point you stop noticing it, and your subconscious mind kind of takes over.
Check this one out. 80% of women polled report that images in the media of women make them feel insecure. Hmm. You think the media knows that
in a way, my friends, it's literally impossible to come out unscathed in this world because of the onslaught and sheer volume of these messages. We are programmed in this toxic way from a very young age. That's another way of saying if you or anyone you know as a challenging body image ain't your fault.
It's predictable in this world these days. Uh, and I, and I mean that it's literally predictable. If it doesn't happen, that's a wow.
When I meet a young person that hasn't been hurt or wounded by the body messages of the world, particularly a young woman, I'm amazed.
I scan the environment for them. I look, I listen.
I don't meet many of them. So it's not any one individual's fault. It's not your family's fault that we have a distorted body image. And that's important, you know, because a lot of people can clearly trace their unwanted body image to, my mother was dieting me from a young age. She took me to Weight Watchers. She was telling me I was fat. She was always on a diet. She hated her body. My dad always weighed me and told me I was fat. So I hear these stories
and people, humans, we can be very wounded by that. Very hurt by that. My friends, I met some smart people. I've worked with therapists in their forties, fifties, and sixties as my clients who are battling body image into their forties, fifties, and sixties from the hurt and the wound and the harm that they experienced from the words and the behaviors of their parents or a parent.
What I wanna say to you is it's never your family's fault because where did your mother and father inherit that from? Where did they get that?
All I'm saying is we need to have a bigger picture of things.
Your parents inherited their nonsense from somewhere. They're not immune to it. Hardly any of us are.
You know, you've heard me say this, I wanna remind you again. Humans are highly, highly susceptible to shaming messages about the body. We just are,
you know, I don't care what you think about the Bible necessarily, but you look at the story of creation in Judeo-Christian heritage in much of the western world creation story is Adam and Eve. And one of the essences of that story, our creation myth, how the whole freaking world began inside that story is a deep message about shame, about the body. Adam and Eve are hanging around the garden. Everything's cool. Everybody loves each other. The wild animals are hanging out. Everybody's tame. It's a beautiful garden of eaten like existence. And then they break the food rule, they eat the apple. A woman bites it first. She's tempted, tempts the man. And as soon as they do that, and the big guy upstairs discovers it, they immediately feel shame about their body. And previously they were naked and loving it, and now they're naked and ashamed. Interesting. Fascinating. To me.
What I wanna say is, I think one of the ways the story can teach us is that the feminine, and you observe this, you tell me if you see differently, the F part, particularly the feminine IE I'm saying women, and I'm saying men with a strong aspect of feminine. The feminine is particularly vulnerable to critique, criticism, comparison, and corrupt messages about the body.
That's a politically incorrect statement. We ain't all the same
females and males with a well aspected feminine are particularly vulnerable to critique, criticism, comparison, and corrupt messages about the body.
I'm just raising my hand and stating the obvious.
We the collective, we don't want to come out and say that number one, because it exposes the whole show. It exposes so much of what's going on. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of some of the richest humans on earth, which are the corporations, which are the ones that are selling you all
of the products that are supposed to make us look more beautiful and their aiming their messages At women. The beauty industry is about the women. The make yourself prettier industry is largely about the women. The anti-aging industry is largely about the women, the wipe away, the wrinkles. Advertising is all about the women
and those advertisers. The marketers are some of the greatest psychologists on the planet. They know how to manipulate the mind, the feminine mind, the masculine mind. They know the messages they have to give you to hook you just saying.
So this might sound like a, what's the word? It might sound like the kind of statement that should leave us hopeless, but it's not at all. It's actually the opposite. Let me say the statement. A negative body image is virtually impossible to overcome by any one single individual. So you show me any one single individual who has a challenging body image, a negative body image, and I will show you somebody who has an impossible task. Overcoming a negative body image is virtually impossible for any one single individual. Another way of saying that is that this toxic virus, this toxic meme that floats around the idea sphere, that floats around the energy sphere, this toxic virus, is simply too powerful.
The good news is that's why people need help. That's why we need a collective immune response. That's why we do this work. That's why we're talking about it. Because you can't overcome it with any single individual, virtually impossible. However, once you get two individuals together talking about it, or 10 or a thousand, all of a sudden you're mounting a collective immune response. People are joining together. They're seeing, oh, wait a second, I'm not crazy. Oh, wait a second, I need help here. We need each other in this realm. That's why we're doing this work. Technically speaking, there are on, there are an unlimited amount of people, numerous amount of people who will need your help in this realm as a professional. A, a, a. And that's simply the state of the world. You've heard me say that the effects of a negative body image can last an entire lifetime. People will go to the grave, still hating their body.
To me, the proper response to this condition is compassion and understanding with a healthy dose of outrage. That's for me personally. I have a lot of compassion for it. I have a lot of understanding for it because I've looked at it, I've studied it, I've broken it down. I've gone through my own journey with this. And as I watch and look and listen and see, I'm outraged. So for me personally, this is how I channel my outrage. I look to harness that energy and use it for good.
I look to harness that energy and do my best to channel it into leaving the world a better place. That's my response to all this.
So we are part of a collective immune response. Humans getting together and saying, no, no, I'm not going to take in these messages. These are harmful. And in fact, I have taken them in to a certain degree, to a great degree, and I'm going to start extracting them, changing them, shifting them, replacing them with better messages, taking baby steps to help myself
and your client's gonna go out into the world and they're gonna be exposed to all the people, all the conversations, all the images. And then when they're with you, they get to be in a conversation that matters. They get to be with someone who understands it, who gets it, and who is being with them in a way to support them, guide them, mentor them, befriend them, stand by their side in creating a collective immune response. So how many times, for the longest time, I never had an answer to this. For the longest time, I would have clients tell me the beginning of my practice, when we'd start talking about body image. People, particularly women, would say, it's impossible. It's impossible to have a healthy body image because the message, the crazy messages are everywhere. It's, it's just impossible.
I never quite knew what to say to that. 'cause it's kind of true until I figured out they're right. It is impossible, which is why we need a collective response. It's impossible for one human. Sometimes we just need to band together about certain things. Yeah. Can one human overcome this by themselves without any help? Absolutely. Do people do that? Absolutely. But I'm saying in general, most people don't have that inner resource. Again, that's the good news about why we do this work. That's the good news. Just being in this conversation is doing good.
So here's a postulation. A negative body image can especially take hold in us because of shame that al already exists in us. A lot of humans just have shame. Shame for being born, shame for existing. Shame about basic shame about the body. It was just there. A lot of us have fears, fears about this that the other thing, fears. Am I okay? Am I gonna be lovable? Am I gonna have a good life?
Those are understandable fears. And then all of a sudden the message of, well, you can't have any of that unless you have the perfect body. And then all of a sudden that meme takes hold, that virus takes hold because there was a fear already there.
A negative body image can especially take hold in us if we're already disconnected from the source. And when I say that, I mean from a spiritual source, from a higher wisdom, from a greater power, from a higher code,
however you wanna call it. If we don't believe in something greater, then it is easy to believe in something lesser, plain and simple. Oh, well, there's no higher power guiding this all. There's no higher road, there's no higher wisdom. There's no innate intelligence.
So I might as well believe in nonsense. And what's nonsense? The perfect body that'll get you everything you want. So people make that their religion, they make that their God, they worship that.
Just saying that. I think that's where some of this can come from. So I'm gonna tell you personally, what I've noticed is that when people have a challenging body image, have a stronger and stronger and stronger spiritual connection, religious connection. As they explore that and they explore the fact that they are here for something far more interesting and greater than having the perfect hot Hollywood body,
when people start to cultivate their connection to a higher power, it is far easier to heal a negative body image. Just notice that. I've noticed that.
So a problematic body image, oftentimes, you know, we talked earlier, earlier on,
you know, we use the perennial philosophy,
the supposed great collection of all the world's greatest religious and spiritual traditions, looking for the commonalities of those. And we learned that across so many of the religious and spiritual stories. One of the commonalities is at some point there's a separation from the source, a separation from that which created us. In the beginning, we were whole, we were connected, we knew where we came from. We were in the garden. Everything was sweet and cool and nice and wonderful. And we know that there's a higher power guiding this all. So consequently, we feel good.
And once we get separated from that source, somehow there was a fall, there was a disconnection, maybe it was a temptation.
All of a sudden we start to feel shame. We feel alone, we feel isolated, and we feel not enough as who we are,
separation from a higher power. And all of a sudden we're alone, we're isolated, and we begin to feel shame. We feel small as a way to cope with that. We look to control things. Okay, this sucks.
It's a random, nasty universe with no higher power. Let me try to control things. Let me try to control all these crazy people. Let me try to control my finances, control the world, control all these people around me who have all these emotions. Let me control my food. Let me control my body. Let me control my metabolism, my exercise. 'cause if I can control better, then I can have exactly what I want.
And for many people, we believe that if I have the better body, the best body, the perfect body, that's what I'm gonna shoot for. Because when I get perfect, then everything is good. Whew.
But we also know that anytime we go down the road of perfectionism, anytime, anytime for anybody, self-abuse at some point is always predictable. It's around the corner. You show me a perfectionist. I'll show you somebody who at some point is gonna lapse into self-abuse. I particularly perfectionists around food and body. It is, it is. Ugh. It's like clockwork.
So perfectionism is a very toxic virus, my friends.
It's the false belief that rather than be connected to a higher power, we somehow must become that higher power. Perfect. What's a higher power? It's kind of more perfect than us. Perfectionism is where you substitute you for the higher power. Okay, well, if there ain't no higher power out there, because I'm disconnected from the source, because somehow we've all fallen from grace, if there's no higher power, I might as well be that higher power. Perfectionism is a symbolic substitute for a higher power to the subconscious mind, to the, to the mind that you're ain't in contact with. On a conscious level, perfectionism implies that we're finished with our work. Ain't nothing more to do. I've arrived. I'm here. No more pain, no more suffering. Only the goodies in life because I'm perfect, perfect, got perfect health, got the perfect weight, got the perfect shape, which means I'm only gonna have perfect people around me who are glorious and glamorous. And we live in a, I don't know, some music video. Everybody's like partying all the time.
Perfectionism implies beyond criticism, beyond reproach. Nobody could say anything to you if you're perfect. What are they gonna say? You're imperfect. No, they can't. You're perfect. In other words, we can no longer be touched by the judgment of others or ourself. So the unenlightened mind, which is all of us, at some point, we try to deal with our pain and suffering, eh, with the wrong strategy. What's my pain and suffering? I'm disconnected from the source. I'm trying to feel good. I'm trying to feel okay. The world gives us an option. Hey, if you have a perfect body, you got everything you win.
Oh my goodness, let me just get that perfect body. How do I do it? Diet and exercise.
And once I get that perfection, nobody can judge me. 'cause what am I experiencing? I'm experiencing intense weight, hate and judgment from the invisible atmosphere. I've interjected it into myself. So I'm constantly attacking myself. Others are constantly attacking me. It's a constant attack. If you have a negative self body image, it is just like being in a war. You're a constant refugee. You're constantly being bombed. You're constantly picking up your stuff and trying to find safety and constantly being tortured by the war.
And nobody wants to be in that state. So what do we do? We think, well, if I'm perfect, then there's no more judgment and there's no more pain. And it makes sense. And that's the child's mind. That's the young mind trying to come up with a strategy to get out of pain and suffering and it doesn't work. And that strategy makes perfect sense. So if you suffer or have suffered from perfectionism, or you have a client who does understand that, that is actually a reasonable strategy of the young mind, of the immature mind, which we all have at some point to get out of its pain and suffering. And you know, on the flip side of perfectionism, yeah, it drives us to wanna be better. It drives us to want to take care of ourselves on a certain level. It can drive us to be skillful and useful.
And the downside is it tortures us and never takes us where we wanna go, baby steps. So right now we're just kind of laying out the turf, trying to take a deep dive here, trying to see where this all comes from, where it arises from.
So once again, perfectionism can only be healed only when we shine the light of consciousness upon it. Perfectionism means living in the dark. Perfectionism means your head is not above water. Perfectionism means you're actually not breathing yet.
Perfectionism to the perfectionist feels like the best religion in the world. This will take me to the holy land. If I am perfect, I achieve godhood enlightenment. I made it, I've hit the top.
A human has to see that their perfectionism is harming them to the core. A human being must at some point commit to repairing it within themselves, otherwise it'll just continue to eat at us. So my job, your job, I believe as practitioners is always, always, always, always, always, always. No exceptions to at some point in our relationship with our client, alert them if they are indeed living in perfectionism, alert them to that.
Alert them to the fact that they're indeed grip by a toxic virus and do an intellectual intervention here.
Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's what I've noticed. We've been working together for three sessions now. I really want to help you get where you wanna go. I really wanna help you lose the weight.
What I am seeing for you is that you have something that exists in the world that I believe is called perfectionism. And you know, I'm with a lot of people. I wanna do things the right way. I wanna do things in a skillful way. I wanna be the best version of me. Perfectionism is something different. Perfectionism is the belief that when we get to some exact body that looks exactly a certain way and we're eating exactly a certain way and we have exactly the right weight, then everything is gonna be okay in life. That all our problems are solved. I love myself, people will love me. I'm gonna be the real me. The real me's gonna finally come out. But of course, meanwhile, you're not the real you. You're this God awful version. But you're working towards perfectionism. And what I wanna say is perfectionists always end up in self-abuse because that's the nature of the beast. Perfectionism is an impossible state. If we're all perfect, we'd be bored. And there'd be nothing to talk about. Perfectionism does not exist. Do you know a single human ever who you've met who achieved the perfect body and the perfect weight and their life was now perfect? Really challenge is you didn't invent perfectionism, you inherited it from the world. It's a floating virus, it's a bad virus. People catch it.
So you follow your perfect diet perfectly and then all of a sudden you jump off it. Why? Because it's not sustainable. And then when you go off your perfect diet, what do you do? You punish yourself, you say horrible things to yourself, you drop into self-abuse, and then at some point you pick up your perfectionism again.
So what I'm trying to tell you is that I think I see you here. And what I wanna let you know is until you become clear that your perfectionism is harming you, you are never in my opinion, going to get where you wanna go when it comes to being happy with who you are. And when it comes to reaching your natural weight. Why? Because perfectionism is a massive stressor. The attempt to be perfect, a perfect human with the perfect body and the perfect weight and the perfect shape, there is nothing more stressful to do practically. And stress means stress response. Stress response means sympathetic nervous system dominance. You are living in a low level state of sympathetic dominance constantly, which means you are bathing your body in excess insulin and cortisol, which can signal the body to store weights door fat and not build muscle. The stress response will impact your digestion. It'll impact your calorie burning capacity day in and day out. Stress response will deregulate your appetite, all because you're trying to be a perfectionist. You're trying to achieve an impossible state that throws your brain into necessary, understandable, confusion, stress, and breakdown. So what I'm saying is you didn't invent perfectionism, it's a toxic virus. But until you commit to letting go of it, you will continue to be in misery and suffering.
And to me, that's gotta be a piece of our work is for you to see where you torture yourself with that it is not working for you.
Can you see that Mr. And Mrs. Client does what I, is what I'm saying, landing for you in any way? So that's an example of how I would do an intellectual intervention. I'm being very clear. Pretend it is your le. So whenever you do an intellectual intervention with somebody, I hope you really get what I mean. It is you going right into the belly of the beast with a human being and explaining to them with the power of your understanding and the power of your mind and your passion and your care. Yo dude, here's what I see is going on for you. Here's why this strategy doesn't work.
You're using scientific mind cookies. And the key is pretend. Pretend anytime you do an intellectual intervention, that this is the last client you will ever have. You will be dying later today, and you wanna go out in glory. You wanna go out knowing that you did your best to lead the world a better place. And here's an opportunity. So this is the last conversation you're gonna ever have with a client. Make it the best conversation. Pour your heart out, tell it to 'em. Let 'em know what you think about what is holding them back. That's adding a great place with which to come from when it comes to an intellectual intervention.
So putting all this together on one level. So based upon an onslaught from the media, a planet wide history of body shaming, weight hate in the social environment, and the constant messages we receive from just about everywhere that we're not good enough as we are again, it makes perfect sense that we'd obsess about our bodies and wanna change them. Makes perfect sense.
Self body shaming, self-hatred about weight. Incessant dieting is a perfectly reasonable and predictable response to a world gone mad about body and weight and appearance. And what it is is that gives us our value. So again, I say this so you get, it's not your fault, it's not your client's fault. And yet, yet, yet yet, it's our responsibility. We are here to respond. Each one of us, we must respond and address this collective challenge that personalizes within us. If you have a problem with body image, your client has a problem with body image, welcome to the club. Welcome to Earth.
If you would've escaped it, you would've. You're one of the few. So it's a collective challenge that personalizes within, within each human being. So even though it's not your fault, your client's fault, it's our responsibility to address it because it's harming us. You catch a cold, you catch a virus, it's your responsibility to deal with it. You didn't invent the cold, you didn't invent the virus. No, but okay, I got this. What do I do? How do I make this better? That's what it is. When you get to cold, you go, oh my God, I'm the only person that's ever had a cold. Woe is me. Oh my goodness, I should be perfect. I should just have perfect health all the time. What do I have to do? So I have absolutely totally perfect health.
Oh, caught a virus. It's okay.
So back to sexuality. Here's a postulation, a suggestion to consider that at the core of any negative body image is shame around sexuality.
The body houses a lot of things. Our organs, our muscles, our bones. It houses our physiology. The body houses our emotions. The body houses our experience. It houses our senses. The body houses the emotion of love and hate and pleasure and pain and everything that a human can experience. And the body houses is the home of our sexuality.
Chances are, if there's shame about body image, how I look, how I am shaped, how I am weighing,
chances are there's shame around sexuality. Who we are as sexual beings.
Once again, sexual wounding is, is is kind of timeless. I think it's very cultural, it's familial, it's genetic, it's a package deal. If you're born on planet earth, you've gotta deal with sex in some way and some form. And right now, planets kind seems to be kind of of confused around this, let's just call it like it is. If you're paying attention to what's going on in the world and in the media, you know, we don't have this down, we don't have this sexuality thing down. We don't have this nutrition thing down. We don't have this health thing down. We don't have economics down in terms of we don't have all these things in the right place. So we all feel good about it.
Just saying, just saying we can't sweep it under the rug. We have to notice the connections. Once again. Sexual wounding. Um, defining as a past physical or sexual abuse, emotional, personal shame around sexuality. A person doesn't have to be directly physically harmed sexually to have sexual wounding. Sometimes it's just lives inside of us. In our minds, many humans are walking around with a core belief that their sexuality is wrong, tainted, unclean, bad. We've inherited this throughout the ages. It's wrong, it's tainted, it's unclean, it's bad. And then we're giving, we, we get a lot of mixed messages.
You get messages in one place, maybe from your skull wrong, it's tainted, it's unclean, it's bad, maybe from religion, maybe from certain people. And then, you know, you turn on the tv, you get on a computer, you go to the movies. And if you're not a s**t, then you're missing something. So the absorption of religious, cultural, and from family injunctions that identify sexuality as toxic can harm us.
So if sexuality is bad, then we are bad because we are sexual beings. When you make sexuality bad, when you meaning the world makes sexuality bad, you know what it does? It makes our very existence bad people don't make that connection because it's an unconscious connection. It works to impact the deeper levels of mind. And what I mean by that is, you are here because of sex. Sorry to say this, if this is uncomfortable for you, but you are here because one day or evening your parents did it. They got together and they had sex. And that's how you got here. You got here because of sex. Your parents got here because of sex. Just about everybody else got here because of sex, except for the first couple far as we can tell.
So what I'm saying is sex is where we come from. So what I'm saying is when you make sex bad on a certain level, we're making our own existence bad because we're sexual beings. We're a product of that. And because we have a biological imperative to continue life and continue the species, at some point, we are driven to procreate. We are given a sex drive.
The drive to procreate is powerful for both men and women with different flavors in different ways. It's powerful. The drive to eat is powerful in different ways for different people. But you gotta do it. It's an imperative to continue life. So when you make it wrong, it puts our soul and our brain and our being into utter cognitive dissonance.
Can you see how the craziness of the world can drive us a little crazy?
La la. How we imagine the body and how we imagine our sexuality is often, often, often one and the same. So your body image is also your sexual image. How you imagine your sexuality, how you imagine yourself as a sexual being. The two are closely connected.
You've heard me say this, especially for women. Our relationship with food and body and sexuality can track one another. Oftentimes are directly connected to each other. They can mirror each other, they can be metaphors for each other. That's why I'm always wanting to know, particularly with my weight loss client, my body image challenge client. Okay, some point. Let's talk about sex. Let's talk about sexuality, let's talk about sensuality. Let's talk about pleasure. Talk to me. What's that like for you? Are you in relationship? Are you in sexual relationship? How is your experience of your sexuality? Where are you at with that? Where would you like to be with that? What's working for you? What isn't working for you?
It's a conversation, my friends. You ain't fixing anything. As you can see, I'm in a conversation with you. As you can see, even though I'm not working with you individually right now, just being in a conversation, ideas start to come up. I might say something that might trigger something in you. You might think of something, you might make a connection. That's what a good conversation that matters can do. It's not about you learning how to fix someone's sexuality. This is not about you learning how to fix someone's body image. This is you learning how to be in a conversation that matters.
We have to be humble, understanding that we're, we're going into a lot of uncharted territory here.
So we do our best.
So let's talk about polarities for a second. So I'm gonna tell you my observation of heterosexual women. 'cause that's simply what I know best and what I understand. I don't wanna comment on things that I don't know or that I don't feel like I am. Um, I don't have the authority to comment on. So for heterosexual women, the feminine desires to be noticed, seen, honored, adored, loved.
I'm making what I consider to be an archetypal statement. I am looking at my read of women as I've noticed them in the world. I am reading our accounts of men and women throughout history, in poetry, in philosophy, in literature, in art, in case you haven't noticed. The feminine desires to be noticed. The feminine in us to desires to be noticed, seen, honored, adored, loved. Now these days, the world tells us that, okay, the feminine, you're loved by us, by the world, by culture. When your body looks a certain way, which is usually some combination of slender, curvy, pretty young
people look around the feminine looks around and goes, huh, that ain't me. Or that could be, or I could be doing that better. And the only way to do that is food, diet and exercise. That's the royal road that we've learned to shapeshift the body. And honestly, it is on a certain level.
Thus, sex, food, body image and love are intimately linked for many, many women. Sex, food, body, image and love are intimately linked. For many women and for many men who have a strong, well aspected, feminine
sex, food, body, image, and love are intimately linked. That's why I wanna know my client's story. I wanna know about their relationship life. I wanna know about their love life. I wanna know about their sex life.
I wanna know about their personal world
'cause that's gonna help me with their weight. Because now I'm understanding what's driving them. I'm understanding the pieces of the puzzle.
And oftentimes what's driving a person to lose weight is self-hate around their body image. But I can't help, nor can you a person lose weight who is committed to self-hate and committed to that self-hate not going away until they change their body. What I'm telling you is you have to take a different road. You have to inspire your client in a different direction. That takes a little time, that takes a little trickery. You gotta seduce your client. You gotta slowly kind of dance them with some subtle moves into the place where you want to bring them.
Now, for men, far as I can tell, body image for a heterosexual male body image is often tied for heterosexual males to whether or not the world sees a particular male as strong, invincible, unmovable, unshakeable, and untouched by fearful or tearful emotions. I wanna say that again for men. Body image often tied to whether the world sees a particular male body, a strong invincible, unmovable, unshakable, muscular, untouched by fearful or tearful emotions. So a large and muscular body is the warrior's body. It's the soldier's body,
it's the prince's body. And a well-defined masculine body is seen as a power for attracting the feminine, for attracting sex, for getting sex.
So the world has given us an image of the alpha male body that defines one as an alpha male in the world. So the world is basically telling the men, yep, you know what the best males are. They're the alpha males. Yep, that's true in nature. The alpha males rule, they don't always got the best life in nature, but alpha males tend to rule until they don't.
But the alpha male tends to be the biggest and the strongest and makes the loudest noise. So it's the alpha male body that defines one as an alpha male in the world, I'm successful, I am dominant. I got all the goodies, I got all the money, I got all the power.
So what I have seen these days is that men are increasingly vulnerable in this day and age to shame about their physicality. Men are increasingly vulnerable in this day and age to shame about their physicality, their body, and their looks.
In the gay male population, I am noticing a dramatic increase in eating challenges, body image disorders, eating disorders. The masculine mind is extremely visual.
Gay men understand that to attract men, they need to have the right visuals. They get it. There's no secret there. Um, and the way the feminine male mind can be tortured around body image can be very intense and very profound.
Now, what I'd like to suggest is that in our true natural, unencumbered state, your body image, my body image, anybody's body image is genetically encoded as completely positive
that for most human beings in our natural, unencumbered state body image is genetically encoded as positive.
Look at a baby, look at an infant. Do you really think they're worried about what you think about their body?
A child reaches a point at some point where they start to feel a little bit, uh, private about their body depending on how they've been brought up.
But there's a point at which, you know, an infant, a 1-year-old, a 2-year-old, a 3-year-old, yeah, they rip off their clothes, they're hanging out naked. They can care less about what you think. They're in their body, they're embodied, they're celebrating their body. They're not looking in the mirror going, I hate my body. It's not a thought. It's not a concept until they learn it from the world.
Just saying, I believe that's our
God given state. It's our life given state. It's genetically encoded in us. We are not genetically encoded to self attack.
Life is not that foolish. If we were genetically encoded to self attack, humanity would not exist.
However, the world has been programming us to self attack,
and that's a big attack. So we band together, we create a collective immune response. We talk to each other. We support each other.
We name what we see. We take baby steps.
You look as good as you feel.
This is a write or downer, something to consider, something to notice. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, you look as good as you feel.
Take the average person who doesn't have a good body image, and you will notice. They will notice that their body image will vary. Oftentimes, day to day or week to week, there will be moments in their life when for whatever reason, they feel good, someone smiled at them, something good happened. And on that day, in that moment that they feel good, they will look in the mirror and they will look better to themselves.
What I am trying to say when I say you look as good as you feel, is that there is a place inside of us where we can help ourselves along by doing our best to create the conditions so we feel better about ourselves,
not just focus on creating the conditions to shapeshift the body so we look different so then we can feel better.
Do you know anyone who has the ideal looks and body and all that kind of stuff that you are looking to have? And they don't always feel good about themselves.
In fact, do you know anyone who has the looks and the shape that others desire? And in fact, they constantly don't feel good about themselves. Their looks, didn't guarantee them anything. This is simply proving I will ask my client these questions because I am now proving to them my point through their experience. Hopefully I just did that with you so you can see what I mean. So what I'm trying to say is normally what we do is we try to change how we look so we can feel better. Now, my friends, that makes perfect sense. I get it. I get it. I get it. And fine. Mr. And Mrs. Client, you really wanna change your looks and your shape. Great. I'm on your team. If you really think you have weight to lose, if I think I you have weight to lose, I'm on your team. I want you to get where you want to go. That's what I'm thinking, and that's what I'm gonna say.
And we have to have some good strategies. So yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We're gonna shape shift you so you can feel better. I get it. But if that's your exclusive strategy, it's not gonna work. Why? Because you're coming to see me and it hasn't worked your way, hasn't worked. You haven't gotten where you wanted to go. So we're gonna try some different things. We're gonna actually try to feel better along the way because if we begin to feel better along the way, believe it or not, we start to look better to ourselves. And when we start to look better to ourselves, life becomes better. We let go. We feel better. We drop into physiologic relaxation response, parasympathetic nervous system dominance. And you know what that does to a person's appetite, regulation, calorie burning capacity and digestive system, and overall health.
So we're creating the conditions at the beginning that we're expecting to have in the end. Once you lose weight, you're expecting to have as the end result, I'm gonna love myself. Got it? The fastest way, way to get where you want to go is to love yourself along the way.
Don't take my word for it, prove it to yourself or prove me wrong. But you gotta do it. Gotta do with yourself. Gotta do with your client. I will bet you every penny I have that that is true. And that is so that people will get where they want to go faster if life is indeed going to take them there, that they're gonna get where they want to go faster
when they're achieving the end results in the beginning.
Meaning, what's the end result that you want? You wanna feel better about yourself when you lose all this weight and have your perfect shape? Got it? Let's start to feel better about ourselves now. So then you're inventing ways, knowing your client, understanding them, okay, what are the baby steps that I'm helping my client with in terms of food, in terms of body, in terms of embodiment, in terms of loving their body, receiving pleasure, feeling nourish. What are the baby steps so they can slowly, slowly start to love themselves, little more baby steps. That's all you need. You know another way of saying this, I believe our dance with body image is the soul's journey to find the truth, find the truth of who we are.
Who are you? If you loved your body, who are you? If you weren't hating on your body like this, who are you if you were out of this fight with your body? That's a big question, my friends. That's an important question. What I'm suggesting to you is that our dance, our journey with body image is the soul's journey. It's our deeper journey to find the truth with a capital T, the truth of who we are. If you struggle with body image, if your client struggles with a negative body image, they don't know. You don't know who you are without that struggle.
What I wanna say over here from my end is who we are without that struggle is awesome. Who we are without that struggle is a completely different human being who we are as a more empowered human being, who we are as a happier human being, who we are as a more pleasure and nourish human being, who we are as a human being who can celebrate life more. Who we are is not a perfect human being who we are. There's still the little things that, oh, I wish I could change this. Wish I could change that. But it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't flood our brain with hate and self-rejection. It doesn't stop us from living our life. It's just that little 5%.
I've maybe met a few people in the course of my life on planet Earth who didn't wanna change a damn thing about their body.
Yeah, people have this. Yeah, I wish it was this, wish it was that.
But for our client to get to that place where it's just, yeah, this little wish, little wish. But you know something, here I am. We don't know. Until we know who we are without the struggle with body image, we don't know what's on the other side. What I wanna say is that you have to be committed to your client to helping them get to the other side. They will likely not hit gold in their work with you because it's a long journey for people. I'm not saying that to discourage you. I'm saying that to encourage you. So you understand that this is a journey that we are up against a powerful toxic virus. And a person, your client, you, every individual who wants to get to the other side of their struggle with body image has to understand that it's a journey and it's a commitment. It's gonna take work and practice.
And that which motivates us and inspires us to move forward
is the belief that there's something beautiful on the other side. That's the message. I'm always giving to my body image challenge client. I am encouraging them like crazy. I am smiling into the space with them. I am cheerleading them on.
I will not let them sink into self-rejection for very long when they're in my presence.
So let's close this part of the conversation with what I believe are some important postulations postulations are. I'm positing this, I'm posing this.
I'm suggesting this, by the way, I believe in this, but I don't wanna hit you over the head with it. I'm just saying try this on. So some important postulations healing body image is about practicing self-love on a daily basis. Healing body image is about taking baby steps. Healing body image is about learning to be in the body to embody. We're gonna be talking about that more healing body image is about reconnecting with a higher power, a higher code, a greater wisdom God, whatever. Healing body image, healing your own body image is about helping others heal theirs. One of the best ways you can help heal your own body images to help others heal theirs. And one of the best ways you can help people heal theirs
is to inspire them to help the people in their life who they're ahead of when it comes to body image. 'cause whoever your client is, chances are they know someone who's in a little bit worse shape than them when it comes to how much they're hating on their body. So I'm always encouraging my body image challenge client that I'm working with. Is there anybody else in your life that you can be kind of sharing some of these things with it you can help along? Woo is that powerful healing body image is about creating boundaries, a good immune system around the kinds of media that we consume. You gotta control what's coming in through your eyes just as much as you control what comes into your mouth. Same, same, same. You don't want eat junk food that's gonna crash your system. Yeah, have some junk every once in a while. Fine. The dose makes the poison. But you don't wanna just consume food that's gonna limit your life. Limit your body, limit your health limit your time on earth. Limit your energy limit, your brain power limit, your ability to feel and enjoy. You don't wanna consume junk.
The same with what you're taking into your eyes and your ears. Why would you do that? Junk media is equally as toxic. Healing body image is a radical and courageous act in this world. How's that for a person to go on the path of healing their body image, changing their body image? I tell my clients this. I tell my body image challenge client this. The fact, Mr. And Mr. Client that we are in this conversation, to me means you, believe it or not, are a radical and courageous person because this is hard work. And honestly, not a lot of people attempt to do it. What most people do is they look for the quick fix. They look for the pill, and they just exercise their brains out, and they starve themselves so they can have the body that they want, thinking that that's gonna finally make them happy. And maybe they reach their target weight and they gain their weight back and they still don't get it. And you've been down this road, and here you are really grappling with this and willing to go into some of the discomfort here. That's that's pretty radical and that's courageous. I just wanna say that Mr. Mrs. Klein, I wanna say that to you, listening right now. If this is you, the fact that you're grappling with this is radical, it's courageous, it's honorable, and good for you.
We have to acknowledge the courage that it takes to do something like this that is difficult, that is painful, that is very intimate. You know, nobody wants to walk around proclaiming to the world. I hate my body, I suck, I'm unlovable. But in a weird way, that's what we're broadcasting. Even if we're just keeping those words silent to ourselves, we're broadcasting that through our behaviors, through our energy, through our through, through everything you know.
So to take this on, good for you to consider helping others with this. Good for you. You only need to be one step ahead of your client. You don't need to love your body fiercely to help somebody love theirs. Just need to be one step ahead. My friends, this is an intense conversation. It is a deep conversation. I hope you are getting value from this. I hope you're making connections for your own self, for perhaps if you're already seeing clients, for the clients that you're already seeing,
we're diving into new territory and there's more to come. So this is body image, part one. Part two is next. More good information and distinctions. Thank you. And I'm gonna see you on the other side.

PART 2

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Let us continue our conversation about body image. Now, in order to learn, I think about something so
interesting, complex, hard to fix, hard to help, hard to heal. In order for us to put ourselves in position, to be of use to anyone, our clients, our patients, ourselves, we gotta explore the terrain first. We have to be good scientists and by good scientists, what I really mean is we have to be good observers. We just have to gather data, we have to look at the turf, we have to look at the terrain and start to make connections. So before we get into diving in, in specifics and do this and do that, and fix this and fix that, and work here and work there, let's spend a little more time getting to know the turf and the terrain so you can have a feel for body image. So we can begin to gather the kind of insights and distinctions and data that will just live inside of us in a good way. So this conversation, we're going to explore different aspects of body image and just kind of see where it takes us. When I think beyond a negative body image, what's the goal? Where, where are we looking to get to? What's the point? Well, let's just say it, and everybody might answer this a little bit different, but beyond an unhappy body image is body love. Hey, here I am. Hello world. Hello universe. Hello everybody. Hello body. I love this. I'm okay with this. There's a place where we can love the body beyond an unhappy body. Image is body confidence.
You know, our younger people, this is probably a faster step for them before they can get to body love. They need to get a little confidence first. Um, but there's a way that once we start to land in the body a little bit more, once we start to let go of some of the inner negative self chatter about the body, we slowly get a little more confident. And confident can mean I sit down at the table with other people and am essentially okay with myself. Confidence means I could stand in a group of people and be seen and talk. Confidence means here I am. I'm okay, I can interact. I'm not going to hide. In fact, I'm gonna show up. Here's me, and this may not be perfect, but here's me.
A lot of our younger people just need more confidence along their journey. Beyond an unhappy body image is celebrating the body, literally celebrating it. Here it is. This is your shot. As far as we know in this life. You get one body. This is the body, you know, we celebrate birthdays, we celebrate different rites of passage. You know, there's times to celebrate the body.
It's what we got. It ain't perfect. Life ain't perfect. You know, beyond an unhappy body. Image is a place where on a daily basis we do little things to nourish the body. We're nourishing it. It's no different than if you have plants, you're taking care of your plants. It's no different than if you have a fish tank in your house. You're taking care of the little fishes. It's no different that if you have a garden or a lawn, you're trying to nourish it. It is no different than if you have children. You're trying to take care of them. Nourishing the body is something you do because you have pride in the body. It's something you do because you are a steward of the body. You are here to take care of it.
Nourishing the body is always about little acts, simple things beyond an unhappy body. I'm just owning the body. It's okay, this is mine. I, I own it. I'm owning it. Owning it means I take it to the practitioner, I take it to the doctor, I take it to the gym. I take it on the walk. This is mine. I'm taking care of it. Another way of saying that is just being responsible for the body. You know, the body's not perfect. The body gets its ills, it's pains, it's sicknesses, it's distortions. The body goes through its moods, the body goes through its nonsense. The body, you know, it's not always fun to be in a body, but we have to be responsible for this body. That's sometimes feels good. Other times it feels not so good, but we're responding to whatever the body's asking for. Why? Because we're owning it. We're taking responsibility for it. Another aspect of what's beyond body image, and this is just using different language here to say some of what I've already said, is learning how to ride the waves of the body. The body comes in waves, you know, the body is largely water. The adult body is at least well over two thirds water. Infant body is a higher percentage. The body comes at us in waves. The body has its waves. We have waves of energy. We get waves of tiredness. We have waves of emotions and moods. Health comes in waves dis-Ease comes in waves. Things are constantly changing. Watch the ocean, watch the tides. It's always changing Day to day, the water looks blue, the water looks brown, the water's smooth. The water's rough. The waves are pretty. The waves are not. It's so there's a wave nature to the body. There's a watery ever changing flow to the body. What I see happen, and I remember seeing this from a young age, something happens to somebody's body and they freak, oh my god, you know, uh, I woke up and I have a pain in my elbow. And there's just immediate fear.
And sometimes, yes, I have to obviously address the pain in my body. But remembering that the body comes in waves, remembering that your pains come and go. You know, some pains are here for us to live with. But to begin to notice the wave like nature of the body, and to not go into extreme anxiety and fear. When the body goes into its places of body goes into times of low energy, days, weeks, for some of us months, the body can be depressed.
We automatically try to medicate it. You know, depression is a journey for the body, for the nervous system, for the heart, for the soul. You know, the body goes in waves of just feeling good. It's building itself. The body goes in times of cleansing itself. It comes in waves. Can you begin to relax into that wave like nature of the body without freaking out that, oh my God, my body's changing now I'm feeling this. Now I'm feeling that with most people. Whatever's ailing them, whatever's bothering them that they freak out about just lie down on the couch. That'll pass at some point. Um, you know, be on a negative body image is just beginning to feel pleasure. The pleasure of embodiment, the pleasure of food, the pleasure of being outside, the pleasure of looking at another human. The pleasure of engaging your senses, the pleasure of seeing beauty with your eyes. The pleasure of touch, the pleasure of sensuality, the pleasure of movement. There's so many pleasures of embodiment beyond body. Wind. Image is also being aware of the destiny of the body. What is the destiny of the body? You know, destiny of the body is death on one level. So that's definitely the destiny of everybody as far as we can tell throughout the course of all human history. So to understand that, that you're borrowing this spacesuit for a while, the destiny of the body is also to take us, me and you, the soul, whoever's inhabiting this body is to take us on a journey. The destiny of the body is to express itself as best as it possibly can to reach its highest potential, as best as it possibly can. And the destiny of the body is to take us to where we need to go, which is a good reason to own it, to be responsible for it, nourish it, and even celebrating it. It's, it's, it's the spacesuit that we need to be here.
Remember, just a reminder, I had to put this in again because I love this. You look as good as you feel. People think if I look better, I will feel better. And you know something, it is true for so many of us. You get the haircut, you restyle your hair, you think you look better, and you do. Maybe you feel better. Okay? You just took a vacation and you relaxed and you've been out in the sun and you've been exercising. You start to glow, you notice that you look better. And consequently you feel happy about that. You feel better. So yes, I'm saying, yeah, when we look better, a lot of times we feel better. But the opposite is equally as true.
When you feel better, you look better. The, and this part is true for, so it's especially true for people who have the toxic nutritional belief, the toxic life belief that when I look like this, then I will be happy. Then I will feel better. Then I will finally be able to relax and stop hating on myself. That ain't true. You gotta start feeling better now. And then you're gonna start to look better. And as you start to look better, because you're feeling better about yourself, you're creating the conditions that you expect at the end in the beginning, which makes it far easier for us to actually get to our destination.
So I'm saying this, and these are things, everything I'm saying to you are things in any way, shape, or form, you can say to your client, by the way, um, 'cause body image, it's, it's a conversation with your client. I explore it with my client.
So you look as good as you feel. Ask your client who hates their body? Who doesn't love it? Who's not loving on it? Are there days that you just wake up for whatever reason? Who knows why. We wake up on the right side of the bed, you feel better. And then you look in the mirror and, and you kind of, you're the same person you were yesterday. But because you feel better, you look at yourself, I'm like, oh my God, I look better. That works. So yes, we're gonna help you do your best to shapeshift your body and lose the weight.
And unless we start to do the things that help you feel better right now, that have nothing to do with weight loss, you're not gonna feel so good. And you're gonna keep thinking that it's weight loss and weight loss and weight loss and weight loss alone. That's going to make me feel better.
And as it turns out, that's just not how it goes. Down. 98 to 99% of all people who are losing weight gain it back. Something's not working in there. So my friends, the act of loving one's body.
Have you ever had the experience of loving on your body, of loving your body a moment where you loved your body? It's a good thing to ask. It's a good thing to recount a moment or moment.
Can you remember moments from your childhood of loving your body? Can you remember any moments in your life of just loving your body?
I will say to you, from my own personal experience and from the humans that I've observed over the years, many of them friends, family, loved ones clients, people in my circle, in my universe, the act of loving one's body for so many people is really a sacred experience. It's a peak experience. It's a deep experience just in and of itself. There's something deeply special about it.
It's a very BEUs, earthy experience. It grounds us here, grounds us on earth.
For people who haven't agreed to be here, the soul lesson just agreed to be here on planet earth. Loving one's body helps us be here.
It's kind of a sense of heaven on earth.
The act of loving one's body. You're saying to yourself, you're saying to the world. You're saying to the invisibles. You're saying, when you're loving you body, you're saying, I'm happy to be here. So the weird thing is, it's true for the people who don't love their body. The people who don't love their body. The people who have a challenging body image, they intuit inside their brain, if I can only love my body, then I'd be happy and feel good about life. So what I actually wanna say is, there's a correctness to that. For the people who have a negative, unfortunate, challenging body image, I don't love this body. They know deep inside, and it's true. If only I could love my body, I would then be happy and feel good about life. So they know it's true.
But here's the challenge.
We think that in order to love our body,
it has to look a certain way, has to weigh a certain amount, it has to have a certain shape. There's the rub right there. Did you catch that? If you know deep inside yourself that if I love my body, gosh, man, I would feel better about life. Life would be better. I would be happier. The people around me would be happier. It, it would just be better if I could only love my body. You are correct. You are absolutely correct. You know, if you loved your body, ha you would be pleasured. You'd feel responsible for it. You'd be nourishing it, you'd be celebrating it. You would have confidence, you would have more fun with your body, you'd get more pleasure. It's as simple as that. So we know that. So if you say that to yourself, and only I could love my body, then I, I I would have a better experience in this world. You are a hundred percent correct. Where we go wrong. Where you and I go wrong, where our clients go wrong. Where a lot of people go wrong is we then jump to, and in order for me to love my body, my body has to look a certain way. And in order for me to love my body, it has to be shaped a certain way, way, a certain way.
And that sends us down a dangerous rabbit hole that never quite takes us where we wanna go,
because there's a falsehood in there. And the falsehood is that essence
where loving the body with conditions as opposed to without conditions healing body image means moving from conditional love of the body to unconditional love of the body as best we can. What does that mean? For those of you who are parents, for those of you who are aunts and uncles, for those of you who were ever in a position where you were babysitting or being with a small child or infant, if your infant pops out the womb, do you look at the infant and say, Hmm, you know, little infant, you got a lot of baby fat. I don't quite love you right now, but as soon as that baby fat is gone, as soon as I start to see some tighter abs, then I'm gonna love you. But meanwhile, I don't. But we're gonna get there. I know it. We're gonna eventually get there. That's called conditional love of your tiny little infant. No, the infant comes out. You, you, you love it. You love it. No matter what the challenges are, no matter what the problems are, no matter how much it's burping, no matter how much it's barfing on you, you love the little creatures unconditionally.
What happens is we tell our body, we tell ourselves, we tell our life. Yeah, okay, I know I'm supposed to love my body, and I know that when I do love my body, I'm gonna be a way happier person. True, true, true, true for everyone you love in your body, you're gonna be a happier person. Life is gonna be better. But if that love is conditional, intensely conditional, we ain't gonna get there. It's no different than telling that small child, you know, I'm gonna love you when you're, when you're taller. Right now, you're this little tiny thing. I don't, I don't like short people. I like tall people. I you're a short little person. Okay? It's conditional love.
We're learning to love the body from a more unconditional place.
Can you do that for yourself? Are there people that you do that for? Are there people in your life?
Well, you just love them for who they are. No matter what they look like, you just love them.
Are your best friends or the people that you're closest with, do you constantly think, huh, I'm hanging out with this person I really love and care about, huh? Hanging out with my best friends, the people who I feel great about, but I would really love them more if they were just little. If they looked a little bit more this, if she could lose about four pounds from her midsection, ooh, then I'd really love her. She'd be even a better friend to me.
Gosh, if your friends were saying that about you, they would not be your friend.
The people who we're closest with, oftentimes
they're accepting us without a whole lot of conditions. They're accepting our body without a whole lot of conditions. You know, I remember when I was young, when I was very young, my, my grandparents were gods to me. My grandmothers were goddesses. They were just these, these epic humans. They had so much love. They were so good to me. Um, one of my grandma, she was a big lady. She's the kind of lady that, you know, she passed away many moons ago at the age of 86. Um, my grandma Molly, many humans would consider her fat. And I, I don't remember when it was. It was sometime when I was about 15 or 16, and I don't know where I was. I was with my grandmother somewhere and I heard somebody make a comment about her weight. And I was stunned. I had to call my grandma fat. But it wasn't so much an observation as it as it had this judgment in it, you know, it had this negative energy in it. That's what I was picking up on. And it had this, you are a less than human being because of this. And, and I was, I was stunned. I'm like, why would you hate on my grandma? I'm sure she's a hell of a lot better than your grandma. This is a person who is just as unconditionally loved me. And all of a sudden I started looking at her body through the eyes of this other person. I'm like, oh, right, okay. She's this big lady. Oh my goodness. And I couldn't bring myself to hate on her. I couldn't bring myself to want her to lose weight.
I couldn't bring myself to wanna change her because the love for me was so without conditions. The love from her was so without conditions, never complained about her own body. Never tried to change. It. Just had a lot of love. So moving towards unconditional love of the body, look at some of the conditions you put on it. Look at your own conditions that you've put on your body. Look at how intense they are. Look at how selfish that is. Look at how mean that is. We get mean with ourselves. We get selfish with ourselves. Okay? Body, I love you. But's the conditions. Ouchies.
You, you want your partner to say that. Do you want your future husband or wife to say that? Do you want your present or husband and wife to say that I will love you, but under the following conditions, you lose six pounds from here, two pounds from here. Get rid of this body fat, eliminate this wrinkle. Ah, it's too much nonsense.
So don't forget, we teach what we need to learn.
If you're not perfect when it comes to body image, great. You're better than a lot of people. You only need to be one step ahead of your client. Well, learning as we go, we go along. Planet earth in many ways is learning how to love the body more without conditions. We do a lot of things to the body. We forget the body. We ignore the body. We override the signals of the body. We want to change the body. We compare the body to other bodies incessantly. We are constantly being bathed in imagery of here's how we should look. So it makes perfect sense that we would be insulting our own body with our thoughts and our inner conversation. It's okay. It's where we're at as a planet. We teach what we need to learn. You don't have to be in love with your body to help a client.
And it's a journey. Body image can't be fixed. Do not sit with a client and think, oh my God, she hates her body. He hates his body. What am I gonna do? As soon as you go to that place, you know you're doing the wrong thing. As soon as you go into, my client hates their body, what do I do? You don't do anything literally. I mean, literally, that's the first thing you do is nothing.
And then you take a deep breath, and then you love the person in front of you without conditions.
You create a relationship with them where when you look at them, you're loving them for who they are.
Think of them as a tiny little infant. Are you gonna judge the hell out of them? 'cause they got baby fat on them? My client does not have to do anything different for me to regard them more, for me to accept them more as another human being on this planet. My client doesn't have to look any different for me to love them anymore. There's nothing they have to do. There's nothing they have to prove to me.
There's no amount of pounds they're gonna lose. There's no shape shifting of their body that they can do that's gonna cause me to respect them more than I do now. So I'm unconditionally accepting and loving my client right now. That doesn't mean I like everybody. You know, some people have this habit, that habit. You like certain clients better than those. I'm not talking about that.
When your client steps into your office, you have a job. When you're with the, on the phone with your client, your job is to create a container. Remember that your job is to create a sacred space. Remember that your job is to create a container between you and your client where this relationship is special. This relationship is sacred. And according to the guidelines of this relationship that we're creating together, either practitioner, either coach, either healer, either doctor, whatever you are, whatever kind of kind of professional you are or are going to be in that container, you are unconditionally accepting your client no matter who they are. So you are beaming them with the energy and with the force field that you want them to adopt for themselves. The moment you go into, oh, my client hates her body, what do I do? You do the exact opposite of what you just did. You're freaked out just like they are. You're actually freaking out like they are. They're freaked out about their body. They're freaking out because they've concluded they can't love their body the way it is right now. And now you're freaking out. IE you're not doing your job. Now, does this happen? Yes. Happens to newer practitioners in this realm. And honestly, it happens to experience practitioners in this realm. Your job, and, and I really mean this, I really want you to get this. Your job is to relax into your client's physical form. Accept it, relax it. You don't need to change it to love them more. So what they're experiencing is a person who unconditionally accepts them and regards them. They are no longer in the invisible atmosphere of body hate and body attack that the rest of the world tends to give them. Let's be honest. But when they're with you, the force field is different. The message is, I love you. The message is, I accept you. The message is cool. You wanna shapeshift your body, okay, but I ain't gonna love you more. I ain't gonna accept you more. 'cause I'm already at a 99% of how much I love and accept you.
You lose a bunch of weight. I'm not gonna go, oh, thank God now I like you better. No, I'm not gonna like my client anymore. Am I gonna celebrate their successes? Sure.
But it's not a conditional love. So you're creating that atmosphere, you're creating that environment for your client. So this is an evolution. It's a journey, it's a process. It's a cultivation. It's not something you fix. It's not a button you push. It's, it's a reeducation.
Because since the beginning of time, there's a darn good chance that you and your client and so many of us, we've been brought up in an atmosphere of humans attacking their own body because it doesn't look good enough. Humans having conditional love about their own body because it's not good enough. And yeah, there might've been other humans outside of you who looked at your body, other humans outside of your client who looked at their body and said, bad girl. Bad boy, bad body. Okay, got it. That happens. It sucks. And when you're a kid, when you're young, we interject that we are imprint vulnerable goes into our system. We believe it, we take it on. And at some point we wake up and we realize, this ain't good. This doesn't work for me anymore. Self-attack doesn't work. Self-hatred doesn't work. Conditional love about the body does not work. If you wanna shapeshift your body, fine, your client wants to shapeshift their body, fine. Let's learn to lu it into that direction, not when it is like this, then I will love it.
Does that seldom, seldom works? I I I, I really mean that
A lot of people, they're able to shapeshift their body, they diet it into misery, and they exercise it into misery and they lose the weight. And they're a misery. Yeah, they might have a little temporary high because the body looks nice, but they actually haven't learned how to be with themselves. They haven't learned how to love themselves. They haven't learned how to nourish their body, care for it, celebrate it, be responsible for it. They've been denying it food. They've been denying it nourishment and pleasure. They've been pushing it hard with exercise, forcing metabolism to burn calories in kind of an artificially stressed way. Yeah, a lot of people could do that short term.
But we haven't changed from the inside. And inside is where the accident don't matter what the outside looks like. You know that there are people who are beautiful and wonderful and perfect in Hollywood, and they're suicidal.
The outer guarantees us nothing. Okay, my friends, you know this. I know this. Let's just say it. Society, the world culture tends to objectify the body. Women equal sex objects in the heterosexual universe. Men often equal success objects in the heterosexual universe. The woman's billboard is her body. The man's billboard is the numbers in his bank account. That's how we, one of some of the main ways we objectify women and men. In addition to men being success objects, they're, they're also, they're work objects. They're worker bees to do your work, get s**t done.
Well, of course women are far more than that. Of course men are far more than that.
Yes, there's, these are not hard and fast rules for every human being. I'm making generalizations. And what I'm saying is, when we objectify the body, when the world objectify your body, when you objectify your body, when your client object defies their body,
we remove something. We remove something sacred. We remove love, we remove our naturalness, we remove the true essence of who we are. We're not an object. The result of objectifying the body is so ridiculously predictable. It's suffering it's symptoms, it's distorted behaviors, meaning an unwanted relationship with food.
And then we think we have a food issue,
but we haven't objectify the body issue because I need to look a certain way to be loved and to love myself.
You know, much of the world is taught to be an eternal teenager, a prince or a princess. When it comes to the body.
This means we are type casting the body, we the collective, we the cultural we, the we you're exposed to in the media is saying, here's, here's our ideal of the body. It's teenage, it's energetic, it's immortal.
But along with being a teenager, it's insecure. It's sexually and emotionally immature. It's not quite responsible. We don't talk about that part.
We just want the body to be in the prince and princess stage. Especially damaging. For women. Especially, especially, especially
so on one level, for many people,
particularly women, healing body image, often, often, often, not always, not for every woman.
Healing body image often means living into a deeper definition of the feminine for that particular person.
The surface feminine says, I have to look a certain very specific and perfect way. That's the surface, feminine That culture teaches us higher feminine, deeper feminine. It's natural, it's embodied, it's connected. It's fluid, it's sensuous, it's celebrating, it's nourishing. It's heartfelt. That's a deeper definition of the feminine.
Most girls are taught the surface feminine. You must look this way, period.
And that's their relationship with their body. They're not taught to be connected to their own body, to experience the sensations in their own body, to trust their own body, to celebrate their body, to feed it okay. And feel good to give their body moments of love.
That's a deeper feminine that we're not always taught.
And if we are taught that, it's easy to forget because then you leave the house and all of a sudden you're in the world and things are looking a lot different. You're getting different messages. So it's hard. It's hard. Now, for men, healing body image oftentimes, oftentimes means living into a deeper definition of the masculine for that particular man. So the surface masculine, here's what the surface masculine is generally taught about the body. Your body is a warrior body. It's supposed to be fit or chiseled or, and or your body exists to be sacrificed for the greater good. So yeah, there's a subset of men who, like you're taught, and you could see this with a lot of young teenage guys. You see this with guys who, you know, join the military. You wanna warrior your body. You want a fit body. You want a chisel body. Why? Okay, it's gonna attract sexuality to me because men and women like hot bodies. Okay, got it. But it's a warrior body. It's an alpha male body. It's strong. And then there's a whole other subset of men who, you know something, they're actually not worried about fitness. They're not worried about chiseling their body, their body. They've been taught. Your body needs to be sacrificed for the greater good. So they work jobs where your body is being sacrificed, your body is exposed to a lot of toxicity where your body is gonna be worn down from certain kinds of physical labor. You just gotta go to work, you gotta provide. And sorry, you know, you're not gonna have time to spend three hours a day in the gym.
Your body is here to take care of the people around you and work and do a job, do good in the world. That's what a lot of men walk around with.
It's a challenge. So higher masculine is a more mature warrior mentality. Like, yes, okay, I want a fit body. But what for? What am I gonna do with that energy? What am I gonna do with that power? How am I gonna use it for good? It's the king mentality. The king is embodied as present is a caretaker of his own body for a greater good. Clearly I'm taking care of this body, not so I can look in the mirror three hours a day and think how good I look. I'm taking care of this body because I'm an important dude. 'cause I'm taking care of others. I'm providing for my kingdom. I'm being good to the people in my world. I'm being aware of the people in my world. I'm mentoring, coaching, guiding the people in my world.
I'm serving a purpose that's natural to who I am.
I think healing body image for men and women is also about connecting to a higher power and a higher purpose.
You know, especially for men, when they just get caught up in worrying about what their body looks like. Sometimes the only way to get out of that is to connect to something higher than us. Connect to a greater wisdom, connect to a greater good, connect to a higher purpose for your life. Men and women, consider how much energy you put into worrying about your body, attacking your body, wanting your body to be different.
That becomes your purpose. Your purpose becomes your billboard. Your purpose becomes changing. This part of my body, changing that part of my body, making it look different, making it look like this. And that's a whole purpose. And we end up robbing the world of us.
We end up starving the world of us.
The more human being obsesses about their own body, the
less energy they have for relationship of any kind, the less energy they have to give, the less energy they have to shine, the less energy they have for intimacy with others. Any kind of intimacy, I don't care what it is, physical, emotional, sexual, intellectual, the intimacy of love that you share with your kids, your relatives, your friends.
So in dynamic eating psychology, we're looking to identify and gradually starve slowly all the practices and habits that tend to support the surface feminine and the surface masculine. So we're often doing a lot of things that is just solely focused on surface feminine and surface masculine. IE, if my client is doing exercise that they hate,
that's never gonna get them where they want to go. Moving your body in a way that you can't stand, how is that going to lead to you loving your body and enjoying embodiment? So we're gonna look to identify that and gradually slow that down and starve it. If somebody is constantly dieting and dieting and dieting that I'm calling a surface strategy.
Dieting, particularly when it's low calorie dieting. Restrictive dieting doesn't, doesn't work. They gonna starve that people do other things. They have other habits. They create social circles, friendships that are based on, I hate my body, you hate your body. Great, we have something in common.
I wanna starve that kind of practice or habit. Okay? The number one method for healing and unhealthy body image, without a doubt, nothing else even comes close, is embodiment.
The number one method, the number one strategy, nothing comes close for healing. An unhealthy body image is embodiment. It is so simple, my friends. It's the last place we wanna go.
What do I mean by embodiment? Unless, say it again, because this is so important.
You're gonna have to really learn what this means for you. You're gonna have to explore this more and more and more for you, for your clients. Embodiment is the act of inhabiting one's body. Get in it. It's being in and with your body on the body's own terms. Your body has its own terms. Like stop it. Stop trying to make it be something different. You can't starve the body and expect it to be healthy. You can't hate on your body and expect it to respond with love and health and energy and healing.
Your body has its own terms. Your body gets tired. Are you gonna push it after that? Your body is hungry or you're gonna deny it. Your body needs pleasure. Are you gonna starve at a pleasure? Your body needs nourishment. The body needs love. Just does.
You show me any body that's been denied love. I will show you a person that's not so happy.
Embodiment means discovering and experiencing the innate pleasure of the body. Your body has innate pleasures. Many that you know of because you've experienced. My guess is your body has other pleasures or level of pleasure and joy and satisfaction that you haven't experienced yet. Just as there are probably other levels of satisfaction in life that you and I haven't experienced yet. Because life keeps giving us more experience.
Think of life as a series of experience. We're here to experience. And through that experience, we're here to learn and grow from such experience. Sometimes our experiences aren't easy, they're challenging, and we have to learn how to grow from that. Sometimes our experiences are really good and we have to learn how to be present to that 'cause we grow from the goodness as well. Embodiment means embracing the natural expression of the body. Here's the thing, my friends, the body houses our emotions. So embodiment. Part of embodiment is means experiencing your emotions. Whatever they are. Feeling this, feeling that embodiment is about movement. Whatever that means for any human being. It's about all the sensations In any given day, moment, hour, minute, you're experiencing sensations. Are you present to it?
It's embracing the flow of symptoms. Yep. Got a pain here today. Got a pain there today. Yep. A cold today. Yep. Stuff. Sinuses today. Yep. A headache today. Yep. My period today. Yep. I feel great today. Whatever it is. The body has nuances. The body's constantly talking. The body has desires, it wants things. The body has discomforts. It doesn't like other things. It embracing it all, conducting it all, experiencing it all. Learning how to be with it all. So the net result is, Hey, I'm okay.
It's not always gonna be fun. It's not always gonna be perfect. But if we're constantly bracing ourselves and hating on the body and abandoning the body, then there's not gonna be any goodness.
Far too many humans, my friends have abandoned ship to some degree. They have stepped out of the body.
They're not a hundred percent in. They might be 10% in 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, I don't know.
And we abandoned the body. We stopped taking care of it. We stopped loving on it. We stopped noticing it. We stopped paying attention to what it's telling us. We stopped noticing the food we're putting in and how it's affecting us. We stop notice, noticing the drugs we put in and how it affects us. We start, stop noticing the prescription medications we're taking us and how that affects us. We stop noticing the symptoms that if we just stopped and listened, like, oh, hey, I'm feeling this. I'm feeling that. We stop noticing our pleasures. Why? Because we've abandoned the body. If you stop, if you Don't wanna experience pain, if you don't wanna experience discomfort and you shut that off, guess what? You're gonna shut off pleasure. You're gonna shut off the goodies. You can't just shut off the experience of pain from the body. You can't shut it off. You can't just avoid it. 'cause pleasure and pain is a package deal.
Try to avoid one. You will naturally be avoiding the other. You'll be starving yourself. So we abandoned the body for good. Reason why? Because at some point it was too painful to be in. Why? Because at some point somebody says something mean, somebody harmed us, somebody abandoned us.
Someone said the wrong thing to us. Someone did the wrong thing to us. Someone crossed a boundary, someone harmed us physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually, whatever it was. And we abandoned the body. 'cause it's too painful to be here. I get it.
Our job is to get back in, is to land back in the body and agree to be here. So, so, so, So, so, so what does this all mean? What some, Here's some examples of acts of embodiment
And, and forgive me if these are obvious to you, but sometimes we just need to say them to each other. And this list could be Miles long acts Of embodiment, dance, Movement, Exercise, yoga, nourished eating, expressing one's emotions, consciously breathing, awareness of sensations. Just noticing what's in your vision. Taking in the colors, noticing the sounds, taking in the sounds.
Pleasure in any form is an act of embodiment, sensual, and sexual expression. That's an act of embodiment. Listening to your body, wisdom and intuition. Hmm, what do I need today? Do I need to go to bed early? Do I need to sleep later? Do I need to drink some more water? Like, like listen to your body. Wisdom and intuition. That's embodiment. Honoring our symptoms. Oh my God, I got a headache. Let me just take an aspirin. Okay, fine. You could take an aspirin, but, huh? Where did that headache come from? All right, I have four glasses of wine today. I usually don't have that much. Oh, connection. So you're honoring the symptom. You're listening to it for what it teaches you. That's embodiment. Conscious attention to clothing and an adornment. A lot of people already do that. That's embodiment. Any kind of body care practice that you do.
Putting healthy things, oils, lotions,
on your body, body care, practice, bathing, cleansing, showering, cultivating any sport, Any physical skill or activity. That's an act of embodiment. We talked about the five senses, especially touch, massage, any kind of touch that's embodiment. Receiving touch, giving touch, paying more attention to my posture. Oh, why? Because the more your spine is erect, the clearer you can think and feel. And notice you have more cognition. You literally have more IQ points if you're trying to learn something when your body, when your spine is aligned and straight as opposed to hunched over and curved, embracing and listening to music that's embodiment. Playing music. Just being moved by your surroundings, being moved by art, being moved by beauty in, in any of its forms. Beauty in another human being. Beauty in sound, beauty in nature, you know, uh, beauty in noticing an interaction that's loving between two people. Just, just breathing that in. That's embodiment. Being present when you're in nature, immersing yourself in the water, in the sun, being truly present with an animal, you're embodying. Simply being aware of the body and present in it in any given moment is embodiment, my friends.
What helps you be here?
It's the little things I hope you're starting to see.
It's all the little things that happen throughout the day because you're in a body all day long.
And what happens is, if you're looking at this list, most people throw this list out the window and they think embodiment means when I look a certain way and weigh a certain amount and shapeshift this body, then I'll be in my body.
Well, how do I do that? I gotta starve it and exercise it to hell. Got it? So that's a lot of people's embodiment, freaking out and worrying about their diet, trying to limit their appetite
and doing exercise that they don't like in general for many people. And that's embodiment to them because that's what we've been taught. If you believe that, if your client believes that they didn't invent that, that's what you've been told by the world, can't avoid it.
So we are learning to expand our definition of embodiment. Embodiment doesn't mean you win the weight loss lottery. Embodiment doesn't mean I'm outside my body, I'm not in it, but as soon as it looks a certain way, I'm in it. No, that's not embodiment, that's magical thinking. That's wishful thinking. That's erroneous thinking. The only way to be in your body and embody is to be in your body and embody right now.
The moment we start to embody in all the little ways, all of a sudden we're present in our physical form, all of a sudden there is a magic that happens. Because, because any way that we love the body generates embodiment and heals body image any way that you're loving on the body anyway. No matter how teeny tiny,
it puts you more in your body. It helps you embody. It helps you be here. Love gets us here. Love makes us land here. Love makes us wanna be here.
I mean, I'm not saying anything new that poets and philosophers haven't been saying forever, that lovers haven't been saying forever. You know this. How many people do you know? It's like, I just wish I had love in my life.
People who don't have love in their life, that's hard. Easy to not like life. Easy to get down and depressed and easy from that place to wanna look for love. Absolutely. We look for love. Why? Because love makes it much more fun to be here. When you're in a loving relationship, when you have love in your life in any way, shape, or form, damn, it makes life better. Your friends are loving on you. Your kids are loving on you. Your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whoever is loving on you. Heck, you get a dog. And the dog loves you. Life is better.
Love invites us into the body, which love invites us into the world. So as soon as there's love in our life, we actually wanna be here.
And I mean, be here like in the soul lesson way. We agree to be here more because that's worth it.
So once again, people naturally intuit people who are hating on their body naturally intuit, damn, if I only love my body, I'd really want to be here. And they are so correct. If you've ever had that thought, if I only love my body, wow, life would be so much better. You are so correct. But here's where you're wrong.
And in order for me to love my body, it has to look exactly like this. Hmm. That's where people fall off the wagon. That's conditional love. You don't wanna be in a relationship with a person who is conditionally loving you like that. You don't want to have friends who, okay, glad to see you today. Um, I brought the scale with me and I'm now going to put you on this scale by the way, before we, you know, go out and have a great day together. Um, it it's, I just wanna say, if you've gained a pound, I hate you. Um, if you weigh the same, eh, it's okay. Uh, if you lost a pound, then we can be friends.
That would suck. You don't wanna be loved like that. But that's what a lot of us do with self. We're constantly carrying the scale with us and using that to determine, am I lovable? Very conditional. So once again, any way that you love the body, any way your client loves their body, generates embodiment, gets us in the body. Because love invites us on to the freaking planet. It makes it desirable to be here, loving any form from your partner, your husband, your wife, your pet, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your friends, your relatives. Love makes us want to be here.
When we begin to do acts of self-love that helps us embody and it heals our body image.
We have to do some work on ourselves. Our clients have to do a little work on self. That's just the name of the game.
Embodiment heals body image, my friends. It is literally as simple as that. This is the royal road. You wanna know how to get there. This is how you do it. Embodiment. You're sitting there with a client who hates their body. They can't stand their body. I want you sitting there thinking you don't say to them, ha ha, you need to embody that heals your body image. They're gonna know what you're saying.
It's not your job to teach them what I've taught you. It's your job to notice where they are on the continuum of life and gradually invite them into acts of embodiment. Great. Mr. And Mrs. Client, I wanna help you get where you want to go. You wanna shapeshift your body. Looks like you've truly got weight to lose. I want to help you get there. And you know something. Here's what I've noticed about you. All the ways you've been trying to get there. You've been starving your body. You've been exercising it like crazy. You've been dieting it like mad. You look at your body and you don't have a lot of good things to think about it or say about it. Now I know you know that you wanna shift your body, you wanna make it look different. So you're gonna love yourself and you're gonna be happier. So the whole goal of you having a body you want is that you could love yourself and you're gonna be happier. You're gonna have a better life. You're gonna be happier, and you're gonna love yourself and you're gonna be the real you. Well, here's the thing. If you're hating yourself and doing unhappy practices, starvation, diet, exercise that doesn't work for you, looking in the mirror and saying the most awful things in your own head to your own self, how could a journey and a road of self hate and self attack and self denial possibly lead to a destination of happiness and self-Love doesn't work like that. If you want to end up in a destination of self-love, self-love has to be present along the way more and more and more, my friends, this is the last road that most people want to take 'cause they don't know how to love themselves. And loving ourselves, liking ourselves ain't easy if we're not there. It's not. And it's not easy for good reason because we've been practicing self-hate, self-attack, self-rejection about the body for a long time because that's what the world has taught us. So it's not easy. I get it. So it's the last road most people want to take because we wanna believe, just let me push the weight loss button. Just let me push the shapeshift button. Let me look like this person, that person, the other person. Then I will be like them glamorous and happy and people will be taking pictures of me and putting me on magazines. Trust me, they're not any happier. I know them. I work with them. It's very interesting what we think, um, about the beautiful people. So embodiment, heal, body image. It's that simple. My friends, this is the rural road. So with your clients who are body image challenged, you're gonna be thinking baby steps, little acts of self-love. Yes. We're gonna help you as best we can, doing all the right little tweaks to lose the weight, Mr. And Mrs. Client. And we're going to be doing tiny acts of self nourishment along the way. Tiny acts that affirm that it's okay for you to be in your body. It's okay for you to start loving your body. In fact, you're gonna love your body. Here's what I want for you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein. I want you to love your body into change as opposed to hate it interchange as opposed to attack it into change as opposed to look at it and say nasty things about it and hope that that's gonna change. Really, if you want someone to change and behave different,
do you attack them fiercely and dramatically? No. You might give 'em a little feedback. You might give 'em a little open-hearted words and say, Hey, you know, I wish you could do this. I, I wish you can do that. You wanna put a little love into the equation.
If we don't love ourselves into change, then we're not gonna get where we wanna go.
When it comes to being happy about the body. It's as simple as that. Okay, A couple of false beliefs about healing body image. I just want to name them. We're gonna, we've said them. I wanna collect them in one place. Some of the false beliefs we have about healing body image, we believe we can heal body image by changing the body. Aha. The body's changed. Huh? If I had a hundred dollars for every time I have met a person or had a client who thought that they could heal their body image by changing their body and they changed their body to what they said they wanted to change it to, and they were still unhappy about a hundred bucks. For every client or person that I've met who does that, I would be a very wealthy human.
Whew. It is such a false, toxic, dietary, nutritional life belief. And people are freaking seduced by it.
They're hypnotized by it. It's like a spell that the evil warlock witch has put on us.
A lot of us believe that we can heal body image just by losing weight. That'll make me love myself.
You know, many humans, not all, many humans are carrying around extra weight because they don't love themselves.
The weight is not the problem. The weight is just a symptom of I don't love myself. I don't wanna be here. I don't like my life. I don't like the world. This is a crazy place. I don't like my upbringing. I don't like men. I don't like women. I don't like this. I don't like that. I don't like myself. Oh, but if I lose weight, all of that will change. No weight has nothing to do with it. We believe we can heal body image through diet or nutrition. Ugh. How many people have I seen over the years who they started studying? Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. Really their issue is, I hate my body. Really? They wanna study nutrition because they wanna find the secret to something. 'cause they think the science of nutrition will heal the psychology of our relationship with food. That's the biggest nonsense ever invented.
And like I said, there's so many people, understandably, you've only been given, people have only been given the nutrition universe to understand our relationship with food. There just, there's not enough work out there. There's not enough information. There's, there hasn't been a body of work. Work that says, okay, yes, nutrition, here's all the nutrition for sure. Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. There's tons of nutrition. There's not a lot about the mind, heart, and the soul of the eater. There's not a lot about the psyche of the eater, the psychology of eating, the, our relationship with food and with body, which is connected to our relationship with every aspect of life. That's why I created this work. There was this huge need. I'm going, oh my goodness. Like what a big, huge missing piece. So all the people who are hating on their body, trying to change their weight, trying to change their over reading, their emotional eating, their anorexia, their bulimia, their whatever, they turn to nutrition
over the years, I gotta tell you, I've, I've mentored many, many dieticians. Many dieticians, and majority of them being young women. And those dieticians, so many of them went into dietetics, went into the field because of a challenging relationship with food and body, hoping that dietetics would help me there. Sure they have an interest in nutrition 'cause it's interesting.
But the secret hope is that this is gonna help my relationship with food. And honestly, it does the opposite. It makes it worse because it just, it takes the human and reduces them to a bunch of chemical processes. You know? Yes, the field of dietetics is changing, but far too slow for my taste. Um, and there's a leading edge in that field that's embracing all the goodness and all the new stuff. But traditionally, nutrition, the fields of nutrition, the fields of dietetic don't address the human, the soul, the heart in us. Okay? We also falsely believe that we can heal body image by having a body that we believe is more acceptable to others. So many people have a challenged body image in a weird way. What the, what one of the key drivers is for them is when I have this kind of body than you will accept me. He will accept me. She will accept me. Finally, they will accept me. All the men, all the women, my mother, my father, the invisible people out there we're trying to please someone or someones. So I could only please these invisible peoples or these real peoples. If I could somehow please them, ugh, then I'll love myself.
Hmm, interesting. If you had to please others in order to love yourself, you would have 10 full-time jobs of trying to please people. And you've probably tried that. That doesn't, doesn't work. We also falsely believe we can heal body image and find a place of body love by hating the body into change. It's the most illogical approach. And it's understandable 'cause that's what we've been taught. The world tells us hate on your body, criticize it, critique it. 'cause that's kind of what the world does. So we take it on. We assume that programming as our own, and we falsely believe that I can end up loving my body by hating it. If I hate it enough, I attack it enough, at some point, I'm gonna love it. Ouch. Hmm. I mean, imagine if you were in relationship with a person like that who's saying to you, you know something, I really wanna love you. I wanna love you like no other love. But in order to get there, I'm gonna spend a long time hating you. 'cause I know if I keep hating you and hating you and hating you, one day I'm gonna wake up. I'm gonna love you. So just, just, just hang in there with me, honey, while I'm gonna be hating you, I'm gonna be saying some nasty things to you. I'm gonna be treating you bad, but, but, but, but don't. Yeah. But it's gonna eventually turn to love. Like one day it's like we're, we're gonna wake up and it's gonna be love. You wouldn't do that. And if you're considering doing it, please let me know first, because I'm gonna tell you not to. But that's what we do to self. And once again, it's understandable because that's how we've been taught. So, reminder, my friends reminder. Healing body image takes time, years, decades. It's an ongoing journey of self-exploration and self-transformation. You are here to help your client take the next step or two or three or four or five on their journey. You're here to encourage them on their journey, to mentor them, to offer guidance, invent homework assignments.
You cannot have the goal of By the time we finish, my client is gonna love his or her body like no one ever before. We are here to help each other. You don't need to have the ideal body image to help your client. Indeed, by helping others, we help ourselves. You know that by helping ourselves, we help others. It works both ways.
We're just being a community of equals helping each other, supporting each other, cheerleading each other. So you must, I mean this, you gotta be bigger than your client's self-hate towards their own body. You gotta be bigger than that. When I say bigger than that, you gotta watch your client self hating their body. And you can't freak out about it. You can't get stressed out about it. You can't go, oh my God, I gotta fix this, this, otherwise I'm a terrible practitioner.
If you do that, take a deep breath and let it go. It's not your job. That's not what this job is. That's not how life works.
What that means is you wanna look in the mirror and notice where you're thinking. You have to fix your body to love yourself. So as soon as your body image challenge client starts to make you go into fear,
that's your cue to practice as a professional. Relaxing yourself to practice might be really hard for a few clients. Some people, some clients are gonna push your button. Some clients they're gonna remind you of, of, of you. Or they're gonna remind you of something that you definitely don't wanna be. And every client remembers here to teach us they are paying you money so you can learn how to be a better practitioner. That's why you gotta rise up at the same time you're here to give them your best gift. So even though you don't perfectly love your own body, that's okay because as fate would have it, the way humans are designed, it is far easier for us to assess another look at another and help another from a higher place where we're not all self-involved. It's, it's easier to help another oftentimes than it is to help ourselves. You can give amazing advice to your friends about relationship, really great relationship advice for them. Doesn't mean you don't have relationship problems. It doesn't mean you don't fall into all kinds of
potholes in your own relationship. It just means we are often just good. We're often good at helping others along their journey. Great, fine. That's how life has set up the game. So great. Then help people and let them help you.
It goes around and it comes around.
Now here's some information that I want you to start to consider and you're gonna see some of this as we eventually get into some case stories and studies. But I wanna tell you that a person who has an unhappy body image, an unhappy and unhealthy, a negative body image may often be a direct cause or a contributing cause, a direct cause or a contributing cause of somebody's fatigue, of somebody's mood, issues of somebody's digestive, concerns of somebody's weight, challenges of somebody's low immunity and more, I wanna say that again. Someone who has a poor body image that actually might be the cause of their fatigue, their mood issues, their digestive concerns, their weight challenges, their low immunity and more. Just, lemme give you a brief example. I hate my body. I don't love my body. I wanna change my body. When I change my body, they're gonna love myself. Okay? A lot of people have that. Hmm. Okay, so I hate my body. In order for me to love my body, I have to lose weight. Oh my goodness. Fat and food equals fat on my body. I better eat low fat. 'cause if I eat low fat, then that means I have less fat on my body and I might lose weight, which means I will be lovable, which means I will love myself. So a person adopts a toxic nutritional belief. Fat and food equals fat on my body. Why? They wanna lose weight. Why? Because if I lose weight, then I'll be lovable. So all of a sudden you adopt a low fat or a fat free ish diet that can lead to the symptoms called fatigue, low energy, mood issues, digestive concerns. Um, you will have low assimilation of fat-soluble nutrients such as vitamin D, vitamin E. Um, you're gonna be lacking in essential fatty acids. That's gonna impact hormone production. That's gonna impact brain power, that's gonna impact estrogen. Testosterone being fat deficient can lead to weight loss resistance. It could lower your immunity. It could lower your threshold for dealing with stress. It can cause a person to be more stress sensitive. It could impact the health of your hair, your skin and your nails. And then that person might come to a doctor or a practitioner and a practitioner does all these tests like, oh my God, you're, you're fat deficient. You're low in vitamin D, you're low in vitamin E.
Ah, let me give you a supplement. Ah, you have to put more fat in your diet and they send you home. And of course you're not gonna do that 'cause you're living in a fear of fat in food because fat and food equals fat on my body and I'm trying to lose weight because I believe that nobody will love me and I will never love me until I shapeshift my body. So you've created a physiologic condition that originated from a body image issue.
You see what I'm saying? The same holds true of, okay, I don't like my body. I don't love my body. Ah, what's causing the problem? All this fat ha. What makes the fat food? Therefore food equals the enemy. So you're walking around with a toxic nutrition belief called food is the enemy. So one thing you might decide to do is try to eat a little food as possible. Many people what they do is they wake up to their day, they wake up to life and go, don't eat food. Food makes me fat. Fat means I'm unlovable. Food is the enemy. Fat is the enemy. Have to defeat the enemy so I can finally love myself and find true love.
So we try to not eat much breakfast and not eat much, much lunch. And then we end up binge eating in the late afternoon. We end up fatigue and we end up having brain fog. We end up having low mood. We end up having poor digestion or very low energy. And then you go to the doctor.
And the doctor, because they're not trained in this direction, are never gonna notice that all these health issues that you are presenting with are driven by the fact that you hate your body. The person hates their body and they've adopted toxic nutrition. Belief food is, food is the enemy, which means they will adopt the behavior. Don't eat food, starve myself as long as I can, which then causes all these symptoms. You see where I'm going with this? I can keep going and going. We're gonna hear more about this later on. Yet another piece of the puzzle to how a negative body image can impact physiology. You simple, poor body image equals stress. I hate my body. You will go into a physiologic stress response when you say that and when you feel that it is self attack. Anytime the brain registers attack goes into a stress response, that's the smart thing to do. If you're being attacked, you want to be in a physiologic stress response. 'cause you want to be able to fight or flee.
I hate my body. This body is not good enough. I will never find love. You are creating stress chemistry via thoughts. And as you know, stress chemistry, sympathetic nervous system dominance will impact day in, day out calorie burning capacity. It will impact digestion. It'll impact assimilation. It'll impact natural appetite regulation. The more stress you have, the greater chances you can have of having low immunity, low mood.
The more stress we have around body weight, the more we believe in numbers, the more we believe in a number, the scale, and the more you weigh yourself and you gain a pound and you go into more stress, which is more insulin and more cortisol, which signals the body to store weight, store fat, not build muscle, muscle being your calorie burning tissue.
I will at some point do an intellectual intervention with my body image challenge client. Just as I'm telling right now. Here's the stress of a poor body image. Here is what happens when we have self-chosen thoughts that create stress physiology and stress chemistry. Here's what happens in your body. So all I'm saying to you, Mr. Mr and Mr. Alein after I just share with you all these scientific mind cookies, is that if you wanna shapeshift your body, you gotta relax into it more. I know that's not gonna happen overnight 'cause you've been not liking your body for a long time and attacking it and hating it with your words and your thoughts and your actions. So we're gonna slowly turn that around, which means we're gonna slowly turn around your metabolism and your body chemistry and we're gonna shift it in the direction of giving you the greatest probability for reaching your natural weight.
You see what I just did there? I gave him the bad news and then I gave him the good news. Bad news is Mr. Mr. Klein, here's what happens when you are inventing self-created stressful thoughts about your body. Here's the impact of stress on your physiology, on your calorie burning capacity, on your digestion,
on your appetite regulation. It's not helping you get where you want to go. It's actually taking you in the opposite direction. The good news is as we slowly, slowly, it's not gonna change overnight. Mr. And Ms. Klein, as we slowly start to shift that you're gonna be creating the kind of metabolism that puts you in the best part of the probability curve to get where you actually wanna go because you're gonna be more in a relaxation response. And a relaxation response is where you optimally digest and assimilate and regulate your appetite effortlessly. And it gives you your best natural every day, day in, day out, calorie burning metabolism. When I say day in, day out, calorie burning metabolism, I mean your resting calorie burning rate, yes, you will burn more calories for the hour a day that you exercise. But all humans, you don't burn calories, you burn for the average human. You burn the bulk of your calories not in the hour that you exercise. You burn it in the other 23 hours at a day.
So if I'm living in stress chemistry for much of my day, I'm impacting perhaps chances are for many people I'm impacting my calorie burning capacity.
The physiology of a negative body image, the stress of body hate, the belief I hate my body leads us to, we've already mentioned imbalanced dieting,
weird meal timing. I'm trying to skip meals. I'm trying to not eat. We're gonna just deprive ourselves of food. We're gonna deprive ourselves of nourishment, we're gonna deprive ourselves we calories 'cause food is the enemy.
We may have a macronutrient imbalance because a lot of people believe fat and food equals fat on my body still, others don't naturally think this, but they think of protein containing foods as also more dense in calories and therefore they're going to avoid protein, which for many people takes them in the opposite direction of where they want to go. Not all stress, the body hate. If you are depriving yourself of food and you're depriving yourself of nutrition, eventually you will binge eat or ov eat or emotionally it's go. It's predictable. You could set your watch by it. Having a negative body image can drive many people to over exercise. Over exercise. Stress induced
over exercise can impact the body. So even though you're working out like crazy, it actually starts to take you in the other direction because you're not listening to your body wisdom and all this creates more stress. So it's an endless cycle that we have to do our best to remove ourselves from.
So let's close this conversation with a few important thoughts.
Again, a negative body image will drive dietary behaviors that will impact our dietary choices, which will then impact our metabolism.
Impact our metabolism means impact our health, our mood, our digestion, our immunity, our energy level, our calorie burning capacity, our appetite regulation,
the dietary choices that we make that are driven by, I hate my body as we've just seen, can lead to binge eating, overeating, emotional eating. And then we think we have a binge eating or an overeating or emotional eating problem. But what we have is actually the brain demanding. The brain driving you physiologically. The brain is screaming. It thinks you are starving. Your brain loves you. Your central nervous system loves you. It's going, oh my God, this poor creature, he, she is starving and not eating food. Let me help this person by screaming hungry. 'cause if we don't start eating, we're gonna get real sick and we're gonna die of starvation. So that's what the brain is thinking. So your brain loves you, so your brain's gonna scream, eat.
And that feels like binge eating or over reading or emotion eating. And it is, but it's physiologically driven.
And that physiologic drivenness can be traced back to the original belief that this body's unlovable. The feeling called, I hate my body. The belief that I can only love my body once it changes and I have to hate my body and to change.
So all the while our attempts to lose weight so we can have a happier body and a happier life and a better body image. It's actually working against us and our frustration increases. And then your client comes to you with a lot of failed attempts. The good news is you are here to help your client break this endless cycle. And it is an endless cycle. And I've seen people in their eighties still in this cycle.
That's where you come in. That's where you're offering something different. That's where you're seeing something different. That's where you're doing something different. That's where you understand that the royal road to healing, embodiment to healing body image is embodiment. And every act of self-love, self nourishment helps us embody, helps us want to be here. So we have to love our body into the life that we want. Not hate it. So you have to walk your client there in baby steps.
That's your job. What a good job to have.
This is the end of our part two for body image, but ugh, we're just beginning. There's more to come after Part two comes part three. I appreciate you hanging in there with this conversation. This is some good stuff. I think. Um, we're learning. We're learning the deeper ways of seeing this whole body image thing so we can understand it. So we can start to heal it from the roots as opposed to hacking away at the weeds and the branches that don't really get us anywhere. So be kind to yourself. Relax, go slow. Change doesn't happen overnight. You're not gonna learn this all at once. We're still laying a foundation. You're gonna get some techniques. Great job, my friends. Thanks for hanging in there. I'll see you real soon. On the other side.

PART 3

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Greetings. Once again, friends. Mark David here, founder of the Institute, your guide on this educational journey. Here we are in part three of four in our intro conversation to body image. I wanna jump in right now to speaking about the royal archetypes and body image. This is so, so, so, so, so, so helpful. What I wanna say to you right off the bat is that understanding the king, queen, prince, and princess archetypes can help us when it comes to body image. It can help us, my friends, with a lot of things in life. And here we're gonna focus in on body image. These can help us, help our clients to reimagine their body in a whole new way, and perhaps finally have some breakthroughs, some openings. I find that this can be extremely effective and rewarding for women. It can be extremely effective and rewarding actually, for men as well, especially men in the king age of things. And you know, on one level, this is really about the power of story. This is the story of who we are as human beings. This is the story of our potential. This is the story about who we are and what we represent at different life stages. Stories can transform us, as you know,
and as you've seen, you know, body images, how we imagine the body. So when we begin to embrace stories about the body,
a new imagination about the body that's easily absorbable for us, that can help heal body image. So I'm excited about this conversation because we're gonna take some of the concepts we've already learned about King, queen, prince, princess, and move them into the realm of body image. So let's start with the ladies. Let's start with the queen and princess, and remind ourselves who they are and why they are so important, because they just are. So, as a reminder, the queen archetype is dignified. She sits on her throne womanly, author of her experience, poised self-cure royal giving bestowing. She owns her queendom. She enjoys her beauty. She enjoys what she has. She knows life is short. She's aware, she serves others. And in turn, she is served. She's generous with her energy. She's generative. She's a creator just by giving of herself. A queen doesn't need anyone's approval, especially when it comes to her body and her looks. Remember, we're a queen in training from age 40 to 49. Age 50 and above is time to sit in the throne. Now, let's talk about the early stages in the life of a female human. The princess archetype age, oh, pretty much. Zero to 30 is, you know, the time of the earlier and mid princess. 30 to 39 is very late princess. So the princess archetype, when it's a young female, she is new to the world, and she is asking the logical questions. Who am I? Am I okay? Am I lovable? Do you love me? Am I safe? How do I win your approval?
The princess wants to be loved and approved of all children want to be loved and approved of. When it comes to the princess archetype, there is an special energy in this archetype. We're calling in an archetype. It's a timeless form, a timeless blueprint that is passed down to us through eons of time. To the princess. Her fantasy is often her reality. So of course, to the young mind, the young mind has a rich, rich, rich inner world. Fantasy is very important to children. Fantasy is important to the young princess. For the young princess. Her true inner world is as yet discovered. She hasn't found it yet. Why? 'cause she's young. That's just the way life is.
The young princess wants to know how you can benefit me, what you can give her, what you have to offer her. She's also starting to understand that on a certain level, her value is in her looks.
She is taught that by the world. She is oftentimes taught that by the archetype itself. The beauty of the young feminine. For the young princess, it's about comfort.
The young princess often has the notion that she needs to be rescued. Why? Because she is not as as physically strong as the masculine. The masculine is presented as the hero, as the knight in shining armor. She is the one who is softer and is to be saved, is to be rescued. I'm not saying you should believe these things. I am naming and describing the archetype as it has been presented to us in various ways, throughout story, throughout fairytale, throughout the ages. I just want you to get that. The princess is wondering, who is my role model? She doesn't quite ask that necessarily, but all youngsters, they wanna know who their role model is. She wants to know, how do I become a real human, a real woman.
So she will look to the older girls, the older women in her environment as her role models.
She wants to know how she steps into her girlhood, her womanhood more and more.
So once again, the princess archetype is the natural state of the feminine. Up until her late thirties, this stage of the feminine needs a level of protection. Nurturance needs to be loved. In this stage, the princess needs to be cultivated, meaning she needs a culture around her that allows her to step into her potential. Once again, the princess by nature is vulnerable. She's constantly getting put to sleep in curses. She's constantly getting poisoned by a needle or by an apple. She's being holed up in a castle somewhere. She's out in the woods somewhere. Being protected. The princess by nature is vulnerable. This is important, my friends, to understand the young feminine is vulnerable. It is vulnerable to all input from the environment. It is vulnerable to that which is toxic to it. Therefore it needs to be protected. But more so than protected, it needs to be nurtured. The young feminine, the princess archetype, needs to know it needs the clear information from the outside. You are loved, you are accepted. You are good enough as you are, who you are is lovable. That's princess food. That is princess food for the soul. Because you know what the young mind does that the young mind eventually interjects. It assimilates. It absorbs the messages that it gets from the outside, from the world, from all the other voices, the voices of parents, teachers, culture, heroes, heroines. The princess takes those voices and makes those her own. So when she is told you are loved, you are good enough as you are, what you are is beautiful, it's acceptable, is wonderful. She will take that message and make it her own. If she is told you are not enough as you are, you are not okay, you don't look as we need you to look.
She will take those messages and make those her own. So the Princess, by nature, is very vulnerable to input from her early environment.
Let's just invoke a few fairytales just so we can get an understanding of how this might play out and how now, some of the characters that came before us have encoded the Princess archetype. In story, we'll mention the princess and the P. We'll mention Sleeping Beauty. We'll mention Rapunzel for now. Let's talk about the princess and the P. Remember that? So the princess and the P, it's essentially the story of here's the princess, and she wants to get a good little nap. So she lies down on the mattress, and basically she becomes very aware that there's a bump. There's a bump somewhere. This isn't comfortable. Now she doesn't know this, but somewhere there's a pee, a little pee, tiny little grain, a legume or whatever it's called, and it's under her mattress. And it's that tiny little thing that's making her uncomfortable. So the Royal Court puts another mattress on top of that mattress, and she could still feel the discomfort. I'm uncomfortable, puts another mattress on top of that mattress. I'm uncomfortable. I can still feel it. Something's wrong. They keep piling and piling and piling up mattresses, and it never quite work out for the comfort. And it doesn't look so good in terms of getting a nice nap. Now, you'll learn this as your, as a kid, what's useful from it. Let's pull some good psychological transformational content from this. First of all, there's an importance of comfort. And for the young princess that is, okay, this is a stage where the young female needs to learn about that, which makes it feel nourished and comfortable, and that which makes it feel discomfort.
So there's an exquisiteness to the sensitivity of the princess. She is sensitive. This is important. The tale is often used to disparage this. This particular tale often disparages the princess. It speaks to her sensitivity.
Many humans, male and female, we'll talk about the princess. Now, the young feminine is extremely sensitive. It's sensitive in body, it's sensitive in feelings, it's sensitive in emotions, it's sensitive in its hearing, it's sight, touch, sound, all of it. Smell, taste. The feminine loves to distinguish between taste, that it enjoys textures that it enjoys. There's an exquisite sensitivity to the feminine that can especially show up when it's young.
So there's a place where that needs to be cultivated and understood for what it is.
There's also something here about the importance of innocence. She's trying to sleep. The girl's trying to get some sleep. She's trying to lie on a mattress and sleep. Oftentimes in fairytales, sleep is about descent into the unconscious realms. It's descent into the dream world, and it's often symbolic of the need for innocence. Sleep is innocence. How innocent are we as humans when we're sleeping? How vulnerable are we as humans when we're sleeping? It doesn't matter who you are, what you are, how big you are, strong, you are rich, you are, we all need to sleep. Sleep is this very innocent, vulnerable, hopefully comfortable state. So the princess needs to maintain her innocence. She's trying to maintain her innocence. And there's a disturbance.
The disturbance of the princess
is the dis, the disturbed princess is being. She's being disturbed by the world. She's being disturbed by life. She's waking up out of pure innocence because the world isn't so innocent when we're young, it is ideally, there's a level where we need to maintain our innocence. You can't mature a young person too fast. You can't be giving them all kinds of responsibilities to do. The young person needs to live in their fantasy world. They need to live in their world of play. They need to live in their world of metaphor. They need to live in their world of magic.
You can't harm them or maim them or hurt them or traumatize them at an early age because that that completely harms them. It harms their growth. It harms their future unfoldment. She's trying to maintain her innocence. And we're also seeing at the same time in this fairytale, how it is easy for the princess energy in her need to express her sensitivity in her need to feel comfort. Comfort means safety.
Safety means I'm okay. So the princess needs to know I'm safe. I'm okay, which often means comfort. She's exquisitely sensitive. Good. We want our humans, our young humans, to be sensitive. We want them to grow up and have sensitivity that they can distinguish and manage and regulate. We want our young ones, we want our young princesses to have their innocence up until the time that they're ready to mature into something different. But this tale reminds us that the princess energy can become perfectionist, and all of a sudden you've got a dozen mattresses and she's still uncomfortable. It's gotta be perfect. It's gotta be perfect. So we're getting all different sides of the feminine here. It's gotta be perfect, gotta be perfect. It's still not perfect. Still not perfect. I gotta lose one more pound from here. I gotta lose a half pound. I gotta lose five pounds, whatever it is. So it's just showing us that we can lapse into perfectionism
if we don't pay attention, if those around us don't support us in a mature way. And there's a little bit of dryness, there's a little bit of humor in the impermanence and the futility of it all. The futility of trying to have that perfect moment of comfort, the futility of trying to maintain our innocence. There's a place where, yeah, we lapse into perfectionism. There's a place where we just can't get perfectly comfortable. There's a place where for certain aspects of the princess archetype, it will never be pleased.
Do you know that aspect of the princess archetype? It's n there. There's never enough. They're never pleased.
The princess has to learn. The young princess has to learn. When enough is enough, let's stop at the third mattress maybe. So we're seeing different sides of the young feminine. It is not good or bad, it's just here's our humanity and all the range of it. Sleeping. Beauty, this is an interesting one. Just take those two words. Sleeping, beauty. So there's many different ways to play with this and interpret this. Let's start with this. Beauty, sleeping beauty. Beauty that is asleep cannot express its fullness, cannot Step into its full power. That is good because remember, sleep represents innocence. So beauty needs sleep time. Beauty needs time when it's innocent because at some point the beautiful princess is going to people gonna want her and desire her and take things from her and take her and steal her and kidnap her and marry her and baby her. All these things. So you're gonna have to deal with all this nonsense. So you don't wanna start that out too young. You want to give beauty. It's time of innocence. You wanna let beauty sleep a little bit before you start sexualizing it. Notice what happens at a younger and younger age just blows my mind. Some of the, some of the professional models that you see in some of the women's magazines, they're 13, 14, 50 years old, where sexualizing girls at a very, very young age in terms of, I, I'm blown away at how parents are, are dressing girls who are 10, 11 years old. We're not giving beauty. Its innocence. And when we do that, there's a distortion and we grow up unhealthy. Now also, notice, you know, sleeping beauty falls into a curse bottom line. And the girl's asleep. What awakens her? How does she awaken? The sleeping feminine? The innocent feminine that's not yet awakened needs to be touched by the pure masculine. So the prince comes, the prince kisses the princess. Really what that is, is the masculine energy. The masculine energy in the universe. The masculine energy in the heterosexual universe outside of us touches the feminine. The first guy she falls in love with just changes everything. So if you're a woman, think of the first time you fell in love or fell in infatuation. Just all these new feelings awaken. So the feminine, in order to evolve and grow, needs to be touched by the pure masculine needs. To begin to understand the masculine in the world, the masculine energy of the world, the masculine energy of the world can be very intense. It could be very mean. It could be very, uh, overpowering. It could be confusing.
The pure masculine energy of the pure prince is kind. It's pure. That masculine energy itself of the pure prince is innocent.
So innocent feminine meets innocent masculine, and is a beautiful alchemy. And throughout the fairy tale, we're seeing the interplay of good and evil, light and dark with the feminine. Because the feminine is always dealing with its own light and dark, with the light and dark of the feminine outside of it. We're always thinking of the guys as the bad guys. Well, there's the goods, the good feminine and the not so good feminine. There's the good intention feminine and the not so good intention feminine. And the young princess needs to understand that there are females queens older than her, princesses older than her, that are not innocent, that will not protect her. Yes, she was supposed to be protected by her family, but once she's out in the world, there are energies, masculine and feminine that are not always on her side.
Let's briefly look at Rapunzel. Okay, so here's a girl. Um, she's taken from her parents in infancy by kind of a not so nice lady, a evil older lady who through a series of events, ends up twisting the arm of the father. So he's gonna give the infant baby to this lady who's not so nice. And the bad lady ends up taking Rapunzel and raises her. And when Rapunzel turns 12, evil lady puts her in a castle way on top of a tower and steals her away from the world. So right off the bat, we're seeing the timeless wound in the feminine lineage. So the feminine lineage has its wounds, so does the masculine, but we just have to be aware of it that there are wounds that are passed on from mother to daughter. There's wounds that are passed on from father to son. There's goodness that's passed on from mother to daughter. So in this case, she never knows her real, real mother. She's raised by the feminine that doesn't have her best interests in mind. So here's the protection paradox. She wasn't really protected. She was taken away, and now she's locked away. So she's being more than protected. She's being imprisoned.
That often happens to the feminine energy. What's it's when the feminine princess energy has been wounded, it becomes locked away. It goes deep down inside. The pure natural feminine that the princess will evolve into is stunted. It's hidden. It goes deep. The wound goes deep.
Now, in order for the evil lady to visit Rapunzel, who's still under her care, in order for her to get up to the castle, up to the top where Rapunzel is, Rapunzel has to let down her hair. And oh, witch climbs up the hair. And that's how she gets up to the castle, huh? What's that about? Letting down the hair is about revealing the feminine energy. Letting down the hair is revealing the mature feminine energy. You know, think of all the movie scenes where you know, the lady has her hair and her all kind of pulled back and knotted up and got the glasses on, and then all of a sudden the glasses come off and the hair comes down. And you're looking at a completely different human being who is also more powerful in her feminine energy. So when we let the hair down, that's letting out the pure, now more mature feminine energy that has a whole different power. Beauty has a power. Feminine energy has a power. We don't always acknowledge that we wanna be politically correct. The masculine has its versions of power. The feminine has its versions of power. If you want to argue the power of classic beauty, you can. But just notice throughout all of human history, the power of beauty to move, the power of beauty to move people. It's okay. It's very human. Me, you know, the tail goes back and forth. Eventually, a young prince notices the witch climbing up the hair and realizes, oh, that's all I gotta do. Hang out outside the bottom and say, Rapunzel, let down your hair. And one day he, he does that. Rapunzel thinks it's the old lady. He climbs up, they fall in love, and then they go back and forth rescuing each other a few times because they each befall certain challenges. But the bottom line is the masculine and the feminine end up continuously saving each other.
There's a certain sweetness to that tail because there's times when the feminine does need a bit of a rescue from the masculine. There's times when the masculine does need a bit of a rescue from the feminine, maybe in your own life or talk to your friends, people that you know, people that you're close with oftentimes will have interactions, relationships, affairs. Where the other person was, was a bit of an angel. They really provided something for us. There was a little bit of rescue in there somewhere. We do that for each other now, where there's a princess, there's always a witch. My friends pick a fairytale. You show me a princess, there's always a witch around the corner. What's that about?
The witch archetype? My friends, it's the b***h. There you have it. Think of the b***h. You know, we say, we use the term, oh, gcis such a b***h. And we say that like it's an insult, but quite the opposite. It's a fact, it's an archetype. The b***h is an archetype. Like any archetype, use it when you need it and don't use it when you don't need it. Some people get stuck in their b***h archetype. Some people get stuck in their witch archetype. They don't always express some of the other aspects of their archetype. You could be a sister archetype, you could be a best friend archetype. You can be the good princess archetype. You can be the good queen archetype. And you could be in your witch or your b***h archetype as needed.
So by the way, in the positive, the b***h or the witch in us is able to use her anger, is able to use her power to say, no, I don't want that. Get outta my way. This ain't good. I don't like this, I want this. I don't want that. Back off. Classically, the witch archetype, especially as you're gonna think of it, the bad witch is against the light. The bad witch is all about competition. The bad witch competes with all the other feminine. The bad witch wants to win above all else. The bad witch is jealous.
Remember the queen from uh, snow white mirror, mirror on the wall? Who's the fairest of them all? That's a queen of queen age competing with a princess. The mirror says, Hey, you ain't the hottest. It's snow white. Whoops. And that bad queen isn't her bad queen archetype. You can also call that the witch in her. So the witch archetype is self-serving once what she wants. She's got some angry, she's angry, she's hurt. Oftentimes she's wounded. And instead of recoiling from that wound and digging herself into a hole, she makes holy hell. The witch archetype has a lot of power. Good or bad. Got a lot of power. The witch, this is very important to understanding the feminine. I'd love to spend a lot of time on this. The witch casts her spells. So witches in the fairytales, they're always casting spells and usually it's a bad spell and they're putting somebody to sleep. A prince, a princess, a king, a queen. What the spell thing points to is that the feminine can cast a spell. You've seen this, you've seen when certain women can cast a spell over certain people, over other, over men, over some women. They have their little magic. They cast their spell. They make you like them. They make you do things for them. They make you see them in a certain way. Now, this isn't a bad thing. We cast spells. The masculine has its way of casting its spells.
The feminine has its particular way of doing it. You can call it manipulation. You can call it psychological control if you want. I like the term spells better. I think it actually says it better. Do you ever have somebody cast a spell on you in relationship and then one day you kind of wake up and you see them completely different and the spell is over? I've can't tell you how many times I've heard men and women say just, just in talking about a relationship, and like one day I woke up and the spell was gone. Something to that effect. I've heard so many people use that term.
So yes, we, and especially here, the feminine can cast a spell. Meaning the feminine has power to make some magic. That's a good thing when we use it for good. So it's interesting to own that.
It's interesting to own for the feminine that you can cast a spell. Chances are you've done it many times and not always for the good. Maybe you've done it for the good as well. Maybe you've done it more times for the good. I don't know. The witch archetype is the b***h. So the positive witch archetype, you know, think of the Wizard of Oz. She protects, she emanates power. She's pro-life. The good witch dressed in white. The good witch rises to stand up to the negative masculine, the bad guy or the negative feminine. The bad girl, the bad king, the bad queen, the bad witch, the bad warlock. They will go to battle. You've seen this, you've seen good women put misbehaving women in their place. You've seen a good strong woman put a misbehaving man in his place. Ask the good witch coming out. They do that. They're strong. They know their power. It takes time. You don't have young good. Uh, here's the thing for the princess. Before she starts stepping into her queen in training stages, she's, she doesn't have which potential yet. When I say which, meaning, you know, good or bad.
So if we think of witch's power, princess doesn't have that witch potential yet because she doesn't have the maturity to understand her own power. So for the princess archetype, she will revert to the b***h, which is the younger version of the witch.
She's just being b****y. She's just being, we call it a little witch. We don't say the little girl's being a big witch. We say she's being a little witch because that's what a little witch does. They be b****y and they really don't know how to be a powerful witch yet. For the good or for the bad.
The healthy princess. Think of, um, star Wars. Think of the princess warrior. Think of Princess Leia. She's a princess warrior. She'll go to battle.
She knows her destiny. She knows she's a leader. She knows she's going to be a queen right now. She's young. She's not in her queen hood yet. But that doesn't stop her from being a royal princess and stepping into a young woman of character who is willing to stand up for the good, who is willing to search for the good, to find the good, to see the good in other people, to recognize when people are not expressing the good. And to stand up to that, that's the princess warrior Cinderella, or most people don't realize about that tale is Cinderella. She works, she's cleaning up, she's cleaning up the ashes, she's cleaning up the fireplaces. She's, she's a, she's a worker bee. And she works really, really hard because that's that particular princess's lot in life. She has to work and she does it without complaint. She does her work with the inner knowing that one day she will benefit from her work. A good princess knows, a healthy princess knows that, yeah, I can work hard, I can study hard and I'm gonna benefit from that work. Snow White. Snow White is a pretty healthy princess. You find her in the woods with the seven dwarfs. She's an apprentice. She's learning, she's cooking, she's serving, she's helping.
She's also kind of overseeing a little bit and starts to realize she's kind of a little bit of a mama too. But she's being an apprentice. She is learning how to fend for herself and to care for those around her in a good way. She's seeing the imperfections in people without judgment. She's hanging around a bunch of dwarfs who are dopey and sneezy and and whatever. And she loves on them despite the fact that they're dopey and sneezy.
She's guided by a higher moral compass that's a healthy princess. So we're gonna be educating our clients, of course, about princess and queen archetypes. We're gonna be pointing out to women over the age of 39. You know this, the futility of trying to be a princess. We're encouraging women under the age of 39 in their positive princess development. Simply put, simply, simply put for your body image challenge queen or princess female.
You can do amazing work just by focusing on helping them be in their age appropriate archetype and helping them understand the goodness of their archetype, the correctness of their archetype. What that archetype is, locate them on the map. Show them you are here of costs. Of course, miss Princess, you are gonna be having challenges with body image in so many ways. That's the stage of life that you're in right now. You're discovering your power. You are discovering your sense of self. The young princess, think of all the young girls you've ever seen. Think of all the little girls you ever seen. They want you to notice them. They want you to see them. They want your approval. They want you to say, I see you and yes, you are beautiful and yes, I love you. And yes, you are lovable. They want that because when they get that message enough and enough and enough, at some point they own the message and they don't need it so much from the outside, of course is nice when it comes, but they don't crave it and hunger for it and they haven't been starved out of it.
So yeah, so you're, you didn't get all those messages Miss Princess, when you were a young, young, young, young, young, young princess. You didn't get enough. You didn't get it the way you needed. More to the point. You got the opposite. More to the point through all the images that you've been bombarded with and the movies and the this and the that and the Disney, you've been given an image that's basically been saying, you are not enough. You are not okay. You are not lovable. This body's no good. That one's better. This one isn't.
So it's kind of like you were poisoned. A bad spell is put over you
and you're now at a time in life where you're gonna be undoing that spell with the help of the people that matter most to you. Certainly we're gonna be doing it in this relationship. That's what I'm here to help with, to help you undo the spell that says, you're not lovable, you're not good. Your body sucks. Yep, I'm fine with you wanting to shapeshift your body. I'm fine with you wanting to change it. Good for you. Absolutely. What a wonderful thing. But we're not gonna shapeshift the body by heating it. We're gonna shapeshift the body by loving it. It's a whole different way to go about our business. And then you're gonna talk about how the journey informs the destination. You know this. How could a journey of self-hate possibly give us self-love at the end? So again, the princess needs ongoing praise and encouragement above all else. So if you have a client of princess age, that's what she needs. Ongoing praise and encouragement.
She needs loving support around knowing and hearing that she is indeed loved and accepted for exactly who she is. Communicate that at the very least silently to her. You through the container that you create of unconditional acceptance.
You could say it straight up, I've said it straight up to clients. Sometimes I'll speak directly to a princess client and I'll say, listen, there is nothing you could do in my eyes that's gonna make you any cooler, that's gonna make you any more lovable, that's gonna make you any more beautiful. Far as I'm concerned. What you got is great and if you wanna shapeshift it, you wanna lose weight, you wanna change your body, I'm all for it. But what I will say is, I am not all for you changing and shapeshifting your body from a place of hate. Because that ultimately doesn't work. Hate is not gonna create love. So for my princess client, I'm always looking to coach her. She's concerned about her body. I get it. She needs to have something else because like the young princess mine, it can fixate, it can step into perfectionism. The virus, the spell that has been put over her is so strong that all she sees and all she feels is the P under the mattress. This ain't good, this ain't good, this ain't good. So she's constantly focused on the P in the mattress and she's constantly focused on perfectionism and constantly focused on, I'm no good. This body is no good. One of the ways to actually break that spell is to get her out of her head. One of the ways to get her out of her head is to find different ways that she can actually start to help and serve others in any way, shape, or form. And no matter what that is, It have to be around body image, around anything. What are her opportunities to volunteer that's attractive to her? What are her opportunities to help any other kind of human being? Young or old? Or what are her opportunities? I don't know. To teach the younger ones the things that she knows how to do. Maybe she's good at art, maybe she's good at gymnastics. Maybe she's good at reading, writing, math, science. I don't care. I don't know. How can she be in a situation where she is cultivating others that is healing food for the young princess who was body image obsessed. So it's all and alongside that, alongside that, to help her get out of her obsession, to help break the spell of perfectionism, to help break the spell of me, me, me, me, me. Not her fault. She's not a bad person. She's under a spell. And the spell comes from the world.
You're a princess client. You gotta encourage and support her in pursuing interests, passions, and talents. You have to find out all her interests, passions, and talents to have her write down an inventory. Everything that piques your interest. Everything, all the different talents you have. I don't care what they are. I don't care if it's, it doesn't matter what it is. If it's braiding hair, great. I wanna know all your talents. I wanna know all the things that you really enjoy doing. No matter how silly you think they are, no matter how inconsequential or small you think they are, I want you to get a list from her of everything. Leave no stone unturned. Interest, passions and talents, persons, places, things, thoughts, feelings, but anything that falls under that category. And then you're gonna go over that list for her and start to see what she can be pushing the pedal to the metal on in terms of including more in her life. Because that's princess food that will help her grow and transform. Is it directly addressing her body image? No, it's not a direct hit. But you are cultivating her garden. You are helping her step into her potential because her perfectionism, her self hate, her self attack, her toxic belief that I'm not lovable and I'm not good enough, is stunting her. It's stopping her from stepping into her talents, her passion, her power, her potential.
So you're actually doing a strategic strike. Let's just start elevating your passions, your talents and your potential and get it. You doing those more and all of a sudden she's gonna start to feel more powerful. And as you start to feel more powerful, the body image nonsense slowly, slowly dies.
You're gonna look for any and all opportunities to help her embody with a sense of celebration and joy and fun. What is it that this person can do? Baby steps, I don't care what it is, uh, is getting a manicure and a pedicure, doing some dance.
Go into a yoga class. Something that helps her feel good about being in her body, riding a horse, taking a walk, going swimming. Find out what she loves to do in any way, shape, or form. That points to embodiment.
I also wanna notice at some point with my princess client, whose body image challenge how they need to be protected. Protection, protection, protection. They didn't have it. Well, let's start to do more of it then. How much media is she consuming? And from where and what, what websites is she going to? What is she reading? Who is she following? Who is she listening to? There's so much toxic media.
Girls could be spending time on websites teaching them how to be anorexic. I kid you not. So it's protection from the kinds of media, the kind of people and the kind of environments that reinforce her wound, that reinforce the unrealistic images and expectations of what she needs to look like. Who are the friends that she has that really aren't being good friends, who are not loving on her enough?
Is she in a relationship that's toxic to her? How do you talk to her about that? So it's seeing where you can help her protect herself and you knowing that you are here to notice how you can help her have stronger emotional and psychic and media immune system immune filters.
Because sometimes it just takes a little bit of changing of social circle. Sometimes it takes a little bit of changing of how we're spending our time with media.
And that's a big baby step in the right direction. The queen or queen in training needs a clear understanding of what indeed it means to be a queen and why she needs to celebrate letting go of the princess stage. So for my queen clients, they're getting an intellectual intervention for my queen age clients who are in the princess stage still, they're getting an intellectual intervention by no later than the third session.
Generally speaking, for me, you can wait longer. You have to feel comfortable.
And I don't mess around. Because if you want to bring out the queen and a queen, you talk to her like she's a queen. You talk to her like she understands what you're saying. You talk to her like she's a mature adult.
You evoke the queen in her by talking to the queen in her. Granted, she's sitting there acting like a princess, even though she's 50. It happens. And why does it happen? 'cause that's how the world taught her the world. Put a spell on her. You are here I am here we are here to break. The spell queen has to understand that it's time for her to serve and
time for her to step into time for her to ascent her throne. The queen in training or the queen needs to start delivering and stop obsessing. Plain and simple. She needs fellow queens and kings who can support her in her queen archetype. Who are the people around you who are gonna be most supportive for you? And you stepping into your power and you stepping into your royal archetype. So you've gotta do an intellectual intervention. This by itself
can save a person, can save a queen freaking a decade or more of psychotherapy. Ah, kid you not by at about 500 bucks for every time a woman has said to me, you know, a woman client of queen age has said to me, you know, I've been in therapy for fill in the blank. 10 years, 20 years, and we got more done in, in this one session than I did in, you know, 20 years of therapy. I, I, I could retire here. I kid you not. And that's not me bragging. That is telling you the impact of invoking the royal archetypes when it comes to helping our clients understand who they are and how they can heal a godawful body image that's been holding them back from being in their power.
A queen in training or a queen age woman needs to start mentoring and guiding younger women, the princesses, whoever they are in her life.
No princess is to be disrespected by the queen because the queen is older and wiser and smarter and can see them. She's been around the corner. She knows the deal. She's wise. She's lived through the world. Stop competing. Stop wishing you were that. Start helping them.
A queen needs ways that she can start to celebrate her embodiment. Plain and simple. We're not trying to fix what's broken in you, miss Queen, just no, there's nothing broken. It's just time to get in your chair. Time to sit on your throne. There's nothing to fix. Nothing. Zero, nothing. Starts celebrating your embodiment. Start celebrating your queen hood. Celebrate your throne. Start surrounding yourself by people who serve and support you in your queendom.
You are helping her see that she has been trying to attain the body or the consciousness and the body of a princess.
Which is fine when you're a princess. Not good when you're a queen is like a frog trying to be a tadpole. It's like why?
It's like a 15-year-old trying to be a fetus again. Why? This just doesn't make sense. It doesn't work for the circle of life. We've done that. I've been there, done that. You know, sometimes for the queen, there's a little bit of letting go. A little bit of letting go. You gotta say goodbye. Sometimes we gotta say goodbye.
Maybe for those of you who are more ritually oriented, you create a ritual or your client creates a ritual ritual for themselves to let go of the princess stage. Say goodbye. It's okay.
So as we're seeing healing body image is not merely about healing the body. It's about being very well supported in our age appropriate archetype. My friends. It's about being well-informed and aware of our age appropriate archetype as best as possible.
It's a journey for the young ones. The s the princesses. It takes time. And stepping into your age appropriate archetype is an imperative mandate for the kings and queens when it comes to their body. We ain't spending a long time on that with them. You gotta get this. It takes one conversation for a king or a queen to get what we're saying. It takes one intellectual intervention for them to get the lay of the land. And yeah, then it might be a little bit of work for sure. But then you're in the right territory. You're in the place where the work needs to be done. You are going to the root cause of a person's unhappiness with their body. They're unhappy with their body
'cause they're not sitting in their throne.
The king is on a bad couch somewhere and the queen is maybe on a treadmill. I don't know. No, sit in your chair. Here's your crown. It's okay. Time to just take it on.
So let's spend a few moments on king and prince.
You remember this? The king sits on his throne wise, dignified, fair, just in kind. King is clear about who he is, who his who, and what his kingdom is, meaning who he serves, and who he is responsible for what he is responsible for, what he is here to do. Now, it doesn't mean some guy has have all these people running around him. It doesn't mean a queen has have all these people running around doing. It's not what I'm saying.
You're in your dignity wherever you are. Every place for a king or a queen is their kingdom or queendom. Wherever you go, there it is. The people in front of you are always the people that you are meant to serve. You take the high road wherever you are. That's what a king and queen does. So a, a king answers to a higher king, a higher power. If a king is not answering to a higher power, a higher moral code. If you're an atheist, God, if you're not an atheist, the king is not answering to something higher. He's not trustable and he is not that effective. And you don't necessarily wanna spend a whole hell of a lot of time in his kingdom.
It's been said that as goes the king, so goes the kingdom. So you wanna, you wanna understand what's going on around the king and his world and his work life and his family, who, what's going on in his inner world and what's going on in his immediate outer world. They're always a reflection of each other.
Same is true for the queen. It's particularly true for the king in a lot of ways. King's gotta be on it. King must have a purpose and a mission king must know, here's what makes me feel useful. So a purpose and a mission doesn't mean I'm here to, you know, save all the whales. I'm here to save the world. I'm here to open up a big holistic health center. It's your purpose or your mission could be so simple. It's to love people. My purpose and my mission is I love fixing things. I love being useful and helping people take care of stuff that they don't know how to help for themselves. And they don't know how to fix and they don't know how to organize.
A king might be here to just be an important figure in the life of his grandchildren.
King might be here to elevate the people in his working environment and just spread love and light, whatever it is. It could be simple, it could be not simple, doesn't matter. It's just what gives a king a sense of I'm useful and giving of my energy. My life has a purpose.
If there is no purpose, you'll never get anywhere. Helping a man of king age deal with his weight issue and deal with the fact that he can't get motivated to exercise and deal with the fact that he can't get motivated to take care of himself with food and can't get motivated to the fact that he doesn't wanna overeat. But he keeps overeating, but he really doesn't have the energy to stop overeating, has nothing to do with food. Zero and everything to do with. He doesn't have a purpose and a mission. And that's his job.
A king knows his strong points in his weak points, and at some point a king has a plan, or he soon, he soon figures one out if he doesn't, but he's on the way to a plan. He making plans. He could change the plans, but he's got a pretty decent plan. Somewhere the bad king, lots of these guys wants for himself. He's competitive with other kings. He's willing to destroy to get what he wants. He wants more power, more things above all else. What does a man of power want? More power? What does a wealthy man want? More wealth. That's a bad king. If you want power for the sake of power and wealth for the sake of wealth. Bad kings do not answer to a higher power. In fact, not interested. He directs his kingdom for the prophet of himself. Just read a history book. You'll find those. The bad king is secretly a prince without developed morals.
He is a prince, but in a king's body hasn't figured it out. So a bad king is the, uh, equivalent
of the woman who still trying to be a princess. The bad king is technically not trying to be a prince. He's not trying to be a prince. He just is being a prince, a lower level prince.
He's letting the lower level prince in him run the show.
It's far easier to, in my experience, it's far easier to help a woman who hasn't been a good queen. Turn it around really fast, man. Who's been a bad king? Yh not so easy. I'm just saying observationally. We can go into that, but that's not really the topic of this training. But I just noticed that more about the king. When a king loses his mission, has no sense of purpose and does not answer to a higher power, he often just becomes dissociated from his body. Checks out of his body, doesn't want to take care of it. What's the point? That leads to depression. Apathy. He can become angry and bitter. He can act foolish. In short, he disembody because he has no reason to be here. He's on his way out.
He's no longer agreeing to be here.
I've said this before, we live in a world where there's not a whole lot of good kings, at least those who are portrayed publicly, um, publicly in the media we're presented with a world of bad kings, rich, powerful, selfish, you know, selfish politicians and leaders, or we're presented with impossible to become wealthy billionaires. I am freaking sick of looking at the media and seeing this billionaire and that billionaire and this billionaire. It's like, I'm not interested, not interested, because we're putting these guys out as that's the model for a king. Does anybody ever, ever ask how these guys become billionaires? You don't become billionaires because you're a good guy. You don't become billionaires just because you're a smart businessman, if that's what you think. You don't necessarily know the ways of the world behind the curtains as you move up the ladder in wealth.
Billionaires are not thought leaders.
The public portrays them like that. They, they put that out as this is what a good king is. Amassed all this wealth. So you're shown that impossible to become. How many people? They become billionaires. Well, no more than a hundred or so.
So what's a good king? Or you're shown, you know, the cartoon characters like Homer Simpson who are dumb and ineffective.
So they give you the extreme opposite. Really? My friends, the good kings are often the family men, the community men, the religious leaders are followers. They don't have big egos. They don't make a big splash. They don't need to bake a big splash, but they take care of their worlds. They're the farmers. They're the ones who are raising families and going to work and and doing good. They're the ones who care. They're the ones who have values. They're not splashed across Time Magazine.
That's the equivalent. Putting these freaking wealthy male billionaires in front of us is equivalent. It's it. It's the male equivalent of, you know, putting all these hot, impossible to attain bodies of, you know, female actresses or whoever they are. That's the equivalent. Like, oh, whoa, how am I gonna become that wealthy male billionaire who's plastered everywhere? So, so we have these weird models in our head about what king hood or queen hood looks like.
I can't tell you how many young women I meet who want to be Oprah. They want to have a TV station. No, don't be Oprah. Really what they're teaching you is, okay. So the new queen, she's like a king. She's powerful and she owns tons of stuff and she has a media empire. Now, come on my friends, how many, how many women are gonna get there? Like fine, fine, fine. Okay, somebody's there. Fine. But we elevate that as if that's what we're shooting for. It's not what we're shooting for. That's for the one or the two or the three who get there. Fine. Congratulations. Big hug.
But that's not what the world looks like. There's billions of other people in the world who ain't gonna be the media mogul, the female billionaire queen. Don't hold that out to me. Like that's what a queen is.
Yeah, she has qualities of a good queen. I've met a lot of good queens. They ain't billionaires and they ain't famous. Same with kings. So have you. So the prince archetype, the prince, my friends, zero to 30 is the young prince. 30 to 39 is the late prince.
Prince is on a quest to find himself and find his power. Power is very important. Power is not a bad thing. What am I powerful at? What am I good at? Where do I excel? Watch young boys, watch young heterosexual boys. They wanna play with powerful things. You know, they are interested in strength in bigness size, to them means power.
So to the young, heterosexual, masculine mind, power is what they like. What is my power in this world is really what it is. So that desire for physical power, when you're 5, 6, 7 years old of superhero power, like, look at our superheroes. Come on my friends, they're powerful dudes. Or ess, traditionally the superhero magazines were mostly guys, superheroes, muscular with all kinds of powers because that's so appeals to the young masculine mind. It wants to find its power. But those divert us because the superpowers of flying through the air, breathing, fire being invisible, or you know, flying through the universe with your cape on, um, is unattainable. We think those are our powers and not the power of our intellect. The power of love. The power of skill, the power of having a craft, the power of having a purpose, the power of following a higher code, a higher power.
You know, the prince archetype is also seeking adventure. He wants opportunities to test his courage and abilities and find his power, and he does that through adventure. So the prince is on a search for meaning to find his place in the world. Oftentimes, the prince is completely asleep to who he is and what he's capable of. The prince naturally wants to do good.
Don't listen to any of this nonsense where philosophers are trying to figure out, are humans good? Are humans bad? It's such a bunch of bull crap. Okay, humans are good, humans are born good. Might there be a bad distorted seed in the bunch one here or there? Yeah, sure. 99.99% of humans are born good. They're born with an inborn moral code. But check this out, the prince archetype is easily ugh, easily imprinted by the values of the world, especially by those that it considers more powerful than himself. The prince is, is worshiping those who are more powerful than him.
So if there's a gang leader who's more powerful than him, he's gonna look up to the gang leader.
And the young prince is easily pulled off a good path. The young prince has an innate moral code that is easily buried, pushed aside, and atrophied from a young age. When he imprints role models in the world that do not follow a moral compass,
the masculine mind is easily pulled off its path. The masculine, the young prince is easily wounded emotionally, sexually. Though these wounds are not easily seen, it's very unfortunate. Very, very, very unfortunate. The wounds of the feminine will oftentimes be far more obvious. The masculine mind is the masculine archetype. The prince archetype wants to be brave, wants to be courageous, doesn't want to show its pain because that's not good. You don't show your pain, you don't show your hurt, you don't show your wound because then you can be easily defeated. So the prince will automatically cover up its wound, not talk about its wound, not share about its wound, push. Its wound down. And that wound is not easily seen. I don't wanna go into that too much, but I just wanna mention that
today's prince has far too many confusing expectations put upon him. He's asked to be good and righteous
and he's bombarded with toxic messages and temptations. Bombarded. My friends just spend five minutes on YouTube, look at a bunch of music videos,
the young Prince and princesses. We are being shown the, they're being shown the lowest, lowest common denominator of what their potential is. Materialism, sexism, stupidity.
So many of the music, the music videos, the music lyrics, the images, the images from movies, their anti intelligence, their anti-intellectual,
it glorifies dumbing down ourselves. The prince is being asked to be emotionally aware. We want our young men to be emotionally aware, but at the same time, he's supposed to be a killer in the world and in the business field and not show any pain or hurt. Hmm, that's confusing. Prince doesn't have good role models and then they ain't coming from the media, that's for sure. Think of the Prince role models in the media. What are they? They're rock stars. They're athletes, they're famous people, famous actors who, I'm sorry, but they generally present as spoiled, irresponsible. I do whatever I want. I'm rich. I got no accountability. And that Prince hasn't done anything to earn them money. The famous people, why are you paying an athlete $20 million a year? You should pay my grade school teachers 20 million bucks a year. That's who deserves it more. So all I'm saying is the young Prince role models that the young prince is exposed to are toxic. I'm not saying all of them, but in general,
and even when they're not toxic, we're still presenting them as these, this is what you gotta go for. You are a successful prince. If you're a rockstar, if you're an athlete, if you're famous, and if you're not that, well, I don't know, just get yours while you can. That's how the male mind is being conditioned party like a rockstar.
The prince does not know the feminine. He can't 'cause he does it. He's too young. But at the same time, he naturally hungers for the feminine. Watch that in young males similar. The princess does not know the masculine yet. She hungers for it.
Different religious and philosophical traditions have said that at an equal age, 12, 13 years old, male and female females will tend to be more morally developed than the males. I have found that to be true. Uh, that's not a judgment. I'm just stating that as a scientific observation. I've noticed it and noticed it and noticed it. The challenge is today's prince, because the prince is easily pulled off of a moral compass. The messages that the prince has given is to be taught to disrespect the feminine. By the way, when you disrespect the feminine outside of you, you will naturally disrespect the feminine within you. You'll disrespect your own body. You will disrespect your own nourishment, you will disrespect self-care.
Princes end up disrespecting themselves.
And again, it's all being taught to us through the world, through the images, through the media. So a few more things about the prince, my friends, where there is a prince, there is a frog, right? In some of the fairytales, you got a prince, you got a frog. Oftentimes. So in various fairytales, you find the prince is turned into a frog by the bad witch, or the frog is turned into a handsome young prince upon being kissed by the princess. What the hell does that mean? Let's dive down. Why is there a frog? And what does that have to do with the prince? Here it is, my friends, the frog is the sleeping unrealized masculine.
It's the masculine completely a hundred percent unaware of its own potential.
That powerful potential is unleashed when we are touched. When the masculine, the unaware masculine, is touched by the pure feminine,
there's a pure feminine energy in the world. It is often delivered to the young prince in the form of a young princess. They look upon a young princess and something happens. It's a something. It's a transformation. It's an alchemy. It's an inner magic. Something happens.
The frog is just a prince who has no idea that he's a prince.
You know, it's also the lower, darker feminine, the witch that can turn the masculine into an apathetic, depressed, powerless frog with her wounding power. So in a lot of fairytales, it's the dark feminine. It's the bad witch, the castrating female that can turn the masculine into apathetic, depressed, powerless frog. So women have that ability. Women can emotionally emasculate a man,
a woman who's emotionally or worldly and smart, more worldly and smarter than a man can emasculate him with her power if she chooses. So that's a dark energy.
So oftentimes what happens is the masculine has been wounded by his mother, by girls who, whatever, they didn't treat him in the way he needed to be treated. This happens, happens both directions for male and female, female, male. But oftentimes what happens is, and it, and it's not just the woman, the world can do that to a young man. The young man looks around. The young man has been exposed to bad kings. The young man has been wounded by the father.
The young man has been wounded by the masculine of the world. So it can, it can happen in any which way, but he will become apathetic, depressed, and powerless.
And we symbolize that in the frog. You know, frog's not a bad creature. It's just a frog. It's got kind of no emotion. It's just just a frog. So in short, the prince is here to wake up to his potential. And in the meantime, before he's in his potential, he's likely in a frog like state. He just, just existing frogs exist.
Frogs aren't plotting a takeover of the world. They're not looking for their potential to grow into being a hawk or a eagle or whatever. You know, frog is just a frog. It's okay. We like frog. I love frogs. Um, it's a great imagery. I think it's a great metaphor. It's a great archetype for understanding the sleeping stage of the prince. Okay, so what does a prince need? A prince, your prince client
who is challenged around weight, who's challenged around body image needs to be challenged. He needs a challenge in life. He needs challenges in life. How can you challenge him? What's a good challenge for him? What's a good athletic challenge for him? What's a good intellectual challenge for him? What's a good creative challenge for him? What's a good emotional challenge for him? You wanna give a prince a challenge that he can rise to?
He needs to explore. He needs to just get out there and explore possibilities. Get 'em out of just, just, okay, here's the plan. You're not gonna be sitting on the couch, you're not gonna be staying at home. Here's the following things you're gonna be doing. How can we get the prince out into the world exploring, going to classes, going to meetings, going to something that will pull him out of who he is? Can he travel? Can what? What new? What is new that he can try?
Prince also needs some hard boundaries. Okay? Yeah. He needs to be explore, exploring, but he also needs boundaries. You need to see the places where he's leaking his energy. You need to look at the places where he's morally overstepping boundaries.
Is he stealing? Is he lying? Is he not telling the truth? Is he withholding information? Is he telling little lies? You gotta catch those. You cannot let a young prince who you're coaching, you're mentoring, get away with any with a single lie. Lying is not okay. You either tell me the truth or you tell me you're not gonna answer my question.
A prince needs feedback. How's he doing? Hey, you know something? I really appreciate you. We had a hard conversation last week. I gave you some homework assignments. You took it on. I'm really proud of you. Congratulations. Or you said that you were gonna have a conversation with your brother and you agreed to that and now you came back and you told me you never had that conversation. How am I gonna trust you? How are you gonna be a man? How's anybody gonna trust you? You gotta be good with your word. So that's the lesson from this. So now I want to ask you, can you speak to him about the topic we talked about next this coming week before our next session? And if he says yes, you go and you gotta stick to that this time. So you're giving him feedback, you're mentoring him, you're giving him a higher code to live by. Literally, you gotta teach him.
Here's how a good human lives. Here's how you take the high road. He has to develop skill in anything. Doesn't matter what he needs, something to practice. That might mean developing a skill. It might mean a musical instrument. It might mean a craft, it might mean a sport above all else. In many ways, a prince needs role models. He really needs role models. So yeah, here you are. Maybe you're working with him with his weight and his body image. 'cause he is hating his body. But everything I've just listed is actually what he needs. If you try to just tweak his diet
and make him exercise, you're just teaching 'em how to be a frog more. I mean that. I have watched so many weight loss programs where they're taking young people and that's all they do. They exercise them and they calorie restrict them.
And they don't cultivate the archetype in them. They don't cultivate what does a young prince need? What does a young princess need? That's what they're missing. That's why they've disembodied. 'cause they don't know how to be in this world. Why should I be? This world is crazy. It's, it's what are all these adults doing? What world am I stepping into? Can you imagine being a young person these days and you're watching TV and you're reading the news and you go, what the hell's going on here? Or that's what they're saying. And we give them distractions. We give them drugs, we give them junk food. We give them junk media. We give them stupid music and stupid videos. And then we have them go party and medicate themselves.
We give them ways to medicate themselves from the world that we're running for them.
Yeah. So we're here to change that one person at a time. One person at a time. Don't be discouraged. This is one person at a time. You help one person. You have done something amazing, by the way. But this is what a prince needs to be challenged to explore. He needs boundaries. He needs feedback, he needs mentoring. He needs a higher coach to live by. You gotta tell him he needs skill development. He needs to practice something consistently. He needs good role models with that. He's on the right road to embodying with that. He's on the right road to reaching his natural weight. With that. He's on the right road to be respecting his own body. He can't respect his own body. Why? 'cause he doesn't respect life. Why? Because life doesn't deserve his respect. Quite frankly, life hasn't shown him yet that life is respectable. The world hasn't shown him that the world is respectable. So you, if you're the one coaching him, you show him that you're worthy of that respect because you're giving him what he needs, whether he like it or not.
Okay, what does the king need? You know this. He needs a higher purpose. He needs a mission. Needs to start talking to a higher power, to a higher king, to a higher code. King needs to be serving the young ones needs to be mentoring the young ones. King needs to identify his kingdom, who he is responsible for. A king needs respect. Yes, he needs respect from the outside, but he only gets respect from the outside. When he is self-respecting king often needs a final challenge. Whatcha gonna do with the rest of your life? Mr. King.
Now your king's gonna come to you and he doesn't like his body and he wants to lose weight, but he can't motivate himself. This is why, because he doesn't have a higher purpose. He doesn't have a mission. He's not answering to a higher king or a higher power. He's not serving the younger ones. He hasn't exactly identify his kingdom and what he's responsible for, who he serves.
And because of all that, he can't respect himself.
He doesn't need to lose weight. Who cares? Like really? So you're gonna help that guy lose a bunch of body pounds and you're gonna feel successful and this guy's gonna walk out of your office and gain it right back.
Who cares if he has less weight? I don't. I care that he steps into his king hood. That he steps into his potential that he came Here to step into. Because when each of us starts stepping into our potential, our God-given potential, our inborn potential, when you start to express the content of your acorn, then, then when you can help another human do that, you're saving the world. That's how you save the world. You don't save the world by saving the world. You don't save the world by being a superhero.
You save the world by helping humans step into their true potential. And when each one of us has the opportunity to begin to do that more and more, a world becomes a better place. Because humans are good. Don't believe otherwise. Humans are good. We get damaged, we get wounded by the world, we get dumbed down by the world. But inherently we are good. So we're cultivating the goodness and our clients. And one of the easiest ways to do that is invite them into the archetypes that are age appropriate for them that are pre preceded, predestined in their spiritual, cosmic, archetypal, emotional. And I believe physical, DNA, it's in there. It's born in us.
You know this is true. If the things I'm saying are resonating for you or just remembering who we are.
So my friends, as you can hopefully see some final thoughts here, we're not just helping people like their bodies more. Of course I want of course, of course, of course. You gotta love your body. It's gonna be so much better to live on the earth if you're loving your body. But we're not just doing that. 'cause if you just wanna help people love their body, then you're gonna force them into exercise and dieting. And then maybe they have the body they want, but they're still not loving themselves. And you gotta figure that out.
So yeah, I'm always looking for the little baby steps. So here's the paradox. We're looking to help people love their bodies. We are, we're looking for all the little ways to get them to take care of themselves and embody. We are. You bet I'm doing that. That's a very, very, very, very, very practical detailed work of what we're looking to do. And at the same time, at the same time for your body image challenge client who wants a different body, we're looking to guide people into the best of their age, appropriate archetype, their royal archetype. We're looking to help them be in the life stage that they're supposed to be in and to the, and to follow the kinds of guidelines, the inner guidelines that help them live into their archetype so they can begin to flower.
When we do that, the natural result is that we're more empowered to to be here.
And when you're empowered to be here, the body starts to become the place where you wanna live. The body becomes your friend, it becomes your home. It becomes a necessity because you have a reason for being here. The body is worth caring for. It is worth loving because your life is worth living because you're moving towards something higher
is not enough to just want a hard body. I'm sorry, I know there's people out there doing that. You wanna help them go for it. It's not what most people are looking for though. And it's not what most people need. We do that. We're human. A lot of times we're looking for the thing that we think we need and we never get it 'cause we don't need it. And we think there's something wrong with us because we're trying to get the thing that we think we need. We can't get it. The thing we think we need is the perfect body, the perfect weight, the perfect shape. We're trying to get it. We're trying to get it and we can't get it. And what's wrong with me that I can't get it. Life sucks that I can't get it. I suck that I can't get it.
And meanwhile, there's nobody there to tell us, wait a second, maybe you went down into the wrong neighborhood. Maybe you had the wrong map. Maybe you got the wrong instructions. Here's a different way. In fact, here's what I think is a better way. In fact, here's what I know is a better way. 'cause your way hasn't worked. And if you look around you, there's a lot of people doing the same way you do that hasn't worked.
People are thinking that it's a body type shape or weight that's gonna rescue them and help them wanna be here.
And it's a collective spell that has put us to sleep. And in that sleep state, we're in a bad dream. And in that bad dream, we repeat to ourselves a lie. And the lie is that when I have the perfect body in the perfect weight or some kind of close to the perfect body in the perfect weight, then I'm gonna be the real me and then I'm gonna be happy.
And then we try to change our shape through all the usual ways. And it only makes things worse or it's only temporary. We find ourselves back in the same place. This is why, 'cause our task is to step into your, your God-given royalty. And by royalty I mean the best of who you are.
'cause the best of who you are as you aim for that, as you embrace that, as you practice that, as you Live that, how could it not help your body be the best that it is?
Body doesn't come first. Life comes first. You come first. Heart and soul come first. Purpose comes first.
That's the house we're looking to get in order. Love this conversation my friends. And the good news is it's not over this part of the conversation's over, but there's more parts to come. This is body image part three. We're gonna be jumping into body image part four next. I hope this was helpful for you. I hope things are starting to come together in certain ways. I hope you're making connections. I hope you're seeing the power of the foundation that we're laying need a good foundation to do this work, to really serve people, to really help each other. That's what we're doing. We're helping each other. I appreciate you. I appreciate you being with me. I really do. I hope you're enjoying this. I certainly am. And I'll see you on the other side.

PART 4

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Screenings. My friends, Mark David here, founder of the Institute. Here we are in part four of four talking about some of the fundamentals of body image. Now, in further conversations down the line, we will be going into some body image case studies. We'll be talking about simple strategies for embodiment. For now, I wanna continue some foundational pieces and begin to get into some of the core
distinctions and techniques. Things to do with your clients, more awarenesses to be aware of. I love this topic. Remember some reminders to start this conversation. Embodiment, heals body image. That's it. That's the royal road. That's the key. That's the secret, that's the goal that's striking at the roots. Because you know when a human being, as we embody, as we just enter the body and be in it and get accustomed to it and get used to it, and begin to explore it and understand and appreciate and get to know and get curious about the sensations, the pleasures of being alive on planet earth and being in a body. The simple ways, all of a sudden something changes, something happens. We get happier to be here. We no longer attack the body. We might wish to shapeshift it or change it, but we're not cursing it. And embodiment heals body image. That's the key. You don't heal body image by pushing, forcing, and punishing the body into a new weight and shape. I'm sorry, it just ain't gonna go there. Doesn't work. We don't heal body image by somehow inventing the body that we will love more.
You heal body image by learning to love the body that you have. We must get out of the mind of the magical child who wants to ride off on a winged unicorn to another planet where you can be whoever you wanna be, and look however you wanna look. It's a great wish. I'll feel better about myself if I could only look like that. And that's not what we came here for. My friends, we didn't come here into this world and into this body to hate it and to escape it. We came here to occupy it. We came here to inhabit it. We came here to embody in the body that we have, and then let things happen from there. You heal body image by landing in this body you have right now. And then of course, by the way, when you land in the body that you have right now, that gives you the best chance to help it. Turn left, right, go straight, go backwards, go up. Go down. Meaning, the more you're embodied, the more you can shapeshift the body. If indeed body wants to be shapeshift, if indeed it's our time, no one knows. We heal body image by inhabiting the body, feeling it, claiming it right now by starting with this body in this moment. You gotta learn to love step one. Step one is, this is where we start. And again, I wanna say from this place, a truly sustainable shapeshift becomes possible. Now, a lot of people think, well, I'm sorry. How could I love this body that I have right now? I hate it. I can't stand it. I'm not saying that you have to want to have this body forever that you have right now, but you have to love you.
You gotta love the person in the body. You have to love the person who's trying to change the body. And you gotta give the body, you have a little love. Now, if your client is very clear, I'm gonna hate my body until it changes. Hmm, that's an interesting one. If my client isn't open to exploring what I consider that particular toxic nutritional belief, chances are I'm not gonna be able to help them. Honestly. They're not gonna be very fun to work with. Honestly. They will throw up roadblocks along the way. So I usually don't hang with a client that long, who, and I've only had a few of these over the years, a handful who just know every day I'm gonna wake up, I'm gonna look in the mirror. I'm gonna hate this body until it changes. And I think, okay, how has that strategy worked for you? You told me you were dieting. How long you told me you've been trying to change your body for how long and how long have you been trying to hate it into change?
So I'll do my best to do an intellectual intervention with that client to let them know that their strategy doesn't work.
Who of your friends would you want to hate to change?
Uh, who of the young children you know, or of your own children would you wanna hate and to change?
And if they're not on board with that, then it's probably not the right client for you. That's okay. Remember, some of the acts of embodiment, self-care is embodiment. It's, it's, this isn't complicated feeling feelings, really feeling our desires. Sometimes it's about feeling them, owning them, being able to acknowledge them to ourselves, eating in a nourished way.
Any kind of movement or exercise that gives you the slightest amount of joy, happiness, peace, fun, any kind. I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's juggling any kind of play, any kind of play just about. And I'm not just talking about the sort of play where you're on the computer and you're disembodied, ah, the kind of play where you're being playful. You don't have to be running around playing in the playground. But anything that invokes, playfulness helps us embody authenticity, being real, being the real me, expressing my real self.
If we want people to love us for who we are, then we have to show up for who we are. And then people decide, yep, I love that person for who they are, or, nope, I don't love that person for who they are. And the ones that don't love you for who you are, good. Cross 'em off the list. Thank them. Send them on their way. Really that simple. Music helps embody us. Obviously if you're dancing, that is a deeper level of embodiment, but just listening to music and letting it move you feeling it, letting it wash over your body, letting it wash over your emotional body, that's embodiment. Any kind of touch that is enjoyable. Any way that we express our sensuality, how we move, how we sit, how we gesture, how we walk, how we conduct ourselves in any given moment. What you do in the bedroom, all of it. Being in nature is a big one. That's where the body originally kind of comes from
anyway, that you can spend time in nature. Your client could spend time in nature and appreciate it and accept it and absorb it and just let it wash over them. That's embodiment. Okay, let's dive in. For your body image challenge clients, I want you to notice their relationship with numbers. Numbers and numbers. Numbers kill the soul. When it comes to body image, how much do you weigh? What is your target weight? Oh, when I get to this target weight, then I'm gonna be fully happy. I'm gonna be the happiest person ever. Then I'm gonna love myself. But until I get to that number, I don't love myself. So we make the number our God, we worship it, we make it our religion. That's your true religion. If you're, if you are weighing yourself, if your clients weighing themselves every day, bunch of times a day, numbers for so many people, not for everyone, not for everyone, but for a majority of people, I'm gonna say majority, you're soul crushing. We give the numbers. And in this case, let's talk about the scale. Wanna focus on the scale. We give it so much power. Numbers actually numb us to the body. So we're not actually being in our body. We being in our head about a number. And we think once we hit a number, then somehow we'll be in the body. Oh, when I hit this number, then in that moment, lightning will strike and all of a sudden I'm gonna be loving my body and I'm gonna be in my body. I'm gonna be enjoying my body. No, if you're hitting your body now and you're just waiting for the number to change, do you really think that's gonna do something? Start to eh, do this. If you haven't done it yourself, have your clients do it. I want you to start interviewing Mr. Mrs. Client. Interview people that you know, interview friends, interview people, ought to be honest with you, who are trying to lose weight. Ask them, have you ever hit your target? Ask them why they wanna lose weight. What's the end result? Ask them if they've ever hit their target weight. And if they say yes, what happened? Were you that happy person forever? More people will either be honest with you and tell you no, or they'll tell you, oh yeah, I felt great.
IE they had a temporary high. No different than doing some drugs. And then the drug wears off. I hit my number, I hit my number. I'm so happy. I can't believe it. I feel great. Look at me, everybody. And then however, we lost the weight because it wasn't sustainable. Our inner life didn't change, our character didn't change. Our relationship with food didn't change. The nutritional challenges, the stress challenges that were holding us back didn't change. And then life takes over and the weight comes back. So your happiness was a temporary high. You might as well have just just taken a hypodermic needle and put some kind of feel good drug in your system. That's what it was. It's a temporary state, high temporary state addiction.
So for many clients, I am looking to see how often they weigh themselves. If it's once a day and it's A body image challenge client, I want to ask them to let go of the scale for at least two months. And letting go of the scale doesn't mean they don't weigh themselves. Yes, it means they don't weigh themselves, but they have to put the scale in a bag and put the bag in a closet. If the scale is sitting there, it's honestly like an alcoholic. And you, you know, leave a glass of wine around every day. It's too tempting, it's too much. So you're gonna notice your client's relationship with the scale. You know, if somebody's weighing themselves once a week, ah, okay, maybe, maybe I'm looking for the people who are habituated to the scale once. And there are people who weigh many times during the day. If it's more than one, I'm definitely putting you in the no fly zone. The no way zone. And your clients will, chances are freak out a little bit. That's a good sign. If they freak out, if they come up with a lot of resistance to this idea, if they're really afraid, you know, 100%, not 99%, you know, 100% that you are onto something.
If it's not a big deal to somebody, they're gonna say, yeah, who cares? I don't need to weigh myself. But if it's a big deal to them, they will resist. They will look at you like you just asked them to give up their firstborn or something. Um, they're so attached, they're so habituated to the number on the scale, telling them how they feel. So you have to make sure the scale is out of sight. It's put away, it doesn't tempt them. And you know what, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, instead of focusing on the scale to tell you how you feel, here's the whole point of this. I want you to liberate yourself from a tiny little knucklehead machine that has no heart and no soul and no intelligence. It's a bunch of metal. It's a bunch of plastic, it's a bunch of glass. Instead of letting that machine tell you how you should feel, Ooh, I gained a pound. I feel good, bad, I lost a pound, I feel great. How do you feel? How do you actually feel? Do you feel better in this new way that you're eating? Do you feel better in this new way that you're taking care of yourself? How does your body feel? Does it feel like you are losing weight? Does it feel like your body's happier and more nourished based on some of these other things that we're doing? Those are embodiment questions you are asking your client to embody by getting rid of the scale. The scale for many people, disembody them. It literally is, is is. That's what it does. It takes you outta your body and it puts you into thinking that a dumb machine can't even call it dumb. Um, it has no life.
We give our power away.
We make ourselves small.
So again, you're gonna notice your client's relationship with numbers. And it's not just a scale. How much energy do they put in energy into counting calories? Are they counting macronutrients, especially fat grams? Uh, notice their stress level around wanting to achieve a number. Feel free to ask curiosity questions. How long have you been focused on that particular number? Have you ever achieved that number? What happened when you achieved that number?
Any friends in your circle have a similar experience where they achieve their number and then just gained the weight back? Why do you think the weight came back? So always, always, always, it's always your job within the first three sessions to do an intellectual intervention with your client around giving away our power to a specific number.
You invented that number Mr. And Mrs. Client. It sounds like a nice number, but you just invented it. There's no science behind it. There's no nutritional science behind it. There's no physics behind it. There's no biology behind it. It's a number you decided is the number that is your lottery ticket, that when you hit that number, you are gonna all of a sudden be happy. You invented that number and then you're giving it power
and that hasn't worked for you. And you're coming to see me because you wanna get where you wanna go. You wanna shape, shift your body and you haven't been able to do that. First thing we have to do to help you be in the best position to get where you want to go is you have to love yourself into this weight loss journey.
And if you wanna love yourself into this journey, then one of the things you do is get rid of the some of the things that are very unloving.
The scale has no love in it. Your relationship with the scale is not a loving relationship. It's no different than being in relationship with somebody who, in any given moment, you walk over to them and you say, do you love me? And they either say yes or no. And if they say yes, they go, yes, I love you. And if they say no, they go, no, I can't stand you and your relationship with that person. And you never know what they're gonna say. Well, that's the scale. When you gain a pound, the scale says, I hate you. And you say to yourself, I hate you. Lose a pound. Oh, I love me. Scale loves me. Everybody loves me, love, love, love.
It's your job to inspire your client to a new place. It's what you gotta do. How do you do that? It's your job to assess their body
by kind of pretending to inhabit it for a moment. Imagine yourself in that body.
It's our job to help our client begin to feel, notice, experience, and enjoy their own body. It's our job to cheerlead our client in that direction. Now, now, now, now we don't wait till we lose weight to embody. And by embody, I mean, feel, experience, enjoy, celebrate. Give it a little love. So again, some of the number questions you might want to ask, why have you chosen this particular number? Any any reason? And and these are all kind of rhetorical questions. I don't, uh, it's, it's, I'm asking these questions not because I really need an answer. I want my client to begin to hear their inner conversation. I want to be able to shine a light on their sleepness. So why have you chosen this particular number of pounds to lose?
Where does this number come from?
Have you gotten to this target weight before? What happened when you did? What do you think the weight came back on? So you reached your magic number and yet you're here with me today trying to get back there again. Wow, that must be irritating. Don't you get worried? That's gonna happen again. By the way, a lot of people, they get amnesia. They literally forget that they hit their magic number and it didn't work, and now they think they gotta hit it again and they'll hit it again and it won't work until they shift their inner world. Can you see Mr. And Mr. Alein, how you're selling your soul to some number you've invented in your mind that will magically make your life perfect and you'll be living happily ever after? Can can you s do you get how a little crazy that is? I'll talk just like that. Are you willing to see how this strategy is just a dead end loop for you? It's draining your valuable life energy. It's stealing your attention from relationships. It's robbing you of your dignity and self-worth. I'll look a person right in the eye, especially
someone in their thirties and up. Once you hit 30, you can hear that. Do you see how this is draining your life energy?
Honestly, someone in their twenties can hear it too. The queen in trainings, king in trainings, the kings and queens, they definitely gonna hear it.
You never mince words with a king or queen in training 39 to four, um, excuse me, 40 ish to 49 or a king or queen, 50 and up. You don't hold back your words because they're smarter, they're wiser, and they're closer to the end of life. So you wanna come at them as an equal. If you want to get through to a king or queen, you gotta be real. You gotta be strong, you gotta be powerful. You gotta tell it like it is. You're not doing it to insult them. Intellectual intervention, you're loving someone, by the way. So it's tough love, it's intellectual love. It's clear love.
It's love that's helping them see themselves and set a boundary. It's to kind of love where you're telling somebody what you are doing ain't working. In fact, it's doing the opposite of working.
As always my friends, I want you to remember as a technique, as a technique for any kind of client, you're always looking to invoke your client's wisdom and experience to prove your point. Have you ever known someone who had the ideal looks, weight and body, yet they were miserable, insecure, and unhappy?
If your client doesn't say that, yes, then I'd be surprised. I've never had a person tell me no. And when they shake their head yes, I say, what do what? What does that tell you? What do you make of that? So I'm gonna be in a conversation with them.
It's a curiosity conversation
and they know where I'm going. That's okay. It's okay for you to lead your client in the direction you want them to go in. That's your job
overarching strategy. This is your overarching strategy in many ways for body image to help heal an unhappy body image. The overarching strategy is to achieve the end result in the beginning. The end result in the beginning is to achieve it. Now start to work towards what you think you're gonna get in the end of having a perfect body. What do you think it's gonna give you? Find that out from your client. Ask them directly. Take notes as they talk. Mr. And Mr. Klein, I wanna, I wanna get this down. I wanna know exactly what you want and who you're gonna be when you have the body. You want. Just that, just that dialogue alone is worth a million bucks because people never actually think it out and then speak it and then speak it to someone like you who's listening and speak it to someone like you who's listening and is gonna have some interesting things perhaps to say. So Mr. And Mrs. Client, here you are. You finally have the perfect body, you got the perfect weight, you got what you want.
What's gonna happen? Who are you gonna be? How is life gonna be different? I'm taking notes here. Well, I don't know. No, come on. I want details. Day to day, what's it gonna look like? Who are you gonna be? How are you gonna, like, what is gonna be different? This is important because I want to make sure we get you where you wanna go. I wanna know who this person's gonna be. So usually you can get a nice little interesting list of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things at the most.
And then your job is to notice all the things that they could start doing now and give them homework assignments to move them in that direction.
In general, the only thing your client will not be able to do now that they say they wanna do when they lose the weight is fit into clothes. Some people will say, I'll just feel lighter.
Even that one. Yep, I get it. But you can begin to feel lighter. Now, there's a lot of skinny people who are pretty heavy. They feel heavy. There's people of any size and shape and weight who at any given moment can be, can feel lighter or heavier. You know that there's moments, you just feel heavier. It's an energetic thing. It's an emotional thing. So all I'm saying is I want you to be on the lookout for that one. Oh, I'm gonna just feel lighter. And people put that up like it's some God.
Yeah, of course. People wanna feel lighter. I get it. I wanna be lighter too.
Plenty of ways to be lighter without losing weight. And as you begin to achieve the end results in the beginning, as you start to move in that direction, the journey becomes easier. The journey becomes happier. You're more inspired.
And it is far, far, far easier to actually get where you actually want to go in terms of your true natural, sustainable weight. You're stepping out of a nasty, low level stress response of self-hate and illogical thinking that just causes a conundrum in the brain. I wanna be the real me, but I'm not the real me now, but I know I'll be the real me once these pounds of body fat are off. That's an impossibility right now. You're the real you. This is you right now. This is the real you. Are there more interesting versions or different versions? Sure, you could change you. Okay, what do you want it to be like, feel like, look like? But this is the real you. This is the real you.
And yes, we all have a potential. Let's work towards our potential.
But if you want your body to get to its potential, particularly its natural weight, you have to get to your personal potential more and more and more along the way. You can't cheat life.
Personal power equals metabolic power.
So I just wanna let you know this is for your clients. It's a simple, easy to understand strategy. And I'm saying it's essential to helping your client transform their body image. It helps put them in present time, meaning they're no longer living in the future. They're futurizing all the time. When you're futurizing all the time, you ain't here. You're in a time machine somewhere, meaning you're disembodied a bit. So when you start to achieve the end results in the beginning, you're embodying, I'm being happier now. I'm dressing better. Now I'm enjoying my body more now I'm dating more now.
It helps people become more conscious about the unconscious ways that they're locking dissatisfaction and self-hate.
You are gonna show your client that everything just about everything that they expect at the end. When they get what they want, they can start to experience right now. And I always let them know. And we do this as a way to help you get where you wanna go.
And I'm gonna tell them, in my experience, this is the only way you are gonna get where you want go sustainably.
Because, 'cause yes, you wanna lose the weight, but you really wanna lose it. So you can feel like the following happy out there, creative, sensual, sexy, outrageous, whatever you think it is the real me. Great. Beautiful. How could you do that? Now, there are plenty of people that other people think are big or fat or overweight, and they are the real them.
What about Oprah? Hmm. That lady's been big for most of her professional life, huh? Maybe she just has never been the real her because she hasn't lost enough weight. Huh? That's a good one. I like that.
So again, some of the common answers to who will you be? I'll be more confident, more outgoing, more comfortable in my body. I'll wear the clothes that don't fit me right now. I'll be more sexy and attractive. I'll like myself more. I'll feel lighter. Exercise will be easier. I'll finally be the real me.
This whole conversation, this whole
little dance that you're doing around achieving the end results now and asking your client what they want, it isn't powerful intellectual intervention. That's what it's doing. You're helping your client step out of a toxic nutritional belief that is just truly holding them back. So once again, you are not here as a professional to help your client be happier as a result of losing weight.
I say that again, you are not here. Your purpose as a professional in the realm of body, image and weight is not to help your client be happier through the vehicle of weight loss.
Your job is to help them be happier
to do the practices that a human being can do to help them embody and nourish themselves. And through that process of embodiment, your client becomes happier. And by being happier and in their body, they are now in position to reach their natural weight more as simply a side effect of stepping into who they truly are.
So I agree when most people who wanna hit their their target weight, people think, when I love my body, I will be this great person. I agree you will be. Why wait when I love your body now. Oh, I know, I know, I know. It is conditional love. I love you honey. But only when you lose seven pounds from here, I love you honey. But only if you could run a marathon. I love you. But only if you were taller or shorter, skinnier fat. Ugh. Come on. Gotta get over it.
On one level, we're asking our clients to wake up. My friends, we're asking them to step into their maturity. I don't care what age they are. When it comes to body image, you are stepping into your maturity. You are embracing the world as it is. You're embracing life as it is. Life will not conform to your humble demands. We have to conform to what life is.
Here's the body you have right now. Why would you hate it? No good reason. You might wanna change it. I got it. You might wanna shift it. I got it. You might wanna make it feel better. I got it.
Okay, great. Would you band together with a bunch of friends and y'all wanna feel good? And in order to feel good, you just start hating each other? No, I do it the right way. Great. Shapeshift your body, loving into shape, shifting.
That's the goal. Now remember, people don't want to hear that. That sounds like crazy. Talk to them and they will hear it.
And the reason why they'll hear it, whether they know it or not, whether you realize it or not, whether it's obvious or not in the moment, because it's true. It rings the bell of truth inside of us when we hear a deeper truth.
And the deeper truth is our happiness is not dependent upon a shape or a weight.
Oftentimes what got us to the place where we don't like our body is the simple fact that we abandon it oftentimes and always. If we've abandoned the body, always, we have a good reason or reasons. Always. If somebody stopped loving your body, stopped taking care of it, started disregarding it, started hating it, didn't enjoy it, doesn't want to be in it. They've always got a good reason always. So you gotta know that we disembody, we check out of the body, and then we pay the price. Paying the price means our relationship with food gets outta control. Perhaps weight comes on a as a result, perhaps weight might come on as a result of the intense stress or trauma we have experienced or continue to experience perhaps.
But again, bottom line, we have a good reason. Every human has a good reason for why they checked out of the body.
And it's safe now my friends, now it is safe. Why? Because we're in this conversation. If you're hearing these words for the first time, if you client hears these words for the first time, hallelujah, then let it be. So it's safe to go back in now. Why? Because you're smart. You're an adult, you have a little bit of experience under your belt, you've been through a lot. And now it's time to get back into the body maybe for the first time ever.
And you know something, my friends getting back into the body after we've checked out can be very scary. So your client is afraid because you've just challenged their religion and you've just showed them why their religion is inaccurate, their religion, meaning their worshiping a perfect body that they think is going to make them happy and all of a sudden make them embodied. But know they checked out of the body because of stress, anxiety, fear, trauma, confusion in a crazy world, giving them crazy messages and crazy experiences. So they checked out and maybe they overate, maybe they were binge eating, maybe they were emotional eating. Maybe they just didn't take care of themselves. Maybe the straight up physiologic stress of so much anxiety, fear, anger, challenge that they experienced is causing them to gain weight despite the fact that they don't have a high calorie diet, whatever it is.
Clients, people, humans, always have a good reason to check out. It's hard to get back in. So you gotta know that. So when you're helping people embody, you're helping them get back into their body as a result of having left. Someone who tends towards anorexia is trying to escape the body.
At some point that escape becomes a thrill. Meaning when an anorexic gets thin enough, there's a brain chemistry change and they actually think I'm happy. And a part of them feels happy and successful. They feel like they've won. It's a little trick. The brain plays tricks on you like that when you've lost too much body fat actually changes brain chemistry because the brain thinks the body's dying, it thinks it's starving, and it wants to give you a good last few months or year before you die. Just make this person happy.
So we're here to help each other get back into the body in a good way. Baby steps slowly. Okay, some other strategies for embodiment.
Coaching your client to receive touch in whatever way is doable for them. Loving touch in whatever way, whether it's through massage, whether it's through their partner or someone that they love and trust.
For many people, my friends, I'm telling you, this is so big, there are humans who haven't received touch for a long time because they don't feel they deserve it. They have chosen to believe that their body is so unlovable that why would anybody touch this? And when touch starts to happen, touch talks to us, touch goes beneath all our nonsense and helps us feel good and helps us feel here. And it could be scary and it could be unbelievably powerful.
I don't care who your client is and what they can and cannot do physically. There's always some way they could do some kind of enjoyable movement.
I met a woman, a woman in her late, actually, she was in her mid forties, had a couple of kids, two young girls, and had been in a wheelchair for probably 15 years from a car accident. And she goes around teaching workshops to people who are in a similar condition to her and teaches them joyful movement and embodiment.
I don't know how I ended up in her class, um, because I wasn't in a wheelchair.
Somehow I'd heard about her. Uh, some friends had told me about her, just an amazing human. And she really, she probably experienced more joy in her body than the average person that I know.
And she's confined to a wheelchair and doesn't have a lot of feeling from the waist down and puts on music and helps people move their upper body, their neck, whatever, whatever they can do. She creates an experience, uh, and goes into joy just about anybody can do it. You know, especially for women clients playing with dress and style. Now, a lot of women have this thing where, okay, the cool clothes come out when I lose the weight.
You know, there's ways to play now
because that helps us play now. And with each of these, your job is to be creative and to negotiate with your client what they can and cannot do. And always, always, always celebrate the smallest victories you don't know or maybe you do. How huge the small victories are when it comes to embodiment. So important, my friends. Okay, let's talk about more strategies for women. And I'm talking about the heterosexual universe right now. If that's not your universe, then you have to figure out how to translate this into your understanding and your clientele. And maybe think in terms of masculine and feminine polarities.
But for women, there's a lot of women who the obstacle for them is the masculine is men, is their relationship with men for whatever reason, whatever reason that is. And there's millions of reasons why a woman will feel uncomfortable around the man.
Oftentimes, if a woman has been speaking unkindly to herself long enough about her body, she imagines that others are speaking as unkindly, if not worse, about her.
The way women project onto men about what the men think about the women and their weight is shocking. It is shockingly off. Women are much more perfectionist about that kind of thing. Are there guys who are perfectionists? Yeah, they're usually princess. They're usually young.
Cross them off your list. Cross anybody off your list. Who's a perfectionist about your body?
There are far more people
who are fine with your body than who are going to attack it like you do. So I'm always noticing my heterosexual women's clients' relationship with men. The masculine. Are you married? Are you single? You dating? What's going on? What's happening? So oftentimes the feminine women become afraid of their attractions, afraid of their desires, afraid of their sexual energy, which is all a side effect of I hate my body. Of course, if you hate your body, you're gonna feel uncomfortable around men because men are visual men, heterosexual men like women. But if you don't like yourself, but the men like women, but you don't like yourself, then you're assuming that they don't like you.
So part of that is for women learning how to play. And what that means is, at the very least, learning how to be playful. You can be playful walking outside your door and walking down the block to the store. So for my women clients, I'm gonna ask them to engage the masculine differently than they've done before. I'm gonna try to see for each client what that means for them. So on average, for many people, what that can mean is noticing your attractions and making them right. Many women, especially if they're in relationship or they're married, they attack themselves for having an attraction. No, make it right. It doesn't mean you're gonna jump in bed with the person, but just own it. Feel it. Let it circulate in your system. You're not breaking a law, it's your body talking. It's okay. You can trust your body. Let the attraction wash through you and just it'll eventually subside. Lie down somewhere, go take a walk. It's, it'll eventually go. Um, so it's about noticing attractions, making them right, honoring them. It's learning how to be more playful with the masculine.
If you're a woman in the lesbian universe and it's learning how to be more playful in the realm of the women who circulate around you, it's being willing to flirt.
It's remembering to embody and feel your body and ground yourself in your body while you're engaging with someone you're drawn to. Oftentimes what happens is when people talk to someone they're drawn to or attracted to or they desire, they check outta their body. It's just too much sensation for them. So it's learning how to be in the body with our sensation, with our attraction, with our energy, with our desire. So a lot of times that means welcoming your nervousness, welcoming your anxiety instead of trying to fight it, or using that anxiety and nervousness and fear to stop you.
Be willing to uplift. For women, I tell them, be willing to uplift the masculine with your words and energy. Women don't understand that one good smile can light a man up for the rest of the day. Someone you don't even know. One good smile, one good interaction can enthus them and energize them. What goes around comes around my friends. When you start to circulate that energy, when you're generous with your energy in that, that way when you start to tap into the way you can use your feminine energy to uplift people, to uplift the masculine, that's being playful. If you're in the heterosexual universe, use your feminine energy to uplift whoever and whatever. But especially understand the dance of the sexes. That's okay. It's very important for women to be interesting.
This is, um, this is about being authentic in a lot of ways. You know, one of the key secrets in the heterosexual universe for women when it comes to attracting a man is to actually be more interesting. Women think they have to like have a different body. No, you actually gotta be more interesting. What makes you interesting? What makes you you, what makes you uniquely you be that. And then you're interesting. Then you'll garner attention. Another way of saying that is let go of trying to be something that you're not. To get the guy, oh, I know what I gotta do. I gotta lose all this weight to get the guy. I gotta be really fit and toned to get the guy. So then what's gonna happen is you're gonna spend all this time focusing on losing the weight and exercising your brains out and dieting to get the guy. And you're gonna get a guy who you attracted through all that effort. And you're kind of not being you, you're being this person who's like desperate to lose weight to get the guy. And meanwhile, you really haven't focused on being you, you're focused on hooking somebody.
Just be you and the people who show up are the people that you're interested in for the feminine. You have to trust that being yourself is your best attractant to what you want. In the opposite sex, or same sex just being you. That is your best move. Again, the ones that don't like you, they're gonna be quickly eliminated. The ones who do will have a better chance of showing up because you're advertising the real you.
How many women have I met who are in unhappy relationships? Because they pretended to be somebody they weren't to hook the guy. So what you end up doing is you hook up oso, you trick somebody into being with you by trying to be what you think you should be for them. And you end up in a mess because the person is in relationship, not with you, but with the mask that you put on. And eventually it takes too much energy to keep up the mass, the mass comes down and all of a sudden, ouchies.
Now I hope you're seeing by the way, that there's gonna be a lot of clients you have. And we're talking about women right now, who your engagement with them when it comes to embodying
is gonna be helping them get out there with their energy more, with their feminine energy. More. Why? Because there's a big subset of women who are holding themselves back. They're holding their, they're waiting for the perfect diet, weight, body, whatever, to finally have love.
And that's terrible. Don't do that. Let's stop that. Let's start getting out there. Now. You gotta learn how to be a good dating coach. So these are some great distinctions, okay? For men, once again, we're the heterosexual universe. If that's not your universe, translate this to the polarity and the way that it works for you. Okay? I'm just talking about what I know best for men, I'm gonna often look for them for the body image challenge, male, not happy about their body, whatever. I wanna notice their relationship to women, to the feminine. And I want to ask them to notice what you are drawn to and attracted to. Can you take more risks to be playful? Take risks in your communication. If you're single, notice your fears. Be willing to be afraid and still engaged.
Can you breathe yourself into your body and not disembody? Can you ground yourself in your body when you feel afraid yet attracted to someone?
So Mr. Klein, it's learning how to check in with your body instead of checking out with your body. Because men will do this.
Um, if you don't know this, women men do this. Does every man do it? No, but a lot of men do this. You have no idea they're doing it. They're attracted to you or to someone and they're checked out because they're too nervous. They don't know what to do. They know what to say. They don't know how to be, they don't know how to deal with their energy.
We humans don't always know how to deal with their energy. It, there's no judgment here. It's just a fact. We get attracted, we get drawn, we get sexually attracted. It could freak people out, meaning the person having the feelings. Why? Because you're married. Why? Because you're in a relationship. Why? Because you're single and you really like that person, but you're just too afraid because these feelings are just overpowering and overwhelming. So we're learning how to regulate our emotions in such a way that we can be present to them without dis embodying. And when you can feel your feelings without dis embodying, all of a sudden a whole new power comes out. So you've probably noticed that people who are more confident about their sensuality and their their sexuality, they have a certain presence to them.
They are present with their sexuality and their sensuality. It doesn't mean they're, all it means is there's a juiciness to them. There's, um, an authenticity to them. There's a certain kind of attractiveness that comes from them just being comfortable with that part of themselves.
So similar for women, men have to let go of performing for the feminine and just be you. Authenticity helps us embody just be you. Whatever that truly means for you. Authenticity helps us be in our body. Just be the real you show up as being the real you.
Authenticity heals a negative body image. This is me. This is what I like. I love this music. I hate this kind of music. I love to dance to this. I don't like to dance to that. I'm attracted to him. I'm not attracted to her. I'm attracted to them. Whatever it is. It doesn't mean you have to go speaking and saying everything that's on your mind to anyone who's in front of you. No. It's just learning how to practice, showing up as who you are and not trying to pretend to be something else.
And that's an interesting journey for each one of us. We have to figure out what that is. Oftentimes, remember, we cannot create, we cannot create self-love and a loving body image by hating ourselves into it, by having a forced diet, by doing lifeless exercise, by repeating hurtful thoughts. My friends, our journey is always, always, always, always, always informing our destination. That is just the way it is. We can't help it. But journey informs the destination. Tell that to your clients every single session.
I'm playful with my clients. I'm very playful. There are certain things, if I notice something lands for a client when I say something, I might remind them every session. Oh, by the way, remember that thing I said that was really powerful for you. I bet you forgot it. Let me remind you,
you can have so much fun with your body image challenge client who hates their body. Ha ha, bet you didn't think of that. You gonna have so much fun with them. How do you have fun? By you making it fun, by you embodying fun. This could be fun, Mr. Mr. Client, imagine, okay, you say you wanna date, but you're not ready to date because you don't have this perfect body. And you, once you lose 25 pounds, then you're gonna go out there and date like, no, no. I want you to start dating now. I want you to start getting online now. I want you to start, start just, just, you don't have to find the perfect person. Just get out there and then you start making that fun. And you know something, when you're really scared, breathe. Take deep breaths. I will poke and prod at clients and push them to their edge. Especially when it comes to this area of their sensuality, sexuality, relationship with the opposite sex or whatever sex they're into.
Notice where you could be playful with them. Notice how you can make this experience fun.
It's gonna be different for you. Each one of us as professionals is gonna be different for each client.
Always, always, always. Some of the embodiment strategies with food.
Slowing down, by the way, is an embodiment strategy. People who eat fast are disembodied with food.
People who get through sex really quick oftentimes are disembodied with sex. Many people have sex and disappear in the act. They're in their head, they're not present, they're worried. They're performing, they're doing this, they're doing that.
When you start to slow something down, you start to experience the thing that you're doing more. So, slowing down with food is an embodiment strategy. Feeling nourished by food. Oh yeah, I just bought fresh peppermint today and made fresh peppermint tea is so much better to my palette, you know, than the dried peppermint that you, you know, buy in a box in a tea bag. I feel so much more nourished when I buy the fresh peppermint.
I feel even more nourished when I can pick some fresh peppermint. And because I don't have a garden, it usually means from someone else's garden or someone else's house when I'm there. But that nourishes me. That one simple thing, nourishment. Well, I love it. What nourishes you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, you gotta notice that it's the little things, little things
that make us feel warm and good
strategies with food. Receiving pleasure, actually noticing the pleasure quotient of the thing you're eating, especially if you consider it a pleasurable food. Then get the freaking pleasure from it. Do not let your client eat anything that they think is pleasurable and not receive the pleasure.
Some of your clients, you gotta talk into a little bit of dessert every day because they're so pleasure less. They believe if I am pleasure less, I will lose weight ouchies. So then if you follow a pleasure list journey to lose weight, you're gonna end up a pleasure list person with a pleasure, listless body and pleasure. Less sensations. No, don't do that. Pleasure yourself into the weight loss journey, for goodness sake. That's way more fun. And it works.
It doesn't mean you slaty yourself and pleasure all day long and Gord yourself
pleasure and wisdom and intelligence goes hand in hand, my friends.
Just because something gives you pleasure doesn't mean you do it in any given moment.
Be playful with food, whatever that means for you. You know, we always tell our kids, don't play with your food. I'm not talking about playing with the food, but how do you make a meal? Playful. How do you make the preparation playful? How do you make the enjoyment of the meal when you're sitting down with people? Playful. How do you have playful conversation? How do you celebrate? Like actually, how do you celebrate? Do you have celebratory meals? And I'm not just talking about holidays and birthdays.
There a special meal you can cook with friends, family, loved ones by yourself.
Celebration helps us embody.
Just think of celebrating people playfulness. It is embodiment, my friends. You can help your clients so, so much. I I, I really mean this as I'm saying this, I, I literally, I'm thinking so many people that I've worked with over the years. You gotta understand that these are baby steps for people. You are literally helping someone perhaps land in their body in a good way for the first time in a lot of ways. You know, I actually like the word reparenting. I like that term. Many, many humans go through sta certain stages in life where we need to be reparented in some of those times. We reparent ourselves. We just be a good parent to ourselves.
When we're seeing a good coach or counselor, they're oftentimes functioning as a good parent for us, guiding us in a good way, guiding us so that we actually get where we wanna go and where we truly need to go in a good way.
So a lot of times you're just being a good parent for your client, understanding that they're like a child. And I mean, childlike. And I say that sweetly, our clients are childlike in that they don't know how to feed themselves. If somebody is binge eating or emotional eating or overeating, or is afraid of food, afraid of body, afraid of the pleasure, they're having a hard time being in relationship with food. They didn't quite learn a good way. And when you don't learn a good way, it can be ouchies, it can hurt, it can be problematic, and it can be painful. So that's what we're doing. We're changing that slowly with baby steps. You're being a good parent to your childlike client. Remember, you could be talking to a 75-year-old and you might be talking when it comes to food and body for them, you're, you're talking to a 12-year-old, a 7-year-old. Know that and understand that and play with that in your own mind.
See their innocence, your client has an innocence to them. And that innocence probably got trampled on a little bit somewhere along the way. So you have to see their innocence and respect it and notice it and smile at it and speak to that.
Another key ingredient to help transform an unhappy body image is other people.
That's why I am always looking at my single body image challenge client or my married body image challenge client who has cut off from other humans and not getting the love from other humans. You know, a lot of times
we need a little help other people. So right now, as a coach or counselor, you are an other person that's helping somebody with their body image healing is seldom done alone. Like, yeah, there's ways that we heal alone. Healing also happens in relationship. There's certain kinds of healing, certain kinds of growth in a good way. Certain kinds of transformation in a good way that only happens with another person. There's only so much you could do by yourself. It's okay.
And there's certain things we can only do by ourselves that we can't do with another person. That's okay too. So all I'm saying is healing doesn't mean I gotta go home and do this alone.
So we have to learn how to reinvent our community of people around us, our community of women, our community of men,
as a way to support ourselves on our body image journey. So healing community means people who support us. Your body image challenge client must, must begin to come out of isolation. Why? Because many people who have hate been hating on their body have determined that I need to be quarantined. Why? Because I'm such a hateful creature. I've had far too many clients like this shocking to me. And it's understandable. If we feel I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable as I am, in fact I'm extremely unlovable, then it's a wonderful thing that we're doing. We're isolating ourselves from other people so other people don't have to deal with our unlovability. That's so nice of us. You gotta come out of isolation. Your client has to come out of isolation. You as the practitioner, have to invite them out of isolation. That's your job. If they're isolating, you gotta help get 'em out. You gotta notice that about them.
Your body image challenge. Client needs to see that we have a shared humanity. Your body image client needs to hear the stories of others
who are their friends that they can talk to. Who are their loved ones they can talk to.
If you have a story about your body image journey, and if it feels right to share that briefly, don't take a lot of time, it's fine for you to share something about your own life.
A healing community is so important because we need each other to heal body image. It is too difficult to heal body image by ourselves, one person alone. That's why people will tell you. You will hear it's too hard. Anytime somebody tells you it's too hard to heal. Body image. There's, there's too much. It's too much. There's too much, too many images. There's too much. I'm constantly being bombarded. Your response ought to be something like this. Mr. Miss client, you are a hundred percent correct. I couldn't agree with you anymore. I know exactly what you mean. It is too hard for any one person to do alone. That's why we, you and I come together. That's why you're seeing me. I am here to support you. We are here to support each other. There are plenty of other humans. There's all kinds of places online to find people who are addressing a more positive relationship with their own body. We do it together because it is too hard to do by ourselves.
Part of healing, an unhappy body image is to begin to be contributed to by others and feel the love and connection to others. That's called a baby step. You might not be ready to jump in the sack with someone, but you can certainly sit in a room with other people.
Great idea. For those of you interested, or a lot of you already do this, small groups, small group support. Not around weight loss per se, but around transforming our relationship with our body.
Having a happier relationship with our body. If there's a weight to lose, then it's a side effect from all the good practices that we do.
Now, I mentioned we need other people. Oftentimes, here's how others can help with body image as well. You know, for a lot of people. Not all, not all, not all. But oftentimes getting loved on and adored and touched and pleasured by another person is powerful medicine. So yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Your client needs to do the inner work. And we operate in a world of relationships. I have had dozens of clients over the years, particularly women clients who they're married, they're in relationship. Their partner, their husband loves them, digs on them, wants them, and they keep their partner at length, at arm's length when it comes to sensuality, sexuality, touch, pleasure because my client hates her own body. And if I hate my body, how could you, my partner, positively love it? Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And when I have a client like that, you know, when I think to myself, I have just struck gold, we've got a great way to help you because you got a person who lives with you, who loves you, who's committed to you, and who just wants to play. If you've got a client like that, you've struck gold. 'cause you're always using the resources that your client has to help your client. One of your jobs, yeah, you're a resource for your client for sure. But they have all kinds of other resources that they're not tapping into. This is a powerful resource. When you have this configuration with a client, IEA client who doesn't love his or her body, their partner's got no issue, their partner's ready to roll, wants more connection, wants more pleasure, wants more touch, wants more sex. Great. That's the perfect person for a body image challenge person. Let them drive the car. Let them lead the way you tell them, okay, here's what I want, here's what I don't want. What coach your client into saying, okay, here's my boundaries. Here's the thing I don't like. Here's where you need to go slow. Here's what you need to do to get me warmed up. You, you can coach your client to give their partner very, very good specifics because a lot of times we, and in particular the feminine needs to be specific around the body.
Now, I don't know if you've noticed this, my friends, the feminine mind, and I'm talking women and I'm talking men with a strong feminine. They're the ones who, when they go to a restaurant, they are so particular about the meal and the flavors and the dressing and the taste and the texture and the like. It just like this. I don't like it that the feminine love specificity when it comes to pleasure, ain't nothing wrong with that. It just is ever notice, like guys, especially like the beer drinking guys, they're so unspecific. Just give 'em a lousy beer. Just give 'em a bunch of poor quality bar food and a, and a good football game, and they're happy. They don't need to. A lot of the masculine doesn't need to be as specific. It's not wired that way all the time.
So again, for my body, Ms. Challenge client, I'm gonna coach them up to the level of touch, intimacy, fun, sexuality pleasure that they can get to by enrolling, having them enroll the conscious help of their partner. Cre, you're creating, you're helping them create a new relationship, a new exploration. Mr. And Mrs. Client, this is an exploration, this's, an experiment for your client who's not in a relationship. You can have them consider that relationships short-term ones can be healing in this regard. If they're not open for a short-term relationship, that's fine.
But a lot of people out there need a kind of starter relationship from where they are. They need to just dip their toes in the water. They don't have to find the perfect mate right now.
Some people, you need to learn how to identify that, I think, or it's, no, let me put it this way. It's useful to be able with your single client, my friends, I'm, I'm, I'm really stressing this or emphasizing about a client's, um, relationship status because it's so important for people. So, so, so, so, so important. There's so much energy, so much action there because, you know, relationships, were either in one, we're recovering from one, we're wanting one, we're dealing with one. We're still unhappy about the one we just had and trying to figure out the one where this, we, we put a lot of energy into relationship. We're looking for the perfect person or we're trying to fix the relationship we have now. So relationship has a lot of energy and a lot of people, especially a lot of women, are looking for the perfect partner right now, but they're not ready to have the perfect partner right now because they have to have the perfect body first. Ouch. So a lot of people need to, to let go of perfection. Just, just let it go. Just let the world deliver what's right for you by being open, by being willing to not have the perfect person and to not have to find the forever relationship right now. A lot of people just not ready for the next forever relationship. Hey, if it shows up, great, but why not be open to play? For some people, that's a revelatory idea and a good one,
my friends. A hurtful body image is the fertile ground for a healthy one.
You know, the soul often learns through pain and suffering. That's just what a lot of us have noticed about life on earth. The soul learns through pain and suffering and having, um, relationship with our body that's loving for many people. That's a soul lesson. That's a soul triumph. When we get there, it is a worthy place to put our energy.
So I'm saying that this is deep, that's what I'm trying to say. I'm saying this is, it's big, it's potent, and the soul is off and on a journey that has pain and suffering. It just is. Let's learn as best we can to remember that, to embrace that you are here to witness your client in their painful journey
and hold a sacred space.
Make this as fun and playful as you can, and understand that for the body image challenge client. Chances are this is a soul lesson for them, and that's a beautiful thing. That means, as they love the body more and more and inhabit it more and more and embody more and more and welcome their body more and more, there's a beautiful victory that happens. They step into a person, steps into themselves, into their destiny, into who they're meant to be.
And that doesn't mean some magnificent Hollywood out there partying person. People have this glamorous image of what is gonna be like when they love their body. It's very simple many ways. It's a simple love. It's an uncomplicated love. When you love your body, it's less conditional, it's consistent, it's committed, it's caring. Yeah, stuff happens. You can have a healthy body image and one day, ah, something gets to you fine. Deep breath, big hug, and you recover back to self love.
Carl Young had an interesting line. He said, the foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.
I don't know if that's the foundation of all mental illness, maybe, but a lot of people have an unwillingness to experience their pain, their suffering. We try to medicate away from it so we don't feel it. When you learn to go more into the pain to embrace it, to face it, which is painful,
you then begin to relax around the pain. And when you relax around the pain, healing begins to happen. Insight begins to happen,
but you can't change the body
as a guarantee that we're gonna be happy. Just can't do it. Changing the body to a specific L look, weight shape guarantees us nothing.
My friends, some powerful questions for women.
Now I'm asking the universe on behalf of my client, on behalf of my female client, I don't care what her orientation is around her sexuality. For my female client, I am going to wonder about the feminine. Why? Because that's the physiology she was born into, and the body and the brain of a male and a female, they're different. We're different. So I'm gonna ask the universe on behalf of my client, what is the feminine asking of my client? How is, and I'm talking about feminine with a capital F, the archetypal feminine. What is the feminine asking of my client? How is it calling them? What does it want? How is the feminine wanting to express through my client?
The answer's unique for everyone. Maybe it doesn't wanna express. Maybe the feminine wants more masculine expression from client. Fine. So what is the feminine asking of my client? How is it calling her? What does it want? How is the feminine wanting to express through my client?
And from there, I'm listening to the universe. I'm listening to life. I'm listening to the silence. I'm listening, I'm listening, and I'm noticing what homework assignments I can give that I invent or we invent together that will help my client embody how the feminine is calling her.
Now, when I say feminine, you know, I'm not talking about the the collapsed definition that the media has about the feminine, which is I, I don't know, slender, pretty young and uh, I don't even know. But it's usually some collapsed version we've seen. The feminine is a long list of possibilities. Feminine might be calling my client to step into motherhood
and consider having a child. The feminine might be calling my client to
start putting less energy on motherhood and more energy on herself. It could be anything feminine might be calling my client to just care for her body. More feminine might be calling my client to dance. The feminine might be calling my client to be gentler with herself. The feminine might be calling my client to stop judging her own moods and understand that the feminine in all of us has its flow and has its moods, the ups, the downs, the inbetweens, the everything feminine. Might be asking my client to creatively express in a very specific way. Feminine might be calling my client to just be more with herself and her own body and not be in relationship and not jump into the sack with anyone. Right now, the feminine might be calling my client to come out of her attachment to being alone. Her fear of being out there and yeah, start experiencing
feminine might be calling my client to explore her sexuality. Even if in her own mind
feminine might be calling my client. To find women who can be in her life, who can be good role models and good friends and good women
so much, it's endless. Then you're gonna look for homework assignments that you invent that will help your client move in that direction. So you're talking to the wisdom of the universe. You're talking to a higher power, you're talking to the invisible architecture. You're calling upon a higher code
that's way smarter than all of us. It exists. I promise you, when you beckon that wisdom, it'll talk. It'll eventually reveal itself. Likewise, for men, what is the masculine with a capital M? Asking of my client. How is it calling my client?
How is the masculine wanting to express through my client? And I'm talking for my male client right now? Same. Same. What practices and assignments. Assignments can I invent or we invent together that helps my male client embody the masculine? More so commonly with male clients,
the masculine might be calling them to have firmer boundaries. The masculine might be calling my client to be stronger in his communication. The masculine might be calling my client into commitment to another person, to another being, to an animal, to a job, to a career, to a mission, to a purpose.
The masculine might be calling my client to more rigorously take care of his body.
The masculine might be calling my client to say no more. The masculine might be calling my client to say yes more. The masculine might be calling my client to have more courage and to speak up and not hold his voice back. The masculine might be calling my client to not be bullied by certain people in his life.
The masculine might be calling my client to make good on a promise than he made could be anything.
Okay, let's close up with some final reminders. Remember my friends, we heal body image as a collective, not merely alone. You and your client are being a collective. When it's you and your client, you and your client are helping heal and transform and elevate your client's body image. You're doing that together and as you're helping your client, you're helping yourself. We can't help it. It just happens.
We heal this collectively because it's a collective challenge. Hundreds of millions of people across our globe
have an unhappy relationship with their body. That's not a personal issue in one person. That's a collective issue that personalizes within individuals. We must understand that. Yes, it's my body image challenge, but it's our body image challenge.
Now, here's the thing you gotta remember, constant and repeated toxic messaging from the world got us into our body image. Mesh constant and repeated toxic messaging from the world got us into our body image mess. People are getting bombarded. They're getting thought bombed moment to moment to moment. Wherever they go, wherever they look, whatever they read, whatever they listen to, it's there. Therefore, constant and repeated positive messaging from each other will dramatically help us get outta that mesh. So we're just reverse engineering. How do we get into it? Let's reverse engineer. Great, constant, repeated, toxic messages that put me down. Got it? Let's start to have constant and repeated positive messaging. So that's what you're doing with your client. You're giving your client positive messaging. You are giving them baby steps to take that. When they do those baby steps every day, slow down with food, be nourished by food. Get pleasure from food, for example. Invite more touch, for example, go out in nature, for example, spend more time in a luxurious bath, for example. You're giving yourself a positive message consistently. I love you body. I'm taking care of you body. You're worth it. Body, even if you don't love it like it. Even if you don't like it, just do something good for it. But it's constant and repeated. The same way we got into the mess is the same way we got out your job as a practitioner. Our job as a practitioner is be consistent. You gotta be patient, meaning you gotta play a long game. Let go of, my client has a body image challenge. What do I do? I've been telling you it's a long game. If you are in a rush,
then you gotta take a deep breath and learn how to relax. That's your job. You have to learn how to relax into a long game here for your client and likely for yourself. So when you're speaking to your body image challenge client about some of these principles, you have to speak with conviction, meaning confidence.
You have to let your client know you are guiding them and mentoring them. You're assuming your role. Just as you hear me, assuming my role with you, you assume your role with your client. You're playing a role. It's not acting. You are being in an archetype. You're being in a role. It's a specific kind of relationship. Your accountant, that's a specific kind of relationship. It's about the numbers, about the money, about the details. That is a specific kind of relationship. Great, hallelujah. This relationship with your client is a specific kind of relationship and with your body image challenge client, you have to be consistent, patient, play a long game unconditionally regard them. Understand their age appropriate archetype, help move them into it. Help them with tiny baby steps. Help them get back into the body with baby step embodiment practices, and you gotta trust your client's journey.
We're very fortunate, my friends, to know some of the things we know to be sharing with each other in this way and to be plotting how we're going to take over the world of unhappy body image and change it one person at a time. You don't have to save the world, you don't have to save anyone. You just need to be you. Do the things we're talking about. Trust your own journey as a practitioner. Trust your client's journey. Good things will happen. Body image, case studies and stories are next. Thank you, my friends. As always, I really appreciate you and I'm gonna see you on the other side.

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