A 30 day, compassion based support program to soften your sugar habit

Friends, Emerge: Create a New Habit is available as a home study course that you can join at any time. Tuition is $200 USD. If you live in Texas you also pay sales tax.We also take checks if you prefer to pay by check. To pay by check contact us here.

The pain of feeling caught in sugar

It's painful to be caught in a compulsive sugar habit - especially when you feel like you 'should' know better.

You may be someone who really cares about health and wellness. You may be versed in mindfulness and self care and know all the tools. You may even be a health coach, meditation teacher, or a therapist.

But when you feel stressed or overwhelmed, despite your knowledge, good heart, and sincere intentions, you regularly turn to sugar for stress relief, self soothing, and for warm care.

Sugar may feel like your secret shame, a place of stuckness that creeps up over and over again. It's so frustrating, especially when you long to do differently!

The anxiety of feeling stuck

Your struggles with sugar can you leave feeling anxious and worried about sugar, food, and your weight. You may feel scared or overwhelmed, especially when your cravings feel out of control.

You may dread get togethers, birthdays, and celebrations. Holidays may feel like mine fields.

You long to feel peaceful with sugar and to feel more present, and more connected, filled with those things that feed you. But when stress takes over, and you find yourself in sugar again, you start to feel hopeless, like you'll never change.

When drastic solutions are appealing - but don't work

I hear from so many people who talk about the toll sugar has taken on them. They feel self conscious about their weight and bodies. They feel ashamed that they overeat. And they feel caught between the part of them that wants to heal and the part that aches for the temporary comfort of sugar.

When we're feeling this way, we may feel like the only thing that will help is a drastic detox. You may ping pong between bingeing on sugar and trying to eat as 'good' or clean as possible.

But punishment and perfectionism don't work. Fixating on food or eating 'clean' creates its own stress, and we often end up feeling more anxious and more hopeless - a loop that leads us back into self blame, and back into sugar.

The wise impulse underneath the sugar

We can be so hard on ourselves about our habits with sugar. But when we turn to sugar when we're under stress, we're following a wise impulse to nurture ourselves - to find a soft, warm place to help regulate our nervous systems, bodies, hearts and minds.

When we were little, many of us learned to 'tough it out' on our own, to soothe our stress with sugar or other substances, or tried really hard to be 'good' in order to feel safe and cared for, to keep love close.

Soothing ourselves with sugar is how we adapted to our emotional, physical and spiritual environments - whether that's our families, communities, or culture. 

Looking to sugar for comfort is not a personal flaw, but a sign that you learned to rely on sugar when it was the best possible alternative for the love, care or connection you needed.

You don't have to eat perfectly to get relief

The good news is that this pattern can shift. As our inner and outer environments become more nurturing and connected, sugar can fall away as a primary source of safety, connection and care.

The other good news is that we don't have to do this on your own, and we don't have to 'eat perfectly'  to heal.

Most of us have an idealized image in our heads of what we think our sugar journey should look like. When our lives don't match this ideal, we panic, thinking there's something wrong with us. We compare ourselves against this ideal and fall short.

This feeling that 'something's wrong with me' or that 'I'm falling short' fills us with stress, anxiety and inner tension that worsens the very sugar habits we're trying to change.

This can show up in a number of ways:

• trying to do everything perfectly or be in control
• panicking or beating yourself up when you make a mistake
• getting easily thrown off course when you hit an obstacle
• feelings of hopelessness about changing
• and lots of worry about 'doing it right'

There's something really tender underneath the sugar

Change is possible. And it's not true that you're falling short. You merely need a different approach.

It starts with the ground floor - what's behind eating too much sugar. There's something so tender underneath this habit that's driving you nuts.

We all have times when we feel stressed, overwhelmed or like we don't have what we need. We can feel lost, uncertain, and insecure.

And many of us carry pain from past experiences in our bodies. This pain gets pricked in our daily life and stirs us up, physically and emotionally.

When we feel overwhelmed, when our pain gets pricked, or when we feel exhausted and stressed, we may reach for warmth and nurturing – like sugar – to help us feel better.

Then, when this morphs into a habit, and we get more and more stuck in it, we don't like ourselves. We feel bad for our 'bad habit.'

What will help you eat less sugar

This is where compassion steps in.

Compassion helps you eat less sugar by fostering gentleness and bringing in crucial emotional support. This helps you replace the refuge of sugar with true refuge, the refuge you nurture whenever you practice self compassion.

These particular forms of self compassion are especially helpful when you want to eat less sugar:

1. Gentleness, ease and patience for the healing journey – unwinding a habit is a process, and one that takes time, kindness, and presence. When you understand and make room for this process, you feel less stressed and less driven to get it right – and right away. This, paradoxically, helps you change and grow.
2. Gentleness, ease and patience for yourself – in addition to unwinding the habit itself, you're also building new habits, new ways of caring for your feelings and needs. This also takes time, patience, and kindness. When we acknowledge this, we support ourselves and bolster our courage rather than criticizing ourselves.
3. Emotional support. When you're moving through the growth process, you'll have times when you'll panic, when you'll feel like nothing's changing, when you feel bored, when you get scared, and when you feel resistant, when you don't feel like doing the things that help you feel nourished and cared for. During these times, you need emotional support to care for these emotions without getting stuck in them. This helps you navigate the ups and downs of the journey with resilience, trust, and strength – an internal sense of, “I can handle this.”

In teaching thousands of students and listening to their sugar stories, these three things are what I see over and over that lay the foundation for change. Emotional support is especially crucial. Nearly everyone needs more of it.

That's why I created this course for you.

How this course can help

In Emerge you'll receive support, tools, practices, and understanding to give you greater confidence and competence in helping yourself through the process of changing your habits with sugar.

This course is designed to help you compassionately reframe your experience with sugar so that you can honor your body's natural limits.

This is not a diet (you won't find information on what to eat) nor a bootcamp, nor a course on what or how to eat. Rather, it's a course to nourish, support and grow the internal resilience, strength and levity that helps you make external changes with sugar or other painful habits.

You'll receive daily emotional support to help you when you feel panicked, overwhelmed, like "f** it!" or frustrated.

You'll learn how to apply self compassion to the process of habit change, so you can create more nourishing self talk and build resilience , the inner confidence of, “I trust myself to move through this.”

And you'll receive help to reframe how you see the growth process, so that you can relax and settle in to your healing rather than feeling like you have to try really hard and make it happen on your own.

This course is especially designed for highly sensitive people and those who want a gentle approach. Step by step, with gentle persistence, change is possible.

How the course works

Each day for 30 days you'll receive an audio message to help you care for stress, soften difficult emotions, and deepen self compassion as you change your habits with sugar. 

You can listen to this audio as you start your day, in your commute, or while running errands or cooking dinner.

You'll learn how to use self compassion in the daily, nitty gritty of your relationship with sugar so you can eat less sugar without being overwhelmed by perfectionism, stress, and trying too hard.

Examples of what you'll learn:

• How to soften perfectionism and taking on too much
• How to embrace rather than resist limits
• And how to care for mistakes so they don't derail you

There's also a special bonus section with help for cravings and sticky feelings like boredom, resistance, and hopelessness.

You'll receive practices and tools to help you:

• move through cravings
• feel centered in moments of overwhelm and panic
• and move through resistance (The voice that says, "I don't want to stop eating sugar!")

This course is hosted on the Growing Humankindness Mighty Network, where you have unlimited online access to the course. Mighty Networks has a free app that you can download to your device for ease of listening to the audios whenever you need them. 

Connect with your Inner Elder

One of the key things you'll learn in Emerge is how to connect with your strongest self. You can think of your strongest self as your inner parent, Highest Self, or Inner Elder.

Like a mother caring for her children, your strongest self is the ring leader, the Self that cares for your other selves, needs, parts, worries, needs and concerns.

As you learn how to put your Inner Elder in 'charge,' you quiet, soothe, and care for the other parts of you that may be feeling overwhelmed, panicked, angry, or wanting to eat sugar for relief.

Be rooted in your strength

Over time, as you practice connecting with the wisest, steadiest part of you, you rest more and more in this part. It becomes your center.

The difficulties of the pandemic will still be there. Painful emotions like fear, anxiety or worry may still be there. 

But the 'you' that you're bringing to the situation feels different, more connected to the values that you care about and your inner strength.

So you can care for your anxiety rather than feeling like you're swallowed by it. And you feel more capable of caring for the difficulties and challenges that we're all facing here in a time of pandemic.

It's my hope, that in her own small way, that this course and the community space we've created for you will be a refuge of support, a space that bolsters your courage and feeds your heart.

May the support you find in Emerge nourish the ways you feel called to serve your loved ones, your community, our natural world, and your own being during this time. For you're needed!

There's room for strength and gentleness

As we face more stress and uncertainty, we need more patience, more compassion, and more gentleness. This is what helps us let go of the unhealthy ways we're coping.

So as we embody our strength, we also embody gentleness. This course is especially designed for highly sensitive people and those who want a gentle approach. 

A shelter in the storm:  hands on help for a time of uncertainty

While this course was originally created to help with sugar in 'normal' life circumstances, the teachings and practices in this course are especially helpful in a time of heightened alarm and uncertainty - what we've experienced these past few years with a pandemic, climate crises, war, and other stressors that we're facing as a world community.

Many of the tools in the course can help you both with sugar and in strengthening your web of support as you face financial insecurity, social distancing, disconnection, and worry about loved ones.

For example, you'll learn how to:

• feel comfortable asking for and receiving lots of help
• break patterns of isolation
  
• care for feelings of panic
• and care for feelings of overwhelm

Frequently Asked Questions

How long do I have access to the course materials?

Emerge is hosted on the Growing Humankindness Mighty Network, where you have unlimited access to the course materials. Mighty Networks also has a handy free app that you can download on your phone or other device.

Is this course just for sugar?

While this course can be used to eat less sugar, it can be used for any habit - anywhere you feel caught in painful false refuges and would like a compassionate approach. People have used this course to soften overworking, overspending, and to create restful sleep rhythms, to name a few.

I've taken other courses with Karly. How is this course different?

In all our courses, you'll find common threads like fostering compassion, relating to rather than cutting out various parts of ourselves, and approaching ourselves with reverence. What makes this course different than other courses is it's specifically focused on creating new habits with sugar.

How do I know if this course is the right fit for me?

A good question! If you enjoy reflecting upon your experience, becoming more intimate with your inner life, and have the spaciousness to practice the practices, this course can be a good fit. This is also a good course for you if you yearn for guidance that's not about what to eat, but how to create a more nourishing relationship with food. It's also helpful if you're comfortable with or open to meditative and contemplative practices and are comfortable in an online/virtual learning environment. Lastly, this course is especially designed for highly sensitive, mindfulness oriented people and offers gentle ways of supporting growth and change - if this is you, we're a good fit!

Can this course heal trauma?

Trauma can be so tender, and we have so much empathy for the challenges of living with trauma and the ways it can impact your relationship with food. While this course can help you in changing habits and bring support and understanding, it's not designed to heal trauma. For help with trauma, we highly recommend searching for a therapist with trauma training in your community. Many people find it very helpful if they pair a course like Emerge with trauma support. This kind of support can make all the difference in bringing ease and healing in your life - and we want this for you!

What if I'm unhappy with the course? Do you offer refunds?

We want you to get the help you need, and we want you to find the right fit for your needs, whether that's with us or with someone else. If you have any questions if this is the right course for you, please reach out to us by phone or email. We're here to help! 

If you take the class and discover it's not the right fit for you, please contact us in the first 15 days of purchase and you'll receive a full refund. Kindly note: after 15 days, we don't offer refunds.

How do I know if the course is NOT for me?

Another good question! If you want a 'kick sugar' food plan, guidance on what to eat, nutrition help, or medical advice, we encourage you to look elsewhere, as that's not our expertise or focus.

And while this course offers support and nourishment, it's not a replacement for therapy, trauma help, or medical support. Lastly, if you're uncomfortable with mindfulness or self compassion practices, then our course won't be a good fit.

What past students have said

Below you can read what former students have said about their experience in Emerge. If you have any questions on whether Emerge is the right fit for you, please reach out - we're here to help!