Something that shows up for nearly everyone who longs for healing with food is resistance. This might arise for you, too. While a part of you longs for change, growth, healing or relief from painful eating patterns, another place may resist these changes. Something in you may feel scared. Another place may insist that they really need the food or overeating to feel safe and ok. Or you may resist making changes with food because you were criticized for your weight, shamed, or put on diets as a child. So a place in you (understandably) says, “Hell no!” when you try to set limits with food. This can feel frustrating, discouraging, and exhausting – like you have an inner battle between these conflicting needs and desires. You may feel like your only options are to be harsh with yourself or to throw your hands in the air and give up. Thankfully, there’s another way – the path of relationship: to come into relationship with the places inside and their different needs. I think about the Psalm about ‘setting a table in the presence of my enemies’ and imagine setting this table with every part of ourselves – every part of us that feels like an ‘enemy’ to our well being, health, and wholeness. The word enemy has an interesting etymology – it’s rooted in the Latin root ‘amare’ (where we get the name Amy) which means ‘to love.’ You combine amare with ‘in,’ which means not, and you get something like this: ‘the friend that is not loved.’ So the ‘enemies’ inside are those places in us that our outside of our circle of love. These places long for a place at the table, to be welcomed to the banquet hall inside our hearts. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to care for resistance is not to dismiss, minimize, plow through, override, or capitulate to it, but to become curious, to get to know it, and to care for the pain it’s protecting. What the resistance needs – or what it’s pointing to – will be different for each of us, and will ebb and flow. In my own life, sometimes resistance is my caution saying, “Stop! Please listen! You’re going too fast!” At other times, resistance is showing me a place that’s hurt and that needs care. Our willingness to be in relationship with these places of no, stop, slow down, or protest is what helps us tune in to what’s needed. Just as we build relationships with people outside of ourselves, we also build relationships with our inner lives. Our upcoming class – Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel If you wrestle with resistance and feel overwhelmed, discouraged or perplexed about how to relate to these feelings, our upcoming class, Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel, may be for you. This class can help you better understand why you protest against or resist making positive changes. This understanding brings the left hemisphere of our brains to rest as we orient ourselves to the complexity inside. And the class is designed to bring lots of warm support so that these places of no, rebellion or resistance can feel safe and cared for – and so you can align the various parts of you towards a common yearning. Class begins Tuesday, January 30th and is intentionally offered at a time of year when we often feel inspired to make changes that will nourish our well being. You can learn more and sign up here.