Growing Human(kind)ness by Karly Randolph Pitman

Foster a change of heart

When your ‘inner rebel’ creates obstacles to following through

by Leave a Comment

In my last few emails, I’ve been talking about how important power is in your relationship with food as a preview for my new course. In case you missed those emails, you can read them as blog posts here – why power is a form of love – and the two forms of nurturing that create healing with food.

I feel really excited to email you today to share that this new course is officially launching! (If you’re eager to learn more, you can go directly to the course page here.)

But first, I want to talk a bit more about power, because it’s so important. If you’re feeling stuck and frustrated because you can’t seem to make changes in how you relate to food, your body, or your needs, power may be the missing component.

When we don’t have a connection to our power we often feel unable to effect or make changes in our lives. This can exacerbate patterns of overeating, for food becomes the primary or only way we express power or care for ourselves.

Likewise, we may feel afraid of using power in our relationship with food and with ourselves because we’re afraid of hurting ourselves. This can show up in a number of ways:

  • you may feel paralyzed, unable to move forward
  • you may collapse into hopelessness and ‘why bother’
  • or you may ping pong between too lenient and too rigid ways of caring for yourself

These dynamics can be so frustrating – and often have a common root:  a conflict with your ‘inner rebel.’

Meet the inner rebel

The inner rebel is the part of us that says, “Uh oh, no way!” and strongly rebels or resists when we try to tell ourselves no, set limits or steer or guide ourselves into new ways of being. The inner rebel can arise as strong emotions, body sensations, thoughts and feelings of resistance, rebellion, opposition, and defiance.

It’s like a 2 year old saying, “No! You can’t make me!”

The inner rebel can be so frustrating! For there’s a part of you that longs for growth, healing and change. And yet the conflict with the inner rebel can create ‘self sabotage,’ fester feelings of self doubt, and keep you stuck in the very patterns you long to change.

In teaching over a thousand students and in listening to their food stories, nearly everyone experiences conflict with their inner rebel. It’s really, really common – and is why I’m offering a new course, Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel, to support you in softening the conflict with this part of you.

The good news is this – you can learn how to understand, listen to, and care for the inner rebel so that you don’t feel caught in so much internal conflict.

Why it’s about relationship

It’s not about ‘cutting out’ this part of yourself, but understanding its necessary and vital role, giving it outlets so it can do its job, and connecting with this part of your being.

With loving relationship, you can align your inner rebel with the other parts of yourself, where your various parts cooperate in greater harmony – working together towards your dreams, hopes and yearnings rather than against each other.

If you’ve spent a lot of time nurturing your softness, making room for your vulnerability, and creating a more compassionate relationship with yourself and your overeating, and yet you feel like you’re not able to make the changes you’d like to make with food, healing your relationship with your inner rebel may be the next step on your journey.

In this new course you’ll learn about the dynamics that feed the inner rebel, how to soften the battle between your desire for change and your desire to say no, and how to relate to your inner rebel with more levity, playfulness, and friendship rather than fighting this part of you.

Be filled with power

Healing your relationship with your inner rebel helps you embody and embrace your natural power. This then frees you up to follow through on the dreams, intentions, and hopes that are precious to you.

As a sign in my gym bathroom says, “Don’t throw paper towels, trash, or your hopes and dreams down the toilet.” This note makes me smile – and feel a bit inspired – every time I see it.

If this topic speaks to you, I invite you to follow the link below.

A few nitty gritty details:

You can find the details for the course here.

The course starts February 25th and is open for pre-registration. If you already know that this course is something that speaks to you and you want to join me, you can pre-register now.

If you’re still unsure if this course is for you, rest assured – I’ll be talking more about the inner rebel over the coming month so there’s plenty of time if you need to hear more. Pre-registering, however, does give you the best price and helps us prepare a place for you.

Questions about what’s included or how it works? Please explore the course page below. And if you have more questions that we don’t answer there, please send us an email and we’ll get back to  you. As we’re a small company, kindly give us 1-2 business days to respond.

The two forms of nurturing that support healing with food

by 5 Comments

When we overeat, we tend to use food in fairly typical ways.

One of these ways is using food for comfort – eating for stress relief, to self soothe, and as a source of softness, care and tenderness.

In my classes, I call this using food ‘as a mother.’

When food is a ‘mother,’ we’re using it as a relational substitute.

Food is not just food, but a mothering presence – a source of nurturing and comfort, a source of empathy and attunement (a way to feel ‘felt,’ seen and understood), and a source of stress relief.

Overdoing and using food for a ‘treat’

One of the patterns that tends to go hand in hand with this tendency is overdoing.

There may be areas in your life where you feel like you’re too hard on yourself – where you feel like you’re pushing yourself too hard or asking yourself to do too much. This internal pressure can feel oppressive and painful.

One of the ways you may cope with this stress is to treat yourself with food. For example, people will often share with me that food is their one or primary source of comfort or pleasure.

In truth, most of us use ‘things’ to relax to some degree or another – whether it’s with a dessert, a glass of wine, or a favorite TV show. Of course!

But when this pattern becomes excessive or compulsive, it creates a lot of pain and frustration.

Why setting boundaries can feel so confusing

This can bring you to a challenging place:  where you want to set some boundaries or structures around comfort or stress eating, and yet you also want to do so in a way that doesn’t feel overbearing or punishing.

This can be especially tricky if you have relational trauma, and eating is a primary way you feel loved.

When food is a substitute mother – a warm, attuned loving presence – setting any kind of limit or boundary with food can feel like abandonment or neglect, a removal of this motherly love.

Many, many people have told me how food is the primary or only place where they feel deeply loved – and that removing this source of love feels like a giant emptiness, hole or void.

Likewise, so many have shared with me that setting any limit with food feels like punishing themselves. Cognitively they know the limits are helpful. But emotionally, it’s a different experience.

Alongside these strong feelings that come up around limits, there’s also another part of us that wants structure and limits, for limits and structures are a powerful and primary way we feel protected, nourished, and cared for.

Caring for the feelings that arise

What this can create is a double bind, or a push-pull – where you may have a desire to grow or make changes, or to set some boundaries with food, but you also feel afraid.

This mix of feelings is very understandable, and makes so much sense. And it can feel like these feelings are ‘getting in the way’ of your healing.

It can make us want to ‘remove’ or ‘get over’ these feelings so we can heal. I know I had a lot of drive to ‘fix’ myself and my painful feelings that kept me so caught in food – which often left me feeling like I was steamrolling over really tender places in my heart. Ouch!

In truth, our tender feelings aren’t in the way. They aren’t something we need to ‘get over’ to get to our ‘real life.’ They’re something precious arising, asking us to pause, and to offer care.

From a heart perspective, they’re openings and opportunities.

Here are a few things that can help:

Combine softness with strength:  Both forms of nurturing are necessary to have a healthy relationship with food.

You need the warm, nurturing, yin, empathetic caring that helps you feel cared for and safe when you’re experiencing pain, overwhelm, or discomfort.

And you need the solid, strong, steady yang of boundaries, limits, and structures. This yang form of nurturing helps you feel protected and softens the anxiety about the ‘free for all’ that you can feel around food.

Get help for trauma:  If very strong feelings arise when you try to create limits with food, or if you recognize that you have trauma, I highly encourage you to get support. Working with a therapist or a support group can make all the difference in healing and unwinding the pain underneath overeating.

Healing this trauma can help soften the very understandable resistance, alarm, and fear that can arise when you try to set limits or boundaries with food.

Take the next step of growth. If you feel the desire to integrate greater power, structure, or boundaries in your relationship with food, you may be entering a new stage of growth.

The yin qualities of nurturing, compassion, mercy, and gentleness, grace will still be a part of your journey.

And you may be feeling inspired to nourish, support, and embody the yang qualities of love – the forms of love that arise as boundaries, no, fierce protection, sovereignty, and power.

While this place may feel a bit new, or uncertain, this is a great place to be! For something is yearning to be born in you, and in your relationship with food.

Why it’s important to face your relationship with power

Facing your relationship with power helps you integrate the compassionate mindfulness that brings kindness to overeating with the grounded sovereignty of self leadership, facing limits, and implementing loving discipline with food.

It’s how we move into a middle way with food without veering so much into the extremes of excessive permissiveness or excessive rigidity.

It’s a powerful combination!

I’ll be talking more about these two forms of nurturing over the next few months and in my new course on healing your relationship with power. If this topic interests you, you can sign up for the waiting list for the course here. Class begins the end of February.

Power is a form of love

by Leave a Comment

This coming February I’m excited to share that I’ll be offering a new course on healing your relationship with power and food. Why power, you may ask?

It helps to step back a bit.

The two gates of healing with food

If I had to give you an overview of the healing process with food, there are two primary ‘gates of healing’ that you walk through.

The first is the gate of vulnerability. In this stage of the journey, the heart softens. Your perspective changes: rather than judging yourself for ‘not doing better,’ or blaming yourself for overeating, you start to see that there’s something really tender underneath.

Your self compassion grows, and you move to care for the vulnerability that lies underneath food compulsions with greater kindness and tenderness.

This is where you understand and may even share with people, “Oh, I get it – it’s not at all about the food!”

If you want to learn more about this stage of the journey, you may be interested in this article on self forgiveness and this article on self compassion. And if this is where you’re needing help and are looking for more support from me, I highly recommend my Heart of Food course.

Healing your relationship with power

But with this softening – a deepening of self compassion and kindness –  what’s also needed is something seemingly moving in the opposite direction:  strength and power.

Healing your relationship with power is the second ‘gate of healing’ with food, and it’s as important and necessary.

It’s also an area where nearly everyone struggles, to one degree or another – especially if you’re more sensitive and intuitive by nature, and especially when there’s been trauma.

It’s one of the reasons why support can be so helpful – we’re not meant to go through these gates alone, and without help.

Do you wonder if you’re at this stage of the journey?

Challenges with power and food can show up in the following ways:

• you have a lot of compassion for yourself, but still have a hard time telling yourself no or setting limits
• you ping pong back and forth between ways of eating that are either too strict or too lenient
• you have a strong inner food rebel who resists any limits with food
• you struggle with ‘self sabotage’
• you have a lot of desire, but collapse when you try new things

This stage of the journey can be really frustrating, especially if you’ve done a lot of work to be more compassionate to yourself. You may even feel hopeless, like ‘compassion doesn’t work.’

If you recognize yourself in this list, take heart – it’s a great place to be, for it means you’re primed for this next stage of the journey. And while it may seem hopeless, it’s not – it’s merely that different qualities of love are being asked for in your relationship with food.

You’re being invited into the dance with power.

The challenge with power

Because most of us were raised in cultures that have conflicted and confusing relationships with power, and because we’ve all experienced the pain when power is used in hurtful ways, this can cause us to reject power as something ‘bad.’

We may feel so afraid of potentially hurting ourselves (or others) that we shy away from using power and self leadership in our relationship with food.

Power is a form of love

But without a healthy relationship with power, we suffer. An absence of power and direction doesn’t leave us feeling nurtured, but the opposite:  overwhelmed, unsupported, and unprotected.

It’s counterintuitive, but a healthy relationship with power is what helps you feel grounded, cared for, protected, and strong.

In a nutshell, power can be and is a form of love.

It’s healthy to thirst for power

Your hunger for power is not wrong, but arises from a desire for self leadership and empowerment – the desire to be the leader of your life.

It’s a natural and necessary stage of your development, and is how you emerge into your own viable being.

There are beautiful gifts and offerings your heart longs to give to the world. And there are ways you long to nourish and care for your body so that it feels healthy, cared for, vital, and strong.

A healthy relationship with power supports you in offering your gifts and caring for your body with presence, wisdom and strength.

And a healthy relationship with power is the ground, the ballast, that helps you venture forward.

I’ll be talking more about power over the coming weeks on the blog. And if this topic interests you, stay tuned – I’ll be sharing more about the nuts and bolts of the class so you can see if it’s a good fit for you.

In closing, I invite you to sit with your relationship with power and wonder a bit. You might ask yourself – how do I relate to power? And how does power long to express itself in my life?

And then watch, feel, and listen – listen with the ears of your heart – for the answers.

To the power that lives in you,

Karly

When sugar is a call for praise

by 6 Comments

Friends, here we find ourselves in the last month of the year, deeply immersed in the holiday season and all the rituals, traditions, and celebrations that the season brings.

This often includes many opportunities for the festive partaking of food and delicious treats. If you’ve wrestled with any kind of overdoing with food, this time of year can bring up the most dread or fear.

It can feel really, really vulnerable.

Our minds and hearts are so tender. Because of our tenderness, this softness at our core, we may guard ourselves from things that we believe will bring discomfort or pain.

So when sugar cravings arise, or when you come upon a particularly fantastic dessert, it’s easy to tighten up and tense, as if awaiting a foe. You may feel a sense of danger, or alarm, and even frustration or disgust. I often hear this when people tell me they ‘hate sugar.’

Whew – there’s a deep well of vulnerability underneath these feelings.

A ‘sign of the love we bear for ourselves’

In truth, our humanity is both tender, and intelligent, and resilient.

As an Indian sage, Sri Nisargadatta, said, our pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain “is a sign of the love that we bear for ourselves.”

So when we experience pain or discomfort, our minds and brains – being problem solving machines – are quick to think of solutions – what they think will stop or protect us from pain.

If sugar has worked to soften our pain in the past, it makes sense that when we feel some tingle of discomfort, that the impulse to eat sugar can co-arise alongside these uncomfortable sensations and feelings.

On some level, we’re thinking – “Sugar is the solution to my problem, what will make this pain and discomfort go away.”

Slowing down to see what’s there

This is where it’s helpful to slow down our process, to invite curiosity, and to ask with a ‘willingness to be surprised,’ as one of my teachers says.

For if we can pause and be with the longing for sugar, we may discover that it’s pointing to something different than what we think it is.

When sugar is asking you to feel

Sometimes we use sugar to numb or distract ourselves from pain or some anxiety that feels too much to bear. In this case, we’re using sugar to not feel something.

But at other times we can use sugar as a way to feel something. Often, it’s not sugar itself that we’re needing – rather, we’re longing for the quality that sugar evokes in us.

When I began studying the Sufi qualities – the 99 qualities of the Divine – I was struck by the quality Shakur, which I’ve heard translated as ‘thankful’ and ‘grateful.’ Etymologically, the roots of the word Shakur are also kin to the words sugar, praise, gratitude and acknowledgement.

This made me wonder – perhaps a craving for sugar is a longing, a messenger, a carrier for this quality of Shakur. When sugar cravings arise we may mishear or misunderstand this hunger, misinterpreting its message as a literal call for sugar.

But in truth, our hunger may be for something else:  for praise, appreciation, and grateful love.

“Everythings wants to be loved”

What in your life longs to be loved? What in your life is asking for appreciation – perhaps starting with your own tender self?

While I was writing this article, my son paused in his weekend chores and peeked over my shoulder. He began reading the words aloud to me, in a teasing, light tone.

In that moment I had a choice:  do I view his pause as an interruption? Or do I honor this moment and my son, taking this opportunity to connect with him here on this December Saturday?

I know I can forget to appreciate the Gift and gifts of life and love. It’s easy for me to put my head down and do what needs to be done – to keep on cooking the meals and running the errands and answering the emails, tending the fires of life, but forgetting to savor its inherent sweetness.

When I spend too much time in this ‘doing’ mode, I start to feel dry and barren; anxious, and irritable. I can feel irritated by my loved ones’ interruptions and by my body’s craving for sugar. I feel off.

The craving is a cry for connection

The irritation, the cravings, the dryness:  they are all signs of thirst, they are all cries for connection.

Sugar cravings are not here to do us harm:  they are an opportunity for intimacy. They whisper to us, “Come closer. Sit beside me and put your arm around my shoulder. For I have much to tell you.”

Then they whisper their secrets to us, and they remind us:  look around. Love what surrounds you. See what is really here.

The piercing beauty of life

I remember, about seven Christmases ago now, when I was visiting my parents’ Ohio home for the holidays. My brother and his family were there, too, and my children and his children – seven in all – were piled together in the basement craft room, in a giant bed we had made on the floor for all these little ones.

The room was a sea of blankets and pillows and cuddlies and clothes – various stuffed animals and blankies and socks and night lights and the special fan my nephew uses to sleep.

As I watched them settle into sleep from the doorway, my heart was pierced by this scene and all these accoutrements of love – the ways each of these children expressed their being in the world – and all these things – like this particular moment in time – that I knew would pass, and has.

As Shug Avery says in The Color Purple, “Everything wants to be loved.”

Come close

This holiday season, when sugar cravings call and call and call, rather than fearing their presence, turn towards them, and honor their invitation.

See if something in your life is longing for that sweet, sweet presence of noticing, of appreciation and gratitude.

Perhaps you begin or rekindle a ritual that embodies this presence – whether it’s lighting a candle, or saying a blessing over a meal, or singing praise to your loved ones, or simply slowing down to savor the small moments of a particular day.

To deepen this experience, you can invite others to join you in this ritual – or bring them into ritual with you, by honoring the memories and relationships and people that are a part of you.

See if honoring the cravings for sugar as a craving for connection both softens the fear of sugar, deepens your pleasure when a dessert or treat is called for, and heightens your joy, your appreciation for the soft, tender, sweetness of life.

Moving from self criticism to “This is difficult”

by Leave a Comment

When we’re facing challenges and difficulty, it’s easy for the inherent frustration of the situation to turn inwards, towards ourselves. This can arise as self criticism, self attack, and self judgment.

In the wake of this frustration, you may experience feelings, thoughts, and inner dialogue that sound and feel like this:

Ouch – it can be so painful.

When conscientiousness leads to self criticism

I’ve found that self criticism can often arise in those of us who are highly sensitive, earnest, hard working, or conscientious.

In highly sensitive people, there’s often an underlying hope, belief, or desire that because we’re hard working, conscientious, or sincere that we should be able to effect more change or make things different.

This can inflate our sense of power – as if our good intentions should be a protection against life’s difficulties, problems, or even our own fallibility. It can create a lot of pressure and feeling of responsibility.

The poignancy of self attack

Then, when problems do arise – when we experience a setback or go through a challenging time, when our dreams, ideals or expectations fall short, or when we make a mistake, we may turn against ourselves: “Why didn’t I prevent this from happening?”

It can easily send us into a place of collapse or a feeling of depression – a chronic sense that ‘I should be doing better.’

This pathway is understandable. Our hearts care, they love, they feel, they long to embody the ‘better angels of our nature.’

It’s painful to face our limits, it’s painful to face our reactivity, it’s painful to find ourselves in situations that are hard and difficult and lonely and challenging.

Of course we want to feel empowered to make things less painful or difficult!

It’s ironic and poignant – how our desire to protect ourselves, or our desire to protect our hopes and dreams can turn into aggression, into an attack against ourselves.

The shift from self criticism to self compassion

It’s a radical and powerful shift when we move from “Why am I not doing better?” t0 “Oh, this is really hard.” In this movement, we soften self blame and self criticism and lean into compassion, understanding and acceptance.

There’s a deeper embrace for how it really is right now – “Ah, yes, this is hard.”

It’s a big picture integration that takes in all the parts, all the players, all the complexity of being human.

This integration is a movement from fear – the sense that, “Something’s wrong, something’s terribly wrong!” – into love – “This is so tender and difficult. Oh, how it needs care and support.”

‘Touching the ground of our being’

In this turning from fear to love, we also turn to humility – what was once called ‘touching the ground of our being.’

Humility isn’t beating ourselves up – rather, it’s a warm, tender, wide and wooly embrace of our limits and of the complexity of being human. It reaches up and around and claims us as our own, as beloved, as rooted, as belonging.

In my own life, ironically, it was in my failures – my wrestling with eating disorders and food addiction, my wrestling with depression and anxiety – that I finally found the belonging I had sought in trying to ‘be better.’ The more I opened to my own humanity, the more I felt connected to others’.

I found my heart becoming tenderized towards my flaws, towards others’ foibles and failures, and more forgiving to both.

In my failure to achieve some mentalized ‘ideal’ I was connected to others, not separate from them.

Joining the human family

Through “failure” we join the giant umbrella of the human family:  every other being who has also failed to meet their own expectations, every other being who’s wanted to ‘do better.’

In this place of ground – ah, how human of us to make mistakes, to err, to experience difficulty – we find home:  a place open to us all.

And in this place, we find connection and support. When we move from “I should’ve done better” to “this is hard,” often the next step is, “I think I could use some more help.” Rather than trying harder, or beating ourselves up, we open and reach out.

We ask for help, we share our difficulties with another, we expose our vulnerability. Ironically, the hard time and the challenge gets easier, because we’re no longer trying to do it alone.

How beautiful – that it is through humility, compassion, ground – “Oh, this is really hard” – that we find a deeper connection – to ourselves, to others, to life.

To the ground of your being, and to the ground that holds you on this good day,

Karly

Wanting more hands on help?

If you want to read more about softening self criticism and self attack, you may enjoy this essay on practicing self compassion – “I will not make war against my own heart.”

You may also enjoy this post on softening the frustration and fear of overeating.

Nourishing your hopes for healing

by Leave a Comment

One of the most devastating consequences of shame, trauma, and loss is that we can internalize feelings of powerlessness or collapse – where we feel hopeless and impotent to effect any positive change in our lives.

You may feel stuck in a prolonged ‘freeze’ response, where you feel powerless to change, heal or grow. You may feel overwhelmed by feelings of rage, loathing, and frustration – frustration that often gets directed towards yourself and to your hurt and vulnerable parts that self soothe with food.

This can lead to feelings of despair, hopelessness and a sense that we’ll never heal – that our lives will never feel good or whole. It can be so painful and ‘sticky.’

The refusal to live a living death

The feelings are familiar. If you’ve been a reader of mine, you may have heard me share that alongside my years of eating disorders, I’ve also had a long journey through depression.

One of the greatest challenges with my depression is how I’ve felt trapped by it – as if I would never break free from the despair, darkness, and pain that engulfed me. I wondered if I would ever feel like ‘myself’ again.

I had an epiphany one day while listening to an On Being podcast, where Quaker writer, teacher, and educator Parker Palmer had this to say about his own journey through depression, and the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’ suffering:

“I do not believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live a living death. I believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live life fully, and well.”

I felt all the hairs on my neck and arms stand up at attention as I acknowledged that I, too, wanted to live fully, and well.

Building the foundation for the new life you long for

It was about this time that I began creating my Book of Love. I didn’t know it at the time, but later, I realized that creating my book was a tangible way of stepping forward and claiming this wish:  that I refuse to live a living death.

Making my book became an important piece of my foundation for healing and growth.

I think that’s what happens when we begin to ‘play’ with our dreams in some tangible way, whenever we act on those desires of the heart – whether it’s in creating a book, writing, dancing, joining a group, taking a class and learning something new, or reaching out for help.

It begins to build a foundation towards the new life we long for.

Reclaiming your birthright

Every time I worked on my book, I was like the barren Queen of folk tales of old, who yearns for a child and dreams of this yet to be born one: breathing my desires into a cup, reaching towards my hopes and longings, planting them, and giving them life. (If you want to hear a gorgeous telling of this folk story, I invite you to listen to troubador Martin Shaw’s version here.)

These places that hold our dreams are like midwives – birthing and breathing new life into the tender and precious desires of the soul, desires that may feel buried, hopeless or forgotten.

What longs to be born in you?

You may be walking through your own hopelessness. You may be wrestling with depression, or traveling through a journey of grief, loss, or transition.

You may wonder about feeling joy again, and you, too, carry dreams and longings within you.

My book was a love letter to joy and new life. But your book may be different. Your book may be a love letter to hope.

Your book may be a love letter to a relationship that’s beginning, or ending; a love letter to the parts of yourself that have become lost; a love letter to a new desire – to write, to teach, to paint, to dance – that longs to express itself in the world; a love letter to a desire for a partner, a beloved; a love letter to heal a painful past; a love leader to a cause or passion or thirst for justice.

I encourage you to seek out and claim those things, places and people who support you in birthing these hopes and dreams. And if The Book of Love feels like one of those places, come on in and join us.

Class begins this coming Monday, October 22nd, which is also the last day to register.

You can read all the nitty gritty about what’s included here.

Should you have any questions or wonder if this class is the best fit for you, or questions on payment plans, please reach out – we’re here to help.

I’ll close with this thought from Joan Mills: “I’ve gone through life believing in the strength and competence of others; never in my own. Now, dazzled, I discover that my capacities are real. It’s like finding a fortune in the lining of an old coat.”

To the fortune in your coat,

Karly

Most Popular Posts

>