Grow out of Painful Patterns
We offer web based group classes and do at home courses to soften shame, criticism, perfectionism, and overconsuming sugar and food.
When Food Is Your Mother
For many people, overeating, food obsessions (like a sugar obsession), and binge eating are not just “bad” habits or coping strategies but emotional bonds – a well-intentioned attempt to feel safe, secure and connected in the face of isolation, overwhelming emotion, powerlessness, and pain. This emotional bond with food – and the needs that drive it – can be so strong that it overrides a need for health or sobriety. Gain insight on how to heal it, and guidance on how to replace it with true, secure refuge.
Emerge – Create a New Habit
Next class begins early 2020
If you overuse sugar – or another habit – for stress relief, to care for your emotions, and if you tend to be hard on yourself about being so stuck, this course will help you soften self criticism, set nourishing limits, and change your sugar habits with a gentle, compassion based approach. You’ll receive daily emotional support and learn how to apply self compassion to the process of habit change, so you can create more nourishing self talk and build resilience, that internal sense of, “I trust myself to move through this.”
Rather than relying on will power or control to create change, you’ll learn practical, hands on ways of using compassion, acceptance, and connection to gently support yourself into new ways of relating to the needs and feelings that drive your cravings.
This course is our most popular and has been taken by thousands from around the world since 2012. *Note – this course used to be called The 30 Day Lift. It was renamed in 2019 as Emerge: Create a New Habit. Same course, different name!
Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel
Next class begins early 2020
When you attempt to make changes in how you eat, care for your body, or care for your self, you may bump into your Inner Rebel – the part of you that strongly says “No!” The result? You may get stuck in collapse, resistance or inner conflict – fighting amongst these various parts and needs. In this course, you’ll learn how to soften this inner conflict, understand the needs underneath the inner rebel, and playfully work with this part of you rather than against it. This will help you follow through on the changes you want to make and express a greater sense of power in your life.
The Heart of Food
This class is a do at home course, and is open for registration!
The Heart of Food is a 28 day support program to soften anxiety about sugar and food. Instead of a focus on behavior – eating a certain way – you’ll learn tools to deepen compassion, nourish resilience, and soften the anxiety and obsession with food. Your relationship with food and sugar can feel more nourishing and less anxious – and you can feel less tension about getting it ‘right.’
You’ll also learn some of the primary emotions and drives that feed overeating, how to approach the vulnerability that lies underneath food, and new ways of relating to these unmet needs. This course is video/audio based with written transcripts.
The Book of Love
When we experience heartache, hardship, or pain, or when we struggle with something long term, it’s easy to feel like we’re ‘damaged goods’ – like there’s something wrong with us.
Our struggles can become the lens through which we see ourselves, coloring our perceptions and beliefs about who we are. In the wake of this separation, we often lose our connection with ourselves: our hopes and dreams, abiding goodness, capability, and trustworthiness.
The Book of Love is a playful, art based class to reconnect to your wholeness: to the deeper story that lives underneath feelings of disconnection.
In this 6 week class, you’ll be crafting a journal – using a blank book that you fill with images, stories, symbols and more – to create a book of connection, a chronicle and witness to your soul’s story. Through this creation and through sharing a space with others, you’ll reconnect with your deepest self, soften shame, and embolden courage – supporting your healing journey with food or any other challenge.
More about our approach:
We should stop using the word addiction and shift to a new word – bonding.” – Peter Cohen
Our approach combines gentleness with power, and softness with strength to care for the vulnerability that lies underneath overconsuming, perfectionism, and self blame.
When you approach your vulnerability with compassion, you reconnect with your wholeness, goodness, and strength. You nourish the self leadership that enables you to set loving limits, soften shame, and make healthy changes
Our approach can help you in 3 key areas:
- Changing how you see – learn a different way of understanding compulsive behavior – as a cry for connection and help – that normalizes the behavior, softens the fear, and offers a map for healing. Learn how to use compassion and connection to build the container for growth: loving relationship.
- Changing how you relate – learn how to use connection to support yourself in difficult situations, when you feel triggered and reactive. This is an important switch: responding to your needs, emotions, challenges, and triggers with compassionate, caring support rather than fear/anxiety, disgust, contempt, frustration, collapse/helplessness, or self hatred.
- Changing how you grow – learn how to use the power of connection and the safety of relationship to support your growth out of compulsive behavior. You’ll also learn what “prunes out” impulses and how to support this process. Connection makes healing and growth easier, less stressful, and possible.
The fruits of this approach appear “up on the surface” as changes in how you respond to triggers, changes in how you talk to or relate to yourself, and changes in how you relate to your emotions and vulnerability.
Because this approach is grounded in development, not habit change, you can expect to see these shifts appear in multiple areas in your life. Our approach is non-violent, gentle, and grounded in deep respect for our human vulnerability.
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