If you self soothe with food or sugar to manage anxiety, care for unresolved trauma, or to lower stress, and you want to care for your needs without overeating, I offer home study courses to support your healing journey.
My courses will help you understand the roots of food suffering, change how you relate to the wounds that feed them, and gently outgrow a painful bond with food.
My courses are hosted in a private, beautifully cultivated space where you have unlimited online access. (Take a peek here.) Courses are $200 USD and are yours to keep.
Where to start
Soften a Sugar Habit with Presence, Compassion and Grief
The first place to begin is by taking Soften a Sugar Habit with Presence, Compassion and Grief. This class offers four foundational tools – presence, compassion, grief, and loving limits – that we explore in all our classes and that can help you transform your patterns with food.
This class will help you understand the ‘how’ of how you change your relationship with food and relate to cravings.
When Food Is Your Mother
After taking the Soften class, you want to take When Food is Your Mother. Relational neuroscience has helped us understand that our addictions – including food addictions – are emotional bonds – places of safety, warmth and ‘holding’ that we turn to when we’re overwhelmed by pain, alarm, or distress.
In moments of overwhelm, this emotional bond with food – and the needs that drive it – can override other needs, such as a need for health or nurturing limits. In When Food is Your Mother, you’ll learn more about this new understanding of addiction and ways you can nurture the healing process.
Where to go next
After taking Soften and When Food is Your Mother, the garden path opens to my other offerings, and where you go next is a matter of which course speaks to you and where you need support.
Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel
Align is for you if you reactively push against help and support and get stuck in feelings of resistance – “No, you can’t make me!” – when you try to set limits with food.
You’ll learn how to soften the inner conflict between the part of you that wants to change and the part of you that pushes back. Defusing this conflict will help you follow through on the changes you want to make with food, set limits, and express a greater sense of power and agency in your life.
Emerge – Create a New Habit
Emerge: Create a New Habit is for you if you want gentle yet powerful emotional support to navigate the transition into a low or no sugar diet. For 30 days you’ll receive daily emotional support. You’ll learn how to apply self compassion to the process of habit change with sugar, so you can create more nourishing self talk and build resilience, that internal sense of, “I trust myself to move through this.”
Listen: Gentle Ways to Support Your Healing with Food
Listen: Gentle Ways to Support Your Healing with Food covers seven core areas where nearly everyone struggles in their healing journey. These core areas are caring for neediness, befriending cravings, caring for places of collapse and powerlessness, becoming more comfortable with the ebb and flow of emptiness and satiation, limits, receiving care rather than caretaking, and softening perfectionism.
Nurturing Your Inner Mother
Nurturing Your Inner Mother is a year long intensive to transform your inner world from shame, judgment, and criticism into a warm, welcoming inner refuge where self soothing with food, isolation, and self judgment can gently fall away.
Each month has a theme – like blessing the body or befriending the outcast – to help you soften shame, rest in your wholeness, and deepen your courage and compassion.
The best value – the home study bundle
If several of my courses appeal to you, I offer a home study bundle where you get my four core home study courses Align: Heal the Battle with Your Inner Rebel; Emerge: Create a New Habit, Soften a Sugar Habit with Presence, Compassion and Grief and When Food is Your Mother for one price, a savings of $400.
Here are the payment options for the home study bundle:
A play based class to soften shame & nurture resilience
If you want a class that isn't about food, per se, but about nurturing a compassionate relationship with our life's story, The Book of Love may be for you. This playful class uses imagery, story, creativity, and collage to reconnect to your essence. You’ll explore weekly themes about connection and healing. Then you'll take each theme and fill a blank book with images, stories, collages, symbols and more to create a Book of Love, a chronicle and witness to your soul’s story.
Art, story, poetry and creativity are powerful ways of supporting resilience - the new life that longs to rise in you, what lies underneath the painful feelings of there's "something's wrong with me." Learn more about this course here.
A collage I made about my yearnings for healing and play.
Questions?
Help! I don't know which course to take. They all speak to me.
If you don't know which course is the right fit for you, please reach out. I'm here to help!
What if I begin a course and find I need more support?
I'm glad to help - I offer 1 on 1 support for those who want extra support and care. Learn more about 1 on 1 companioning here.
How do I find a therapist who resonates with your approach?
Sometimes the help you're wanting is to work with a therapist. If you want to find a therapist who resonates with my approach, you'll want to look for a therapist who's attachment focused, emotion focused, or who has training in relational neuroscience, or IPNB. Go here to learn more about finding an attachment trained therapist.
Do you offer nutritional guidance?
This can be important, but I don't offer information about the 'what to eat' question or offer nutritional advice as this isn't my area of expertise. If you're looking for this kind of support, I recommend working with a nutritionist, physician or health coach.
Can I take more than one class at a time?
While you choose how you move through the courses, if you're asking for my recommendation, I'd focus on doing one course at a time. You don't want to overwhelm your nervous system by taking in too much at once or rushing the healing process.
When we're suffering, we can feel alarmed and frustrated, which can make us feel driven to 'make our healing happen.' This is understandable! And... I encourage you to slow down, take one step at a time, and trust the healing process that's carrying you. Your nervous system, body and psyche have wisdom and will guide you.
How long does it take to heal?
Which brings us to a question I hear often: How long does it take to heal?
While each person's journey is filled with its own timing and wisdom, I've found it can take a few years to soften protectors like food - which can feel frustrating. But facing this truth helps us relax into the healing journey, with all its ups and downs and unwinding.
The healing process needs patience - for it's supporting us in reclaiming our feelings, moving out of isolation, grieving the losses that live underneath the food, and pruning out what doesn't work. This takes time!
You may also be healing trauma, for which I highly recommend having a therapist's support. Learn more about trauma support here.
Closing Blessing
I respect your time, money, energy, and dreams of healing, and I want you to get the support you need. If you have any questions, or don't know which course is the right fit for you, please reach out. I'm here to help!
Please go here to read my refund policy, privacy policy, terms and conditions, and more. I welcome all feedback and questions.
With warmth and sincerity, Karly and the Growing Humankindness team