What's tugging at your heart these days? What's lifting your spirit? What's evoking strong emotion - a knowing deep inside of you - that you can't ignore?

My clients experience transformative healing in their relationship to food – but more accurately, with themselves – when they build capacity to navigate the pain, grief, regret, shame, confusion, and heartache they've been carrying with them in life that turning to food once masked. As they learn to give their exhausted body, numbed emotions, and unsettled spirit the attuned, agenda-less care, compassion, and kindness needed, they at once feel relief and sadness.

Sadness arises because when they finally acknowledge and tend to their emotional needs, it reveals the vastness of those needs that were denied or repressed for so long. They mourn their younger self 5, 10, 30, or 50 years ago who desperately needed the support and perspectives but didn't know any better. They mourn the decisions they made, the awareness they didn't have, and most painfully, the parts of themselves they lost or had to shut down in order to keep going.

I’m talking about my clients, yet this is the human experience of life that we can all relate to in some way, whether we use food to mask our pain or some other protective mechanism such as perfectionism, people pleasing, codependency, substance use, etc.

When we acknowledge and own the uncomfortable truths and pain we carry, we allow ourselves to grieve what wasn't, what simply couldn't be. And honest grieving becomes our path forward; it shows us what we are missing now and what we need for ourselves going forward. This breaks us out of the trance towards a more awake, alive, vibrant, whole, and embodied self.

How do we grieve, consciously? How do we break out of this trance towards a more awake, vibrant self?

• Whatever painful truth you sense, let it be. Don't turn away from it.

• Let your pain guide you to where truth is needed; to the ways you are being contained, restricted, tamed, kept small, and unexpressed.

• Allow the anger, grief, and deep heartache to show you what you WANT for yourself now. Feeling this pain will magnify the hollow void inside of you initially. But let it guide you to a more settled place.

• Remember, precious things are created from discomfort.