My therapy journey began because I wanted to stop feeling. Most therapy begins because you want to change how you feel. At least feeling the things you didn’t want to feel. Just like I wanted emotional control in the form of only feeling what I wanted to feel and never feeling what I didn’t.
Arguably, we’d all love that superpower. To feel the good without ever experiencing the bad. But it doesn’t exist, and for good reason.
All feelings are valid. They have a purpose, even the painful ones. But most people have gotten good at avoiding or numbing feelings as a way to deal with them.
But it never deals with them. It just masks them.
Feelings are part of being human. You were created to feel, which means you should feel. The journey to healing is not by suppressing the feeling but by learning how to feel without being controlled by the feeling.
When I went to therapy, I didn’t know how much control I had over how I felt or at least the ability to change it. I spent so much time trying to run from feelings and create a life where I wouldn’t have to feel the things I didn’t want to that I missed the beauty of healing emotions and using those feelings to create a better life.
I realized the superpower we’re looking for is not diminishing our feelings but creating better ones. It’s being able to feel everything while using what you feel to shift your actions because you know how to heal them.
Emotional regulation is the superpower. That happens through healing your nervous system.
I brought Mandy L. Harvey on the podcast to talk about emotional regulation, healing from trauma, and how to feel without getting hurt by what you feel but using it to thrive.
Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/315
Health has been hard. I want to emphasize the has as a past-tense explanation. Because while it might have been difficult, it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to live complicating health. It’s only difficult because we’ve let it become that.
Perhaps not you personally, but the endless external ideas about what health means are overwhelming, even confusing, but only because we’ve neglected to understand health for what it is. And in the process, we’ve over-romanticized the outcome of health that we’ve neglected the process.
When you romanticize the outcome while hating the process, you create a fantasy of health rather than the reality of it.
I get it. The end goal is enticing. I don’t think anyone can argue that we’d love to rock our skinny jeans and never have to worry about getting sick again. We’d love to arrive at that destination of health forever and always.
But health doesn’t look or work like that. Honestly, I think that’s more of a gift than we let ourselves believe. Health is a flow. It’s growth and movement that is changing as we change. Because of that, it requires you to embrace the process.
The process of living health makes it personal and practical.
In this podcast, we talk about romanticizing the process of living healthy and the top five ways to stop complicating health so you can start living it.
Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/314
Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) seems to be trending right now. While traditionally, I shy away from the fads of the moment. I had my eye on this one. Rather than another shot in the dark, continuous glucose monitoring offered tangible results in real-time. Unlike the scale, CGM opened up the internal workings of my biology to understand how it responded to what I did.
In real time, I was able to see how my body was responding. More than what I do, health is truly how my body responds. Understanding this piece of data allowed me to create change, not on ideas, but facts.
It helped me feel better than I have in a long time. I loved it so much that my husband also decided to take it for a test spin. Inside this podcast, we talk about our results (some that were shocking) and the changes we’ve made to help regulate our blood sugar. And we both share our opinions on whether continuous glucose monitoring is worth the investment.
Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/313
Food can be such a fight. In one breath, you genuinely enjoy food and want to enjoy the process of it. But in other, it’s terrifying. Your mind races with questions on what to eat, how much, will this make me fat, or what if it’s not good for me?
There are so many messages and ideas it’s hard to imagine thinking anything but dread when it comes to food and your body. But this is not the intended design of food.
Food isn’t to be feared. It’s to be enjoyed and used to nourish yourself, just as your body isn’t to be hated but loved and cherished for its role in helping you live your life.
It may not be a common thought, but you can experience food freedom. You can have the best of both worlds, enjoying food and loving your body.
In this podcast episode, I interview Jessi Jean, Mind Body Eating Coach, on what it looks like to experience food freedom and how we get there. If you intellectually know how you want to act with and around food but can’t seem to get yourself to do it, this podcast is for you. Learn how to change your patterns to stop emotionally eating.
Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/312