How Mindfulness and the Creative Process Will Help You Heal Your Relationship With Food (and with Yourself!)

Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with a non-judgmental awareness. The creative process is when you are fully immersed—in mind, body, and spirit—in the act of creating. Both states are healing and life enhancing, and offer direct access to the deepest roots of emotional eating. When truly engaged in the creative process, it’s an act of mindfulness, as well as an opening to become aware of the messages your emotions provide you.

Quieting your mind and engaging with a sense of flow allows for you to access creativity at the deepest (or highest) level. When truly connected to the creative process in a mindful state, everything else dissolves. This offers a sense of timelessness, a complete absorption that is truly powerful. This space of complete absorption, or flow, is where the healing happens. In this state you can connect with your true self and begin to have deeper, richer, and fuller emotional understanding and awareness.

Engaging with the creative process is not limited to making art! While art making is certainly a powerful faction of creativity, there are absolutely no limits to the creative process. The definition of creativity is: the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.

Making music, singing, writing, painting, drawing, working with clay, cooking, dancing, moving, digging in the earth, communing with nature, photography, how you decorate your home, how you express yourself through your personal style... -creativity really is limitless. When immersed in the creative process, you are connected to something beyond the realm of self. Mindfully engaging in the creative process allows you to become more comfortable and aware of your true self and your emotions rather than attempting to escape them with food.

The outcome of the creative process is not the focus. While the outcome may hold value for you, the process is where the healing occurs. Integrating the creative process with mindfulness, you can explore the challenge of emotional eating through your experience of the present moment, emotional awareness, and an expanded consciousness. Engaging with the creative process in a mindful manner will bring you in touch with your inner emotional world and offer a way to witness it, explore it, experience it and let it go. Often the driving force behind emotional eating is fear and avoidance. The creative process addresses those head on and mindfulness creates a renewed perspective on your emotions within the here and the now.

When you give yourself permission to tune into your emotions creatively, you free yourself from the fear and avoidance that drives you to soothe with food. Your personal process may be writing a poem, story, song, or in a journal where you can connect with and release your emotions. Creating an art piece with any art materials offers a space for the psyche to rest, where emotions can be held, witnessed and respected. A physical movement or dance can depict, express and physically relieve deep emotional experiences. Allowing yourself the opportunity to connect with the rich internal world of emotions helps to reduce fear surrounding facing emotions and is empowering.

Allow time and space for your mindful and creative process to unfold. Whatever emotion is present, let it flow freely from within. You will become more and more comfortable with your emotions over time while beginning to see more clearly what messages your emotions are there to provide. Engaging mindfully with your creative self is life affirming and powerful. No matter what creative medium you connect with, no matter how you express your internal experience, tap into the creative process and see what magic may unfold for you along your path to healing your relationship with food.

As you allow yourself the opportunity to know yourself through the inner-workings of your mind, heart and soul, you will live with a deep sense of peace and contentment. When you are at peace with yourself you are at peace with food.

5 Simple Steps to Integrate More Movement Into Your Day (Without Stepping Foot Into A Gym!)

Are you looking to get more movement and exercise in your life and yet you have no idea how to incorporate it into your super jam packed schedule? Do you think that exercise has to be done at the gym and has to be crazy intense to gain any benefit? The truth is, moving your body in some way every day is a consistent marker for greater health throughout your lifespan. It does not have to be fancy, time consuming, painful or boring! With all of the modern conveniences like elevators, escalators, or working from home, we have less daily activity and movement naturally integrated into the day.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, many people I work with share their frustration of not having the time to go to the gym or exercise. When they feel defeated by putting it off and putting it off, that only increases their stress levels. One way to get in more movement and exercise is to integrate physical activity throughout the day rather than worrying about making it to the gym.

Exercise has many known health benefits including improved sleep, improved mood, lower risk for most illnesses, improved cognitive functioning, greater energy throughout the day and balanced blood sugar levels. Most people that integrate movement in some form consistently feel more confident and have a more positive body image. These are all elements that most people desire in their lives. If these benefits all sound great, but you are still overwhelmed by where to begin, start integrating these 5 simple steps to get more active today!

1.    Start the day with marching in place or jumping jacks for one to five minutes and twenty squats. You can do these while waiting for the water in your shower to get warm, brushing your teeth or waiting for your coffee to brew! This movement will get your blood pumping, build strength and create energy.

2.    Every time you have the option, always take the stairs. The first few times you might huff and puff, but over time you will increase your lung capacity and strengthen your muscles and bones. 

3.    Use the technology you have at your fingertips! Set a reminder on your phone each hour to stand up, stretch and find a reason to get in some extra steps. 

4.    Take a walk during your lunch break. Even if it’s just a quick five to ten minute brisk walk, five minutes is always better than zero!

5.    What song gets you moving like nothing else, you hear it and you just have to dance? Find that track. Play that track. Dance and find pleasure in movement!

It’s best to begin slowly, try to integrate just one step at a time. Once you feel as though you are being consistent with one step, move on and add in the next. Before you know it, you will be searching for other clever and simple ways to create more movement in your day. Typically, the more you move, the better you feel. As you use these five steps to integrate more movement, you will notice the mental, physical and emotional benefits. Go ahead, get moving today!

Yoga Beyond the Postures: Healing Through the 8-Limbed Path

Yoga is often portrayed as a physical, body focused practice, but it is SO much more. Yoga is a practice. It is an 8-limbed path that allows you to connect deeply with the present moment, your highest self, with the divine. Yoga offers the opportunity to peel back the layers of mental, emotional, environmental, and social conditioning. Yoga is an opportunity to tune into your limiting, self-defeating thought patterns that cause discomfort, pain, and unnecessary suffering while at the same time offering growth and healing on the very deepest levels.

When I incorporate yoga therapy into the work I do as an integrative therapist, it typically has very little to do with the physical postures. The focus on the yogic elements is a process of creating a connection with your own internal guidance, inner knowing, inner wisdom and inner truth. The mind/body are intimately interconnected, really—they are just one thing—so addressing the physical body is absolutely a necessary part of the process, however, it is just one limb along the 8-limbed path to freedom.

When engaging with the 8-limbs of yoga there is time to set an intention, contemplate, and integrate the five Yamas and five Niyamas; which together create the first two limbs of yoga. These simple yet powerful concepts (such as the first Yama, Ahimsa: non-harming or kindness) allows a connection and renewed intention with how to approach your internal interaction, your external and environmental interactions with more kindness and love. Ultimately contemplating and integrating these ten concepts leads to emotional balance, internal balance and well-being.

The third limb, Asana, or the physical postures, address the physical body. The postures create freedom and comfort in the physical body by reducing tension, increasing flexibility and developing strength. When engaging with and practicing an Asana it is useful to abandon all attachment to any particular outcome (what the posture looks like). This can be a challenge as your ego may have its own agenda. Practicing a posture offers an opportunity to once again return to contemplating the Yamas and Niyamas. The physical postures, or the Asanas, are meant to combine steadiness and ease in your physical body, promoting and offering steadiness and ease in the mind.

The fourth limb of yoga is Pranayama. This limb offers a dedicated time to breathe and connect with the present moment. When you breathe you draw in prana which is our healing life force and life enhancing energy. Pranayama offers a time to release what does not serve you, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Breath work creates a sense of grounding, preparation and training for the nervous system to be calm and quiet.

As your body becomes steady and at ease, the breathing practices create a calm and serene internal experience, the body/mind is then ready to move into the fifth limb of yoga, or Pratyahara. This is an experience of true relaxation by withdrawing your senses. This limb is all about deep relaxation. The process of surrendering to true deep relaxation is tremendously powerful and allows the possibility to feel, to experience, to open to the expansiveness of your being. The process of deep relaxation is the bridge to the inner limbs of yoga.

The inner limbs begin with the sixth limb, or Dharana, where you create a concentrated point of focus. To create this focus you might use a mantra (word or phrase), your breath, an image, a chant, a candle flame, or anything that is useful for you and assists in the process of creating a one-pointed focus of your mind. Concentration requires effort. The mind will wander, there may be physical sensations that distract you, noises in your environment, emotions that arise and impact the mind/body. The practice is all about returning to your point of focus and maintaining effort to concentrate on your single point of focus.

This practice of concentration can directly lead you into the seventh limb, Dhyana, or meditation. This limb offers the opportunity and ability to completely absorb with the present moment: the only moment. Dhyana offers the opportunity to dive into the space between the fluctuations of your mind. Meditation offers precious moments of complete stillness, complete connection to your point of focus without effort, complete peace. Essentially, yoga IS complete absorption with the present moment. Yoga IS the present moment.

When you experience this deep, timeless connection with the present moment through concentration and meditation you may experience the eighth limb, or Samadhi. Samadhi is sustaining the complete absorption and allowing a connection with your highest self, the divine.

As you embark on your yoga journey, know that yoga is always available. When you set an intention, reflect inward, take a breath, calm your mind/body, you are engaged in the practice of yoga. Samadhi is an opportunity, not a goal. It may be an outcome but not the driving purpose of the practice. When you practice without attachment to outcome, without expectation, you create a deeper freedom and complete surrender. There is no quick path to reach it. In life, you get good at what you practice. With yoga, that is all that is needed: practicing with dedication, consistency and effort. Practice being present, and you are practicing yoga. Practice yoga and can come home to yourself and find true peace, the divine, and a deep connection to all beings.