Metabolizing Love: What Grief Has Taught Me About Recovery

I’m sitting at a new desk, in a new chair, looking out at a new view. I’ve just moved homes after closing a significant chapter in my life, and things feels tender, liminal, becoming.

New roots are still finding strength. Branches reach out unsure, yet bravely, into this unfamiliar terrain. My inner trunk steadies as I slowly make sense of what has ended and what is beginning.

Becoming My Own Inner Tree

In this transition, I am learning that no one can be the roots for me. No one can reach out and make choices that are ultimately mine alone to make. No one can act as my center.

I am being asked to become my own inner tree from the inside-out. I am learning how to show up for myself.

This wasn’t always the case. Just before moving, I reread a diary I kept during my time as an in-patient at an eating disorder clinic, sixteen years ago.

I had just finished high school, and on 2 December 2009 I scrawled: “in a depressing, badly decorated place to eat a lot of food.” Back then, I could only frame my experience through anger and rejection.

Grieving My Younger Self

The only thing I knew how to show up for was the eating disorder itself. I clung to restriction, obsessed with the size of my stomach, and grasped onto exercise to punish, soothe, and escape.

Reading those pages, I felt deep grief for my younger self who was always trying to crawl out of her own skin. Every emotion was masked as “feeling fat.” Her world shrank with each repetitive thought of “just one less kilo”, the world spinning out of control by the slightest bloat.

As I read between the lines, I could see how she was afraid of existing as herself. She wanted to be so small, so perfect, her belief of “I’ll never ever be enough” driving her out of sight.

Her obsession with muscles was her attempt at building armor, a shield from an overwhelming world she feared would crush her if she exposed her authenticity.

At the core, she feared the very vulnerability that makes connection possible — and so she remained hungry for it.

Learning to Love Without Restriction

If I could name the essence of my recovery, it has been this: learning to love without restriction.

Sixteen years later, another ending calls me back to that same lesson. As I navigate letting go, I notice the part of me that wants to go small rise again.

Rather than pathologizing it, as it had been when I was an inpatient, I welcome it in. I no longer see the ED part of me as something bad, but rather as a protector carrying wisdom.

Perhaps you’ve had moments too, when heartbreak, grief, or change stirred old patterns of wanting to control, hide, or “tighten up.” In my work, I see this often — how old survival strategies surface during times of groundlessness, not to harm us, but to remind us of the importance of moving toward safety and presence during turbulent transitions.

I’ve come to believe that even the chaos of an eating disorder is attempting to point us toward greater order and alignment.

Recovery in Real Time

As I usher this scared part that wants me to go small and give it space to be heard, I hear it whispering something deeper than the fear of “feeling fat.”

She says: “I’m scared. I don’t know if I know how to love. If I open my heart, I might get crushed — or even crush another. What if I end up alone forever? I fear I might get to the end of my life having restricted myself from experiencing love.”

I feel tears as I write this. The belief beneath these fears is simple. It’s not “I’m too fat”, it’s “I am not lovable.”

That belief shapeshifted itself into maladaptive food behaviours and body image obsessions, distracting me from seeing what was truly beneath the surface.

Beyond Food: What Eating Disorders Teach Us

Digging deeper into the words that I wrote in my diary as an 18-year-old, I was once again reminded of how eating disorders stem so much further beyond the food.

Maybe you've seen this in your life too. The belief of “I’m not loveable” may have made you shrink (physically and/or emotionally) until there was no room for love to land. It may have led you into relationships where you could not show up fully, or where the other could not show up for you. It may have driven you to keep busy, always moving, never yielding close to anything.

Each time I meet this part of me that wants to shrink out of fear, I notice I can stay a little longer with it. I meet it with softness and compassion. This is recovery in real-time.

Grief and Love: Dancing Sisters

And here I am, invited closer to the love within myself. To know its textures: from the pummeling of grief to the soaring of bliss. What a gift this moment is — an opportunity, a lesson, a rewriting of how I meet endings, transitions, and beginnings.

For how we grieve is how we love. Indeed, grief and love are dancing sisters, two sides of the same coin.

My recovery has always been about one thing: learning to metabolize love (and therefore grief). To drink it in. To taste every part of it, even the pain. To lick my lips knowing that I exist — a human, in a body, able and willing to feel it all.

Thank you for being part of this journey. I write this with the knowing that my healing is your healing, your healing is my healing, and our healing is inseparable.

If this resonated with you, I would love to hear how it moved you.

Reclaiming Want: From Restriction to Reaching Out in Eating Disorder Recovery

The Rules We Learned About Wanting

Growing up, what were the rules you learned about wanting?
What was acceptable to want? What was off-limits? Did you secretly reach for things when no one was looking?

The feeling of wanting — whether hunger, longing, craving, or desire — is one of the most human experiences we have. Yet many of us learned early that wanting itself was wrong. Diet culture deepens this wound, teaching us that what we crave is shameful, indulgent, or a sign of weakness. We were told that to be “good” we must override our bodies and suppress our needs.

This collective shaming of desire doesn’t just shape our relationship with food; it seeps into how we relate to love, belonging, and authenticity. For so many, worthiness became tied to not needing at all.

The Developmental Movement of Reach

From the moment we are born, the body knows how to reach. Reaching is a developmental movement pattern that connects us to the world: extending our hand, our eyes, our voice, our whole being toward nourishment, safety, and love.

When wanting is shamed, our capacity to reach gets stunted. We collapse inward instead of expanding outward. We cut ourselves off from connection physically and emotionally.

Reclaiming our ability to reach is central to recovery. It’s about remembering that wanting is natural, that reaching connects us to life and our inherent curiosity and inspiration, and that the act of extending outward is what allows us to form relationships.

From Restriction to Receiving

Recovery is not about denying desire. It is about moving from restriction to receiving, from protection to connection, from bracing to embracing. This is the journey of softening shame and expanding our capacity to receive.

This transformation is gradual. Like a clenched fist that slowly opens into a palm, the body learns to hold more of life with receptivity and trust.

Plant medicines and psychedelics often mirror this process. In heightened states of sensitivity, the body feels sensation, memory, and emotion more acutely. The challenge and the invitation are to stay open, to allow, to practice embracing the fullness of life rather than contracting away. When held safely, these experiences can teach us resilience, emotional regulation, and the embodied trust that supports lasting change.

Reclaiming Want

To reclaim want is to reclaim life.

Recovery asks us to honour wanting as natural, to relearn reaching as safe, and to remember that receiving does not make us weak — it makes us whole.

The more we can practice reaching out towards the soul nourishment that is already here (for us reaching out to us!), the easier it becomes to reach for the food that we truly want (rather than what diet culture stipulates). 

When we reach for what want, and we sense how we are supported in this act of sincere reaching, this leads to a sense of greater trust, satisfaction, and fulfillment. 

In receiving what is coming towards us without shame or needing to hide or pretend, we open up our capacity to give.

Receiving and giving is an act of extending out into the world and out into relationship. Our reach can be reciprocal and can nourish the whole. 

Cultivate the clarity on what you want. You are deserving of what you want. 

Reach out.
To food that truly nourishes you.
To the hands that want to hold you.
To your own inner voice reminding you that you are deserving of what you want.

This is not about playing small. It is about letting in the fullness of life, one reach at a time.

If you are curious to explore a somatic-based approach to eating disorder recovery, you are welcome to reach out to me. I offer one-on-one and group-based ED recovery support, held by embodiment principles, Polyvagal Theory, and developmental movements. You can schedule a free 30-min call to discuss ways of working together.

When Beauty Isn’t Real: Vogue’s AI Model and the Danger to Eating Disorder Recovery and Body Trust

Vogue’s AI Model: A New Benchmark That Isn’t Human

In August 2025, Vogue published a fashion campaign with a flawless, AI-generated model: blonde, blue-eyed, white-toothed, and toned. The only clue was a tiny disclaimer in the corner of the page.

The internet lit up with concern. On TikTok, one user wrote: “So first normal women are comparing themselves to edited models… Now we have to compare ourselves to women that don’t even exist???”

This isn’t just about fashion. It’s about the messages we take into our bodies: messages about worth, desirability, and what it means to be enough.

Perfectionism on Steroids

Social media has already trained us to edit, smooth, and filter ourselves for approval. What started as playful dog-ear filters turned into apps that reshape bone structure and erase every line.

AI takes this one step further. Now, the comparison isn’t between your body and a retouched photo — it’s between your body and a fantasy that doesn’t exist.

For anyone healing from an eating disorder, this is particularly dangerous. Eating disorders often root in perfectionism and comparison. If the standard of beauty is now AI-generated, our human attempts will never measure up. That endless striving is exactly what fuels disconnection and dissastifaction from the body.

Losing Touch With Human Beauty

Over the past decade, fashion has inched toward inclusivity, featuring more body types, ages, ethnicities, abilities, and genders. AI risks erasing that hard-won progress.

When trained on biased datasets, AI tends to replicate outdated ideals: thin, white, young, symmetrical. These “perfect” bodies promote the same unattainable standards that eating disorder recovery works so hard to dismantle.

Slowly, if we are not careful, we’ll forget what raw, unedited, natural human beauty looks and feels like. And when we lose touch with that, we lose touch with ourselves. Beauty always comes from the inside-out.

Embodiment as Resistance

Embodiment is the antidote to AI perfectionism. When we come back into our bodies through feeling hunger and fullness cues, breathing, moving with pleasure, we begin to loosen the grip of comparison. By inward, we turn away from outward competing.

Recovery asks us to honour the aliveness of our bodies, not their likeness to a machine-generated image. It invites us to trust that beauty is found in wisdom of wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, and softness — in the stories our bodies carry.

Choosing embodiment over AI perfection isn’t just personal healing; it’s cultural resistance. It says: I will not erase myself for your standards.

What We Risk Losing

This isn’t just about models. AI campaigns displace photographers, makeup artists, stylists, and other creatives whose artistry celebrates human expression. And most of all, they erase the lived experience of people in real bodies.

The danger isn’t simply that we’ll compare ourselves to images that don’t exist. It’s that we’ll forget the profound worth of our own bodies, exactly as they are.

Coming Home to Ourselves

AI-generated beauty will always be flawless. But flawless is lifeless and soulless.

Eating disorder recovery and embodiment remind us that the cracks, the textures, softness, and lines are what makes us alive. Our raw, lived experience and the beautiful wisdom gained from moving through it all is what makes us human.

In a world rushing toward synthetic beauty, the most radical act is to reclaim our body as it is. To remember that no algorithm can touch the wisdom, resilience, and depth of a living, breathing human being.

👉 What do you think? Does AI beauty fuel your perfectionism, or can it be a reminder to return to the body you’re already in?

Beyond the Food: What Psychedelic Healing Is Revealing About Eating Disorders

Eating disorder recovery is often measured in numbers: weight restored, calories consumed, behaviours reduced.

But what if healing isn't just about what’s on the plate, but about reclaiming your place in the world?

Let’s explore what psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) is revealing about the deeper layers of eating disorders, and why recovery is less about fixing a problem and more about remembering who you truly are.

A Different Kind of Recovery
The research on psychedelics and ED recovery is still new, but what's emerging is profound: healing isn’t just behavioural. It’s somatic, relational, and spiritual.

Psychedelics invite people to remember their agency. To rediscover their values. To feel worthy of nourishment, on a physical, emotional, relational, and soulful level.

As one participant in a recent 2024 study, Beyond The Numbers: reimagining healing with psychedelics for eating disorders, said:

“I thought my eating disorder was me being responsible. But after my journey, I felt what it meant to truly participate in my life — to be self-aware, and to choose responsibility in a way that honors me.”

Beyond the Illness: A Tapestry of Forces
This isn’t just about the individual. In my own healing journey, I witnessed something larger than myself unfold:

“An eating disorder is so complex...
Through psychedelics, I began to see the map — my lineage, the collective, my early childhood, cultural and institutional forces, family systems. It was a tapestry. At first it was intimidating… but it also showed me the way through.”

PAT creates a space where people can reframe their eating disorder, not as a personal failure or even a “disorder”, but as a deeply intelligent adaptation. A response to trauma, to absence, to the longing for love, safety, and control.

Redefining Recovery
This new understanding received from psychedelics allows recovery to mean something more than behaviour change.
It can mean:

• Cultivating self-compassion

• Expanding emotional intelligence

• Honouring boundaries

• Releasing shame

• Embracing love, both given and received

In this light, recovery is a spiritual and psychological rebirth. It’s about reconnecting with your body, yes — but also your will, your voice, your place in the world.

A Path Forward
Psychedelics won’t “cure” an eating disorder. But they can open a door, expand awareness, and usher in new possibilties. A door to truth, to tenderness, to hope. The path must still be walked, slowly, safely, with skillful support. But for many, PAT has become the turning point they didn’t know was possible.

May this emerging field continue to center the wisdom of those with lived experience. May it honour the ancestral and cultural roots of these medicines. And may it continue to offer a way through — especially for the individuals who’ve been stuck for far too long, including affected families and friends.

If you're exploring psychedelic support for ED recovery, your experience is welcome here!
Start by tuning in to your own readiness, seek ethical guidance, and trust that healing can look different than you imagined, and deeper than you ever thought possible.

→ Explore my microdosing support program
→ Or reach out for 1:1 integration guidance

Trusting the Rest Before the Rise: A Somatic Approach to Healing and New Beginnings

As we enter a new seasonal cycle — emerging from winter in the south, winding down from summer in the north — many of us feel the quiet stirring of change. This transitional time offers an opportunity to pause, integrate, digest, and reset. In eating disorder recovery, these pauses are more than symbolic — they are essential phases of healing.

In a world that celebrates productivity and hustle, pausing often gets dismissed. The cultural pressure to do, to set goals, optimize routines, to tighten up loose ends — the pace is relentless, often pushing us to skip over the quiet magic of rest and integration in favor of constant striving.

But the body also needs rest in its cycle of action. This part of the cycle is considered the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state, and it is where completion and integration occur — where nourishment gets assimilated and where leftovers are released.

From this place of digestion, where we take in what we need and let go what is no longer required, space, clarity, and balance emerge.

For those healing their relationship with food and body, this rest-and-digest phase, which is essentially an ending of a (food) cycle, can feel unfamiliar. Endings may bring up agitation, stillness may stir discomfort, and the absence of distractions can surface unprocessed emotions or unmetabolized experiences.

Yet healing isn’t just about action — it’s also about allowing. Rest isn’t giving up; it’s tuning in. And we need to land, be, rest, and allow if we wish to heal, grow, and transform.

Why We Resist Stillness in Recovery

It’s common to resist rest. The quiet liminality might feel threatening when we’ve long equated movement with progress, control with safety. For many in recovery, stillness can be tangled with guilt, fear, shame, or a sense of inadequacy.

Whether it shows up as compulsive movement, post-meal anxiety, bingeing or restricting, or the endless grind of doing — these responses often reflect our nervous system’s way of coping with the vulnerability of endings and unknowns.

When we bulldoze past endings or transitions, we leave cycles incomplete — and in that incompletion, we often feel confused, unfulfilled, insatiable, hungry for more, and perpetually “not enough.”

But since we cannot leave rest out of the cycle, it will find its way in, and more often than not (and unfortunately), stillness finds us only through the slamming doorway of burnout or illness.

Completing the Cycle: Rest as Sacred Metabolism

Rest is not passive nor indulgent. It’s a vital process of assimilation — of metabolizing not just nutrients, but emotions, experiences, and beliefs. In eating disorder recovery, this phase supports the nervous system to recalibrate, the body to repair, and the heart to reconnect with a deeper sense of enoughness.

By honouring endings — the pauses between chapters — we make space for clarity to emerge. Instead of rushing into the next strategy or urgent self-improvement plan, we learn to trust our inner rhythm, and step forward with greater intention, guided by our lucid, inner wisdom. This is how we let transformation unfold from the inside out, rather than from yet another place of doing.

Living the Liminal: Trusting the Space Between

This season invites us to slow down and listen. Whether you’re stepping out of winter’s cocoon or beginning to release summer’s fullness, it’s a powerful time to pause, reflect, and reorient.

Liminal space — the “in-between” — is fertile ground. It’s where something old dissolves, and something new hasn’t yet formed. It’s the butterfly in the cocoon of metamorphosis.

In somatic recovery, this space is crucial. It’s where we learn to hold sensation, to tolerate uncertainty, and to let clarity emerge in its own time. Indeed, there are actual skillsets for the mind, body and heart that we can learn, refine, and master so that that we can move through each new chapter of our lives with grace, resiliency, and courage.

Change doesn’t happen only by doing. It happens by changing the way we relate to doing. This is the heart of embodied recovery — not fixing ourselves, but learning to meet ourselves with compassion, curiosity, and trust.

Even when clarity feels distant, we can rest in the knowing that life is always in motion, and that the unknown will eventually reveal itself.

The rest before the rise: do you trust it?

Trusting this pause allows us to open the door to new beginnings, stepping forward with clarity and intention.

Somatic Reflections for This Season

Take a few moments to drop into your body and gently reflect on the following:

• How does your body hold the experience of “I haven’t done enough”?

• What is calling for your attention to be properly digested? An unresolved emotion? An unacknowledged experience?

• What nourishment — physical, emotional, or spiritual — might help you meet these undigested places within?

• What does it feel like in your body to believe, even for a moment, “I am enough”?

Take the time to integrate what is ending, clear away any fog of doubt, and gently add in supportive, soul-based nourishment — whether that’s in the form of embodiment practices, nature, community, or tender self-compassion.

Rise When You're Ready — Not When You're Rushed

Life’s mysteries unfold when we loosen our grip on certainty and set down the heavy armor of to-do lists, making space for the delightfully surprising, inspiring and invigorating magic.

As this new cycle mysteriously unfolds, may you give yourself permission to rise slowly. To integrate what’s been, tend to what’s here, and celebrate the magic that is bound to come.

You don’t have to start with a sprint. Recovery is cyclical, not linear. Let yourself rest, digest, and return (again and again) — not from pressure or perfectionism, but from trust.

When we allow rest and digest, we find ourselves more present, more attuned to our needs, and more empowered to act from a place of clarity and trust.

Trust that in your body’s rhythm lies the wisdom of transformation. Rest in the knowing that you’re already on your way.

A Prayer for Nourishment: Honouring Hunger, Healing, and the Sacredness of Food

Hunger is universal, yet access to food is not. Around the world, we are witnessing how food is being weaponized, while many of us struggle to feel safe and connected in our relationship with nourishment. This prayer for nourishment is an invitation to honour hunger, remember that food is sacred, and reflect on how our healing is deeply tied to each other and the Earth.

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It’s become harder to show up on this social media to speak about food.

As someone who works in the eating disorder recovery field, and as a white, privileged woman who once starved herself for years, day after day, denying nourishment, talking about food and sharing content about eating has become increasingly difficult.

I acknowledge that by not always speaking openly, I have, at times, contributed to the bypassing nature we so often see in the health and wellness industry. This industry continues to uphold a “perfect” image, often speaking to nervous system regulation, health, and well-being as if they exist solely at the individual level.

But as we bear witness to wars where food is weaponized — a method of control — our individualistic approach to achieving health and healing is no longer sustainable. The health and healing of our fellow human beings and of the Earth is interdependent on our individual well-being. 

There was a time in my life when I chose not to eat, not because I didn’t have access to food, but because I felt unsafe, unworthy, and alone — at war with myself.

To even begin to fathom that there are millions of people for whom food is being weaponized, for whom access is out of reach, and for whom one of the main sources of life is used to kill — this puts my own access to food into perspective. Food can both nurture life and destroy it.

When food is intentionally used to dehumanize, to strip away the right to a dignified existence, we must remember that the memory of starvation becomes etched deeply into the body. That memory is carried forward as somatic inheritance from generation to generation, from body to body. Starvation is trauma.

Even though I’ve been in recovery for many years, if I don’t eat when I’m hungry, my body still goes into a panic. The fear of not getting food remains: a painful reminder of the harm I once caused my body, an innocent body that was only ever trying to protect me.

I share this not to compare my lived experience with the reality of those who are forcibly starved, nor to suggest I fully understand their suffering, but to share the complexity of how the body remembers. Hunger leaves a gaping hole. 

My hope in sharing this is to spark reflection.

If you are struggling with an eating disorder in the midst of wars and genocides, please know: your story still deeply matters, your journey is equally important, and your healing is needed. The world needs you nourished, resourced, and whole — now more than ever — so that together, we can support one another and care for the Earth.  

Your healing is my healing.  

Our healing is collective healing.

May we always hear our hunger.

May we remember that having food to eat is a basic human right, not something to be earned. No one should ever be denied nourishment — no matter their story, their skin color, their beliefs, or their desires.

Your hunger matters. May we have the compassion to truly hear another’s hunger.  

May we nourish ourselves, each other, and the Earth that sustains us in ways that are reciprocal, honouring, and kind.

May we offer gratitude for the clean water we drink, for the vibrant and diverse foods we are privileged to enjoy. May we offer gratitude to the animals, plants, gardeners, farmers, workers, drivers, and shopkeepers who help bring that food to our plates each day.

May we offer gratitude to the sun, the rains, the clouds, the winds, and the soils that grow what gives us life.  

May we remember to give back to our Earth Mother, who feeds us each day without judgment or prejudice.

May we never forget the privilege of being able to choose to eat.  

May our nourished bodies be strong enough to take action, to bear witness, and to care for others.

May we remember that food is sacred. That all life is sacred.

May we honour the cycles of life and death, remembering that we are forever interconnected.

May your plate become a place of peace.

This is a prayer for nourishment — for ourselves, for each other, and for the Earth.

May we listen to each other’s hunger with open hearts. May we respond to our own hunger and fill our own cups to adequately support those in need.

May we have the courage to grieve our own hungers that were never met or that we denied ourselves. May we have to courage to turn towards those who currently do not have a choice to eat.

These words are an attempt to digest what is going on in the world. Feeling the wounds of the world brings healing. I hope these words arrive gently.

I hope you find one glimmer in your day that lifts your spirit and reminds you are here, alive.

A Cloud with a Face: Remembering I Belong

A Cloud with a Face: Remembering I Belong

A few hours into a mushroom journey, I hit yet another wall of confusion, doubt, and uncertainty. I found myself caught between the quiet, intuitive knowing of my body and the louder, rationalizing voices of my mind.

I felt stuck.
Pendulum-swinging.
Taking one step forward, then one step back.

Then, after much inner wriggling, I finally paused — and fear spilled out of me.

At first, I was afraid of the fear itself. But then I softened, became curious, and recognized the feeling:

The deep, human fear of being alone. Of not belonging. Of not being welcomed on this planet.

This fear took me to a much younger part of myself.

She was terrified that if she surrendered to the wisdom of her body — if she let it guide her — she would be swept away, lost in the unknown, and utterly alone. She believed the body was too wild, too dangerous, too unsafe to trust.

The mind, she believed, was where she could strategize, perform, and people-please to minimize the risk of rejection and protect herself from the gut-wrenching pain of being unwelcomed.

I thanked her for protecting me the only way she knew how.

Later, I stepped outside, lifted my arms to the sky, and let my eyes drink in the clouds.

And then — a face appeared in the clouds.

I knew, instantly, I was connecting with something divine.

And just as quickly, I contracted.
“Who am I to receive this?” I thought.
I didn’t feel worthy. I couldn’t welcome in this beauty. Who was I to deserve such a meeting? I had nothing to show. I didn’t believe I deserved such a moment of interconnection.

But then I remembered the young part of me — the one afraid of being alone.
And I gently told her: “Look up.”

And in that moment, we both saw what was true:

There is a mysterious, unbroken, benevolent force that welcomes us — all of us — home with the deepest of love. Not despite our fear, our stuckness, or our shame, but with it. As we are.

My body softened.
Bracing became embracing.
Contraction gave way to curiosity.
Fear transformed into a felt sense of connection and love.

The shape of the cloud shifted.
It became a female form — my form — and I remembered:

God is not outside me. God is within.

I felt my younger part expanding, as she stepped closer towards expressing what her heart knew at birth: she belongs unconditionally.

The Body’s Wisdom Is Not Something to Fear

This moment was a somatic reminder that:

💡 Story follows state.

As my nervous system shifted out of fear and into safety, my worldview softened too.

And that’s when it landed:

Can I trust that as all of me comes forward into existence, I am enough?

It’s the same question I see arise in so many of my clients navigating eating disorder recovery.
And it’s at the heart of the healing path.

When Life Force Wasn’t Met, We Learned to Disappear

For many of us with eating disorders or disordered eating, there is a core wound around not being welcomed in our full, authentic life force.

As children, when we began expanding into the world, expressing, individuating, becoming, we often weren’t met with attunement. Diet culture then capitalizes on this mistrust, convincing us to instead rely on external rules, starving us from our own life force and wisdom.

When our life force hasn’t been allowed to be fully embodied, we can be highly influenced by other people’s wants and needs as we lack inner clarity to know what is it that we are needing, wanting or feeling.

When we can't accurately perceive or interpret the cues that our bodies are giving us, either by hyper-focusing or under-focusing on them, the choices we make lead to dysregulation and stress in the body.

We learned that our aliveness wasn’t safe.
We internalized the belief that our needs were too much, our bodies were a problem, and that being ourselves meant risking rejection.

“It’s not okay for me to exist.”
“I can’t trust my body.”
“I don’t belong.”
“I’m broken and unworthy.”

But when held with compassion, this wound becomes a portal.

A way back to the truth that:

We are inherently welcome here.
Our life force is not dangerous.
It is sacred and is a gift.

Psychedelics Can Help Us Remember What We Forgot

When approached with care, safety, and reverence, psychedelics can transform old wounds into new wisdom.

They support us in:

• Listening to the body’s inner cues (interoception)

• Trusting our intuitive knowing

• Honouring wants, needs, and boundaries

• Returning to the intelligence within

• Plugging us back into our interconnection with the wider web

Resting back into this greater weave of connection is the fuel that can allow us to trust in our bodies, listen to its guidance, and takes leaps of faith into the unknown — because we know on a cellular level that we not alone on this life’s walk. For me, this embodied remembering that psychedelics offer us is one of the life’s greatest gifts.

And often, it begins with one simple, courageous step: Trust the body’s wisdom.

When We Expand Into Embodiment, Food Begins to Feel Different

As we grow our capacity to be with the sensations and signals of our body, our relationship with food naturally begins to shift.

Instead of relying on external rules, we begin to:

• Notice hunger and fullness with more precision

• Explore food preferences with curiosity

• Understand how different foods feel in our bodies

By expanding more awareness into our body container, we begin to explore the edges and depths of our own life force and embodied expression.

When we reclaim our interoception, our body’s inner compass, our choices become more centered, regulated, and aligned.

Indeed, as we deepen into our sense embodiment, we bring sharper focus to our inner state. This is a discovery and a practice of seeing ourselves more clearly.

It is uncovering, recovering and discovering who we truly are underneath the layers of protection, conditioning and fear (which has often been carried through many generations).

This is what recovery is about:

✨ Not fixing ourselves — but finally seeing ourselves clearly.

When we truly see ourselves, we remember that we are inherently enough.

The Clarity Psychedelics Bring Is a Gift

In psychedelic states, the brain’s default mode network quiets, and the rigid stories of who we think we are begin to dissolve.

We are invited to:

• Feel the clarity of our inner compass

• Reclaim exiled or forgotten parts of ourselves

• See our truth beneath the fear

The word clarity comes from clarus — meaning bright, shining, luminous.

And when we reclaim that clarity, we can let our unique life force flow through us — with grace, sovereignty, and trust.

Your Healing Is My Healing

The body wants to heal. It longs to be vibrant, alive, fully expressed.

And when we allow that healing, it doesn't just transform us.
It ripples outward.

💞 Your healing is my healing.
My healing is your healing.
Our healing is all healing.

When we trust the body again, a wise remembering occurs:

I am welcomed on this Earth.
My life force is not a burden.
I am safe to be who I am.

Final Blessing: Look Up

So let this be your gentle reminder:

Your body is not the problem. Your life force is not too much. You are worthy.
You are not alone.

Look up.

You never know what you might receive.

Photo by Tsuyoshi Kozu on Unsplash

What Wants To Warm Up? Coming Out Of Functional Freeze In Eating Disorder Recovery

Change is in the air.

After living nomadically for a few years, I finally found myself on solid ground, only to watch everything I had built dissolve. What followed was a deep season of groundlessness, one that invited me to slow down, step away from being busy, and pause long enough to feel what was beneath it all.

This pause was more than rest. It revealed something I hadn’t seen so clearly before:

I had been living from a nervous system state of functional freeze.

What Is Functional Freeze?

Functional freeze is a state of nervous system dysregulation where mobilizing energy (fight/flight) gets trapped under a blanket of shutdown and numbness. You’re not collapsed or visibly in distress. In fact, on the outside, you're probably highly functional — doing, achieving, showing up.

But internally, it’s like you have the gas and the brake are on at the same time.

With such powerful opposing forces firing simultaneously, over time, the body begins to break down.

This state can insidiously disrupt everything from digestion, sleep, and mood, to immunity and hormonal balance. It’s common in people with addiction and eating disorders, and sadly, it’s also normalized by our hustle culture and diet culture alike.

Functional freeze is often linked to a nervous system that ties the need to prove one’s inner worth and value to external achievements and validation. It’s like you’re running around with an empty cup, giving to others, but unable to nourish and fill up your own cup.

Eating Disorders as Functional Freeze

In my own life, and in the lives of many clients, I’ve come to see eating disorders not just as cognitive distortions, but as somatic strategies — ways the body communicates unmetabolized experiences when words and support are unavailable.

Disordered eating became my body’s way of saying: “Something inside is too much to feel.”

This is why so many people with EDs describe feeling like a “walking head,” numb or robotic. Beneath the freeze is often a highly sensitive, intuitive nervous system that has learned to shut down in order to survive to be in relationship.

What people learn to shut down, numb, repress, block, or invalidate are any feelings that carry a charge that is too big, too much, or unacceptable — as deemed by the people around them. An icy freeze covers everything in order to maintain enough connection, cementing the functional freeze state.

It works for a while until life becomes colourless, dull, tasteless and unfulfilling, starved.

Bottom-Up Healing: Where Change Begins

For years when I was struggling with an eating disorder, I tried top-down approaches to recovery. I focused on stopping behaviours and changing thoughts. But the real shift came when I found polyvagal-informed somatic work and plant medicine.

The changes that have emerged from this healing work has been incremental, over many many years. Breaking the cycle of functional freeze is ancestral and collective, alongside it being an individual journey. The layers are deep, and it takes time to excavate, from the ground up, and to consciously choose to not live or normalize the habitual patterning of functional freeze.

A bottom-up approach is powerful because story follows state.

When we shift the nervous system into regulation (bottom up), the story of the eating disorder (top down) doesn’t need to be fixed or forced away — it begins to transform and dissolve on its own.

In a regulated state:

• Clearer perspective, thought, and rationality returns

• Eating feels more balanced

• Body image improves

• Creativity emerges

• Curiosity blossoms

• Relationships feel safer

• Life feels more possible, naturally, without trying or forcing

This is what bottom-up healing looks like. Rather than pushing ourselves into change, we titrate transformation, adding in sustainable, nourishing tools, practices, and rhythms that help us feel present, safe, and grounded in our bodies again. Rewiring and transforming can only happen when we are present and embodied.

Psychedelics, Flow, and Feeling What Was Frozen

Plant medicines and psychedelics have been an essential part of my journey because they do something very simple yet profound:

They help us feel what we were once unwilling or unable to feel.

In the presence of skilled, somatic-based preparation and integration, psychedelics can support the thawing of freeze, reconnecting us with our bodies, our emotions, and our soul’s deepest longings. This isn’t about forcing catharsis, it’s about returning to an aligned and natural state of warmth, flow, and coherence.

Being able to envision and create a life without an eating disorder-like behaviours becomes accessible as psychedelics widen our vision, soften the limiting beliefs, usher in hope and inspiration, and bring our bodies into a more compassionate and regulated state.

Their visionary capacities helps us widen our space of possibility through helping us dream beyond what we think and embody are possible.

So, How Do We Come Out of Freeze?

Start by asking yourself:

What am I unwilling to feel? (Thank you Tara Brach for this inquiry).

To dethaw the functional freeze, we are required to shift from a state of bracing to one of embracing.

Coming out of functional freeze is not about “doing more.” It’s about accepting and embracing the parts of us we’ve pushed away, especially the tender, fiery, grieving, and longing ones.

Here are some gentle ways to begin:

• Track sensation: Notice what warms you emotionally, physically, spiritually

• Follow pleasure: What brings aliveness? Laughter? Inspiration?

• Welcome parts: Practice self-acceptance towards the frozen or numb states

• Orient to goodness: Let your senses take in beauty, safety, and softness around you

As the freeze begins to thaw and you feel more regulated, digestion improves, intuition returns, relationships feel more connected, and life starts to feel more vibrant, more honest, more you.

This is because when we start coming out of functional freeze, our senses are more accurately perceiving the external environment, we are more attuned to the body and its cues (the internal environment), and we are able to listen to our internal systems that are giving us really important cues for our safety, well-being, and internal sense of balance. This is our intuition coming online.

Functional freeze isn’t a flaw; it’s a brilliant survival strategy that outlived its usefulness. And coming out of it isn’t a race. Dethawing takes time. Let yourself move at the pace of your nervous system.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” — Carl Rogers

As we embrace ourselves with warmth and honesty, we return to our natural state: regulated, resourced, and resilient.

May you trust your timing. May you listen to the subtle longings within. And may you feel held, always, by your body, by the Earth, by love.

Restore Body Trust at Home: A Somatic Practice Using a Physio Ball

Rebuilding Body Trust, One Bounce At A Time

In eating disorder recovery, reconnecting with your body isn’t just emotional, it’s a physical process. A physio ball may seem like a simple tool, but in the context of somatic healing, it becomes a powerful ally in restoring regulation, boundaries, and interoceptive clarity.

Whether you're recovering from bingeing, restricting, or body image struggles, this at-home practice can support your journey back to body trust, self-regulation, and digestion, from the inside out.

Why a Physio Ball?

The ball is both stable and responsive. When I lie on it, bounce on it, or breathe against it, I feel something solid meeting me. There’s feedback, connection, and an embodied reminder: I exist, I am supported, I belong here.

This kind of physical contact can help:

• Reestablish a sense of safety

• Awaken gut awareness and interoceptive signals

• Support the vagus nerve and digestion

• Build energetic and emotional boundaries

Somatic Practices to Try at Home

1. Yield and Be Held
Lie on your back on the physio ball, draping over it. Feel the support underneath you, especially behind your heart and pelvis.

Can you let yourself be held? Can you yield into support?
This helps signal safety to your nervous system and builds trust in resting. From here, a sense of "I have enough. I am enough" can arise.

2. Bounce to Meet Your Life Force
Sit and gently bounce on the ball, letting your spine and pelvis find rhythm. This connects you to your vitality and sexual energy in a safe and contained way, reminding your system that aliveness can feel good.

3. Define Your Edges
Breathe against the ball. Feel it push back.
This helps clarify:

• Where do I begin and end?

• What are my yeses and nos?
  This simple push builds boundary awareness, which is key for intuitive eating, consent, and emotional clarity.

4. Stimulate Gut Receptors
Place the ball or a pillow on your belly and breathe into it slowly. You might want to drape over the ball for this one too. The gentle pressure activates receptors in your gut, helping you recognize hunger, fullness, and emotional cues.

5. Regulate Before Meals
Before eating, breathe with the ball or a pillow to activate the low-tone dorsal parasympathetic system—the part of the nervous system that supports digestion and social engagement.
This prepares your body to receive food without overwhelm or shutdown.

From Dysregulation to Interoception

Over time, these somatic cues guided by the ball lead to better digestion, refined body connection (able to track, feel, and name sensations (aka interoceptive awareness)), stronger boundaries, clarity around wans, needs, and preferences, and greater regulation and trust around eating. They also help you access something even deeper — your gut knowing.

The more you come into your body, the more you can feel the subtle in-between, where the whispers of clarity and truth reside. The ball helps with that in a playful way. It gives your nervous system something to push against, something to connect with and trust.

This is the path of restoring body trust: one breath, one boundary, one bounce at a time.

Have You Tried It?

Have you used a physio ball or similar somatic tools in your healing journey? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear how it's helped you reconnect with your body.

To see me practicing with the physio ball, check out my IG post.

Photo by jerry chen on Unsplash

Why Body Checking Isn’t Really About Vanity: A Somatic Perspective on Body Image and Embodiment

Body checking is often misunderstood as vanity or obsession with appearance. But beneath the surface, this behavior is a signpost — a survival strategy pointing to deeper struggles with body dysmorphia, trauma, and disconnection.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• What body checking is and why we do it

• How it relates to identity, safety, and nervous system regulation

• Practices to support embodiment and healing from body image issues

What Is Body Checking?

Body checking refers to repetitive behaviours used to assess or measure one’s body, such as pinching, squeezing, feeling, or looking in mirrors. These actions often focus on areas of perceived “flaws” and can become compulsive.

But here’s the deeper truth:
Body checking isn’t just about size. It’s also about existence.

For many people, especially those with eating disorders or body dysmorphia, changes in the body trigger identity confusion — "If my body changes, am I still me?" Body checking becomes a way to anchor identity in a world that feels unstable or unsafe.

The Link Between Body Checking, Trauma, and Disembodiment

Often, the inability to “be” in one’s body stems from the nervous system’s history of survival adaptations.

When we’ve experienced trauma — particularly attachment trauma or early developmental ruptures — the spaces and people around us may have felt unsafe or dysregulating. Our bodies learned to brace, numb, or disconnect. We move further and further away from our sense of embodiment, which leaves us feeling like we don’t exist.

➡️ In this context, body checking is an unconscious attempt to feel real — to confirm, through physical touch or visual feedback, that we still exist and are “enough” to be here.

You’re Not Afraid of Your Body—Your Body Is Holding Fear

Here’s a reframe:
You’re not afraid of your body.
Your body is holding fear.

Fear that was never discharged.
Fear from moments where the body mobilized to fight, flee, or freeze, and never had the chance to complete that cycle.

When those survival energies stay stuck in the system, the body becomes associated with discomfort or threat. We begin to project fear onto the body itself, compounding body image issues and furthering disconnection.

Healing Through Embodiment and Safety

As we begin to release this trapped survival stress and establish safety through somatic practices, the need to body check naturally fades. Here's what helps:

• Proprioceptive and interoceptive practices (e.g., mindful movement, developmental movement patterns, breath awareness)

• Connecting to the midline and central channel — the core of your being

• Spending time in environments that feel safe and affirming

• Co-regulating with others who are committed to healing and embodiment

These tools help us inhabit the body not as an enemy, but as home.

A Message for the Part of You That Still Doesn’t Feel Safe

You exist.
You belong.
You are worthy of being here, just as you are.

Your life force is not too much — it’s not dangerous — it’s sacred.
Your body is not broken.
It’s asking to be met with safety, presence, and love.

As fear softens and your nervous system finds regulation, your body becomes less something to manage or fix, and more a place to live, love, and trust.

May you come home to body.

Photo by Wang Sheeran on Unsplash

Eating Disorder Recovery & Exercise Addiction: Reclaiming Embodiment, Balance, and the Wisdom of the Body

Treatment for Exercise Addiction: An Embodied Path to Recovery

Eating disorders are not merely coping mechanisms — they are profound expressions of the body’s unmet needs for belonging, safety, balance, and worth. Exercise addiction, often entangled with eating disorders, is no exception. When movement becomes compulsive, we must ask: What is the body truly seeking?

Recovery begins when we stop trying to “fix” behaviours and start listening to what they’re pointing toward. From an embodied perspective, eating disorders are messengers — revealing where disconnection or boundary violations have occurred, and where reconnection and resourcing are needed.

What Is Exercise Addiction in ED Recovery?

Exercise addiction is characterized by a compulsive need to move — often excessive, rigid, or punishing — even when the body is exhausted. It can feel like you have to run, walk, or work out, and stopping brings anxiety or dysregulation.

But what if, instead of pathologizing the movement, we approached it with compassion?

“Where are you running to? What are you moving away from?”

In my own recovery journey over 16 years ago, these were the questions I longed for — not punishment for relapsing, but curiosity about what my body was trying to communicate. Exercise felt compulsive (I just had to do it) and excessive (I didn’t know when to stop).

Embodiment: Returning to Center

True embodiment means that your consciousness and your physical form are aligned — organized around a central axis that holds your vitality, creativity, and wholeness. Trauma, especially developmental or relational trauma, can disrupt this center. It creates fragmentation — where safety, trust, and energetic balance are lost.

Eating disorders often emerge from these imbalances. They are not random. They point to unmet needs for safety, connection, and sovereignty. The same applies to exercise addiction — it often arises when we feel off-balance, powerless, overwhelmed, or unseen.

The work, then, is not to eliminate the symptom — but to resource the center. To bring curiosity to movement, to ask:

• Where does this movement want to go?

• What part of me is asking for release, or regulation?

• How can I bring more engagement, breath, and presence into the act of moving?

Movement as Medicine, Not Punishment

In somatic recovery, we don’t throw away the movement. We slow it down. We listen to it. When exercise becomes exploratory rather than defensive, it can reconnect us to our center.

Try this the next time you move your body:

• Focus on what helps you breathe.

• Orient toward something beautiful as you move your body (in your room, in your surroundings).

• Pause — and notice how you feel before, during, and after the movement.

• Allow your movement to be relational — to the Earth, to your joy, to yourself.

Rest Is Revolutionary

In a culture that glorifies productivity and the “ideal” body, rest becomes radical. Releasing the identity that’s wrapped up in discipline, control, and body perfectionism takes immense courage in a diet culture world.

Psychedelic healing — especially with intentional microdosing or ceremonial psychedelic work — can support this process by softening the inner critic and reconnecting us to our soul’s rhythm rather than society’s.

Recovery invites us to reimagine nourishment, not just through food, but through how we relate to energy, stillness, pleasure, and presence.

Recovery as Returning to Wholeness

Recovery isn’t just about stopping behaviours. It’s about coming into right relationship with your body. It’s about learning to metabolize safety, rest, movement, and love. The eating disorder — and the compulsive exercise that often comes with it — holds clues to the balance your body is craving.

Rather than seeing these symptoms as the problem, we can see them as the path — invitations to reclaim your center and live in deeper alignment.

Photo by Zaur Giyasov on Unsplash

The Surprising Gift of Fear: A Somatic and Psychedelic Approach to Eating Disorder Recovery

What If fear is your gateway to growth?

Today, I’m contemplating this potent quote by Pema Chödrön:

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”

Recently, I’ve been moving through a portal of fear — not fear of something external, but the fear of fear itself. This has been about confronting and being present with the physical sensations of fear running through my body.

Being afraid of fear itself can feel like a frustrating loop. Fear feeds on itself, creating a cycle that’s hard to break. Maybe you’ve felt this, too?

It’s natural to resist discomfort. Turning toward the burning, buzzing sensations we label as “fear” can feel unnatural — like going against the grain.

If you’ve ever been taught to dismiss fear or lacked role models growing up who navigated fear mindfully, this reaction is incredibly common.

Fear Is Not Wrong

It is helpful to remember that:

• Feeling fear is not wrong.

• You are not broken for feeling fear — or even for fearing fear.

Fear is a vital emotion in this human experience 💕 It helps us:

• Decide what to move toward or avoid.

• Activate survival responses (fight, flight, freeze) when danger is present.

Fear is a necessary ingredient for our survival, one of the seven core categories of emotions we all experience, alongside anger, sadness, joy, excitement, disgust, and sexual excitement.

But what happens when we experience fear outside of serious, life-threatening danger?

The Fear That Holds Our Truth Back

Sometimes, fear shows up when we’re not in danger but in a moment of expansion. Expansion invites us closer to our truth, asking us to remove the armor and defenses that have kept us small. Stepping beyond our comfort zone can feel thrilling — and terrifying. For example, you might:

• Feel a desire to connect with someone but hesitate as fear tenses up your body, holding you back.

• Be curious to try new food at a community gathering but feel fear stop you.

• Want to speak up in a circle of friends but feel your throat tighten, constricting your voice.

In these moments, sensations like tightness, burning, paralyzing, or heaviness arise — a soupy somatic mix we label as “fear.” 😨 These feelings can be overwhelming and uncomfortable and leave us feeling out of control (especially if we didn't have appropriate role modelling).

When fear dominates in this way, we try to avoid it entirely, creating a loop where we fear fear itself.

Escaping Fear Through Disconnection

For those navigating eating disorders, disordered eating, or other mental health challenges, emotions like fear can feel too big, too much, too overwhelming.

Why? Many of us were taught to suppress or numb emotions. Perhaps you were labelled a “wimp” for expressing fear or praised for being “tough cookie.” These early experiences can lead to disconnection from authentic emotions, encouraging patterns of shame, shutting down and avoiding what arises within.

To cope with these feelings, we might turn to food or our bodies to escape — not just from fear, but from the pain of denying our inner truths by only showing "acceptable" emotions to the outside world.

Personally, I see eating disorders as expressions of unmetabolized fear responses.

The thing is, is that fear doesn’t disappear when avoided. It becomes trapped in the body, undigested, and can show up as:

• Anxiety

• Digestive issues

• Disrupted sleep

• Rigidity around food, and more

The way forward is learning to gently approach fear — to meet it with curiosity, courage, and compassion rather than avoiding, numbing out or battling.

I am sharing this theme because there is a lot of fear in the collective right now. The world is certainly at a precipice of radical disruption and change.

Almost everyone I’ve spoken to recently has expressed that they’re in some kind of transition — whether it’s related to jobs, finances, homes, health, relationships, or identity 🌓

We are individually and collectively in the midst of change. And change often brings fear.

Embracing Fear as a Gateway to Transformation

Fear is not something to eliminate. It’s something to understand, hold, and soften into.

Liminal moments — those thresholds of change and uncertainty — often bring fear. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold” or “doorway.” It’s the space between where you’ve been and where you’re going.

How we approach these liminal spaces determines whether we repeat old patterns out of fear — or step into transformation with grace, and become more embodied and wiser through it 👁️

Fear holds a surprising gift: it invites us into transformation and deeper embodiment.

Three Ways to Work with Fear

Rather than tightening and hardening around fear, we can be softened by its presence. By stepping through the gateway of fear, we find opportunities to feel, move, and connect with deeper truths. Here are three ways to work with the fear of fear:

1️⃣ Give Yourself Permission to Feel Fear

Fear is a natural response and can indicate that we are moving towards a more raw, naked, real version of ourselves. It’s not about removing fear but learning to walk with it.

Transitions and change feel scary because our biology craves predictability. Our brains have evolved to avoid and reduce uncertainty (it’s more energy efficient). And the change process is fundamentally uncertain.

Since we have a strong impulse to strive for stability, the unknown inherently feels uncomfortable. By understanding this about our biology, the tight hold of fear begins to loosen.

You are not weak for feeling fear — you are human 🧬 By welcoming it with curiosity, you open the door to transformation.

2️⃣ Work with the Body

Fear is a bodily experience, so moving the body helps you process and digest it.

Here are a few ways to work the sensations of fear:

• Shake your hands and limbs to release stuck energy.

• Rock or sway gently to a favourite, soothing song.

• Walk in nature (barefoot if possible) with a friend or pet to feel grounded.

- Notice how you feel before, during and after these activities. By paying attention to how the sensations feel in your body, they become more familiar and known (see Point 1️⃣!).

It’s important to move in ways that feel within your capacity, where you can stay present to your inner experience.

Don’t be surprised if you start moving very subtly and slowly; fear needs time to come out of its shell and dethaw.

Side but important note: if you are working with fear and trauma that have been trapped in your body since early developmental years, working with it might look very different to what is described above. Working with a trauma-informed practitioner might be needed in these instances.

It goes without saying that turning towards fear requires embodied safety. You might need build a felt sense of safety in your body first before diving into it by:

• Learning about nervous system regulation and how your own nervous system works.

• Placing your hands on your heart or belly and breathing consciously.

• Pressing your feet into the ground or wiggle your toes to anchor yourself in the present moment.

• Engaging your sense — Notice what you can see, hear, or feel around you in this here-now present moment.

• Placing a weighted blanket or pillow on your body or drinking a warm beverage.

These practices build a sense of safety, containment, and regulation, helping fear soften and move.

3️⃣ Reconnect with Your Why

Why do you want to shift your relationship with fear?

Do you desire deeper connection?

More love?

To live more authentically?

These goals can feel scary, but reconnecting with your intention gives you the courage to move forward, adding radiant fuel to your inner fire.

Fear is not your enemy — it’s a messenger, pulling you closer to the truth. Ask yourself:

What is my fear trying to tell me?

What is it protecting me from?

Reframing fear as an ally that's trying to protect you rather than an adversary can help it feel less overwhelming and scary.

A Personal Reflection

Having recently celebrated my 33rd birthday earlier this month, I have finally learnt to trust that fear will not swallow me. One of my core words for my birthday this year is Trust — trusting my inner experience and letting bigger energy, like fear and love, to move through me with acceptance and curiosity.

I look back to my tender 17-year-old self when I first started my journey to heal disordered eating, body mistrust and fear of feelings (especially love) and I feel so much compassion for my younger parts that have grown and transformed.

Learning about my nervous system, working somatically, and incorporating psychedelics into my life have certainly contributed to my capacity and resiliency to hold more of myself.

I still have lots to learn but now I trust that I won’t be swallowed by fear and feel empowered knowing that I have recalibrating resources in reach to support myself in wobbly moments 🌊

Here are some simple reminders that have helped me when fear surfaces:

• Feel it in the body. Notice where fear arises in the body. See if you can also observe a place in your body that feels neutral. Shift your focus between these two places.

• Visualize it as a wave. Fear rises and falls, just like the tides. The energy will eventually subside. Breathe.

• Remind yourself you are safe. Feel your feet on the ground, take in your environment, and affirm: “Fear is a feeling. I am safe in this moment. I can feel it without being controlled by it.”

Fear is a natural response to life’s transitions and transformations. It’s not something to fix or eliminate but rather is a guide that invites us into deeper truths about ourselves.

When we learn to approach fear with curiosity and compassion — to feel it, hold it, and move with it — we open the door to resilience, growth, and evolution. We move closer to what we want and find ourselves more fulfilled. When we show up to ourselves in these ways, we inspire and give others permission to do the same.

Honouring Your Courage

Dear one, if you’ve made it this far, I want you to know: I see you, and I honour you 🙏

It takes immense courage to turn toward the challenging parts of yourself — those shadowy, uncomfortable places where fear resides. Yet, it’s in this meeting that healing, integration, and wholeness begin.

When we meet fear with compassion, it reveals its hidden gifts — courage, resilience, and authenticity.

Fear, while uncomfortable, offers us the surprising gift of transformation. It invites us to grow, to soften, and to discover truths about ourselves we might not otherwise touch. By seeing fear not as an obstacle but as a gateway, we walk the path of self-discovery with courage.

As you navigate this brave walk of transformation, remember that you don’t have to do it perfectly, and you don’t have to do it all at once. Keep going, gently, step by step.

And you don’t do it alone; remember that you are held by a force that is so powerfully benevolent beyond measure, beyond comprehension. This wider, deeper holding is what will carry you through the fear and to the other side of whatever portal of change you are navigating.

You are not alone. You are worthy of healing. You are capable.

If you need a reminder in moments of doubt, let this article be your guidepost — a small flame to light the way when fear clouds your vision.

May you carry this truth with you:

“The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.” — Thucydides

With love and unwavering belief in your path,

Francesca Rose

Embodied Integration: Eating Disorder Recovery Through Psychedelics and Somatic Healing

Walking the path of integration is the path of embodying integrity. The words "integration" and "integrity" both stem from origins that mean "whole" or "complete." When we sit with plant medicine, we often see ourselves more clearly. With softened edges and widened perception, we notice the places that have fragmented, been hidden, or gone unseen. What was once out of sight becomes visible.

Integration invites those hidden parts back into everyday life. This is the work of recovery, of wholeness — the practice of embodying greater integrity. Often, we associate integrity with being moral or upright. But in its essence, integrity is about welcoming all parts of ourselves. Nothing shoved under the carpet. Nothing denied. Walking the talk. The deep work of letting it all belong.

And this is not easy work. This is courageous work. To truly integrate, we must face pain, shame, judgement, grief, and confusion. This is why support is essential — because witnessing ourselves in wholeness can feel heavy. As Tara Brach asks, "What am I unwilling to feel?" The courageous answer to this question aligns us directly with the heart of integrity.

The Heart of Psychedelic Healing: Courage and Recovery

The word "courage" traces back to the Greek word meaning "of the heart." Courage is not about fearlessness. It is about taking our dignified seat inside the heart. It is about letting ourselves feel—all of it—from a place of inner steadiness and soulful care.

Do you have the courage to embody what is authentically yours? The kind of courage that stretches you from the known into the unknown? The courage that bridges you to the quiet truth that lives in the body?

It’s the courage to listen to the body as your compass, ushering you back to the temple of the heart. And from this place, there is nothing to fear.

Somatic Recovery: What It Means to Embody Your Healing

Personally, in navigating the hooks and tendrils of food and body recovery, I keep returning to this question: Do you have the courage to do what is yours to do?

And more deeply: Do you have the courage to embody what is yours to embody?

Recovery is a return to our own unique truth and fullness. It is the slow, daily process of aligning body, heart, and mind so that what we wish to create, share, and live becomes more possible.

Embodiment is when consciousness lands in physical form. To feel embodied is to feel at home, grounded, awake. This can arise through the simplest of moments of connection — breathing deeply, watching the sun dip below the horizon, petting your dog, or dancing.

What moments in your life bring you back home?

Recovery as a Homecoming: A Plant Medicine and Somatic Approach

Recovery is a homecoming.

It’s the repeated practice of returning to the self, noticing when we leave, and gently finding our way back again.

Sometimes the home feels unfamiliar or even unsafe, especially when pain or trauma lives there. In those moments, we might just linger at the doorstep, or watch from across the street. But over time, we build capacity. We begin to enter. And eventually, we find ourselves living more fully in our own skin.

It is a process that requires patience, practice, and compassion.

And yes, it takes courage.

Liminal Moments: Integrating Somatic Awareness After Meals

There’s a moment, just after a meal ends, where many people feel lost and disconnected. Maybe the urge to keep eating arises. Maybe there's a rush to the next task. Or perhaps the phone appears, offering distraction.

But what if, in that moment, you paused?

What if you let yourself feel your feet, notice your breath, and soften the tension in your body? What if you reminded yourself that this liminal space — the space between — isn’t something to fix or avoid, but something to feel and bring your embodied presence into?

Recovery is learning to dwell in these liminal spaces. To build nervous system capacity to stay with the unknown.

Post-meal is one such moment. It's when the nervous system shifts into "rest and digest" — a phase that invites yielding, slowing down, and letting go. When we practice awareness here, we digest more than just food. We metabolize emotion, sensation, and life experience. This is incredibly nourishing for the psyche to experience.

Nourishment as Flow: From Disordered Eating to Soulful Living

"To nourish" comes from the Latin "nutrire"—to feed, support, preserve. Digging deeper, its roots lie in the act of suckling, or letting flow.

Nourishment = flow.

When we are nourished, we can move through life with more ease. We feel present, grounded, open. We connect with what brings us alive — be it creativity, nature, community, or rest.

An eating disorder is not random. It’s the body’s way of speaking on behalf of the soul. It's a coded message about what the soul longs for in order to thrive and experience deeper nourishment.

So instead of silencing the eating disorder’s voice, we can invite it to the table. We can ask: What do you need? What are you trying to say? In doing so, we welcome the soul home to the body. We courageously reconnect to wholeness.

Soul-Embodiment and Plant Medicine Integration

To nourish the soul, the body must be resourced. Dancing, singing, art-making, love, Nature, food, community — these are the raw materials for aliveness. These are how we tend the temple of the body so that the soul may reside fully within.

Recovery, then, is not just a return to eating. It is a return to being.

It is the courage to embody what is authentically yours.

As Winston Churchill once said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

So listen. Deeply. Courageously.

You are not alone on this path.

You are becoming.

And it’s beautiful to witness.

Let us celebrate!

Gratitude for the Wound: Why I’m Thankful for My Eating Disorder

What if your eating disorder wasn’t something to simply get rid of, but a doorway to deeper healing and inner transformation? As someone who has struggled with eating disorders and now a somatic practitioner specializing in EDs, I can honestly say that grateful for my eating disorder because it became a portal to understanding my body’s wisdom, unmet needs, and desire for wholeness.

Eating disorders often emerge when words fall short — when our nervous system and attachment wounds speak through the body in behaviors we can’t always explain. Rather than shame or suppress these behaviours, we are invited to listen with curiosity.

What is your body trying to say? What does it need to feel safe, nourished, and seen?

Let us reframe eating disorder recovery not as a path of control or perfection, but as a journey of courageous self-inquiry, compassionate presence, and embodied trust. This is a journey of reconnecting with the body, through feeling, movement, and attuned listening, and how this process leads to clarity, belonging, and a profound sense of inner freedom.

Healing is possible — not by fixing yourself, but by befriending yourself.

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I Am Grateful for My Eating Disorder

When we try to “get rid of” an eating disorder, we might unknowingly bypass the very opportunity for transformation that it offers. Eating disorders are not random — they are messengers. They speak when words cannot. They reflect what the nervous system cannot hold, what the attachment system never received, and what the heart still longs for.

Rather than viewing them as enemies, what if we met them with curiosity?

What if your eating disorder is your body’s most loyal — albeit misunderstood — way of asking for safety, nourishment, and belonging?

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The Body Speaks When the Soul is Silent

In the early days of my healing, I tried to deny my struggle. But pain doesn’t disappear when ignored — it shapeshifts, often surfacing through the body.

Eventually, I listened. I softened (#thankyouplantmedicine)

And my body whispered:
See me. Hear me. Nourish me. Acknowledge my existence. We belong together.

That whisper became a compass.

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Recovery Is a Relationship, Not a Fix

So many models of eating disorder treatment focus on controlling symptoms. But if we simply shut down the behaviors without understanding their function, we lose the wisdom they carry.

Recovery is not about doing more. It’s about being differently, with compassion, courage, and presence.

Ask your body:

• What are you afraid of?

• What do you need to feel safe?

• What are you starving from — and what are you starving for?

When you listen deeply, you begin to uncover the truth beneath the hunger.

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This Journey Is Not Linear — It’s Sacred

My body has become my greatest teacher — not despite the eating disorder, but because of it. Through trembling, crying, thawing, sweating, forgiving, and feeling, I’ve come home to myself.

This is the long, brave path of embodied recovery. It is not easy. But it is worth it.

And if you are walking this path, I see you. I trust the wisdom within you. And I believe that healing is not just possible — it’s already unfolding.

Whatever journey you are navigating with your body, I see you. I acknowledge the deep deep work you are doing. I honour you and your body, and the capacity that resides within you to radiate from the core of your being. 

May this work continue to evolve and set all of us free.

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If you are inspired to walk your recovery journey with support and intention, you are welcome to connect with me directly to learn more about my one-on-one coaching focused on eating disorder recovery and/or psychedelic preparation and integration.

Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash

Microdosing: A Bridge Back to Your Body’s Wisdom

Healing is never a straight line. I’ve been reflecting on my own recovery journey recently, and how many twists and turns I took before eventually finding a sense of safety, trust, and connection with my body.

While I deeply believe that each of us is inherently whole, being human means we are all given a unique curriculum of lessons to learn and wounds to tend to at this mysterious School of Life, we call Planet Earth. Sometimes, it can feel like we’re repeating the same lessons over and over, cycling through familiar themes and wondering, “Will things ever change?!”

Last year, in particular, was one of those years for me. Experiences I thought were long resolved from my adolescence resurfaced, bringing old wounds back into view. It was challenging to re-meet these parts of myself, but this time, I approached them with a tenderness and compassion I couldn’t offer myself all those years ago.

Healing doesn’t follow a clear roadmap or timeline. Instead, it mirrors the rhythms of nature: spiraling, slow, and steady — with moments of death, rebirth, and unexpected beauty. Each season of healing brings us closer to self-trust, self-compassion, and wholeness.

Eating disorders, in particular, can feel overwhelming and complex. They often carry a reputation as one of the most challenging mental health issues to navigate. And yet, within their complexity lies something surprising: a hidden language of unmet needs. Beneath the surface, eating disorders carry the body’s deep attempts to communicate feelings, desires, and longings that cannot be expressed directly through words.

Food and body behaviours — often labeled as “disordered” — are ways the body says, I am craving love, connection, belonging, and attunement. When we can turn towards the eating disorder and listen to these poignant, underlying messages, rather than disregarding, shaming, or vilifying them, healing becomes less about control and more about cultivating a safe, nurturing environment where these needs can finally be heard and satisfied.

This is where psychedelics, and specifically, microdosing, can help.

Softening the Edges: Microdosing as a Tool for Recovery

Microdosing acts as a bridge — a gentle connection between where you are now and the body wisdom that’s always been within you.

Your body’s wisdom is its ability to guide you back to balance — whether that’s honouring hunger, feeling emotions fully, or finding safety within your own skin. Microdosing helps clear the noise so you can hear this wisdom more clearly.

Don’t expect microdosing to cure or fix an eating disorder. Instead, it offers something subtle yet profound: a gentle, expansive lens through which to view your body, your thoughts, and your patterns with fresh eyes. It creates space for curiosity, softens judgement, and opens the door to rewriting the stories that keep us stuck.

When paired with intention and attention, psychedelics help us shift from doing to being. They invite us to sit with ourselves, including our discomforts and contradictions, and in that space, healing becomes possible as the eating disorder naturally releases its grip.

Your Transformation Is in Your Blueprint

Eating disorders often pull us into cycles of perfectionism, control, and harsh self-discipline. These patterns are fueled by intense emotions — grief, anger, joy, or love — that feel too overwhelming to hold. In response, we self-criticize or numb, creating temporary relief but leaving deeper wounds untouched.

As challenging as it can seem to face an eating disorder, recovery doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems.

Transformation doesn’t come from fixing what’s broken but from remembering the blueprint for healing already within you. It's not something to force or achieve either. It’s about creating the nourishing conditions where growth can unfold naturally — through showing up to ourselves and life with love, connection, and self-compassion.

Microdosing acts as a catalyst for this process by softening self-criticism, quieting judgement, and opening space for curiosity. It encourages an inner environment of patience and care, allowing your innate wisdom to emerge and guide you toward healing.

Three Ways Microdosing Supports Recovery

Like water reshapes stone, microdosing creates space to soften the edges of eating disorder behaviours, enhances new ways of thinking, and disrupts ingrained patterns around food and body image. Through tiny doses, microdosing can lead us towards big shifts in feeling more connected to our body and inner guidance system. Here’s how it opens pathways for transformation and supports recovery:

1. Refined Body Awareness​
   Microdosing enhances your connection to your body, helping you tune into sensations and physical cues with greater clarity, discernment, and refinement. It invites you to interpret your body’s signals as allies, not enemies, creating a foundation for trust and self-compassion.

2. Expanding Possibility​
   Psychedelics foster cognitive flexibility, allowing you to curiously and lightly challenge limiting beliefs and habitual patterns around food and body image. They spark possibility and neuroplasticity, helping you envision and embody a life beyond the confines of an eating disorder.

3. Cultivating Self-Compassion​
   ​Microdosing can help you meet the inner critic, inviting you to sit with it rather than silencing, controlling or belittling it. Through this, you are guided to meet challenging emotions — grief, shame, or fear — with kindness and non-judgement instead of avoidance. This process builds resilience and strengthens your capacity to befriend yourself; this is at the heart of recovery.

The Spiral of Growth

Healing often feels like revisiting and circling back to the same challenges again and again. But each time, you approach them from a new perspective, with greater awareness and strength. Last year, as I circled back to old wounds, I learned that returning to "old lessons" is not a failure but an invitation to relearn them with fresh insight and compassion.

Psychedelics illuminate these spirals, reminding us that repetition isn’t failure — it’s a deepening into the wisdom held within our bodies and hearts.

Nature beautifully illustrates this truth. Growth isn’t linear; it spirals, ebbs, and flows. The roots of a tree grow downward before it reaches upward. The ocean pulls back before it rushes forward. Microdosing invites us to move at the pace of nature — slow, steady, and intentional — and, in doing so, we learn to embrace our humanity as a reflection of the Earth’s wisdom.

Let’s remember that moving at the cadence of nature requires deep self-trust in a culture that is disconnected from the cycles of the Earth. Cultivating this rhythm of healing requires courage, patience, and an open heart. In a world that prioritizes control and perfection, linearity and quick fixes, this kind of self-trust is revolutionary — a return to the natural, cyclical pace of life.

Sustainable, authentic healing isn’t something you achieve; it’s something you cultivate, like a garden, giving space for what is wanting to break through and grow from within the soil of your heart — love, worthiness, expression, and wisdom.

Walking the Bridge Back to Yourself

Psychedelics plant the seeds of change, but the real work — the nurturing, tending, and growing — is up to us to walk the path. Microdosing opens the door, but the bridge back to your body’s wisdom is strengthened by how you nurture it through compassion, embodiment, and safe, intentional practices.

As my own healing continues to unfold, I’ve learned that the process is never about fixing ourselves. It’s about creating the conditions where growth, transformation, and reconnection can naturally take root.

We can cultivate these conditions by weaving practices like somatic therapy, creative expression, time in nature, co-regulation, self-reflection, playful and mindful movement, rest, and love... so much love.

As we walk this bridge of transformation, we build the capacity to meet ourselves and life more fully. We reclaim our radiant, authentic sense of self as a conscious, embodied being.

It is in this fullness that we discover our inner voice, wisdom, needs, desires, and heart’s deepest longings. Here, we meet ourselves — our truths, our wholeness, and the infinite possibilities within us. This is recovery.

Join the Free 7-Day Microdosing Course

If you’re curious about how microdosing can support your recovery, I invite you to explore my FREE 7-day microdosing course. Designed specifically for individuals navigating eating disorder recovery, this course provides practical guidance, compassionate tools, and gentle encouragement to help you prepare for a safe and intentional microdosing journey.

Together, we’ll cover:​

• Setting clear intentions for your healing journey

• Exploring the benefits of microdosing for body awareness and emotional resilience and how to stay safe along the way

• Cultivating a mindset (“set”) and environment (“setting”) that support growth

• Gentle reflection practices to integrate your experiences

This course is not a magic solution — it’s an invitation to explore your own inner wisdom and create the conditions for meaningful, embodied transformation.

Click below to enroll and take the step toward reconnecting with yourself, your body, and your innate capacity to heal.

Is Intuitive Eating a Myth? Understanding the Body’s Wisdom in Eating Disorder Recovery

The concept of intuitive eating (IE) has helped many people heal their relationship with food, breaking free from diet culture and rigid food rules. But what if I told you that you are already eating intuitively?

We Are Always Eating Intuitively

Our bodies are constantly sending signals that shape our eating behaviours — what, when, and how we eat. These cues are influenced by:

• The nervous system’s state (regulated vs. dysregulated)

• The environment and sensory input at any given moment

• Past experiences with food, nourishment, and safety

And these factors impact how we relate to food that is entirely unique to each of us. The belief that intuitive eating is something to “achieve” can create unnecessary pressure, especially for those recovering from disordered eating or eating disorders. The reality is that our body is already guiding us, even if that guidance feels distorted due to past experiences of restriction, trauma, or chronic stress.

It is important to note that the IE movement has paved the road for thousands of people around the world to look at their eating behaviours with greater awareness. It has helped so many people recover from disordered eating through helping people shift their perspective around food. And yet, it is a frame that can keep us stuck if we miss how we are already eating intuitively.

Neuroception, a concept developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, explains how our nervous system unconsciously assesses safety and danger. This process shapes our behaviours, including eating. If the body perceives a threat — whether from past diet culture conditioning, trauma, or a dysregulated nervous system — it will respond accordingly.

When we realize we are already practicing IE in our own ways, we can begin to trust our body’s innate capacity and intelligence.

Rather than striving to “learn” intuitive eating, the journey is about trusting and refining how we listen to our body's cues while resourcing our nervous system for more clarity and balance.

Rebuilding Self-Trust in Eating Disorder Recovery

For many struggling with an eating disorder, the belief that they have lost the ability to eat intuitively can be deeply disempowering. However, recognizing that you are already engaging with food in a way that reflects your current inner landscape can be the first step toward self-trust and empowerment.

Steps Toward Nervous System-Attuned Eating

• Notice and name your body’s signals with curiosity rather than judgment

• Regulate your nervous system through grounding and centering embodiment practices

• Reframe your relationship with food as a dynamic, evolving process rather than something to "fix"

• Honour your identity beyond food and body struggles — because recovery isn’t just about food; it’s about reclaiming who you are.

Identity and Eating Disorder Recovery: Who Are You Becoming?

As we begin to listen to our body's cues and shift our relationship with food, a deeper question arises: Who am I beyond my struggles with eating?

For many, an eating disorder becomes more than just a pattern of behaviours — it shapes identity. I remember, years ago, asking myself how I truly felt about my eating disorder. At the time, my response startled me:
"I’m glad I have it because I don’t know who I would be without it."

That moment illuminated the malleability of identity. Before my eating disorder, I was a passionate, curious person. But at that time, I couldn’t relate to that version of myself. The disorder had become a stabilizing force, shaping my self-concept.

James Clear puts it beautifully:
"True behaviour change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity."

Recovery is an identity shift. It’s not just about changing behaviours — it’s about stepping into a new embodiment of self-trust, nourishment, and wholeness.

Moving Beyond Willpower: Embodied Healing

Rather than using willpower to force behavior change (which often leads to dissociation and burnout), true healing comes from aligning with who we want to become. Somatic practices, nervous system regulation, and even plant medicines can support this shift by enhancing clarity, creativity, and neuroplasticity.

By focusing on being rather than doing, food and body-related behaviours naturally evolve to reflect an identity rooted in balance, authenticity, and self-trust. This is how we shape ourselves into who we want to be that is aligned with the truth of who we are from the inside-out.

You Are Already on the Path

Intuitive eating isn’t a distant goal — it’s already happening within you. The journey is about refining your awareness, regulating your nervous system, and reclaiming your innate wisdom around food and nourishment. Over time, as you step more into your authenticity, you will find your eating patterns will intuitively evolve with you.

Through embodied recovery, self-trust, and nervous system healing, you can shift your relationship with food — not by force, but by becoming the person who effortlessly embodies the nourishment, trust, and wholeness you seek.

Healing Loneliness and Self-Blame in Eating Disorder Recovery with Psychedelics

Loneliness is often deeply intertwined with eating disorders — but it isn’t just a symptom. For many, the feeling of isolation was present long before disordered eating behaviors emerged. Let’s explore the role of loneliness, self-blame, and how psychedelic-assisted healing can support the recovery journey.

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Loneliness: More Than a Symptom

One of the most common themes shared by people navigating eating disorder recovery is loneliness. This isn’t a fleeting emotion but often a long-standing feeling rooted in childhood experiences. For some, it’s a feeling that has been around for as long as they can remember.

Common Beliefs Linked to Loneliness:

• “No one really understands me.”

• “I don’t belong here.”

• “The world doesn’t see or accept me.”

These beliefs often stem from early experiences of feeling misunderstood, left out, not feeling like they fit in, or unable to connect with others. Even within loving families, systemic oppression and societal pressures (like diet culture) can amplify this sense of isolation. Many people with eating disorders are also very energetically sensitive, which makes it even more challenging to fit into a loud, fast, overstimulating world.

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The Eating Disorder as a Protector

For many, eating disorder behaviors provide a sense of comfort and reliability in times of disconnection.

However, these behaviors often deepen feelings of isolation:

• Social avoidance due to fear around food-centered events.

• Rigid food or body rituals that limit engagement with others.

It is helpful to see that the eating disorder is the body's way of communicating about how connected or disconnected it feels in the world in ways that words cannot be expressed.

When we see the eating disorder as the body communicating with the rest of the world about its state of regulation, sense of safety and needs for attachment and connection, we begin to see a clearer path towards a more compassionate healing that is inclusive, focuses on developing a somatic sense of belonging, dignity and enoughness, and that prioritizes establishing safe, sincere connections.

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Self-Blame: A Misunderstood Protector

Self-blame is another common experience for those with eating disorders.

As you journey through processing feelings of loneliness, it is possible you might come across a part of yourself that holds an enormous amount of self-blame. For people navigating eating disorders, there are often pervasive internal voices that spin heavy narrative of self-blame and self-criticism.

When there are feelings of loneliness, blaming oneself as “the problem” becomes a way to deal with the pain of feeling alone. While these internal narratives of criticism can feel heavy, they often arise as adaptive responses to pain.

These blaming and critical parts often arose during a time of incredible, intolerable pain. For example, if a young child didn't have their needs met or were ignored in some way (why this happens in the first place is usually rooted in deeper systemic issues), they may believe they are unlovable and are completely alone in the world.

This is intolerable to bear, and as such, a protector part that is highly critical may creep in.

It is more manageable to blame oneself for not being loveable and this protective part can try to do something about it by trying to be perfect, rather than sitting in the pain of not being loved and feeling alone. It is easier to swallow self-blame than trauma.

How Self-Blame Develops:

1. Early Pain: Experiences of developmental trauma, neglect or unmet needs can create feelings of being unlovable.

2. Protective Beliefs: Self-blame becomes a coping mechanism to avoid the unbearable pain of feeling unloved or alone.

3. Perfectionism: A critical inner voice pushes for unattainable perfection as a way to regain connection and safety.

Though self-blame initially protects us, it can entrench disordered behaviors and perpetuate a cycle of disconnection.

How Psychedelics Can Help

Psychedelic-assisted healing offers a powerful tool to address the root causes of loneliness and self-blame. By softening rigid beliefs and connecting with deeper emotions, psychedelics help facilitate profound healing.

Psychedelics have the ability to soften the critical, blaming voices that we hold towards ourselves, offering a new perspective. In that softening we can connect to what's underneath the inner harshness — which is usually the raw, tender part within us that holds that burden of hard-to-swallow-pain of feeling alone.

Slowly, we make contact. Gradually, we connect with that pain and acknowledge it. Eventually, it moves and digests. As the old pain gets digested (which takes time and has several layers), the protector parts no longer have to work so hard at blaming and criticizing, and perhaps they take on a new role, such as offering guidance on establishing healthy boundaries.

And the part of us that once held the pain of feeling all alone is acknowledged, witnessed and held — and begins to feel connected, loved and seen.

What Happens During Psychedelic Healing:

• Protector Parts Rest: The critical, blaming voices step aside.

• Connection to Pain: You gently reconnect with the tender parts of yourself carrying old wounds.

• Emotional Integration: Suppressed pain is acknowledged, processed, and released.

• Reintegration: Fragmented parts are reunited, creating a sense of wholeness.

This process often mirrors inner child work or reparenting, where we meet our younger selves with compassion, care, and acknowledgment.

We begin to reconnect with ourselves with acceptance and compassion and feel an increased capacity to reach out to life and feel supported by it too. Things feel less lonely. What a beautiful journey.

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The Path Toward Connection

As self-blame eases and loneliness is addressed, space opens within the body-mind for authentic connection:

• A stronger relationship with yourself, rooted in acceptance and compassion.

• Greater openness to forming meaningful relationships.

• A renewed sense of belonging to the world around you.

Recovery becomes less about "fixing" and more about reconnecting — with yourself, others, and the world.

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You’re Not Alone

I offer 1:1 coaching and group programs created to support eating disorder recovery through somatic practices and psychedelic integration. Together, we can explore a path that leads to greater connection, self-compassion, and inner resiliency.

Whether you’re just starting or looking for deeper support, I’m here to walk alongside you with care, hope, and understanding. You are welcome to reach out to me to schedule a free 20-minute call to discuss ways of working together.

Photo by Matt Sclarandis on Unsplash

How Psychedelics Foster Connection and Healing in Eating Disorder Recovery

For those navigating eating disorders, the experience often feels like an endless search to fill a void —a deep hunger for wholeness, belonging, and connection. Psychedelics and plant medicines offer a unique path toward this healing by awakening a sense of interconnectedness with ourselves, others, and the larger web of life.

Maybe you have experienced this in a plant medicine ceremony:

I am part of something greater.
My place in this web of life matters and is needed.
I am made of the same stuff as the Earth; my body is the Earth body.
I am nourished on all levels when I feel in my bones that I am held by the Earth.

In plant medicine ceremonies, many describe a profound remembering:

• We are part of something greater.

• Our presence in this web of life is vital and meaningful.

• Our bodies and the Earth are deeply interconnected.

This reconnection nourishes us on every level — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — offering a sense of being held by something greater than ourselves. This connection is the pathway to healing

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How Psychedelics Work in Eating Disorder Recovery

Psychedelics create a hyper-connected brain state known as "entropic," where pathways that are usually separate begin communicating in new and creative ways. This state allows us to access buried emotions, reprocess trauma, and reframe long-held patterns of disconnection.

From a shamanic lens, eating disorders are attempts to heal and communicate unmet needs. Behaviours like restriction, bingeing, or over-exercising often stem from:

• A lack of spiritual connection; a hunger for something deeper.

• Unresolved trauma, whether personal or ancestral.

• A diminished sense of self-love and worth.

Rather than pathologizing these behaviours or reducing them to mere coping mechanisms, psychedelics encourage us to view eating disorder behaviours with compassion and curiosity. They invite us to ask:

• What is my body trying to communicate?

• What unmet needs is “my” eating disorder attempting to fulfill?

• What does my soul need to thrive?

By addressing these questions, plant medicine facilitates a profound shift from shame to understanding, from disconnection to wholeness.

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The Holistic Power of Psychedelics

Unlike traditional treatments, psychedelics work on multiple dimensions of an eating disorder, addressing:

• Physical: Reconnection with bodily sensations and cues.

• Emotional: Processing, digesting, and releasing unresolved emotions.

• Mental: Reshaping thought patterns and beliefs about self and body.

• Spiritual: Reconnecting with a larger sense of purpose, meaning, and wholeness.

This approach is highly multidimensional, holistic, works on the root level causes, and importantly addresses the spiritual aspect. Plant medicine seem to catalyze one’s connection with nature, or larger spiritual force or intelligence, providing them with unparalleled “spiritual and existential introspection and physical healing” that is beneficial for their eating disorder recovery process (study).

People often describe an increased sense of embodied wholeness after a psychedelic journey. This wholeness arises from clearing energetic blockages, integrating trauma, and reconnecting with the deep truth of being enough, just as we are.

From what I have personally experienced in psychedelic journeys, heard from my clients, and have read in academic articles, specifically “Getting to the Root": Ayahuasca Ceremony Leaders' Perspectives on Eating Disorders” (published in 2023 by Lefrance, et al), people navigating eating disorders are struggling with spiritual disconnection, spiritual starvation, and a hunger of wholeness.

This happens to be the exact teachings that psychedelics and plant medicines offer: a remembering of being interconnected to this great web of life.

Eating disorders are protective strategies of disconnection and so with the support of these medicines, the soul can return to and recover this knowing that we are connected to something greater and meaningful, and that our presence in this interconnected web is vital and needed.

Eating Disorders as Protective Strategies

It’s important to reframe eating disorders not as failures but as intelligent attempts to find safety in the face of unmet needs and incomplete stress responses. Psychedelics help to gently unravel these protective mechanisms by:

• Clearing unresolved survival energies like fight, flight, or freeze.

• Facilitating spiritual and existential introspection.

• Reorganizing relationships — with self, others, and the eating disorder itself.

By nurturing connection, psychedelics catalyze a shift from survival mode to a state of thriving.

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The Transformational Journey Toward Connection

Recovery is not about returning to an old version of yourself — it’s about becoming whole. Our bodies inherently know how moving towards healing, integration and wholeness. Given the right conditions, this healing is possible. When we feel whole and connected, we naturally we feel more connected to the world around us. As within so without.

Plant medicine provides a gateway to reconnect with nature, spirit, and your inner truth. This process fosters resilience, emotional regulation, and a sense of purpose that naturally diminishes the pull of disordered eating behaviors.

Through this journey of reconnection, you’ll begin to:

• Find new meaning and purpose in your life.

• Experience identity shifts that align with your authentic self.

• Cultivate lasting behavioural changes rooted in connection and compassion.

At its core, recovery is about unlearning disconnection and relearning love — for yourself, your body, and the life you’re a part of.

Psychedelics remind us of this truth: healing happens in the nourishment of unconditional connection.

This journey takes courage, patience, and support, but it’s a path worth walking. As you reconnect with the wisdom of your heart and the beauty of the world around you, you’ll discover that the healing you seek is already within you.

You are whole. You are enough. And your presence in this web of life is needed.

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Embracing the Unknown: Finding Trust and Courage in Eating Disorder Recovery

Liminality — the space between an ending and a new beginning — can feel overwhelming, especially for those navigating eating disorders. The food cycle is a powerful metaphor for this: the end of a meal and the pause before the next is often where discomfort surfaces.

For many, this space feels too expansive, too uncertain. Instead of meeting it, we might overeat to prolong the moment, purge or exercise to jump over it, or avoid finishing or starting meals altogether. These behaviours, while protective, keep us from fully experiencing the rest, digestion, and clarity this space offers.

These liminal moments go beyond food; it’s a fertile ground for reconnecting with our inherent enoughness. In this pause, we’re reminded that our worth isn’t tied to what we’ve done, achieved, or controlled — it simply exists because we are.

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The Fear of Rest and Stillness

At the core of many disordered eating patterns lies a mistrust of rest, pausing, and the unknown. Endings — whether of a meal, a task, or a chapter in life — can bring up discomfort, fear, or anxiety.

This discomfort mirrors how we approach food:

• Do you struggle to fully finish a meal?

• Does hunger feel overwhelming, making it hard to start eating?

• Do you turn to behaviours like overeating, purging, or overexercising to avoid the stillness between meals?

These patterns highlight our relationship with endings, surrender, and the idea of simply being and belonging. They invite us to explore our beliefs about rest and non-doing. What do you notice within yourself when you ask the question, “Do I trust myself in the unknown?”

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Trusting the Wilderness Within

Reconnecting with our inner truth is often messy, wild, and deeply courageous. For years, I struggled with self-doubt, often seeking external rules and validation instead of trusting my own inner guidance.

The process of listening to and trusting the quiet whispers of my inner voice has been one of profound transformation. Stripping away masks, people-pleasing, and the need to shape-shift left me raw, vulnerable, and fully present with myself.

This journey isn’t about perfection; it’s about presence. It’s about meeting the full spectrum of your emotions — pain, joy, anxiety, grief, love — and letting them belong. When we allow ourselves to feel, pause, and breathe through it all, we reconnect with the wisdom of our hearts.

Connecting to the truth of who we are is a journey into the wild, vast, oceanic human experience. So often we want to disassociate from this wild ocean that is the body because of what it contains, hold and longs for. Often, we don’t trust what we see and quickly brush over it, suppress it or change it. We don’t often pause with it.

Indeed, it can be excruciating to feel and scary to acknowledge all that we meet — and yet when we muster the courage to meet it, pause with it, breathe with it, and let all of it belong, we make a fundamental shift in our trajectory towards returning to wholeness.

When we pause, we step into presence with the wisdom of the heart. In the liminal space is a chance to see yourself clearly, soften into your inner waves and currents, and hear deep’s longing and hungers emerge.

What do you know to be true? Can you trust it?

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Questions to Explore

As you navigate your recovery, consider these reflections:

• How do you handle endings, both with food and in life?

• What beliefs do you hold about pausing, resting, or letting go?

• What arises when you face the unknown without a clear next step?

• Can you meet yourself — your feelings, your body — with compassion and courage without the need to earn or prove it?

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The Rewards of Meeting the Unknown

When we allow ourselves to rest in liminal spaces, we open the door to clarity, trust, and a sense of deep belonging. These pauses are where we learn that we are enough, not because of what we’ve done or achieved, but simply because we exist.

The more we practice surrender — whether at the end of a meal or in daily moments of uncertainty — the more we grow. With each breath, we expand our capacity to trust ourselves, to navigate the unknown with courage, and to experience the fullness of life. Let the ending of your meal be a practice of surrender.

In this open space, we can land into a sense of inherent enoughness — not based on what we’ve done or achieved but simply because we are here on this Earth. The liminal space is where we clear the canvas to allow for our inner clarity and wisdom to arise, informing us of the aligned next step to take.

You deserve to feel this sense of aliveness. You deserve to trust yourself. The journey into the unknown isn’t just about what you’ll find — it’s about returning home to who you already are.

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How to Stop Blocking Joy and Embrace Happiness in Eating Disorder Recovery

Experiencing joy can be a challenge for people navigating eating disorders.

Joy, playfulness, and excitement are emotions that can feel overwhelming when your nervous system is compromised by trauma or disordered eating patterns. Eating disorders can act as "joy blockers" and at the core, they represent our relationship to joy, the narratives and wounding we hold around this expansive feeling.

Continue reading to explore why joy can feel threatening and offers insights into how to reconnect with this essential part of life during eating disorder recovery.

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Why Joy Feels Threatening to the Nervous System

Eating disorders are often rooted in a fear of emotions rather than a fear of food itself. While much attention is given to fear, pain, and discomfort, less is said about the fear of joy, pleasure, or playfulness. Emotions with high energy — even positive ones like excitement — can register as danger for a dysregulated nervous system. The body struggles to differentiate between excitement and anxiety due to unresolved trauma.

If caregivers in childhood didn’t offer attuned co-regulation, the nervous system’s capacity to handle heightened emotions remains underdeveloped. Joy can feel unsafe because the body lacks the tools to self-regulate in response to increased energy.

Maybe when you were younger, your spontaneous expressions of joy through dancing, singing, creativity, or affection were met with shame or misunderstanding. You might have even been punished for it, or your joy was weaponized against you. As such, when you notice joy, fear, guilt or shame might quickly arise as a defensive shield is put up to block the feeling entirely. It is at this point where we see eating disorders manifesting.

Eating disorders can act as "joy blockers" and they represent our relationship to joy, the narratives and wounding we hold around this expansive energy.

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The Science of Emotions and the Nervous System

Emotions are neither inherently good nor bad — they simply are. Yet, our tendency to label them as positive or negative often influences how we experience them.

Both joy and threat activate the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the body to respond to high-energy states. To truly embrace joy, a well-functioning parasympathetic system — particularly the ventral vagal nerve — is essential. This nerve helps balance heightened energy with a sense of safety and calm, allowing us to feel energized without feeling overwhelmed.

If the ventral vagal nerve didn’t fully develop during childhood due to a lack of co-regulation from caregivers, experiencing positive emotions can feel challenging.

But this isn’t the end of the story. As adults, we have the power to strengthen our nervous system through practices that promote regulation and create a safe foundation for joy to flourish. By learning to nurture this connection, we open the door to a richer emotional life.

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Disordered Eating as a Defense Against Joy

Disordered eating behaviors such as restriction, bingeing, purging, or over-exercising often serve as a shield against overwhelming emotions, including joy. These food and body strategies create a sense of safety by numbing the body’s capacity to feel.

Within the context of eating disorders, that it is sometimes hard to feel joy because the body is in some kind of physiological deficit; and there is only enough energy to keep basic biological process going. There isn’t enough “in the bank” other than to just keep the person alive.

However, by narrowing your range of emotions, consciosly or subconsciously, these behaviours block the full spectrum of life, cutting you off from connection, fulfillment, and joy.

When we use these strategies, we create a smaller world, one where risk is minimized but so is growth. The paradox is that the safety these behaviours offer is an illusion — it leaves us disconnected from the vitality and richness that joy brings. Recognizing this opens the path to healing and reclaiming the joy you deserve.

Steps to Reconnect with Joy

Reconnecting with joy is not about forcing yourself to “just be happy.” It’s a gradual, gentle process that honours where you are and helps you expand your capacity to feel.

Since joy is an emotion — and not a state we need to work towards or achieve — we can all access it and experience it no matter what we've been through. 

This is an embodied process not a cognitive one. Here’s how to begin:

1. Notice the Spark of Joy
   Pay close attention to the moments when a spark of joy arises, however small. What sensations come up in your body? Are there stories or judgements attached to this experience? You might notice the thought: "Will this feeling keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger?" Thoughts like these are clues. Bringing awareness to these patterns is the first step in reconnecting with joy. Start where you are, not where you aren’t.

2. Drop the Storylines
   Rather than focusing on the mental narratives that might surround joy — such as "I don’t deserve this" or "this won’t last" or “joy is a time waster; it’s indulgent and frivolous” — shift your attention to the raw sensations in your body (e.g. bubbling in the chest, rush of energy through the limbs, change in temperature etc). Allow yourself to experience these feelings without overanalyzing or resisting them.

3. Practice Gratitude
   Gratitude is a powerful way to gently expand your emotional capacity. Start small: notice the things you feel thankful for in your daily life. Keep it simple. Extend your gratitude outward by sending good wishes to others or to the Earth itself. Joy wants to spread and be shared with others. Over time, this practice helps you connect with the greater world and softens the barriers around joy.

4. Expand Your Capacity Gradually
   Let joy in slowly, step by step. The suggestion to “just smile” is just as useless as “just eat”. Give yourself time. Allow yourself to feel small doses of it and observe how your body responds. As you build trust in these experiences, your capacity to hold bigger feelings will grow naturally and safely. Over time, these small moments of joy will create a foundation for greater aliveness and connection.

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Reconnecting with joy is an act of courage and self-love. As you gradually expand your capacity to feel joy, you’ll begin to experience life in a deeper, more fulfilling way. Joy awakens a sense of aliveness and embodied connection — not just to yourself, but to others and the world around you.

This journey also eases the reliance on food or body-focused behaviours as a way to suppress emotions. Instead, feelings are allowed to flow freely and safely through your body, creating space for holistic, inside-out, body-first healing.

Allow yourself to be fed and nourished by joy. You deserve to feel the full range of life’s beauty, including the warmth and vitality of joy. By embracing it, you open yourself to a world of possibilities and reclaim the wholeness that has always been your birthright.

Further reading:

Smiling Is The Key For Eating Disorder Recovery

Eating Disorder Recovery Is A Process Of Relaxing

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