Why I Don't Call An Eating Disorder An "Eating Disorder"

Through personal explorations and through the support of plant medicine and nervous system work, I have come to understand that an eating disorder is not a disorder.

Having been in eating disorder recovery for 15 years, I haven’t yet found the right language of how to describe what an eating disorder is. For me, it doesn’t feel quite right to call it an eating disorder an “eating disorder”.

The eating disorder is not the disorder. It is someone in the process of trying to solve a problem (made up of behaviours, feelings, thoughts and beliefs).

The “disorder” is actually responding and representing an external environment that is dysregulated and disordered that has resulted in one’s individual nervous system to become dysregulated.

If we want to treat eating disorders, we need to reassess how our societies operate.

We have to look at eating patterns/“disorders” from this systemic vantage point because eating “disorders” are pointing us towards what we’re missing as a society, and what’s out of balance within these larger forces.

What is out of balance is a society that simply does not offer enough safety and acceptance for individual survival stress/trauma to be processed and digested.

When we experience something traumatic and don’t have someone safe around us to help us make sense of the event, stress survival energies of flight, fight, and freeze get trapped in our bodies.

Over time, these survival energies form a toxic soup in our bodies and cause havoc on our biological processes and our mental and emotional functioning. In an attempt to restore some form of internal balance, we may reach for food and body coping strategies. This is what an “eating disorder” is.

The eating disorder is pointing to the imbalances and the unprocessed trauma that is stored in an individual’s system due to the trauma that has been passed down through the collective.

At its core, an eating disorder is an attempt to try to restore balance to these micro and macro imbalances.

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What we are missing within these larger networks are teachings that guide on how to track our own physiology, to listen to our inner cues, to resource and regulate in healthy ways, and to express emotions.

We are missing moments to slow down, co-regulate, and attune with others because our go-go society pushes us to override our own system, our authentic impulses, and erode our boundaries in order to keep up.

We’re missing trust between others and towards our own bodies because society and diet culture champions physical and emotional hardness, competition, and comparison.

We’re missing moments to rest and reflect and so we lose touch with the intuitive nudges from our bodies, and rely on external rules rather than internal, aligned cues and authentic, biological impulses.

We’re missing connection to the great Earth body because society is more concerned with extraction and consumption than reciprocity. The nourishment that we receive from the Earth is lost. The nourishment that we receive in taking care of the Earth is lost.

This results in a feeling of something is missing. A stomach that can never feel full. A spiritual starvation.

I have discovered that the eating disorder behaviours naturally fade when we learn how to regulate and balance the nervous system.

But -

This doesn’t address the larger systems that are inherently dysregulating, disconnecting, and disempowering, and that instill mistrust, not enoughness, comparison and smallness.

What will it take to create foundations that support a regulated society and the structures that uphold it that invites us into a befriending relationship with food and our bodies?

The eating disorder is not “wrong”. And the person navigating an eating disorder is not wrong either.

Eating disorders have wisdom and they are pointing all of us as a society to where the deepest healing and regeneration are possible.

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And to also remember that an eating disorder is not only not a disorder, but it is not about the food either.

Eating disorders are the body’s attempt at communicating to us about how someone is experiencing and digesting life.

Rather than telling someone that they can no longer engage in the food behaviours, which can be shaming and pathologizing (and silences the body!), we can get compassionately curious about the behaviours instead, and ask what the body trying to communicate about how safe or unsafe the body feels, the level of regulation or dysregulation in the nervous system, and what the needs are that the body is trying to meet in the ways that it knows how.

As such, engaging with the eating disorder from this level requires a deep and sensitive listening to the body – and how the body is communicating.

And the body communicates in a different way – not talking, meaning-making or thought, but through sensation, 5 sense perception, and movement.

When we recongise that the eating disoder is the body’s way of communicating its needs, the organization of its attachment and defense system, and what it is yearning for to thrive, we need to speak directly to the body – and find ways to nourish and resource the body itself.

By resourcing the body, it can ultimately become an ally and a resource in the recovery process.

And this is the goal – for the body itself to a resource in the recovery process.

The body is not something to be feared or an enemy.

When listened to and collaborated with, trust develops between you and your body, opening the door for its wisdom to be shared.

And ultimately, you then become your own guide for the recovery journey ahead.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Eating Disorder Recovery Is An Initiation Into One's Intuition

The process of eating disorder recovery is an initiation into one’s gut-given gift: intuition.

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Most people struggling with an eating disorder are actually highly sensitive, intuitive souls who feel and sense deeply.

The reason why these sensitive people land up struggling with eating disorders or disordered eating is because their expression may have not been understood or attuned to when they were younger.

Maybe there wasn’t enough emotional attunement from their caregivers.

Maybe their thinly-weaved somatic architecture meant that they saw and related to the world differently and thus felt misunderstood.

Maybe their perceptive nature and empathy were scoffed at or simply not nurtured.

For folks who are sensitive in these ways, to not be supported in some way or another to authentically express and be, hurts.

And when something hurts, the soma goes into protection mode.

An eating disorder often shows up as a protective strategy as a way to hide their sensitivity and intuitive gifts. An eating disorder is an attempt to turn away from one’s own authentic nature because the world didn’t accept it.

Additionally, for people with eating disorders, the world often feels energetically overwhelming. This may be because the primary caregivers didn’t have the permission within themselves to emit and emote their own emotions and inner world (which is learnt and passed down generationally), and thus were unable to sufficiently help establish good nervous system regulation through co-regulation.

When the nervous system is in a state of dysregulation and when there hasn’t been adequate role modelling of how to be in one’s body in the world, an eating disorder may develop as a way to make sense of this overwhelming information coming from the inside and the outside worlds.

By shutting down or numbing out through disordered eating behaviours, being in the big world can feel smaller and more manageable.

Part of eating disorder recovery is growing our capacity to hold, feel and sense more of ourselves and the world, from a regulated, grounded and clear space.

As we grow our capacity to attune and listen to our bodies and the world around us, we deepen our regulation. And the more nervous system regulation we have on board, the clearer the signals from the body.

This nervous system regulation impacts all of the systems that it governs, including the digestive system. This means that when the digestion is in a place of flow, balance and regulation, the place from which intuition speaks from - the gut - can be heard with greater clarity.

We can hear, trust and follow our inner cues.
We can listen to the little internal nudges that guide us in curious ways.
We develop interoception, sensing the world from the inside-out.
We feel safe enough to connect with the body, allowing it to speak and guide us towards safety and with what is alignment for us in ways that seem serendipitous and guided by something greater.

This feeling of greater connection is simply us embodying more of our authentic, intuitive selves which is always connected to something greater.

As we engage with the recovery path more and more, we literally become more intuitive at this entire human level.

To connect with this innate gift (that we all have) requires us to connect with the body, with the viscera, and with the senses.

Intuition isn’t something ethereal - it happens in the body.

By connecting to the body, establishing inner safety, following its impulses, listening to its cues, and trusting where it wants to go in gradual, bite-sized ways our superpower of intuition emerges.

This is a practice of trust, of releasing the outcome, and surrendering before the unknown.

It is possible that on this recovery road, that there will be resistance. Indeed, the act of surrendering is something that the eating disorder will fight against.

This is because an eating disorder is a way to keep the world away, because at some point, the world hurt. Usually that hurt occurred in relational attachments, and so the eating disorder is a protection against others from hurting again.

This means that the road of recovery requires us to slowly soften the external defences (aka the eating disorder behaviours) and develop an internal sense of strength and ground, so that we can rebuild trust with the world around us.

This is scary.

It is scary to soften the defences. It is scary for the eating disorder to have a looser grip. It is scary to not have a protective armour between us and the world.

It is scary to be vulnerable.

This is because the state of vulnerability is to be unprotected.

With the walls down, we are in our unprotected selves, vulnerable, authentic. Raw and naked.

As such, what is important for those who are in eating disorder recovery is to learn that we can be vulnerable and be safe.

We can learn to exist in the world with the walls down and develop inner resources and awareness that keeps us safe. We develop interoceptive awareness of what resonates and is safe to move towards, and what doesn’t resonate and should be moved away from. This is our intuition speaking.

The thing is, because the eating disorder keeps the world at bay, it also keeps goodness away.

And recovery is the process of being less armoured towards all of life and rather more discerning.

And of course, protection is sometimes needed and is vital for our survival when there is real threat. However, when we are out of the danger, but the eating disorder is still continuing to protect, it is time to practice putting down the defenses that we use to hold our inner world and the outer world at bay so that we can take in the goodness of life.

The goodness that I am talking about is the goodness that is experienced in serendipitous encounters, and too-good-to-be-true unplanned moments, that remind us that this world is mysterious, creative, exciting, magical, and at play with something greater that we are a vital part of.

Recovery reminds us that this is the goodness of life that we all deserve to drink in and are worthy to express and share with those around us.

May your armour melt so that you can reach out beyond the defensive walls and connect with yourself and the world through your intuitive, gut knowing, leading to life that feels resonate, safe, and authentic to you.

The path of eating disorder recovery is an initiatory doorway into one’s intuition. This is a superpower that we all have access to.

The door is open. Please do enter.

Photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash

Are You Hungry For Wholeness?

Eating disorders indicate that the soul is hungry for wholeness. Recovery is the process of discovering what “foods” helps us feel whole.

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What I have learnt from my psychedelic journeys is that eating disorders are not just a starvation from food, but a spiritual starvation, emotional, connection , and love starvation.

Whilst we need to address the food and find ways to nourish ourselves from a nutritional standpoint, we also need to look deeper. We need to ask the question of why does food - something that gives nourishment, vitality, energy, and life – become something that is feared and used to dim one’s energy and life force?

Psychedelics can help us understand this very complex, delicate question by looking at both the symptoms and beyond to the causes that led to them.

What I have discovered for myself and what I hear from my clients, is that psychedelics can restore our sense of belonging into the web of life. There is an embodied remembering that we are part of this creation too, and that our bodies are part of this greater body of the Earth.

From this place, we feel spiritually full.

When we feel spiritually full, there is a sense of wholeness and embodied connection towards our own bodies and with the bodies of those around us.

We learn that we can trust our internal cues rather than following hollow external rules.

There is a feeling of purpose, clear values, and an inner compass that guides us.

When we reside in this place, a deep contentment arises from within - like how a good, wholesome meal feels after eating.

Satisfied. Satiated. Nourished. Whole.

On the flip side, what keeps us spiritually starved and hungry for wholeness are the life-sucking paradigms of diet culture that many of us are swimming in.

We need to address these greater societal issues that are perpetuated by diet culture and that lead to a sense of our disembodiment, discombobulation, and disconnection from our values, passions, and purpose.

In the world of diet culture, we land up disconnected from the Earth, in a frenzied pursuit of the thin ideal, in a state of hyper-vigilance around food (especially those foods that have become demonized and shamed), and feeling broken or experiencing oppression and discrimination if our bodies don’t fit within the narrow box.

These societal issues that emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically starve us need to be addressed.

The normalization of oppressive diet culture norms that sever us from the body - and its magic - must be challenged.

And at the same time, it is vital that we do our inner work that fills up our cup and brings a sense of fullness and wholeness from the inside out.

This is where, for me personally, the support of psychedelics and plant medicine have brought inspiration, encouragement, clarity, resolve, and a deep remembering of my full, whole, authentic truth.

Working on this restoring this wholeness over and over again, in the quiet temple of our own hearts, means that we feel more free, empowered, and capable to be with the many ebbs and flows and challenges of this world.

This results in each one of us having more space, strength, resolve, and resiliency to shift the restrictive external rules diet culture, thus changing the dominant cultural norms that leave us disembodied, exhausted, dysregulated, off our center, and far from our internal cues.

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It is time from oppressive top-down societal conditionings to dismantle that have resulted in generational trauma, and disconnection from nature, from the wisdom of the body, and from the ineffable human spirit.

Eating disorder recovery is an individual and collective undertaking. Imagine a world without eating disorders…

What would have to change?

What systems would transform or fall away?

What institutions would cease to exist?

How would we relate to each other, the Earth and our bodies?

What would happen if we were living from a place of spiritual fullness and wholeness?

Imagine. And then embody it.

Photo by Erika Osberg on Unsplash

Holding The Heart: The Eating Disorder Recovery Journey

Eating disorder recovery is learning how to be with more fullness. Recovery from an eating disorder or disordered eating is the process of increasing our capacity to be with more of life, to be filled by life.

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No longer restricting life, eating disorder recovery requires us to embrace the fullness of each moment.

It means being able to hold the fullness of a feeling, whether it be grief, anger, pleasure, or excitement.

So, take note for yourself - when you get nervous or on edge, or anxious or overwhelmed, or irritated or scared, what do you do?

How do you navigate that feeling?

What do you reach for as a way to cope?

Eating disorder recovery is the development of our own inner resilience and self-compassion, that is both strong and soft, that can hold and navigate the intensity of the moment, whether the moment is intensely beautiful or intensely challenging.

Eating disorder recovery, at its core, asks us to be with our hearts - the heart that feels the complexities and paradoxes of being a full human in this full life.

Getting in touch with our hearts is at the heart of recovery. We can strengthen the connection to our hearts by:

• Placing our hands over the chest area and breathing into it

• Noticing the pace and rhythm of the heartbeat

• Massaging the chest area

• Connecting to the diaphragm that moves with the mediastinum (the sac that holds the heart)

• Engaging in activities that bring different types of heartrates as ways to consciously strength and support the heart muscle

• Hugging another (people, animals, trees etc) and feeling the heart-to-heart connection

• Singing, sounding, dancing, breathing

It is known that Struggles with emotion processing (aka connecting to the heart) are central to the developmental and maintenance of eating disorder symptoms – and so the question is, how can we relearn how to connect to heart and feel?

These heart-strengthening and heart-softening practices (listed above) can support our connection to the heart, increasing our capacity to be with a wider range of ebbs and flows.

We can grow our tolerance to be present with the fullness of life without getting overwhelmed, shutting down, or using food and body coping strategies to numb it away.

Indeed, many people navigating disordered eating or eating disorders are scared to feel – and eating disorders can numb away feeling, be it through restriction, binge eating, purging, over-exercising, or a hyper-focus on body image.

Eating disorders often develop as maladaptive coping strategies when a person feels like their internal resourcing and capacity are overwhelmed by what’s happening in their life.

Often people are afraid that feeling the feels will overwhelm them – like a tidal wave, or like the sky will fall down, or like the world will dissolve into chaotic confusion, or that the feelings will just never, ever stop, or the heart will metaphorically bleed to death.

This means that if we want to start connecting to the heart and its feelings, we need to go in bit by bit, literally feeling in bite-sized bits.

As such, relearning how to feel is a process that takes practice, patience and courage.

It is a practice.

That means that we need to develop and practice adding sustainable external and internal resources that support the growing of our capacity to be with the inevitable ebbs and flows of life.

We are strengthening the heart, supporting its resiliency and ability to surrender and soften.

We can practice feeling the feels, whether it be sadness, anger, resistance, numbness, joy, pleasure, or love for a few moments, and then back away and resource ourselves with something that brings soothing, settling and anchoring.

Recovery is a practice, and practice takes time and titration.

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If people around us growing up didn’t model a supportive way to be with their own feelings (either they were numb or explosive in how they experienced their feelings), or if our feelings were misunderstood by our caregivers, we may learn ways to disconnect from our bodies and feelings.

This where disordered eating strategies come in as a way to numb the painful feelings, as well as the pleasant feelings.

This is why for many of us, relearning and growing capacity to connect with the heart is a practice, particularly when we didn’t learn how to do it as young children. The good news is that connecting with our emotions and inner state (aka developing introception) can be relearnt as adults even if we didn’t have caregivers around us when we were younger to teach us.

We slowly learn to trust that what we feel is valid and safe to feel, and how we express our feelings is important and accepted.

And we don’t want to feel things all in one go – otherwise that may overwhelm the system. We go in slowly, asking what wants to be felt, tracking sensations and how it feels in the body, whilst staying connected to the environment, here and now. Additionally, remembering that we always have choice and agency in the process – we can slow it down, put the feeling in an imaginary box and return to it at later stage, reaching for healthy resources that helps us ground, tether, and downregulate.

Relearning how to feel can be navigated with the support of another person, with whom we can co-regulate with. Through someone' else’s co-regulating, safe, and accepting presence, we learn how to be with our own feelings, and find our way through to self-regulation.

We can intentionally grow our tolerance to be present with the fullness of life without getting overwhelmed, shutting down, or using food and body coping strategies to restrict or shrink life.

Let us learn how to be full of life, rather than starving life.

We can let life more through us.

We can let life excite our hearts.

Trusting.

Empowered.

Resilient.

Heart-Centered.

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If you are curious to explore the landscapes of your heart, I invite you to join my next Eating Disorder Recovery Support Group.

Over the course of five weeks, we will invite our bodies and hearts to be heard, witnessed, and celebrated within the potent context of community support. If you would like more information on this nourishing container, head here.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

How Psychedelics Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery and Treatment

The ability to shift from eating disorders symptoms to more root-based causes of disordered eating are what psychedelics are helping us awaken to.

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We need to readdress the treatment of eating disorders, including how we understand eating disorders so that we can find a way forward in supporting people - and the reframing power of psychedelics and plant medicine can help us with that.

For me, this is the power of plant medicine; they are supporting us in offering new perspectives on what eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours are and as such, the ways in which we go about treating them.

We know that the traditional treatment options for eating disorders don’t often result in long-term success. Globally, the status of full recovery from an eating disorder is low, and the risk of relapse is high.

There are so many people across all walks of life, around the world, who are struggling in silence, who have reached the end of their options, or who are simply needing a different recovery approach and understanding in order to find a peaceful, free relationship with food and with their bodies.

When we shift from focusing on the symptoms and move closer to the root, we find much more complex issues that need addressing:

• A sense of lack of safety in the world.

• A sense of not belonging in the world.

• Early childhood developmental trauma.

• Lack of or misunderstood care, attunement, validation, support from caregivers growing up.

• Sexual abuse.

• Physical, verbal, emotional abuse.

• Chronic stress and daily pressures.

• Patriarchal gender norms and standards.

• Ancestral wounding and international trauma.

• Sensory processing challenges.

• Living in a hard world od diet culture where external looks, in particular where the thin ideal body size or hardness are championed.

• Living in a go-go world where capitalistic, extractive, objectifying, and misogynistic values are normalized.

• Fear of emotional overwhelm.

• Challenges in identifying, naming, articulating, and expressing emotions and feelings.

• Living in a world where it is best to harden the heart and put on protective armour (causing toxicity in the body) than to show too much emotion.

• Not having good role models growing up on how to be with emotions, authentic impulses, and self-expression.

• Lack of having a voice.

• Not having a clear sense of true agency or independence.

• Living in a world that decries closeness as a form of weakness.

• Nervous system dysregulation.

• Living in a world that is afraid of women (of all ages) in their power.

• Disconnection from the Earth and the natural elements.

Psychedelics help us move beyond the food and rather towards these deeper, core themes. Plant medicines highlight how food is a place where all of these complex issues get projected onto. Psychedelics help us see how food becomes strategies to try resolve, balance, and manage these very complicated, sensitive, generational, and collective issues.

Psychedelics and plant medicine help us drop from the surface to the deeper layers by:

• Softening rigid neural pathways that govern stuck maladaptive rituals, rules, critical thoughts, and emotional ruts.

• Allowing different brain networks to communicate, helping us move from small, narrow focus to open, wider, creative, divergent, and imaginative focus.

• Increasing sensitivity of the 5-sense perception, thus heightening intuition and body connection.

• Quietening the critical and judgmental ego and its demands.

• Opening the heart space and possibility for self-compassion, empathy, and love by shifting brain chemicals.

• Allowing for insights to emerge on an embodied experience, not just on through a top-down understanding.

• Offering an opportunity to re-experience and remember on an embodied level what it is like to exist without the grips of the eating disorder, free, empowered, authentic, trusting.

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A main focus of traditional eating disorder treatment is to put in measures to stop an individual from engaging in the eating disorder and its behaviours.

This can result in a panic or fear because the eating disorder - the one thing in the person’s toolbox that brings a sense of stability, control, and safety - is now taken away. This is why we see many people relapsing and holding onto the eating disorder even tighter once they leave traditional treatment. They are so scared that their one tool - that they can trust and rely upon - vanishes and restricted from them.

And when we see how these food and body behaviours are not just extreme tactics to lose weight but are strategies that are trying help someone navigate a disordered culture, a dysregulated society, and a history of traumatized generations behind them, it begs the question: what needs to be recovered?

Psychedelics are pointing us to look at what is out of alignment not only on an individual level but within the greater collective.

Indeed, for eating disorder recovery to be possible, societal nervous system regulation and collective trauma healing needs to occur.

Psychedelics are highlighting a great and deep need for us to address the societal issues that perpetuate disembodiment from our own bodies, from our relationships, and from the natural world. Our collective nervous system needs restoring and nurturing.

The oppressive diet culture norms, and the normalization of living in the mind and ignoring and being severed from the body must be challenged. The disconnection from the Earth and the natural cycles needs to be restored.

Of course, we need to do our individual recovery work, and of course we need to replenish the physical body with food and good nourishment; working at the level of our own nervous systems means that we feel more free, empowered and capable to be with the many challenges of this world. Supporting our nervous system, and the health of our bodies results in each one of us having more space, strength, resolve, and resiliency to impact the collective nervous system and make change.

And that the same time, dominant cultural norms that leave us disembodied, exhausted and dysregulated need to be addressed.

It is time from oppressive, top-down, societal conditionings to dismantle that have resulted in generational trauma, and disconnection from nature, from the wisdom of the body, and from the ineffable human spirit.

Eating disorder recovery is an individual and collective undertaking. Imagine a world without eating disorders…

What would have to change?

What systems would transform or fall away?

What institutions would cease to exist?

How would we relate to our bodies, each other, and the Earth?

Psychedelics invite us to imagine a world without eating disorders.

Imagine.

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Intuitive Movement for Eating Disorder Recovery

Since an eating disorder disconnects us from our bodies and keeps us stuck in the head where it feels safe, we can’t talk ourselves out of the disordered eating.

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The body, which is feared and avoided, and which the eating disorder has disassociated us from, needs to be included too. Connecting to the body is a pivotal aspect of recovery and Intuitive Dance can be a tool to support the deepening into this embodied transformation.

From this body-first, bottom-up, embodiment approach, we go underneath the mind’s meaning-making of the eating disorder.

This can be challenging for folks with eating disorders as there is often body-phobia - but connection with the body can restored when done in a titrated, safe and supported way.

This means we should add to the toolbox, expanding the repertoire of embodied awareness and somatic regulatory resources that can support us in managing our energy, feelings, physical sensations, and nervous system.

As we expand on learning how to acknowledge, ground, balance, soothe, and accept the changing energy flows within us, we build tolerance to be with, rather than suppressing, numbing or ignoring our fear of the feelings and connecting to the body (which is what the eating disorder tries to do).

In this way, the energy doesn’t keep building and building, whilst being suppressed and hidden, waiting to explode and subsequently drown our system like a river that has burst its banks.

We can develop embodiment skills and nervous system capacity that help us downregulate, soothe and settle, release what can be released in titrated ways, and support us in moving from a grounded place of inner flow and harmony.

When we slowly return to the soma - to our first, primal language of the body through movement, sensation, sound, touch, and impulse we have a chance to experience our healing in a different way.

Developmentally, our motor neurons myelinate before our sensory neurons, so we actually moved before we could sense; movement (body language) is our first language that we all understand.

All of our interactions and gestures that we do consciously and unconsciously around other people and in the world are forms of movement.

At its core, movement is the language of relationship that bring us closer into connection and safety, and away from danger and from what doesn’t resonate.

When we see how the body is involved in all moments and how it is moving all the time, we can start to consciously connect with it more, and use it as a resource to support us in moving towards our needs, wants and preferences, empowered.

How our body responds and reacts to the world is a more accurate gauge of our real experience than conscious awareness of observed behaviour.

When we move out of the narratives of the mind and connect with the body, we experience ourselves in a direct, present moment way through the language of the body.

Connecting to the body is a necessary step in recovery.

Moving from the thinking mind into the feeling body, we deepen inner trust, strengthen emotional resilience, and anchor embodied connection.

By expanding our ability to regulate, ground, and nourish ourselves, we learn how to be with our fears (whatever they may be), leading to the eating disorder eventually letting go of us.

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Letting go of controlling food rules can be really tough. Leaning into intuitive eating can be even tougher. This is because intuitive eating is act of trust with the body.

To build trust with the body we can explore the practice of intuitive, authentic movement. We can test the waters of the unknown through movement and dance - and this can support us in eating more intuitively too.

No longer following external rules, we can listen and respond to our internal cues.

This process is a gateway to meeting ourselves in an authentic way.

If you feel called to explore how intuitive movement can support your recovery journey, you can enroll in Inbody: A Movement Program, a self-paced online program that incorporates nervous system regulation tools, mindful movement, and somatic awareness and education, to inspire recovery from a body-first, embodied approach.

Inbody weaves over 10 hours of experiential embodiment practices that are sensitively guided for those who are still learning to trust their bodies, alongside somatic education that deepens our understanding of why we do these practices (indeed, resistance is a thing when we start to drop into the body, so it’s helpful to have the higher brain on board via the educational pieces that can remind us of why we are doing this work).

If you desire to trust your body’s authentic guidance, and you know it is possible to access feelings of safety, connection, and flow through your body, I invite you to dance alongside me.

Explore how mindful movement, embodiment practices, and a somatic approach can best support your journey towards establishing a more trusting, free, and authentic relationship with your body. 

Photo by Kazuo ota on Unsplash

Psychedelics for Eating Disorder Recovery [Live Online Workshop with WOOP]

Are you curious about how psychedelics can support eating disorder recovery?

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Join me in an exciting workshop collaboration with Women on Psychedelics (WOOP) on June 7th 17:00-18:30 SAST / 10:00 - 11:30 CST. Get your tickets here.

In this workshop, we will delve into the complexities of eating disorders and explore the untapped potential of psychedelics in the recovery process. Having personally experienced the transformative power of psychedelics, Francesca is dedicated to shedding light on their profound impact on healing and personal growth.

Throughout the workshop, we will cover several crucial topics. First, we will discuss the challenges of treating eating disorders and the difficulty many individuals face when trying to let go of their disordered patterns. We will explore the pervasive influence of diet culture and its impact on our relationship with food and our bodies.

Next, we will delve into what exactly constitutes an eating disorder, drawing upon the wisdom and teachings of plant medicine. By examining the perspectives and insights gained through psychedelic experiences, we can gain a deeper understanding of the roots of these disorders and how to approach their healing.

We will then explore the potential of psychedelics as a powerful tool in conjunction with other therapeutic modalities for supporting eating disorder recovery. By incorporating psychedelics into a comprehensive treatment plan, we can open new doors to healing, self-compassion, and personal growth.

Embodiment practice will be a key part of this workshop, and Francesca will guide you through practices inspired by her own plant medicine journeys. These practices will help you cultivate a deeper connection with your body, tap into your inner wisdom, and explore new pathways toward flexibility, acceptance, and self-love.

During the workshop, you will have the opportunity to ask questions, share your thoughts and experiences, and engage in meaningful discussions with fellow participants. This supportive and nurturing environment will foster a sense of community, understanding, and shared growth.

As we approach the end of the workshop, we will conclude with a closing practice that integrates the insights and experiences gained throughout the session. You will leave feeling empowered, inspired, and equipped with valuable tools to continue your journey toward eating disorder recovery.

Don't miss this opportunity to explore the potential of psychedelics for moving from rigidity to flexibility in eating disorder recovery.

Join us for this transformative workshop and discover a new path toward healing and personal growth. We look forward to seeing you live on the 7th :)

Meet the Facilitator

Navigating over 14 years of her own eating disorder recovery, Francesca weaves embodied eating disorder recovery frameworks, sacred plant medicine teachings, trauma-informed integrative somatic coaching modalities, and her life experience into a compassionate approach to food and body recovery. Her eating disorder recovery journey was the catalyst for inner transformation and to trust in her core self. She supports individuals and groups to create an integrated and authentic relationship to food, the body, and towards life that is authentically aligned.

What Psychedelic Research Is Saying About Eating Disorder Recovery

In this current post-Covid world where it seems like eating disorders are on the rise, it is time to reconsider how we go implementing eating disorder recovery treatment plans.

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Plant medicine and psychedelics have great ability in expanding our mind, aligning our hearts, and attuning our bodies so that we can find ways Nourish ourselves on all levels, and envision a world where eating disorders don’t exist.

The post-Covid world has triggered an upsurge in mental health issues. The troublesome blend of social isolation, society anxiety, increased fears of getting sick, more time on social media, and uncertainty about the future, has created a perfect storm in many people’s lives.

As a result, we are seeing a concerning increase in those struggling with depression, anxiety, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, and other eating disorders. 

Many people around the world are affected by some kind of food or body issue. And there are probably more people than we think, since many eating disorders and disordered eating are hidden in shame or go unnoticed in a culture of diet culture that normalizes many toxic food and body behaviours.

We have yet to find a treatment for eating disorders that seem to work. This is worrying since anorexia has the highest mortality rates among psychiatric disorders, due to physical complications that come with being at a low weight and suicide risk.

I believe that the rise of psychedelics in the collective awareness is because it is truly time to find our way back to the body – and ultimately to the body from which we all came from, the Earth.

The times that we are collectively living in is calling for us to release old, stuck, survival energies from past traumas so that we can reclaim our vitality, remember our purpose, restore trust in our bodies, and reintegrate the fragmented parts of ourselves into embodied wholeness.

It seems that there are universal knowings that psychedelics share - and that on a deep level we also know - when it comes to understanding what eating disorders are and how to navigate recovery (aka nourishment).

The potency of psychedelics is that they go beyond the symptoms and go deep underneath, looking at both the symptoms and what led to them. A lot of traditional treatment will focus on changing the symptoms but without looking at why and how someone landed up where they are at.

Anorexia nervosa, for example, is defined clinically by low body weight and a fear of weight gain, but that is the tip of the iceberg of what is going on underneath. And going underneath the tip is where psychedelics can guide us towards.

Psychedelics also seem to support a shift from rigid and constrained thought patterns that come with eating disorders to more flexible ways of perceiving, thinking, and understanding.

The psychedelic experience is characterized by opening one’s ability to perceive the world around them and breaking the rigidity of thought patterns. Brain networks that never connected to each other in the past are able to communicate with each other leading to fresh insights and perspectives.

Areas of brain that govern one’s sense of self and ego that are usually highly active seem to quieten. For people with eating disorders, getting a break from the internal oppressive, critical voice is a relief.

And in that space, something new can arise.

This is the power of neuroplasticity. After a psychedelic journey, the brain is still plastic, meaning that in the days after of the journey behavioural, cognitive, and somatic changes are more accessible to make.  

Incorporating psychedelics for recovery, when done with thorough and safe preparation (check out my psychedelic preparation handbook here), and with the right support, can change the way people see themselves and the world around them.

With a lot of hype around psychedelics and how it’s like “10 years of therapy in a night”, it’s important to remember that eating disorder recovery is a long process, and that integration takes time and is a non-linear process.

Commitment, courage, and self-compassion are needed for the journey ahead.

Recovery isn’t easy. In a society that hurls weight loss ads, #transformationaltuesdays, social media, calorie counts on menus, diet plans for kids, and the pressure to go-go-go at the expense of the body’s natural cycles, it makes the inner journey of one’s own heart, mind, and body even tougher. As such recovery is a revolution against the generations of oppressive diet culture. This journey is both individual and collective.

For a long time, eating disorders have been viewed as complex conditions to recover from and work with. And we still have lots to uncover when it comes to getting a grip on how psychedelics can support eating disorder recovery.

From my own explorations and from talking to other people, psychedelics can help us see the complexities of eating disorders in a new light that is clear, accessible, encouraging, and direct. And from my experience, they have led me to believe that recovery is right. here. right. now.

I feel optimistic that psychedelics have immense and immeasurable ability in helping us open minds, align our hearts, and attune our bodies so that we can envision and activate a life - and a world - where eating disorders don’t exist.

Photo by Max on Unsplash

Can You Slow Down? The Importance of Rest and Digest in Eating Disorder Recovery

Eating disorder recovery requires rest, not hustle. We cannot force our way through recovery.

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We cannot override our body’s current tolerance and Nervous System capacity towards eating disorder recovery, otherwise this causes more dysregulation.

The overriding, forcing, and hyper-achieving may have been what resulted in nervous system dysregulation in the first place.

This dysregulation can subsequently lead to food and body coping strategies as a way to squash and numb the high demands from a world where hustle, hard work, perfectionism, and burning the candle from both ends are revered.

For people navigating eating disorders, early developmental trauma may have been present. These early experiences are overwhelming for young humans where there wasn’t enough, reliable or attuned co-regulation to help make sense of a scary, bad, traumatic event, resulting in the survival energies of flight, fight and freeze to remain trapped in the body.

This is what causes dysregulation in the nervous system.

And we find many ways, such as eating disorder strategies, to avoid the discomfort of that dysregulation and the pain of the past traumas lying dormant underneath.

Eating disorders often require a high amount of white knuckling and override. Restrictive eating, diet plans, over-exercise, eating at specific meal times, and avoiding food groups or ingredients require a large amount of focus, planning, and energy.

This means that when we focus on healing, we have to step out of the hustle paradigm (aka diet culture) and prioritize rest, slowing down, and attuning to our body and its needs. This is what recovery needs.

For people who desire to step out of diet culture where high functioning, high performing, and high achieving gets a badge of honour even in the face of adrenal fatigue, the real hard work is resting and pausing. For people with eating disorders or disordered eating where functional freeze is most likely driving the show, this is hard work.

Functional freeze occurs when fight and flight energy hasn’t been able to express itself at the time of a traumatic event and becomes trapped, usually from childhood. When we are young, if we didn’t have attuned or safe environments to emit and emote our internal world authentically, we learn early on to hold back on our emotional expressions and authentic impulses.

Over time, the holding back of these energies and expressions result in a shutdown or freezing. We may feel numb or disconnected from our inner world. Instead of receiving validation from our authentic expression and sensitive emotions, we find ways to get validation from the external world, achievements, performance, success, and the aesthetic of the body.

As such slowing down, doing less, and feeling an internal sense of enoughness in those moments of pause is where some of the deepest healing lie.

When you hear the words “do less”, what comes up? Do you sense some resistance, a tightening up in the jaw or eyes, or a little cringe or scoff?

I know I do. And that’s how I know that this is where some of my deepest wounds and work resides.

We have learnt that staying busy is an attempt to avoid our own inner challenges or trauma. On some level, busy feels safe. When we are busy, we can avoid or distract ourselves.

In order to heal we need to slowly re-wire that somatic organization and re-write the internal script that we are safe, that it’s ok to rest, and that we are enough in the non-doing.

Our capacity to pause and rest is related to how much we feel within ourselves about our sense of worthiness and enoughness.

When we insert a supportive pause and a moment of rest, we indicate to our whole system that we have done enough on a somatic level and that “I’m enough, there’s enough, there’s enough for enough, and I belong”.

And of course, many of us (who live in diet culture) have learnt that it’s not ok to pause. We learnt that in order to be validated, worthy and good enough, we had to keep achieving and doing. We developed strategies to override our bodies and to keep it together, including holding back our emotions.

If it’s hard to pause and rest (and digest), it can manifest as:

• Bingeing because if we stop eating there’s a fear there won’t be enough, so it’s hard to complete a meal. There’s a belief around “there isn’t enough for me.”

• Restricting because the fear lies in starting something and not being able to execute it in a good enough or perfect way, so it’s hard to even begin a meal. There’s a belief around “I’m not enough.”

• Excessive exercising because if we pause, we will have to be with our thoughts and emotions, so it is only through exhausting exercise that we give ourselves permission to finally stop but only by collapsing. There’s a belief around “my enoughness comes from how much I do.”

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When we aren’t able to fully reach a sense of pause, rest, and completion, we keep going. And in this go-go-go state, it is hard for the body to digest food.

This can lead to physical digestive issues like bloating, constipation, diarrhea, fatigue, brain fog, cramps, mood swings etc.

When we start to practice slowing down and when the body begins to trust that things are safe in the here and now, the body may feel exhausted, tired, and may need more space to do the healing work it hasn’t had time to do.

When we yield, we can integrate and digest our food, emotions, interactions, and experiences with clarity.

When we build the capacity to pause, to rest (and digest), we signal to our system that we are enough, simply because we are.

Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash

The Power of Community for Eating Disorder Recovery Support

I remember the first time I walked into an in-patient treatment facility for eating disorders. It was back in 2009. I had just made it through high school and was on the brink of needing some serious help.

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I didn't want to go this treatment facility.
I didn't think I needed to go either.
But - it ended up saving my life. 

More than what we did or what kinds of treatments we received; it was being with a group of people who understood what it meant to navigate an eating disorder that helped me most.

I felt like I had arrived in a space where I felt seen, heard, and supported in ways I had been missing for so long.

It was a relief to be with people who understood the complexities and nuances of navigating disordered eating. Each person was at different stages on their healing journey, and so it was a rich environment for me to gain clarity, perspective, direction for my own growth.

I felt at home. 

I didn't have to explain or put a disclaimer on what I was going to say. I knew I would be understood and accepted (even through the really, really challenging parts), and through that, I began to feel more of a sense of home within my own self.

I have heard from many people navigating eating disorder recovery that it is an isolating journey. Often there are additional layers of shame, judgement, and fear that make it hard to be out in the world. 

Not only does the eating disorder cut us off from friends and family, but also from our feelings, values, priorities, and purpose - as well as our bodies. 

This is because when there has been trauma and a history of eating disorders, the parts of the brain involved with integrating and interpreting one's sense of self changes. When the body and the brain don't communicate smoothly, we feel emotionally detached, shutdown, disconnected, or no-body.

Only by getting in touch with the body, and connecting to it on a visceral level, do we regain a sense of self, reconnect with what we care about, and feel safe in our body-home, grounded in the present moment.

Sometime later into my recovery, I realised the campfire of connection that the in-patient clinic gave me all of those years ago was still burning and yearning to be fanned. 

I knew in my heart that I couldn't do this work alone.

This insight both excited and terrified me at the same time.

Since my eating disorder tried to keep me protected from painful intimacy, hidden, and unseen in the darkness, reaching out to connect with others felt like a threat to my eating disorder.

Indeed, repairing relational woundings are often what is needed in recovery. And this then requires us to slowly start connecting with others who can support us in the process of developing safe, trusting, loving, understanding, supportive relationships. 

So, in my own recovery, I knew that in order to truly feel at home within myself, and at home on this Earth, opening up to be seen by another, held by another, and acknowledged in all of my contradictions and emotions by another, would be the journey back home.

This, for me, is the heart of eating disorder recovery.

I invite you to consider how you have experienced deeper connection (whether it's with people, the Earth, or your body) in your own eating disorder recovery.
When have you felt more heart?
When have you felt more at home, in your own skin?

Who or what are you with? What are you doing? How do you feel?

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In the spirit of connection, you can now join the next cohort for the next Eating Disorder Recovery Support Group. This group will run from May to June 2023. There will be a total of five group sessions over the container, with email follow-ups throughout. If you can’t make this group, there will many more hosted throughout the year. Sign up to my newsletter to stay updated with new group dates!

If you are looking for a community space to authentically express your recovery journey, to be compassionately witnessed, and to be held openly, I invite to you join us in the next group.

Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash

What Psychedelics Can Teach Us About Treating Eating Disorders

How can we approach eating disorder recovery and healing from disordered eating in ways that are additive and empowering rather than restrictive or controlled?

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With the global growing interest in how psychedelics and plant medicine can support eating disorder recovery, we are collectively moving towards not only a new understanding of what eating disorders are, but how to address treatment too.

From what I can see, psychedelics are teaching us to expand our understanding of how to treat eating disorders (and trauma), and to reassess our current older methods of treatment that we have been using for centuries.

It is clear that eating disorder treatment doesn’t always work nor does it always last in the long run. It is also very clear that many, many people around the world are suffering with some form of an eating disorder or disordered eating, and that a new approach to treatment is needed

Anorexia nervosa, in particular, is the deadliest psychiatric disorder. The physical implications as well as the high rate of suicide are risk factors. Despite the knowledge that has been gathered over the centuries, there is no drug that has been approved to treat it. Treatment usually is a combo of therapy, antidepressants and nutritional programs aimed at helping the individual regain weight. However, the rate of recovery is low.

Reports of people with eating disorders who have undergone a psychedelic experience say that they feel better afterwards. They notice greater ease to eat, to be in their bodies, to express emotions, to socially engage, to state boundaries, to accept all of themselves, to reconnect with purpose, to feel their capacity to regulate and resource, and to feel a sense of belonging and interconnectedness.

This is because psychedelics and plant medicines help individuals go to the root of their suffering rather than treating the symptoms or focusing on the weight.

Psychedelics are here in full force right now because as a collective we have to change how we relate to, understand, and support the process of eating disorders recovery.

With the expansive lens that plant medicines offer us, we can see the eating disorder in a new light, including why they may have developed as protective strategies, what they are protecting, how it is impacting an individual’s well-being, and the generational and societal threads that make recovery challenging.

However, these insights that emerge in a psychedelic journey don’t exist solely in the mind. They are experienced in the body. Psychedelics offer an embodied experience, where insights and reflections land and digest on a cellular, visceral level.

Indeed, the eating disorder only exists because there are stuck stress survival energies that are trapped in the body. So in order to heal, process and release old traumas - and to step into the fullness of our truth - we must go in the body.

Psychedelics point to the importance of adding the body in the recovery road map.

Psychedelics point to the importance of adding support to the nervous system.

Psychedelics point to the importance of addressing systemic issues, like patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization, and how that impacts and shapes the body.

Psychedelics point to the importance of addressing the impact of generational trauma on the body.

Psychedelics point to the importance of adding tools of compassion, curiosity and creativity for the recovery path.

Psychedelics help us expand our perspective and vision when it comes to looking at the recovery road ahead.

Pland medicine remind us that anything is possible in recovery.

And that anything can be added to support the process.

Recovery is a creative process. There is no “correct” way to go about.

Nothing should be judged, shamed, or condemned.

Recovery should never have the same voice or tone as the eating disorder.

We should not approach treatment from the same restrictive lens of the eating disorder.

Recovery should be expansive, supported, nourishing and empowering, where new tools and skills are added alongside the eating disorder - so that eventually the eating disorder lets go of us.

This is a natural, organic process that requires no doing, forcing, purging, or purifying the eating disorder away.

We let the eating disorder let go of us.

We let the eating disorder let go of us not because of what we have done or not done, but because of us embodying (being) who we truly are.

Psychedelics are showing us a new way to approach eating disorders and recovery.

Let us listen to what they have to teach.

Let us listen.

Let us loosen the grip of what we have known as “correct” in terms of treatment plans and be open to what is yet to be known as a possibility for eating disorder recovery.

In order for recovery to be recovery, let us to approach it with a frequency, an attitude, and an energy that encourages expansion, self-expression, agency, and embodied empowerment.

What has psychedelics or plant medicine taught you about eating disorder recovery? I would love to hear from you.

Photo by Tanzim on Unsplash

Self-Intimacy: Connecting to the Body in Eating Disorder Recovery

In the world of living in diet and fitness culture, it is likely that many of us will feel some kind of disconnection from our bodies. This is because diet and fitness culture are inherently built on the foundations of separation and comparison.

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In the world of fitness culture, we are end up looking outside of ourselves, competing against others to win the race of the “thin ideal”, trying to be the strongest, smallest or fittest as ways to feel a sense of validation, acceptance, belonging, and Lovability.

In this reality, the body is objectified; we view the body in parts and judge it for its aesthetics.

Through these competitions that keep us looking outward, we lose touch with our center and stray from our true self. This external focus knocks us off balance. We move further away from ourselves, feeling detached, lost, and just not quite ourselves.

After walking the eating disorder recovery path, some years later I realised that even though great strides had been made, I was living in diet culture.

I had not yet built a bridge down from my overthinking mind into my own body. Despite being in recovery for many years by that point, I admitted to myself that I had yet to make a genuine connection with my body.

I noticed that I still held residual patterns towards my body that were punishing and othering.

I noticed I was still in some ways disconnected and disassociated from my body.

When I acknowledged my body, I observed I felt anxious, urgent or disgust.

I remembered how as a child I allowed my body to express, communicate and move in ways it wanted, not for anyone else but simply to feel my own heart dancing and alive.

Stepping onto the path of healing after years of ignoring my body and subjecting it to restrictive and punishing behaviours, I connected to my inner dance that was yearning to be reignited, for its embers to be fanned, and for its warmth to glow through. My body, despite what it had been through and where diet culture had pushed it, wanted to be so softly and kindly held.

And so, I reached down and held out a hand. At first it felt awkward, sometimes scary and sometimes confusing, but over time, communication between me and my body was established, where slowly bridges of trust, safety and connection were built.

It takes time, patience and practice to disentangle from the external rules and old programming - and to start trusting the internal whispers that slowly unfold from deep within.

Connecting to the body is a relationship that gradually develops. This relationship has no destination or outcome. It asks us to let go, trust the unknown, and to allow the body to communicate and guide rather than the mind.

We learn to connect with our body, listening to and trusting internal cues rather than following external rules.

Through engaging with embodiment practices, nervous system regulation practices and learning about somatic education, my body was resourced in many ways. Greater capacity, regulation, attunement, and trust developed.

Eventually my body became a resource in my own eating disorder recovery journey and my heart could dance once again.

I deepened my embodiment, and this is the process of recovery.

The practice of deepening into embodiment encourages us to reside in the body so that the inner world and the outer world start to match up. When things start to line up, we are able to inhabit the present moment with greater ease and understanding.

As we get more comfortable with being in the here-and-now, the body is able to move with more congruency, one step, one motion flowing to the next.

To move through the world in this way is to move with things as they are: always changing, interconnected, fluid, dynamic, never stuck, evolving, and transforming.

Deepening into embodiment tests our ability to be with the fluid unknown, to embrace whatever arises with non-judgement, and to trust the organic flow of life, rather than resisting, holding, hiding, repressing, gripping, or perfecting.

When we lean back a little, surrender, trust, we enter a deeper state of embodiment. Embodiment leads to feelings of presence, wholeness and interconnectedness.

Rather than pushing life away, embodiment brings us closer to life. We become more intimate with all of life.

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Indeed, eating disorder recovery is the practice of deepening into intimacy.

This means as we walk the recovery road, we develop more capacity to take down more of the armour and protection of the food and body strategies, and let life come in closer.

Eating disorder recovery is the practice of discerning what to move closer towards that resonates and feels right - and what to move away from that doesn’t feel right.

In this way, we become more intimate with our gut and inner cues, listening to and honouring the rhythms of our internal cues that guide us into aligned connection or disconnection.

Eating disorder recovery as a self-intimacy practice is the journey of attuning to our most deepest needs and wants, and developing ways to reach out for them, expanding more of ourselves into the world in order to grasp onto our desires.

It’s the practice of being aware of the intimate movements of our digestive processes, gurgles and all.

It’s the practice of letting food come in all the way so that it can digest, allowing the nutrients to nourish the intimate places within the physical body.

Eating disorder recovery is the practice of touching those harder to reach emotions, like grief, anger, and love - and being with them and feeling them and allowing others to witness us in them.

Above all, eating disorder recovery is the practice of becoming intimate with oneself, whereby we find self-understanding and self-acceptance with the many layers that make us.

Photo by Hala Al-Asadi on Unsplash

The Potential of Psychedelics for Eating Disorder Recovery

Folks who are struggling with an eating disorder often have rigid thinking or cognitive inflexibility and perseverative behaviour – which describes a behaviour that loops or is hard to break free from, almost as if the behaviour is involuntary.

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Psychedelics have the potential to alleviate these characteristics that relate to eating disorders. The potential for psychedelics to increase cognitive flexibility creates a break from the ordinary mind and a loosening of the belief systems that eating disorders are so rigidly held by.

This is important to note because eating disorders have an “ego-syntonic” nature, meaning that the ego’s demands and aspirations drive many of the eating disorder’s values, feelings and behaviours. The eating disorder is regarded as an asset and helpful - and if something is perceived as helpful, why change it?

This is why treatment can be unsuccessful - because the individual doesn’t perceive the eating disorder as a problem.

However with the help of psychedelics, the ego-syntonic nature of the eating disorder lessens, as plant medicine and psychedelics can also offer a temporary dissolution (or softening) of the ego, allowing for the rigid beliefs to break down.

This results in a new perspective, the possibility of transformation, healing, and change of certain behaviours, thought patterns, and beliefs.

Psychedelics can help reorganise the brain into a system that is more supportive for fulfilling, meaningful, inspiring, and connected living; a better connection with one’s body, relationships and community, purpose, and the Earth is remembered and reestablished.

Acceptance and appreciation arises.

Psychedelics help us experience new ways of thinking not just on a cognitive level, but on an embodied cellular level too.

When the body experiences a new way of being on a felt sense level, a different kind of learning, understanding, and transformation occurs.

It is important to note that if there has been a history of disconnecting from the body as a way to survive, if one chooses to engage in psychedelics to support healing and recovery, it’s so important to include preparation practices that focuses on acknowledging the body, resourcing, developing interoceptive capacity, and learning about one’s unique physiology - because the psychedelic experience is an expansive embodied experience!

These practices that support connecting to and turning towards the body, help us listen more deeply and sensitively to its internal cues, biological impulses, and wants and needs so as to not push past or override the nervous system, which could lead to overwhelm and disassociation, or fragmentation.

And when we enter into a psychedelic journey, emotions, sensations, memories, and the environment are more sensitive, expanded, bigger, fuller, more. This can be overwhelming or scary, especially for those who have been cut off from the body for a long time.

In a psychedelic journey, a tidal wave of grief, a boiling pot of anger, or a heartbreaking amount of love can arise. It can be a lot.

And if the nervous system hasn’t been prepared to hold this energy or if we haven’t learnt how to titrate or pendulate the experience, rather than processing the emotion, we can be sent into a shutdown, disassociation, or fragmentation. This can be damaging and possibly retraumatizing.

The more focus we bring to the body and learn how it communicates to us about its needs, the better we can stay regulated and present to the psychedelic experience.

Indeed, it is the body that carries us through the journey.

The body is the resource, and we have to resource (aka nourish) the body on many levels so that it can become a resource for us on the healing path. It can ultimately become an ally.

This is a body-first, bottom-up, embodied approach to eating disorder recovery woven with psychedelics.

Somatic-based preparation support before a journey ideally supports us in resourcing the body so that it can be the ultimate resource during the journey experience - and beyond.

To learn more about psychedelic journey preparation for people in eating disorder recovery, download my free manual here.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Expanding and Contracting: The Dance of Eating Disorder Recovery

The road of recovery is an ongoing dance of expanding and contracting.

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So let’s start with this:

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” ~ Rumi

If you are walking the road of eating disorder recovery, healing from disordered eating, or questioning the pressures and conditionings from diet culture, perhaps you can relate to this quote.

Sometimes it feels as if you're repeating old lessons, hitting brick walls, or spiraling back to familiar thoughts or behaviours.

Sometimes it feels like you're reaching new places within yourself, experiencing life in a fuller way, or effortlessly able to do things that before felt scary.

This dance of expansion and contraction can occur within a single day, over the course of a month, and over many years.

And throughout it all, we are asked to bring our presence to each to expansion and to each contraction.

We are asked to bring open attentiveness to our hands that give and our hands that receive.

We are asked to bring open attentiveness to the pulling in and releasing of the breath, the shifts in hormones, the pumps of the heart, the rise and flow of hunger and fullness levels, the rhythm of waking and sleeping, the ebbs of the ocean tides, the movement from winter to summer.

Connecting to the larger forces of expansion and contraction that we can observe in nature, we are reminded that we too go through similar cycles.

Each time we dance this dance, we gain more skills, tools, insight, and wisdom, with more discernment, resiliency, capacity, and presence to open and close the hand.

Recovery is a dance of being with the inevitable movements of expansion and contraction that life brings (again and again).

Rather than numbing out from life, we are asked to sit in the places of discomfort that makes us want to contract, and to be courageous to allow ourselves to expand beyond what we believed was possible.

Eating disorder recovery is a dance of uncovering the aspects of self that have been hidden.

Disordered eating recovery is the dance of recovering your authentic expression, wants, needs, impulses, and desires.

Eating disorder recovery is the dance of discovering your unique rhythm of moving through life, honoring the need to rest and harnessing the spark of creativity.

It is the dance of dancing within a wide, robust window of tolerance (aka developing greater nervous system regulation).

The ability to consciously slow down so that we can become aware of these natural movements of expansion and contraction is where the work lies.

Awakening to, and accepting these organic rhythms result in a deepening of trust.

• a trust in your ability to fly

• a trust in your experience

• a trust in pausing and resting

• a trust in your voice and creativity

• a trust in your intuitive, gut responses

• a trust in your body's biological impulses

• a trust in your capacity to hold challenging stuff

• a trust in your ability to release what is ready to be let go

• a trust in your core self and your worthy place on this Earth

We ride the ebbs and flows that recovery asks us to be with, through practicing and developing tools that aid the process (such as somatic healing modalities, nervous system regulation tools, and embodied awareness) and most importantly, supported with others who we can trust.

Indeed, as much as an eating disorder separates us from ourselves, our hearts, and the world, the homecoming process of healing happens when there is support, witnessing, and holding alongside other kindred spirits.

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

A Message From The Mushrooms

A little mushroom said to me,

“Restoring connection is eating disorder recovery.
An eating disorder keeps you far away;
Armoured and defended by focusing on how much you weigh.
In trying to make yourself small,
Your dying body tries to convey the message of: ‘stay away, once and for all’.
I know it’s hard to start trusting life,
To reach for connection rather than to pull back in strife.
In eating disorder recovery you learn how to take small steps towards intimacy.
Intimacy that feels safe unconditionally.
Do not let food become a place of projection.
Let your soft animal body be held in tender affection.
Yield to the Earth and let her body remind you of your inner direction,
Her soil holding mycelium networks, and her waters glistening reflections.
Nourish yourself with loving connection.”

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It took me many years to realise that I was struggling with an eating disorder. Many people didn’t even realise either. In fact, rather than concern, I received comments from other people saying that they wished they had the control I had.

If only they knew that whilst externally it looked like I was in control, internally I felt overwhelmed, chaotic, and out of control.

The eating disorder was totally ruling the show. I no longer had control over it.

Many, many years later when I was no longer starving and was far into my own recovery, I tapped back into the energetic frequency of anorexia with the support of psychedelics in a journey. I remembered what it was like. I connected with the uncountable number of people around the world caught in the loop of restriction and starvation.

I remembered what it was like to be consumed by anorexia again.

The fear.

The confusion.

The anger.

The grief.

The disconnection.

For people with anorexia there is a deep fear of getting hurt again. Stuck in dysregulation, the body holds the fear, and anorexia is a desperate attempt of keeping that fear away from manifesting again.

Eating disorders stem from trauma of all kinds, including early traumas that people either don’t remember or have written off as insignificant. Trauma occurs in relationship and in the external environment, and so eating disorders are coping strategies that try keep the world and other people far away.

When no one is listening, when the world feels too loud or too quiet, or when no one is attuning to the needs that are trying to be communicated through words or through body language, starving becomes the only way to say, “get away.”

I have heard my clients say (and I can so relate), “When my bones stuck out, people didn’t want to touch me - I felt relief and protected.”

When someone starves to the point of disappearing, then there is no body to touch. In some ways, anorexia is like the walking dead.

This psychedelic journey showed me how some people literally have to disconnect from all living life, from the body and its needs and cues, so that no other body can come near them.

The cost of this is incredibly high, deep and painful. The energy it goes into trying to protect oneself is draining. The veil of life and death can feel so thin at times, draining connection and purpose from the person.

Connecting to this reality that so many people are enduring this at this time, with the support of psychedelics, was sobering.

And it inspired me even more to commit to continuing to understand the complexities (as well as the simplicities) of eating disorders - and - how we can start to create a world where eating disorders do not exist. A world where communities, cultural norms, and paradigms support each individual to live freely, to make empowered choices, and to feel regulated.

Despite the heaviness of this message that came through in the plant medicine journey, I was also reminded that in order to breathe life back into the body is to reconnect and reinvigorate the connection with the Earth – with the great body that nourishes all of us.

I was reminded that to recover, we have to connect with the aliveness of life. And I received the invitation from the Earth herself that this can be found by spending time with the Mother Earth - and to RSVP immediately.

To drink in her nourishment by bowing to the soils.

To sing to her waters.

To listen to the whispers in the wind.

And to remember how all of life is connected – and how our bodies are part of this delicate web.

This is how we recover. Through healing the wound of separation, we integrate the fragmented aspects of ourselves, reconnecting back into the fabric of the whole, only to realize that we in actual fact, we were always connected and that we deservingly belong.

Through reconnecting back to our bodies in relationship with the Earth, we are struck by the fullness and aliveness that is already present, waiting for us, and is that here for us to drink in and be nourished by it.

Photo by Qingbao Meng on Unsplash

Psychedelics and Eating Disorders: It's More Than Just The Food

We need to go deeper than helping people find an intuitive relationship with food.

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We need to address why food - something that is nourishing and that is needed for life - can turn into something that is feared and used as a tool to push life away.

Of course, we need to establish supportive eating patterns to ensure our own (or our loved one’s) physical wellbeing is taken care of, and at the same time, we need to address what drove someone to start using food as a way to:

• try gain a sense of purpose or direction

• control overwhelming feelings

• manage inner and outer chaos

• get people to finally listen and take them seriously

• feel a sense of power, agency or independence

• keep feelings far away

• keep people away

• bring some sense of balance to a dysregulated nervous system  

It is so much more than just the food. The food is a symbol, pointing us towards what is out of balance and thus what is asking to be realigned and rebalanced.

If we follow the food to the root, we get to a very tender place, often a very vulnerable place that requires the deepest nurturing and seeing and tending to.

We then start to recognize that alongside the food and nutrition support, we also need nourishment that support us in aligning with purpose, developing nervous system regulation skills and introceptive awareness, learning how to create boundaries, practicing how to state our wants and needs, attuning to our personal power and true inner authority, trusting in our capacity to feel, and remembering our innate belonging.

There are many layers to recovery. Food is just one aspect. Sometimes we need to nourish ourselves in other ways first before the food can be addressed. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes they work hand in hand.

It is indeed not a linear process. There are many spirals to journey through and many layers to peel back in order to reach those tender places.   

These layers are not always easy to face. However, it seems that with more research coming out on how psychedelics and plant medicines have the potential to support eating disorder recovery, it seems like facing those layers and the tender parts that are buried underneath with the help of psychedelics, recovery is possible.

There is currently no clear way on how to treat eating disorders, nor is there a single cause. However, psychedelic research and anecdotal reports are telling us that psychedelics and plant medicine may hold potential in support the complex process of eating disorder recovery.

In eating disorders, one often holds negative self-image and feels encouraged to repeat maladaptive behaviors around eating, exercising, and weight monitoring.

Psychedelics and plant medicine are known to affect the structure of the brain that upholds the various cognitive processing related to introspection and self-reflection. No drug has been shown to break these connections, and it seems that psychedelics seem to be able to facilitate that.

Through this process, the rigid patterns of thought break down, leading to new perspectives and ways of seeing oneself, and the root causes of the eating disorder. People may be able to go to the root where right there lies the tender, vulnerable aspects of oneself that have been hidden, rejected, ignored, or feared.

With psychedelics and plant medicine, the brain becomes more malleable and plastic, so people can move from a narrow focus to a wider focus, as they are able to generate new neuronal connections and thinking patterns.

Individuals may see the reasons why the eating disorder developed in the first place, and how it helped them survive and get through challenging times (acting like self-medication). With psychedelics, individuals can perceive themselves, their emotions, their body sensations (including huger and fullness cues), and life with more flexibility.

They may be able to connect with those harder-to-reach, vulnerable parts with greater compassion, patience, understanding, and love.

Despite this, healing is usually nonlinear. Disordered eating behaviours are often deeply ingrained pervasive and require time, patience, and courage – an ongoing chipping away and disentangling of old patterns, a reconnecting to and nurturing of the tender, wounded aspects self, and support to help forge the new, sustainable, life-supporting patterns around relationships with food, body, and the world.

Our ability to digest food improves, as does our system with feelings, interactions, and experiences.

We have clarity around when we are hungry as well as hear when we need to fill up our energetic cups and nourish ourselves with love, connection, embodiment movement, soothing smells, inspiring music, and grounding nature.

We can respond to our food needs, reaching for the foods that we want, as well as asking for help and support in general. We feel satisfied with our food and our body feels nourished, and we discover we engage with other people and activities also nourish our soul.

We can hear our fullness cues and reach a sense of happy completion with our meals, and feel a sense of enoughness with who we are in the world regardless of what we did or didn’t do that day.

With ongoing support, continued bottom-up and top-down integration, and the inner holding of the belief that ‘recovery is possible’ is how the food and body coping strategies and dysregulation are able to release.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Eating Disorder Recovery Is An Additive Process, Not Restrictive

I often share with my clients that they don’t need to stop any of their eating disorder behaviours. For many people who have experienced traditional treatment this can be surprising.

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For many of us the eating disorder has been the number one thing in our toolbox to get through life, so if we take it away it can feel like the world will crumble.

When we add other resourcing tools that have sustainability, longevity, and that can support our overall well-being in the long-run, the eating disorder doesn’t have to work so hard because we have other tools to support ourselves.

We can sit side-by-side with the eating disorder, whilst adding new support structures and tools at the same time. This means that when other tools can begin to support us more and more, the eating disorder doesn’t have to do all of the work, and we can naturally grow out of the eating disorder.

It lets go of us - rather than us trying to let it go or get rid of it.

This approach is additive rather than restrictive.

We want the approach the eating disorder recovery process with an attitude of adding in rather than taking out and restricting.

This means that rather than taking away the eating disorder (and all of its strategies and coping mechanisms), we resource and add other resources and skills to the pot.

Recovery is not about stopping the disordered eating patterns in one go. This almost always ends up in feelings of chaos and terror. If someone is told that they can no longer engage in the one coping strategy that they know and that undoubtedly helped them survive and get to this point, it results in gripping on even tighter to the eating disorder.

An additive approach recovery from an eating disorder, disordered eating, or diet culture can look more like this:

We add more awareness when engaging in the eating disorder behaviours.

We become present to the eating disorder strategies of restricting, ignoring hunger pangs, purging, binging etc. These behaviours are numbing at their core, so this is the first step: to stay present when engaging in a numbing pattern.

We add more awareness before and after the disordered eating pattern has occurred, noticing triggers and habits and changes in emotion.

We start to track what activates us during the day, and the accumulation of stress and somatic triggers, and how that build-up eventually leads to an eating disorder behaviours manifesting.

We want to start painting a clearer image of what keeps an eating disorder going and looping and driving.

We also want to track what happens after engaging in food or body strategy. What emotions arise, what activities do you do, what physical sensations are present?

We want to develop an understanding of how we feel afterwards, as this also keep the cycle going.

We add more resources, tools and recovery skills to the toolbox so that we don’t have to solely rely on the eating disorder to survive.

This includes developing body awareness and nervous system regulation in order to be with discomfort, charged energy, unknowns, and one’s emotions in a grounded, present, connected way. We learn how to thrive.

We want to add more resources so that we have greater capacity to turn towards the vulnerable parts and feelings that lie underneath the eating disorder behaviours.

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Indeed, underneath all of the food behaviors, underneath the disordered eating patterns or the eating disorder behaviors, is something so delicate and tender.

Underneath the rigid food patterns, underneath the over-exercising, underneath the binging, underneath the purging, is something so young and small.

Underneath all of that harshness, shame, guilt underneath, control, domination, and persecution is something so soft, and something so vulnerable.

This is why it’s so important to approach eating disorder recovery with a lot of softness and support, rather than fear tactics or punishment. The body is already in a fearful protected state and so the treatment of eating disorders should be very kind, compassionate, and full of grounding resources.

When we can connect to those deepest, most hidden aspects of ourselves with compassion, we start to reintegrate the fragmented parts back into wholeness.

By calling back home the parts that we have ostracized, ignored, or pushed away, we begin to experience greater self-acceptance, self-compassion, a sense of belonging.

We invite all parts to sit around the fire, each one welcomed, nor matter how much shame, dirtiness, guilt, badness, grief, or burdens they may carry. No longer rejecting aspects of our history, our experience, ourselves, we can weave the lost and forgotten threads back into the fabric of the wholeness of who we are.

Eating disorder recovery is adding more foundation, more connection, and more resources that establishes a sustainable inner core that gives us the capacity to turn within and to look at these vulnerable parts from a centered place.

As such, it is no longer engaging in the eating disorder or restricting oneself from utilizing the food and body coping mechanisms, but rather, recovery is additive process whereby we develop more embodied presence, body awareness, and sustainable resources.

This is how we build a foundation alongside the eating disorder, so that the eating disordercan naturally let go of us.

Photo by Avrora Bch on Unsplash

What Is Eating Disorder Recovery?

There are many hallmarks that make eating disorder recovery. One of them that I have been returning to and that psychedelic journeys almost always circle back to, is learning how to be with the unknown.

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The eating disorder likes to control things in such a way so that things seem like they are known, where the outcome is planned, where there is very little room for spontaneity, and feelings can be well-managed.

Behaviours like calorie counting, over-exercise, restricting food groups, eating at specific mealtimes, not letting anyone else cook meals, eating the same things, body checking, or avoiding social situations that involve food are all attempts to reduce the possibilities of being swallowed by the tidal waves of the unknown.

Sticking to rigid food and body behaviours feels safe, known, measured and manageable.

So, the question is then, why is there such a need to predict, manage, or control?

This is because eating disorder patterns often stem from places of trauma. And trauma is something where there was no choice (it happened and the individual couldn’t avoid), that felt out of one’s control, and left deep imprints of hurt, fracturing the psyche in some way.

The eating disorder patterns are coping mechanisms that try to manage the unresolved stress survival energies (fight, flight, freeze) that are still stuck in the physiology and in the nervous system from the trauma.

Eating disorder behaviours indicate that something happened in someone’s life that was so overwhelming, uncontainable and uncontrollable, resulting in an all-encompassing belief that life cannot be trusted. At the core, eating disorders indicate nervous system dysregulation.

The eating disorder is trying to bring in feelings of order, control, and power to a psyche where one’s integrity, agency, autonomy, trust, and safety was taken away in the moment of the trauma. An eating disorder is actually trying to bring balance back into one’s life and body.

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One of the aspects of recovery (and there are many), is develop a baseline of safety and containment and trust so that over time, an individual can begin to practice being with the fundamental nature of life - which is unknown.

Recovery does eventually ask us to be with the unknown, to try new things, to be courageous to trust in the yet-to-be-known.

Just like a psychedelic journey, eating disorder recovery is a journey from the known to the unknown.

There is no agenda, or needing to find a solution, or to perfect something, but rather to practice being present in your body to what comes up.

This is an opportunity to notice the fears that come up, the limbo states, and what thoughts and emotions come up what when you find yourself in uncharted territory.

We grow our capacity to embrace newness by going slowly and titrating the process, and pausing to integrate and harvest what information is coming through.

As we start to open up to being with the yet-to-be-known and change, implementing supportive and sustainable resources that help us ground, calibrate, and maintain a curious perspective, we will be faced with all new kinds of layers within our recovery.

Indeed, the layers that eating disorder recovery reveals are infinite and come in a variety of forms.

To open up to the feelings we have avoided.
To open up to support from others.
To open up to to trusting that support.
To open up to subtle cues from the body such as hunger and fullness.
To open up to joy.
To open up to believing in that we are deserving of joy.
To open up to the possibility of pleasure.
To open up to rigid patterns around food and body that have become habitual and automatic.
To open up to trying a new food or eating out with friends.
To open up to tuning into your authentic impulses, your yes and your no.
To open up to setting in boundaries; sometimes saying no is an opening up.
To open up taking up space.
To open up to taking space to rest.
To open up to the idea of not having to do this alone.
To open up to the inevitable ebbs and flows of life.
To open up to your capacity to navigate these changes.
To open up to going slow, remembering that this work needs patience and gentleness in order to integrate.
To open up perspective; that this healing work is intrinsically linked to the collective and your lineage.

To open up to trusting in your core self.

Opening up and expanding into the unknown on the eating disorder recovery path requires developing nervous system regulation, inner and outer stability, support from others, and moments of rest (aka integration). There are so many layers to this journey that reveal themselves in strange, relentless and magical ways.

Over time, as one works with releasing the stress survival energies from the past traumas (through somatic practices and by connecting with the body), and developing and adding other life-supportive, healthy resources, individuals can rely less and less on the needing to know, to control, to manage, to contain, or to grip tightly.

The eating disorder patterns slowly dissolve into the background.

New ways to navigate change, challenge, ebbs and flows are established.

Confidence, capacity, compassion, adaptability, and understanding develop.

No longer living from the past, in nervous system dysregulation, one is able to live embodied, in the present moment, grounded, clear, connected.

Photo by Nicholas Sampson on Unsplash

Resistance in Eating Disorder Recovery

Where are you noticing resistance on your eating disorder recovery path? And importantly, how does it show up in your body? What does resistance feel like?

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it is very common to come up against resistance as you walk the eating disorder recovery path. In fact, feeling resistant indicates that you are at meeting an important growth edge.

Maybe you experience resistance to rest, or to include a different ingredient to your cooking, or to try a new restaurant.

Maybe you experience resistance to eat when you’re hungry rather than at a predetermined time, or to allow someone else cook a meal for you.

Maybe you feel resistance to communicate more openly, or to share when you feel nervous, anxious, sad, happy, or excited.

Maybe you notice resistance when going clothes shopping, or when confronted with a mirror.

Maybe you feel resistant in allowing in more connection, play, or pleasure.

Resistance is a beautifully revealing sensation to work with in your eating disorder recovery. When you meet it (which can happen at any moment), stay at the boundary of the resistance. Stay with it. Feel it. Notice where it is in your body.

When we can stay with the resistance for a few moments, rather than pushing it away through food and body strategies and coping patterns, we may notice that the resistance has something to share, that it has wisdom to impart, and that it has clues to give you about what your next step may be in your recovery.

So, take a note for yourself when you come up against resistance:

How is your body telling you there is resistance? How do you know it’s there?
What does resistance feel like?
Where does the resistance live in your body?
How much space does the resistance take up in your body?
Does it have a texture or colour?
Does it have a sound or some movements that want to be expressed?
What is the resistance trying to protect?
What is the resistance afraid of?

In this way, we move from the mind and into the body, and we start to befriend the resistance.

The moment the resistance spins stories of “I can't do this” or “I'm not good enough”, we actually want to pause, notice, and get into the body.

Feel the inner resistance and sense what it actually is. Observe what is lying underneath the body sensations. Is there an emotion? Is there movement that it wants to express? Are there sounds it wants to make? Are there words that are waiting to be shouted? How does it want to breathe? When you can give the resistance form and “three-dimensionality”, it has the opportunity to express itself and to ultimately move through and out.

Remember, resistance is normal and is part of recovery, change and growth. Often when there is big resistance, the growth potential and life force that we can access is huge!

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When we pause with the resistance, we are bowing to the parts within us that have worked very hard at protecting us over the many years - and so they require gentleness, respect and kindness.

Rather than pushing past the resistance or collapsing in defeat upon meeting it, we take a breath, and give it space to express its needs. Embody your resistance, give it space to be heard, seen, and recognized.

Bring it to life and see what is has to share about your recovery, your history, your patterns, and what it is needs.

Don’t push past the resistance, force it out the way, or pretend it’s not there (as this is thesame energy that the eating disorder operates in).

Rather, when we can meet it, stay with its shape, and hold it with compassion, we go at a pace that can maintain equanimity, acceptance, and capacity.

This ultimately, eventually, softens the resistance and we unlock a new layer within our recovery.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

How Psychedelics and Plant Medicine Support Embodied Eating Disorder Recovery

For people facing eating disorder recovery, it can sometimes feel like there is a huge mountain to climb. The climb can feel intimidating, unknowable, and full of dread. It is sobering to face the magnitude of an eating disorder.

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And yet – and yet – it is a mountain that can be climbed. Yes, there are many peaks to climb, and one will need to take rests along the way, but it can be done.

As we know however, anorexia nervosa, in particular, has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, due to both the physical implications of the disorder* and high suicide rates.

There are currently limited pharmacological and therapeutic treatments, and those that are available tend to focus on managing the symptoms rather than tackling the underlying root.

Plant medicines and psychedelics can support going to the root in eating disorder recovery. Firstly, on a pharmacological level, psychedelics target the serotonin system that support mood regulation; this is important since many people with eating disorders or disordered eating struggle with anxiety, depression, OCD, or have some sort of trauma-related issues.

For people navigating eating disorders, there is often pendulum swinging between restriction and bingeing, or malnutrition, or chronic dieting. This has a powerful effect on the serotonin system, impacting mood regulation, clouding our thoughts. We can get stuck in loops and holes, unable to see how to get out.

Indeed, a hallmark of an eating disorder is rigid thinking. Many people tend to have perceptual distortions about their body image and how much they’re eating, and they tend to be inflexible not only around food but around other life decisions in general.

Eating disorders, which stem from trauma and stored up survival stress, often lead to isolation, high degrees of control, trouble accessing emotions, a disconnection from one’s body and the world, and lack of creativity (the higher brain functioning is offline when we are in a survival state).

With the support of psychedelics, one is able see the bigger picture, take healthy risks, be spontaneous, utilize creativity and flexibility to see themselves differently, and the beliefs they hold around their own eating disorder recovery.

Secondly, by shifting away from symptom-focused treatment and rather looking at the root causes that develop changes in self-perception, self-worth, self-compassion, and in one’s somatic organization.

Psychedelics offer a window of breathing room, fresh air, and fresh perspective. With clearer seeing and understanding, one is able to make new choices, and literally shape their lives differently, in ways that feel aligned and true, rooted in worth, deservingness, and authenticity.

Eating disorders are often resistant to treatment due to its “ego-syntonic” nature, meaning many of the behaviours, values and feelings behind the symptoms stem from the needs and goals of the ego.

Softening the ego happens to be a hallmark of the psychedelic experience: In this altered state, people are often able to gain a new perspective on themselves in the world.

Rather than psychedelics acting as a magic drug to cure, they act more like an ally, tool, or resource within a therapeutic framework, that ideally include nervous system regulation tools, and developing somatic awareness that support the deepening of one’s embodied presence.

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I think we're in a point in time where we're realizing we haven't really been human for a large part of the human evolution. We have been disconnected from our bodies and living in survival. This is what plant medicines have been trying to show us for so long. It is what our nervous systems have been trying to tell us too.

Looking at eating disorder recovery through the lens of nervous system regulation and heath is the new medicine, and the new way of healing and creating health.

Our system, our DNA, our organs, and our tissue all want regulation. Our body is built for and thrives on regulation.

Our Earth wants us to get out of survival stress so that we can expand our perspectives and start taking care of others and the body of Earth that sustains and nourishes us (indeed, we cannot access empathy and care for others when our physiology is geared towards trying to keep us alive).

Embodied recovery is the process of becoming aware of what is out of balance and opening up to restoring equilibrium, ease, and empowerment. Plant medicine and psychedelics can support that process by shining light on what is off balance so that we cannot just survive but also to thrive, to feel in flow, regulated, empowered, and aligned.

Through this work of psychedelic embodied eating disorder recovery, we begin to notice patterns of dysregulation (which can show up as holding a lot of tension, chronic illness, burnout, anxiety, depression, rigid thinking, fear of change, unable to tell when we are hungry or full, lacking creativity, looping in toxic relationships, shutting down, panic attacks, over-exercising, unable to state boundaries etc etc etc).

By working from the bottom-up, including the body in the recovery roadmap, we give our whole system a voice, including the organs, bones, breath, joints, guts, and our movements a voice.

And over time, we get back to our center energetically, but also on a visceral level, and in the center in our circle (and in our environment). This is what our body craves and needs to thrive: to be aligned in that core center within.

There is no magic pill – it takes time, integration work, practice, and patience. But armed with inspiration and clarity (which psychedelics can offer), there is encouragement and motivation to keep going, to keep turning towards the body, to keep walking, and to keep climbing the mountain of uncovering, discovering, and recovering.

*I am using the word “disorder” as it is an understandable term, however I believe that eating disorder are more like patterns. They are patterns that have been developed to try solve a need that wasn’t met or attuned to. These patterns indicate trauma or chronic stress and at the core of these food and body patterns is a yearning for safety, attunement and love. Plant medicines can remind of these yearnings and that these patterns can indeed shift. Read more about eating disorders as patterns here.