Inner Family Dialogue

Tips for Natural Eating: I

Health Show Thanks!

Health Show – Something You Can Do

Ready? Or not.

Ready or Not it will definitely come true, loving and caring for someone. Not so long ago I had the blissful experience of falling fully, deeply, soulfully in love with someone. It was truly unlike any experience I have had before.  I had recently completed a 5 day workshop called “Opening to Heart Consciousness” and had learned many things about loving and opening my heart.  The biggest learnings from that workshop were:

1. How closed my heart had been; I could actually feel the walls around it, deep and solid that kept me from truly loving anyone and thus from feeling truly connected and intimate with a single soul.
2. How incredibly wonderful and safe it felt to open my heart and love another being; to invite myself to truly love all beings. I felt so much more connected to everyone I came across and so much safer just crossing the street than ever before in my life.

Naturally I was drawn to want less of the walls and more of the open and safe experience.  I therefore began to focus consciously on keeping my heart open and those walls down.  My experience of life was so much happier and lighter.  I felt so free and so safe to be in the world in a way I had never felt before.

And the amazing thing is, the world responded by sending me lots of safe and loving, healthy, mature human beings. It was like they all started popping out of the woodwork and into my life.

So, back to this man.  A few months after the course, with my heart open and feeling truly light and free I met a man who was just wonderful. If I had had all of the things that I ever wanted in a partner written down on a list he had every single possible quality that I had ever hoped for, except one: He wasn’t available.

And I don’t mean that he was married, or even dating someone else, he really just wasn’t open to a deep and committed relationship.

It took me a while to cotton on because I was so full of love and so open to the experience I completely ignored/missed the signs that he was not as engaged and invested as I was.  It was only a few months before things became abundantly clear and the relationship came to an end.  Of course in the twilight of that fading romance I could see all of the signs and signals that had been present, pretty much since day one, that the relationship was not meant to be.

I have since read something that was written by Dr. Neil Warren, the founder of E-harmony (an on-line dating service) and author of a great book: “Falling in love for all the right reasons,” that I wish I had read before meeting this man as it would have absolutely made things crystal clear much earlier and spared me a few months of turmoil.  So, I share it with you in the hopes that any of you men and women out there who are in relationships that aren’t quite feeling secure will be able to more readily determine whether it’s a piece of work that you need to do on trust and opening your heart, or whether the person responsible for the other half of the relationship just isn’t there!

Ready or Not, To Commit

The phrases that Dr. Warren suggests you be on the look out for as an indication that someone is absolutely not ready to make any sort of relationship commitment are as follows:

“I’m so confused.”

“It’s not you—it’s me.”

“I just don’t know what I want right now.”

“I love you, I don’t think I’m in love with you.”

“I’m kind of going through some changes right now.”

“I don’t know what’s the best for us right now.”

“Why do we have to get so serious? Let’s just have fun.”

Each one of those phrases is an indicator that the individual uttering them is not ready, and equally as important, not able, to commit to the relationship in any long term fashion.

Two other key indicators of someone’s readiness for connection and true availability are their level of consideration of your needs and their demonstration of gestures of love and affection.

If you have been direct in asking for a need to be met and your partner is not respecting that request that is a red flag issue.   Now it’s one thing if your request is something that the other finds too challenging or outside their value system. And if that’s the case, a keeper is someone who openly tells you that: “I understand that this is an important need for you and I am just not comfortable with that particular thing but I would be willing to do ….. instead.”  That’s what you need to hear in order to know that your partner is capable of hearing and honoring your requests even if he/she can’t meet them.  We can’t expect our significant others’ to meet all our needs and respond affirmatively to all of our requests but we absolutely have the right to have our requests acknowledged and validated.  And if our partner can’t meet them then together we brainstorm ways of getting them met.

Gestures of love and affection are different for each of us.  Many of you have likely read the book “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman.  It’s a beautifully simple and clear explanation of the different ways people like to be loved and the mayhem that can ensue when you’ve got two people in a relationship with different love languages: both are doing their best to love completely and demonstrate their love and commitment and the other is feeling completely unloved and unseen because they are not being loved in the way they need to be.  I invite you to visit Gary’s web site or pick up one of his books on the subject of love languages: www.fivelovelanguages.com

And, you know, even though my love experience ended rather abruptly I regret nothing about it. I learned some valuable lessons. The most significant……?  It is safe to love. You will not die, the world will not come to an end if you love someone completely and they do not reciprocate. It is safe to completely open your heart to someone, even if they don’t or can’t love you back. In fact in my lived experience it is more harmful and hurtful to ourselves to restrict our love and to try and stifle our feelings of love and appreciation and respect for others. It is not only safe to love, it is imperative to a full and passionate life experience.

As don Miguel Ruiz (author of “The Four Agreements” and “The Mastery of Love”) says “Your heart is most full when you are giving love.”  It is so true.  It feels so good to keep my heart open and to love others.  It truly feels bad to close my heart and “protect” myself from potential harm, rejection, ridicule etc. that may or may not ever come. So, I choose to keep my heart open and to love, regardless of whether I am loved back equally or even, at all.  And I feel so full of love as a result.

Don Miguel Ruiz also says, “Your heart is like a magical kitchen.” He means you can manufacture, in your heart, enough love for the entire world and then some. You don’t need anyone else’s love in order to feel loved and fulfilled.  And when you get to that place, even for moments a day, of feeling and knowing that you can completely meet your own needs for love, you are capable of creating a truly loving and blissful partnership with another human being.

There is so much to discuss about relationships that I can not possibly hope to cover it all here, and hopefully I have given you some things to think about and explore in your own relationship past or present.

If you would like to discuss these pieces further as they pertain to your own healing and life experience please arrange for an individual session by calling 250-383-0797 or e-mailing mmorand@islandnet.com.

Have a wonderful day and may you open your heart a little more each day to yourself first and foremost.

Love Michelle

A Brief Look At Feelings

Looking Through Your Feelings

Feelings are signals from your body about what you need or want. They are not good or bad, right or wrong. They just are.

You have a need which triggers a thought, and immediately a feeling arises. A spiritual leader, whom I know by the name of Ramana, refers to this pattern as “thought/feeling bundles”. The thoughts arise from the sense of an unmet need, and immediately, with seemingly no space in between, a feeling is elicited, and to the extent that we are conscious of them, the feeling is felt!

It is practically impossible to have a thought without a feeling attached to it. And it is not necessary to the healing process to try to separate them. What is important is that we begin to trust?to know on a gut level?that what we are feeling has arisen from a thought which was triggered by a need. That’s all. When we absolutely know this, we no longer spin our wheels and harm ourselves by judging the feeling. Instead, we just ask ourselves, “What need do I have that is unmet right now, and what can I do about it?”

So, have I made my point? Feelings are normal, healthful, natural, appropriate responses to what you are thinking. Even if someone else may judge your feeling or emotional response as “too much,” “too sensitive,” “too drama queenish,” and so on, your emotional response is absolutely perfect, based on your perception (thought) of the circumstance at that time.

Now, it is possible that your perception is a bit skewed by your past experiences and the beliefs you are holding about yourself and others, but the key point is that your reaction is never “too much”. It is always exactly right for your understanding of the situation.

Did you catch that? Your reaction is never “too much”, you are never “too sensitive.” You are always reacting perfectly appropriately based on your interpretation of what is happenng.

So, remember this the next time a key person in your life judges your authentic emotional response to a situation or if you find yourself judging your natural and appropriate reaction to your perception of the situation. At the same time, begin to allow for the possibility that your perception may be coloured by old, distorted beliefs about how the world works and your right to peace and happiness.

At this time, while your goal is to establish a strong, healthful, trusting relationship with yourself, I beg you to err on the side of trusting what you are feeling versus trusting what others say you should be feeling. If you give yourself the benefit of the doubt rather than giving it to others and looking through your feelings, you will make great and quicker progress with this process. For even if, upon reflection, you can see that your emotional response was coloured by an old false story, you can still give yourself the experience of validating yourself in the moment and of then acknowledging that your response was appropriate, based on what you believed to be true at that time.

Then you can go to this person and let them know that you felt justified in your reaction at the time, and, upon reflection, you can see that you did not have all the information. Then ask if the two of you can talk about this some more. I promise, anyone who is at all interested in having a healthful relationship with you will be eager to share what they were trying to convey, and you will hear it differently because you are no longer blinded by this old belief.

And anyone who is resistant to hearing you or to sharing again, what it was they were trying to convey, is giving you the gift of seeing very clearly their own insecurities and their own need to control and dominate you and/or the situations in their lives. That is valuable information for you because it is proof for you that the difficulties you have in your connection with this person are not all about you. Allow yourself to see this. Always remember you are only responsible for your half of the relationship. And the more you get clear on what is your responsibility and what is theirs the easier it will be for you to trust in your feelings and needs and to seek out connections with people who are actively healing their own selves.

So, for now, allow yourself to err on the side of trusting your own immediate, authentic experience, and know that there is a legitimate reason for why you feel what you feel.

Reminiscing

Remembering How I Ate That Much

Why We Don’t Diet

Why You Don’t Need to Diet to Lose Weight

By Michelle Morand

Hello, All.

This past week I was blessed with e-mails from two clients that I haven’t seen for a while. I have their permission to share them with you and wanted to do so here.

The CEDRIC Centre doesn’t believe in the diet mentality form of promoting our services, you know…”lose 30 pounds in 30 days” or “you’ll lose weight..” etc. That form of advertising only serves to reinforce that the issue is your weight and it’s not.

So, we quietly encourage you to honor yourself, to look beneath food and weight to the underlying issues that lead you to use food and body focus to cope. And what we find is that when people use our approach to healing their relationship with food, that’s exactly what they do: heal it! It’s done, over, gone, not a problem, finito etc.

That’s why I have such an issue with people who purport that disordered eating patterns are like a disease that once you have “caught” you have for life. It’s simply not true. Our staff, myself included, as well as hundreds of clients are living proof of the fact that complete and lasting freedom is to be expected as a result of our healing process, that is why you don’t need to diet and punish yourself.

It makes sense that if you use food to cope because of past and present stressors and hurts, and you find ways to heal those wounds and learn new ways to cope with stress that are not harmful, you just won’t need to use food to cope anymore. And that is what we see in our clients, time and time again.

What we find when we approach healing from a place of inner focus and building a strong relationship with ourselves first and foremost, is that the more highly we come to regard and respect ourselves the more freely and easily we make changes to our relationship with food and to exercise that are in accordance with self-love and not punishment.

So, what before was a great struggle ie. not eating more than we were truly hungry for; or allowing ourselves to eat when we are hungry, without shame or judgement; or engaging in consistent exercise; becomes effortless and easy because we are choosing to do these things out of love for ourselves and not because we feel flawed or sub-standard in some way.

If you use food to cope, any diet program is only going to exacerbate that issue. It’s only going to put more focus on the food and on your body. There is no way to heal from that vantage point.

If you are willing to trust that it is possible that you can heal completely and never have negative thoughts about your body, never have stressful encounters with food, never again punish yourself with restriction or overeating, then you are ready to begin to challenge yourself to begin the journey within.

The journey begins with a willingness to believe that any focus on food and body is simply your inner self calling your attention to something else in your life that isn’t working in the way you need it to. Then you take steps to identify what those pieces might be and learn new tools to heal them and attend to them differently should they arise again.

That’s the process of complete recovery in a nutshell.

Now, I’ll let you have a read at those e-mails I received this week and get a sense of how these women have transferred their old harmful overeating/purging/restriction patterns into honoring choices that are building greater self-esteem and healthy, intimate relationships.

Hi Michelle

I am doing very well. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of something wise you’ve said to me or some realization you helped me with. I am feeling great, my relationship with food is infinitely better, and I have re-established links with a lot of my female friends. I’ve taken up running. It’s so different from anything I’ve done before and I run with the most incredible group of women. I’m finding it very empowering and it’s a great stress reliever.

Although I miss our sessions, it’s great to know that I have the skills & abilities to handle (and enjoy!) life on my own!

Since we last met, I’ve lost 20 pounds (I’ve gone the health-food-do-only-what’s-good-for-me route — which includes treating myself occasionally too — along with Jazzercise) and then gained 10 at Christmas (long story — but I’ve since shed the 10 and seem to be losing more). But GOOD FOR ME, huh? Yeah, I know, I’m amazing (how’s THAT for an attitude shift?!).

You know, despite it being a place where a lot of crap was released, I have good memories of your bright, sunny office. Thanks for making it such a special place to be!

I should mention, just for the record, that I did do some “no you can’t have any sugar” for a good month, even though I craved it madly. I found I just needed to break the cycle and let the hormones balance out.

Although it was tough some days, I explained to myself that the goal was to make me feel better than I ever have, so I could live strong and healthy. I kept in mind that chocolate was certain to be in my future, but when it became a “want” and was no longer a “need”.

Thank you.