Somatic Therapy for Eating Disorders

Finding ways to connect,

Rather than trying to be oh-so-perfect.

Remembering to listen to my body’s signs,

As direct guidance for my life’s design.

Always empowered to choose what I allow into my space,

And this takes practice, patience and pace.

Sometimes the feelings were just too much,

So my body disconnected and went out of touch.

My body has and will always know what to do;

It has carried my trauma so I could just get through, and this it will continue to do.

There is deep wisdom in these inherent workings,

I am grateful for my body’s constant ability to be adapting, assessing and reworking.

The somatic movements that my body makes

Is for the sake of my safety and so I welcome it all like a bird song at day break.

I take a breath. I offer my body nourishing rest, wholesome food, soulful community, and play so the signs I receive are clear and lead my on path’s highest way. I give thanks to this temple.

As a person who has experienced an eating disorder, learning to trust my body has been one of my greatest challenges. There was a point in my recovery journey where I realized that I had done all of this talking and cognitive analysis in therapy but was unable to just be in my body. I came to accept that if I wanted to heal from the eating disorder, the body (which I so feared), had to be included in the recovery process.

This insight propelled me into the world of somatic therapy. I started learning how the body, along with supportive external resources, has inner wisdom that is self-directing, self-connecting, and helps us unfold towards wholeness. By coming into contact with the body, breath, energy, emotions and thoughts, we can begin to see how we are doing moment to moment. And if done carefully, it is not as scary as one may think.

By bringing this information into the now, and holding it with compassion, healing can take place; indeed how the body is a resource and can be resourced is part of the the healing process from a somatic perspective.

From a somatic therapy lens, difficult life experiences contribute to patterns of tension in the body, whilst developing body awareness helps us access an internal source of wisdom that guides the healing process. And we engage more body awareness and healing movements at a pace that can be tolerated.

For people with eating disorders, the body is a scary place to be, and so the pace is slow so that one does not feel overwhelmed. I remember how I couldn’t even practice mindful breathing - it was just too triggering and upsetting. And so I see with my own clients, the body is a sensitive portal to enter. For some, there is a numbness or there isn’t a big enough language to describe what is going on.

By creating a safe space together, we learn how to build up our tolerance to hold and describe bigger emotions. But there’s no rush in this work. When there is trauma, there is a fear of what emotions are stirring beneath the surface and of one’s inner experience. To face trauma, we have to face what is uncomfortable. Everyone is ready at different times as resources, support and stability are built in accordance to the individual. Only once stability and safety are built internally and externally, can the trauma be processed.

First and foremost is creating the space between client and coach/therapist/mentor/loving human who is offering their attuned presence and an opportunity for the client to borrow their nervous system to practice co-regulation. From there, we develop conscious awareness of the somatic experience by paying attention to what the five senses, proprioception and interception are picking up on as it’s happening in the room, between the two parties, and inside oneself. This is the first step to deepening one’s embodiment.

As we strengthen the somatic resources through body awareness, conscious breathing, co-regulation, grounding techniques, empowerment, receiving support, building affect and sensation tolerance, and developing boundaries, we can come to understand the impact that the trauma had on the body, reclaim healing movement, have a somatic release, and then work on integrating this new body into the world.

For my own life, I cannot pinpoint a moment when there was a traumatic event in my childhood, but I can assume that there something (or multiple things) that contributed to my body picking up eating disorder behaviours as a way to cope. These behaviours kept me safe and in a state of defense against feeling my body and internal landscape, being present, and connecting with the world around me.

Over time, by building tolerance to hold bigger emotions and sensations through developing my own supports and resources; trusting that it’s safe to pause and feel what is going on inside of me and sense into sensations and emotions; and allowing myself to receive the messages from these emotions and sensations, my reliance on eating disorder behaviours organically faded as I have naturally matured out of them. This is because new tools, resources and ways of being in the world have been built, practiced and integrated into my life.

Ultimately, we learn how to become good at change. Eating disorders - and addictions - are perceived ways to control and keep things the same as a way to protect the individual. When we accept that the body is always changing, from a physical sensation to an emotion, we are able to ride the waves of changes that life fundamentally brings with greater ease.

Psychedelics, plant medicine and microdosing have been key allies in helping me get more in touch with what my body is trying to communicate with me. Since I have the pattern of numbing out or avoiding uncomfortable body sensations through the conditioning of the eating disorder, it is sometimes too easy to fall back into that way of existing. The sacred plant allies, Psilocybin and Ayahuasca, who I enjoy working with in small and large doses have been immensely helpful in getting me out of this particular rut and into feeling, honestly and compassionately.

Working with the body is an honour. It is the portal that remembers and transforms. Our body is our greatest work.

For those who are interested in working with me, I offer 1:1 sessions that focus on movement, mindfulness and/or medicine for greater embodiment, eating disorder and addiction recovery. Feel free to check out my offerings or contact me.

Photo by Maria Duda on Unsplash

Guided Yoga Nidra Meditation

So much of my own personal eating disorder recovery has been about slowing down. To try manage the energy inside of myself and the world around me, I used strategies like over-exercising as a way to purge and to run away. It lead to behaviours like restricting my food so that I could stop things from coming at and into me which oftentimes felt too fast and too much. I have come to realise over the years, one of the hardest aspects of my recovery has been to soften, open up and slow things down.

In February 2021, I was in a motorcycle accident in Nicaragua and fractured my tibia; I knew immediately in that moment that this was the way I was finally going to slow down. In fact, I intuited something like this was going to happen at some point many, many months before this specific incident. Something outside of myself had to come in to bring me to a halt - I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself.

And so I am grateful for this experience.

It showed me how I’ve used movement over the last 13 years, sometimes excessively and damaging, to suppress, neutralize or avoid overwhelming energy. When I was in the early stages of my recovery after my leg surgery, I finally got to experience the waves of energy, emotions, thoughts - the whole banquet of my human experience - without the hiding, distracting and altering. I was in all of it it and had to face all of it. I got to understand how so much of the movement I do in a day is to manage feelings of anxiety and fragmentation - but without giving myself time to really feel it, question it, or see it so that it could be transmuted.

During this potent time of healing, I found other ways to be with these feelings through breathwork, meditation, massage, sound and vocalization, painting and being in nature, allowing the winds to wash, cleanse and move through me. My understanding of how to find my center, to reground and regroup, expanded over the course of my injury recovery.

One of the ways of settling back into myself was with yoga nidra, a style of yoga that induces “non-sleep-deep-rest”, as Andrew Huberman likes to call it, where we find ourselves in a state of consciousness that is between being awake and asleep. Practicing yoga nidra induces the parasympathetic nervous system to come on and allows the sympathetic nervous system to take a chill. Our sympathetic nervous system governs our flight or flight, which many of us are in too much of the time, leading to chronic stress and subsequent health conditions. While we need this system to get out of bed, stay motivated, play and accomplish tasks, when used for extended periods of time it can cause issues with digestion, sleep and immunity. When we practice yoga nidra, we shut this system off and enter into the parasympathetic nervous system - rest and digest - thus calming the nervous system, improving immune function and deep cellular healing, supporting digestion and stress management, decreasing anxiety, blood pressure and cortisol levels, and inviting all of ourselves into the present moment.

And all you need to do is lie on your back on a mat or in bed, and allow yourself to be guided. There are many ways to be with the body, to move and transmute energy, and journey back to inner peace.

It’s now been seven months since my accident and my healing has been smooth and swift. To celebrate this little moment, I have decided to share a guided yoga nidra meditation with you which I actually created when I was still in Nicaragua in the first three months of my recovery.

Feel free to listen to this before you go to bed, in the middle of the day as a break, or before, during or after a plant medicine or psychedelic journey as preparation, support or integration .

Ground down, relax back, be transported, be transformed.

Photo by Anna Rozwadowska on Unsplash