By Rande Moss
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The podcast currently has 86 episodes available.
I was thinking recently of how many posts I almost held back because of how self-absorbed they sounded:
• I've talked about how I once couldn't bear the thought of dying without having lost weight and lived in my “dream body”.
• I've talked about how my whole world revolved around trying to fix and improve myself.
• I've talked about the years of obsession with food, healing, and becoming my “best self”. It sometimes feels nauseating to show this part of my experience. But after years of work with clients, I know I far from alone in my experience. Trauma can make our worlds incredibly small.
When life in our bodies is so continuously overwhelming, it's easy to pin all our hopes for a 'fix' on one thing.
But as long as we're trying to fix what we perceive to be wrong with us, we're not listening. We're not present in the bodies we have now. Which again, if the bodies have now feel painful to inhabit, this is totally understandable.
Often the first work I do with someone when we're talking about food struggles or a painful body image is just...gentle embodiment. Supporting them in feeling a little safer in their current body. There's a time for mirror work, even sometimes gentle affirmations, but if we're not IN our bodies, or if life feels like it's on hold until we're "fixed"...those tools have limited use.
Whatever state your body takes, whatever transformations you go through, you deserve to feel safe and worthy of love where you are.
LINKS:
Reimagining the Body 30-Day Course (use the coupon code REIMAGINE2023 for 50% off in the month of November!)
Work with Rande
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
You won't get very far in this episode without realizing the click-baitiness of the title. The truth is, there was a time I wanted to keep all of my body shame and use it for fuel to "fix" my body and chaotic relationship to food. It never worked, and in this episode I'll talk about what did.
Links:
Work with Me
Reimagining The Body course (use the coupon code REIMAGINE2023 at checkout for 50% off in the month of November)
If you've spent any time in the somatic healing world, you're likely familiar with the concept of the body saying "no". I'll also often say that the body has a language that it speaks - sensation. emotion. pleasure and pain. Reactions and responses that say "no" and reactions and responses that say "yes".
And it takes a lot of time and practice to understand that language.
In today's episode I'll speak about feeling for the body's "yes" and the body's "no", and how it applies in several situations.
Links:
Work with Rande
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
What I wish I would have known when I was struggling and reading books about "mindful eating":
- Slowing down isn't a tool to make you eat less. It's a tool to notice what's happening.
- No amount of mindful eating is going to make eating less than you actually need serve you.
- Mindful eating doesn't have to be precious. You can eat in front of your favorite show. You don't have to be deeply meditative about it...it's really just in the case of compulsive or binge eating that removing distractions can be a useful tool.
- If you're absolutely desperate to change your body, attempts at mindful eating are probably still just going to be attempts at control.
- Mindful eating isn't just about the "mind". It's an embodied experience. It's not about an idea of how much you SHOULD eat, it's about getting to know your actual body.
- "Embodying a binge" really does mean "embodying a binge". What does a binge urge feel like in your body? What changes as you start to eat? What does the food actually taste like? What's it like to have this food take up space in your body? If shame comes up, what does THAT feel like? What's it like to breathe into it rather than let it spin stories in your head? What happens in your body if you don't immediately distract yourself after a binge? If you don't plan to starve yourself the next day? Can you get to know those feelings?
Binge eating taught me so much. Rather, EMBODYING the experience that I'd been fighting with for 15+ years taught me so much.
As it became safe to embody the entire experience of a binge, it started loosening it's hold.
It also became safe to change things from the inside of that experience.
I learned I could stop shaming myself and "starting over" when the binge was over.
I learned I was actually capable of stopping somewhere in the middle rather than being all-or-nothing.
Eventually I learned that a binge urge (the survival energy driving me to eat) wouldn't kill me if I didn't follow through. Or if I did so in a less checked-out way.
Basically I learned that I was lovable and safe, even in a pattern that felt like the worst thing about me.
And creating that kind of safety opened up room for other hidden parts of me to come to the surface. Embodying the binge was just the beginning.
P.S. I have a couple of spots for private clients and all clients get lifetime access to Free Spirit Academy courses (including Binge Freedom) DM me with questions, book a 15-minute call, or fill out the application through the link below ❤️
Work with Me
Healing doesn't happen in a hurry. The hurry to be healed, integrated, enlightened, free, arrived...it's not as neat and tidy as a lot of self-help books or before-and-after photos might suggest.
It's more like, the harder we try to fix things, the harder our nervous systems work to keep us where things are familiar. Whereas, if we can slow down with ourselves, right in the behavior or with the part of us we hate or struggle with most, we can get to know it. There are often so many unknown steps in a healing process that we couldn't possibly plan them all out, let alone by a certain date. And often, the version of us that exists right here is the one most needing our acceptance and attention.
In this episode, I talk about the desperation and hurry I felt to "fix" my binge and emotional eating. I'll also share about the parts of myself I'd have missed meeting if the "hurry" had worked.
Links:
Work with Rande
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
THE TOP 10 MISTAKES I’VE MADE ON MY HEALING JOURNEY:
Honestly, I cringe a bit using the words "healing" OR "journey" because the internet is so oversaturated with wellness or spiritual teachers. I'm not interested in making "healing" my whole personality, but simultaneously I have always had this deep interest in why things hurt. What any kind of pain, emotional, mental, or physical, is saying. and coming from a background of religious and family trauma, being queer and undiagnosed neurodivergent, and all of the ways those pains spiraled out - into years of an eating disorder, self-harm, depression, anxiety, dissociation, and chronic health symptoms...I became fixated at some point on what it would take to feel free.
So whether I like the term or not, I found myself on a "healing journey" that I would say began when I got fired from my door to door missionary job and started removing myself from my church and toxic family patterns. I was in the thick of struggling with food and my body and had sooooo much accumulated trauma that it was just my "normal"...but taking those steps felt incredible. In fact, something I wish I could have told myself at various points is that there's no "heaven". There's no one point where all the things on all the levels are healed and you live happily ever after. Simultaneously, you don't have to WAIT until all the things on all the levels are healed to feel better.
Life, my body, my general state of being being better than they ever have been. As I thought back, I got to thinking about all the missteps and misunderstandings up until this point and I want to share them with you.
Links:
Work with Rande
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
This podcast is for you if you're feeling unsettled and unsafe right now.
It's for you if being alone, or home all the time, or having your world turned inside-out makes you want to crawl out of your skin.
It's for you if you're like a client of mine who told me this morning that she doesn't want to be stuck in her house with all that food.
This episode is the first class from my 30-Day program Coming Home to Your Body. In the month of August you can use the coupon code COMINGHOME50 to get 50% off the course.
We'll be talking about:
...why you can be "perfect" with your healthy lifestyle and still feel unwell.
...how to build resilience in challenging times.
...the struggle to be 'present', 'mindful', or 'in the flow' no matter how much you meditate or use spiritual and self-care practices.
...the desire to take care of your health while struggling with self-sabotage, compulsive behaviors, and repeating cycles and patterns like overeating but you don't know why.
...when you've talked about your issues and traumas in therapy and feel like you've processed your childhood, but still struggle with anxiety, depression, a constant feeling of frustration or other painful emotions that don't seem to match the present circumstances.
...you've tried to 'just relax' or maybe you KNOW some of the nervous system lingo and you take deep breaths to 'deactivate your parasympathetic nervous system'...and you still just feel like a mess.
...and how to ACTUALLY learn to FEEL, rather than thinking about our feelings, reacting to our feelings, or numbing our feelings.
I hope this episode feels useful and supportive right now ❤️
Links:
Coming Home to Your Body (code COMINGHOME50 for 50% off)
Work with Rande
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
The 15 minute audio you're about to hear is the introduction to my 30-day course Coming Home to Your Body. This is a course that all of my clients get when we start working together but it's also available on it's own or part of the Free Spirit Academy membership. This is easily my favorite course, addressing how the effects of trauma and stress can leave us feeling disconnected and trapped in our bodies. Learning about the autonomic nervous system, as tedious as it seemed on the surface, was huge in my own journey and I try to approach it in a way that's fun, hopeful, practical, relatable, and alongside simple but impactful tools that really make a difference over time. If this audio grabs your attention, there are links in the bio for more on this course.
Links:
Coming Home to Your Body 30-Day Course
Free Spirit Academy Membership
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
Work with Rande
Coming from a challenging childhood, dissociation became my "normal". As I left religion and pursued healing, the dissociation that was once completely disconnected from my body...went internal. Today we're looking at how attempts at embodiment and the pursuit of health can get sticky.
Links:
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
Work with Rande
I love a project. I love working towards something. I think that's pretty human. But for a long time my body was my project. I grew up in a holistic, seventh day adventist, vegetarian home. we used homeopathy and natural remedies and drank carrot juice and ate homemade bread. To this day I LOVE the taste of barley green powder because I have early memories of drinking it as something that would support my health. I wanted to know about all the supplements in the kitchen cupboard and what they would do for me. I wanted to be strong so I ate spinach straight out of the can. There was an early connection with the fact that what you eat has an impact on how you feel.
Simultaneously alongside all this, my relationship with food was kinda weird...
(Listen to this episode for more)
Links:
Free Spirit Academy on Instagram
Work with Rande
The podcast currently has 86 episodes available.