Spiritual Being Visualization by Carol Normandi from our book, “It’s Not About Food”.

Laurelee and Carol talk about what is true recovery and how to get there. 

Carol has been working with eating disorder recovery since 1988 when she co-founded Beyond Hunger with Laurelee Roark, a non-profit that provides support groups and eating disorder prevention education. In 1998 they published their first book It's Not About Food, based on their own recovery and their work with eating disorder clients. They later published Over It: A Teens Guide to Ending the Obsession with Food and Weight, and Body Love Cards. For more information about Carol or Amrita Treatment Center please contact her below.
 Carol Normandi, LMFT, Lic. #29505, 30 N. San Pedro Road, Ste. 265, San Rafael, CA 94903, (415) 488-1104 

Trust is knowing that our bodies are living intelligences, giving us immediate feedback about what does and doesn’t work for us. When we stop viewing our bodies as something we need to manipulate, we can begin seeing them as very wise teachers. When we start to trust our bodies, we can listen and understand what they need. 

Jenny Sederholm, LCSW 

While I have been a Licensed Clinical Social Worker for 14 years, life quieted and expanded for me eleven years ago when I was intensively trained in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I co facilitated a DBT Yearlong program for three years at Kaiser Permanente while training clinicians in DBT skills and principles. 
 
Through DBT, my perceptions were blown to pieces as I practiced intentional awareness, mindfulness and ever present dialectics. I also came to appreciate the functional power of life skills and understanding the purpose of our emotions.

My life journey has since brought me to the Willa Wellness team. Here, I am honored to share with and grow alongside those whom are struggling with eating disorders. Through our work together, we strive to uncover the worn out stories that keep us from the freedoms that are our birthright.

This week’s offering is about creativity. It’s a recording Carol Normandi and I made. It’s on our CD of several visualizations found in our book, It’s Not About Food. We talk about using Creativity as a way to recover from disorder eating and body disturbances. I hope you have as much fun listening to it as we did making it. 

Today’s podcast is about the many miracles of recovery and remembering we are at choice to either accept the miracles or to step around them. Recovery is about opening our hearts to life, to health and to love for ourselves. 
Melanie Larson MA, RDN
Nutrition Director
Willa Wellness Center 
Email: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) 
Website: www.willawellness.com (http://www.willawellness.com/)
Pronouns: she/her/hers

This show is about learning how to set boundaries and being at choice about our own needs. By setting limits or saying no we protect our integrity based on our own truth. 

Kari Floberg is a Marriage and Family Therapist in Northern California. She holds degrees from New York University and the California Institute of Integral Studies.  In her private practice, she works with individuals and groups, offering paths to come home to their true selves and find freedom from food and weight obsession. Bringing 12 years of clinical experience in a variety of settings, plus her lived experience of recovery from an eating disorder, she understands the nonlinear nature of change, with reverence and compassion.  She draws upon expressive arts, attachment theory, parts work, mindfulness and somatic practices for healing. Her previous career as a performing artist, in theater and dance, informs how she shows up in the world; trusting the emergent and creative process.

Carol Normandi and I recorded this visualization about healing the spiritual wound within us. It is found on Pg 128 of our book, It’s Not About Food, 2010, Penquin Putnam, NY, NY.

Carol Normandi and I recorded this visualization about healing the spiritual wound within us. It is found on Pg 128 of our book, It’s Not About Food, 2010, Penquin Putnam, NY, NY.

Holistic means looking at ourselves in a way that includes our entire being, taking each part of ourselves into consideration. When we stop measuring ourselves by how we look, how thin we are, or how much weight we’ve lost, we can begin to embrace all the physical, emotional and spiritual parts of ourselves. We move beyond the goals of having a certain body type and into the integrity and magic of the recovery process itself. 

Sheira Kahn is a Marriage and Family Therapist and fully recovered bulimic. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and the California Institute of Integral Studies. Ms. Kahn taught in the UC Berkeley Extension certificate program in Eating and Weight Disorders for ten years. In the 1990s, she studied inner critic disengagement with Byron Brown and natural eating with Judy Wardell. These discourses became the pillars of her method on ending disordered eating. Later, she trained in couples counseling, where the research on attachment provided the final pieces to the puzzle of understanding disordered eating and how to heal it.

This weeks audio has the visualization on reparenting from the CD Carol Normandi and I recorded after our book, It’s Not About Food” came out. I hope you’ll listen to it and find peace for your own precious child who lives in you still.