ReMothering with Clara Belize Wisner

I touched a tender spot this weekend around not fitting in.

I taught an in person workshop and it was a lovely experience but afterwards I found my mind spinning off into stories like “nobody likes me” and how “nobody can see me.” 

Which is an old and tired story of mine.

It’s a young part of myself that just wants to fit in and be likable. 

Teaching the way I teach, because I truly let people feel all of me, is very vulnerable.

So to teach in this vulnerable way to an entirely new audience, can feel really exposing and it exposed a wounded young one within me. 

This young one is like a hungry ghost for external validation and praise. 

The day after I taught the workshop I was on the phone with a friend and she told me her husband had made some comments about “women being overweight” in our shared community.

My friend didn’t say he said anything about me directly, and I don’t think he did. But because of my tender state I took a lot of it personally (when it wasn’t personal) and felt like the generalized comments included me. 

This is a classic example of how our wounds getting triggered happens. We take something personal that isn’t necessarily. We make a statement mean more than it actually does at face value.

When people make comments about other peoples’ bodies it is either a way to make themselves feel superior or inferior.

It is a really good way to separate themselves. To say “those people are worse/better than me.”

It tells you a lot about their relationship to their own body.

It is a sign they are living on the surface and in the collective programming that we are only as valuable as our physical appearance. 

I am simply not interested in people who are committed to that paradigm. It’s not in service to the world I would like to live in.

I know that there are certain collective “ideals” of beauty, but I do not ascribe to them. I do not allow them to influence me, most of the time. 

I focus on the markers of true health and integrating all parts of myself, which I consider to be true beauty.

However, because I was in an extra tender place having felt a little exposed by teaching an in person workshop and was unexpectedly made aware of this commentary about people’s bodies, a wound in me got even more activated. 

And so I’ve been sitting with what this wounded part of me believes. 

This young, small, wounded part of me believes:

* Being fat is bad, shameful, and shows how irresponsible I am. 

* Being fat is something I have control over on a mental level, and therefore, I am a failure because I am fat. 

* My value comes from my physical appearance. 

* My value comes from the male interpretation of my physical appearance. 

* Other peoples’ opinions of my body should matter to me.

* Having a smaller body makes me more palatable and will make my life easier.  

* There is something wrong with me because my body is bigger. 

* I will never be able to have the things I want in a bigger body.

* People will always judge me when I have a bigger body and that is my problem. 

I could honestly go on and on, this part of me has a lot of programming! 

When I read these over and even as I was writing them, I could feel how deeply untrue these statements are. 

However, I could feel how deeply these statements are programmed into the collective in one way or another. 

When someone comments on another person’s body, as in “Wow! She is so overweight/fat!” most of the time, he or she is operating from the above beliefs.

In our society comments about weight are not a neutral statements, they are value statements.

That is why it activates these beliefs in me. It’s that resonance factor, we cannot be shamed unless we believe we are shameful. 

There must be resonance within us for shame to activate. 

If someone tells you, “You are bad,” and you believe them, you must have a part that believes, “I am bad.” 

If someone tells you, “You are a carrot!” it doesn’t have much charge I’m guessing, unless some part of you believes you’re a carrot. 

So what do I do with this activation? 

What do I do with the part of me that still believes on a very quiet level that because of the size of my body I am devalued and broken?

The part that hears someone make comments about women’s bodies and takes it so personally?

The part that is living her worst nightmare being in the body I am currently living in? 

I most certainly DO NOT stuff her down in to a box and shut her away pretending I’ve moved past her. 

My practice is to call her forth, bring her up, invite her in. 

My practice is to love her.

To get really clear on what her beliefs are. Write them out like I just did, neutrally. To really see, all the way, what I am working with.

I don’t write out the beliefs and go on a pity party for myself or freeze because I’m so afraid of them or go and try to pick fights with anyone who tries to say fat women aren’t valuable.

I don’t beat myself up and call myself a phony because I talk about loving myself on the internet and I have a part that doesn’t love myself. 

No. 

I write them out and have my adult Woman really contemplate whether or not those are beliefs she would like to take on and operate from. 

I don’t say to this wounded part, “You aren’t allowed to have these misogynistic beliefs! What’s wrong with you?!” 

I say, “I see you. These beliefs are in the collective and they can be quite convincing, especially because they are beliefs we operated from for a big portion of our life. I see that these are still subtly hanging out in the background and I’ll just continue to love you here. I’m with you. You don’t have to worry about these things anymore. We operate from different beliefs now.”

It is true that I would like to have less fat on my body. I would like to move more freely through the world. I would like to fit into airplane seats more comfortably. I would like to be able to go to any store and buy the size of clothes that fit me. These are all actually true statements. 

But this does not mean that I am not valuable, desirable, or healthy as my body is now. 

And this is where it can be tricky to parse out the Truth about ourselves from our programming, when it comes to bodies. 

I take incredible care of my body. 

* Over 80% of my meals are cooked at home, from organic, local ingredients, and made with a lot of love and intention. And when I do go out to eat I almost always go to restaurants that have similar values (organic, local etc). 

* I lift heavy weights 3-5 times a week.

* I go on walks daily. 

* I spend a lot of time resting and relaxing mentally and physically. 

* I have a deep spiritual practice and daily devotional practices and feel very connected to my greater purpose. 

* I am active. I play with my toddlers and am outside any moment I can be. 

* I dance daily. 

* I prioritize sleep and I get at least 8 hours of sleep most nights, or at least I am in bed ready to sleep for at least 8 hours each night. 

* I read books that are enjoyable and books that stretch my mind. 

* I spend time building community in person and online. 

* I have hobbies and passions outside work. 

* I feel well used and well loved. 

* The people I surround myself with know me deeply and I feel safe sharing myself with them. 

* My husband and I have the most beautifully supportive and loving relationship. I am wildly in love with him and he is wildly in love with me. We love what we are creating together. 

* I have a strong ovulation and virtually symptom free periods. 

* My hair, skin, nails, and teeth are strong and glowing. 

* I had two incredibly healthy pregnancies and two empowering, fast and natural births. 

* I have good body temperature throughout the day.

* I take supplements sometimes, but do not need any supplements to feel good.

* I feel capable of holding myself through just about anything life could throw at me.

I could honestly go on and on here too..  

This may sound like a long list of arrogant bragging about how good my life is, but I assure you, this is what I needed to do to come back to myself when the story that there is something wrong with me at my current weight started to circle my mind. 

I love myself. I feel really, really good in my body. My body loves me. And I love her.

Would I like some things to be different? I would.

But I also trust exactly where I am at the moment. It’s been a long road to get here and if the only thing that is seemingly “wrong” with me is my weight, well then I’ll trust that it is what my body needs.

And no programming or commentary is going to change that. 

I choose to operate from the beliefs that serve me and my opening. And that is the thing we can all do. 

We can hear the parts of us that believe unhelpful things.

We can really look, neutrally, at what those things are.

We can really see those parts and love them where they are.

We can parse out what actually might be true and then choose which beliefs really serve the reality we would like to create for ourselves. 

This is how we change the collective programming. This is how we become less trigger-able. This is how we value ourselves and love ourselves in an integrated and fully self attuned way.

A podcast episode I did with Nik Toth called Embracing Your Body Beyond Size I did recently felt like a beautiful compliment to this peice so I’m linking it. It’s just 35 minutes and just a great deepening into this thread.

FED | A 6 Month Journey Into Deep Feminine Nourishment is starting in Mid Septebmer (yes, I keep pushing the date back, but I keep feeling I need a little more time). Send me a message to set up a call to see if it would be a good fit.

HomeBody | The Container | two HomeBody practices per month for 4 months minimum along with a Mighty Networks group for writing digestion and coaching from me. $111/month. HomeBody is a like a yoga class for body love. It is a chance to come and commune with your body and what she is telling you. It includes self massage, lymph, and fascial work. Send me a message to sign up.

Nutrition Deep Dive | A deep dive into your body and what she needs on a foundational, mineral, vitamin, and nourishment level. More details here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

The times I feel victimized by motherhood are few and far between these days. 

The first year of my oldest daughter’s life I was victimized constantly. 

I got pregnant very unexpectedly with my youngest daughter when my oldest was just 5 months old. 

This is when the victimization of motherhood took on an almost moment to moment frequency. 

Almost every second I was hit by another wave of blame of my husband or jealousy of my past childless self or self pity because of how much was now required of me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no breaks.

Once I got in alignment with my second pregnancy, my morning sickness subsided and Alma started to eat solids and was not needing to breastfeed as much, I had a sweet spot in my second and third trimester where I remember feeling really smooth and connected to the beauty of Motherhood. 

However, once Maya was born the ever present victimization came roaring back. 

How was I supposed to have two little babies, 14 months and infant, dependent on me? When would I ever get sleep? Or read? Or shower? Or rest? How are you supposed to cook dinner when both babies need you to hold them, or walk to the car, or go to the grocery store? 

Put a global pandemic as the cherry on top and I was in a pretty good position to be victimized for life. 

That first year of being a family of four was by far the hardest year of my life. I was in it. Every single day. No rest. No breaks. 

If you ascribe to the diagnosis of new moms with mental health disorders (I do not, I just call it having your entire existence rerouted and reassigned while your physical body, nervous system, and hormones go through more changes than puberty); I had postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression and severe postpartum insomnia.

Having two babies back to back was like a marathon rapid descent into Motherhood. 

Quite honestly, mothers have every reason to feel victimized in a society that doesn’t value them, doesn’t support them, and doesn’t revere them for the absolute portals of creation they are. 

But victimization isn’t something that actually serves a Woman’s power or opening. 

It is not something a Woman in her true and mature Mother feels. 

Because The Mother is a creator and a creator would never be victimized by their creation. 

The part of a woman that feels victimized by motherhood is a young part.

It’s the part that is in denial of her Creative Power.

It’s the part that isn’t willing to take responsibility for Creation. 

In this way, victimization actually feeds the society that doesn’t value mothers. 

Being victimized because society doesn’t value you is essentially saying: this society has power over me and I cannot change it. 

But..you can. We can. I did. 

As I have slowly and steadily looked at every nook and cranny of my victimization over these past 3 years I have seen all the places I put myself last. 

All the places I haven’t centered myself. 

All the places I abandoned myself.

All the places I didn’t communicate clearly what I needed or wanted. 

All the places I sacrificed myself without anyone even really asking me to but because it was what I had been modeled. 

I saw all these places and I, baby step by tiny baby step, said:

No, I will do this a different way. 

A way that venerates my well-being. 

A way that upholds my values. 

A way that threads fullness, vibrancy, radiance and beauty into our family. 

A way that is rooted in the Earth and what She teaches me about reciprocity. 

A way that is guided by the connection to my pussy, womb, heart and voice. 

When Women truly rise to the invitation that Motherhood is and claim their worth, claim their power, and claim their Knowing, our reality will quickly arrange itself in such a way that the Mother is valued, revered and honored.

In my world on a very real, practical and foundational level: 

Mothers are valued. 

Mothers are centered and The Center. 

Mothers are cared for. 

Mothers are fed and satiated and full. 

The counsel and wisdom of Mothers is taken in and heard. 

No big decisions are made without first consulting and hearing from the depth of the Mother’s body.

My family’s bodies are nourished on every level.

Our number one priority for our family is wholeness, above money, productivity, accolades, success, external validation, and social virtuous optics.

When it’s been a long day with two toddlers and I feel the sneaking thoughts of victimization about how little time I have or how much laundry I have to do start to wiggle in, I turn towards that victimized part and blast her with some of my Mother love. I hold her while I hold my babies. I tell her she heard, seen, and loved.

But she does not drive my life or make decisions, or require anyone else’s validation but my own.

Most the time the feeling and thoughts of victimization dissolve into a juicy, pulsating, and fulfilled sensation in my womb.

The thoughts turn to: what a gift it is to be so well used.

I couldn’t imagine an any more worthwhile task than being with these little human souls as they come into their bodies.

What a gift it is to serve at this level. To Shepard these ancient souls of my daughters. To feed, clothe, hold, bathe, and care for them.

To get to act out on such a tangible and concrete level my devotion to Life and living itself.

The satisfaction I get from being a Mother is really hard to do justice with words and I love words.

It’s like eating a big meal, outside, at a beautiful table, with close friends you love.

It is gratifying on a soul level.

It is perfection.

It is the best thing that I’ve been done or will ever do.

It is everything.

And I am overcome with gratitude, which feels like the most surrendered and deep love.

One inquiry for you to sit with or journal with if you feel activated by this piece:

Where am I more committed to my victim story than my creator story?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

There is definitely a lot of nuance and bio-individuality when it comes to how much and how frequently a body needs to eat properly raised animal products. 

There can be quite a lot of variation from person to person and even throughout different seasons of the same person’s life. 

However, eating nose to tail.. eg eating muscle meats but also organ meats, bone marrow, cuts of meat that include bone, cartilage etc, will always be what humans evolved eating and therefore the most appropriate diet for a thriving, healthy human body, mind and spirit. 

I believe eating in a way that goes against our evolutionary biology because of an intellectual ideal can definitely be defined as an eating disorder. 

Here are the two most common arguments I get when I make this statement about veganism and vegetarianism being eating disorders: 

* “But I see people who are vegetarian and vegan who look healthy and have healthy babies!”

* “I just don’t want to contribute to the suffering of animals or put their suffering into my body.”

I think when we see someone who is vegan/vegetarian “thriving” there are two pieces going on here. 

1) They are not actually healthy at all.

It’s just you don’t see them often enough or aren’t close enough to them to see or hear about their health issues.

Just because someone looks healthy definitely doesn’t mean they are.

We, as a society, are unhealthy. So many people believe that it’s just the normal aging process to experience things like thyroid issues, mental health decline, autoimmunity, have your hair falling out, sleep poorly, feeling exhausted, premature aging of skin or having hair thin out and stop growing.

These things may be common but they are not normal.

Being thin and looking healthy definitely does not make you healthy.

It’s also very rare these days that I see fully healthy babies or children.

If a child has food sensitivities, dental issues, ADHD/ADD, sensory problems, doesn’t sleep well, is constantly getting sick, they are not what I would define as a healthy child no matter what that child may look like.

And yes, I would bet on vegans and vegetarians health issues exacerbating greatly the older they get. The depletion will become more and more obvious. 

2) If vegan and vegetarian people really do seem to be thriving I would say that these people may have a generational surplus.

Meaning their grandmothers and great-grandmothers were exceptionally well fed from ancestral foods and they are benefiting from that mitochondrial inheritance.

If they continue eating a vegan/vegetarian diet they will not pass down their mitochondrial health to their children. 

The next generation will see more things like: airway issues, food sensitivities, more injuries, getting sick more often, hormonal imbalances, autism, mental illness etc. 

If there is anything I want to drive home it is: your health status is not only coming from your choices but the choices of your mother and her mother. 

Our matter is quite literally built from another woman’s body. 

Feeding yourself and being well nourished is a responsibility to the legacy you create through your body.

There is also so much more that goes into healthy mitochondria and cellular metabolism than food. 

Light exposure, non native EMF exposure, connection to Earth’s electromagnetic fields, and just the frequency/emotional/mental state of the people and environments we hang out with and in can greatly effect our cellular health.

It’s possible to say that if someone were really tapped in and tuned into good light hygiene, electromagnetic fields, surrounded themselves with healthy people and healthy environment and tended to their frequency and they somehow still wanted to be a vegetarian (this does not apply to veganism, as you cannot thrive without at least some animal products), and they put the significant work in to getting all the essential protein/nutrients they needed on a daily basis, they may be able to avoid depletion, but it would require so much more effort than simply eating properly raised animals. 

This second argument I receive, the “I don’t want to eat suffering,” argument is actually another reason why I say vegan/vegetarianism are eating disorders.

To say eating animals is synonymous with the suffering of animals is immature and ignorant to the actual ways of Nature.

It is a fantasy and denial of death. And to live in fantasy and denial of death will never lead to a fully integrated, mature, fulfilled life. 

I say vegetarianism/veganism are eating disorders because across the board I see people who eat this way are disembodied and in denial of death, which is part of life.

So it’s also effecting them on a frequency level.

Nature is not devoid of pain and suffering. Have you seen nature videos of lions hunting gazelles? Have you seen eagles grabbing fish out of the water? 

When we deny the existence of pain or death in our lives we are not doing ourselves any favors.

We ultimately cause ourselves more suffering because we are not capable of meeting our inevitable pain with acceptance, but instead fight it and want it to go away. 

As an example, we have the situation where more and more people want to be vegan so we are growing more and more mono crops like soy. The sheet number of small rodents and insects that are killed because of the habitat destruction caused new fields creation and spraying pesticides on those fields actually creates more bloodshed from a “vegan” diet than just killing a cow raised on pasture would. 

The idea that you could not eat meat and therefore cull some of the suffering of animals is simply immature and ignorant. 

It’s a denial of the animal body and the greater whole that we are all a part of.

The whole that requires birth and death.

Factory farming and pumping animals full of hormones and keeping them in tiny cages, is definitely creating undue suffering.

I do not condone nor support factory farming in any way, shape or form. 

I am constantly espousing the use of properly raised animal products and sharing about the lengths I go to procure and use products only from properly raised animals. 

I only eat and use products from animals that have good, happy and healthy lives.

Eating unhealthy animals is not healthy and I will never claim that it is. 

The whole system has to be healthy. 

That is what it means to honor life and death. 

But a cow having a beautiful life on pasture and then killing it in a fast and humane way, thanking the animal and eating the entire animal, bones, organs and all, that is a beautifully reverent practice. And it is in accordance with Nature Herself.

Death is required for life to continue living. 

Death and life are two sides of the same coin.

This idea that “I don’t want that suffering in my body so I won’t eat meat” is disembodied and simply unrealistic. 

It is immature. A little girl’s fantasy.

A slice of the rainbows-and-unicorns-denial-of-the-darkness-pie of new age “spirituality”.

A version of the purity-based, masculinized, “transcendent” idea that the body itself and it’s animal needs are dirty and distasteful.

It’s the product of a society that doesn’t raise, butcher, hunt, grow, process their own food and meat.

It’s the product of a society that doesn’t value the earthy, dirty, bloody, messiness that is birth itself. 

It’s the product of a society that doesn’t value humanity, actually. 

It’s the s**t and piss and puss side of the human experience. 

My practice is to honor it all. The light and the dark. 

Because I am it all. And it is all happening through me. 

And to deny any of it would be to deny myself and my own humanity. 

And I believe this acceptance of two sides of Nature is what is required for a healthy, thriving body, mind and soul. 

I am currently holding connection calls for my flagship program FED | A 6 month journey into deep feminine nourishment. If this piece of writing calls you and that could mean makes you deeply uncomfortable but undeniably intrigued, send me a message. I am ready to serve the part of you that feels the call to this work. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

The thing no one wants to hear in the health and wellness world is: it depends.

People want hard and fast rules.

They want to be able to say this is healthy and this is not.

They want to jump on a bandwagon and have it be the bandwagon they are on for life.

There are very few rigid, definitive statements about what is healthy I can make at this point in my over a decade experience in the world of nutrition.

One is: properly raised animal products are necessary for a stable endocrine, digestive, cardiovascular and nervous system.

You cannot not eat animal products and thrive to the level you could if you did.

Humans evolved eating animal products.

You wouldn’t expect a wolf to thrive if you fed it a vegetarian diet and so the idea that humans could thrive on a diet that is not evolutionary appropriate to them is just insane and shows us how far we have moved away from nature that we have so many people believing eating more veggies is the answer to their health issues.

Do we need to make sure to eat animal products that are organic, pasture raised, grass fed and finished, etc, yes, absolutely.

Eating unhealthy animals force fed diets they are not evolved for will not make you, a human animal, healthy either.

This brings me to the other thing I can definitively say makes people healthier and that is reestablishing a connection to nature.

This could be waking up with the sunrise every morning, going outside and bringing your body into closer connection with the natural cycles of daylight and dark.

It could be making friends with a local farmer and buying some vegetables from her.

It could be going on a walk every day and opening your body to receiving whatever is there:  birdsong, wind, and trees.

It could be going outside when it’s less than perfect weather out and just letting your body commune with the elements.

Reestablishing your connection to Nature could be so many things, and any of them will most definitely make you healthier.

Other than these two generalized things, everything else is context.

This is where taking responsibility and running health information/recommendations through your individual system comes in hard and fast.

Here are some of the biggest places where I see people jumping on health trends without actually understanding the context:

Saunas and Cold Plunges:

They could be really beneficial or extremely detrimental depending on the state of your body’s nourishment/depletion and your body’s resiliency to stress.

Mostly, I see women who are over stressed, depleted of vitamins and minerals, with zero excess energy/redox potential doing cold plunges or saunas thinking that they are helping their body when they are actually stressing their body out even more.

These are inherently stressful practices. If you are burning through minerals or your cortisol is super dysregulated cold plunges and long sweaty sauna sessions will only further deplete you.

However, cold therapy and especially infrared saunas can also such amazing therapeutic tools.

It’s not an all or nothing either. It’s about finding where the benefits start and end in your unique and individual body at this season of your life.

For example, if I did a whole body cold plunge it would send me into a dysregulated state I would be dealing with for days after.

However, I have been doing face ice baths and feeling a lot of benefit from just that. Same with saunas. I can do about 20-30 minutes of infrared sauna with great results, anything more and it ramps up my stress response so much it makes it hard to get back to ground level in a reasonable amount of time and therefore increases my depletion.

Fasting

The science people report to have around the benefits of fasting/intermittent fasting is reductionist and cherry picked at best. It demonstrates an oversimplification and total disregard for the differences in male and female physiology.

Fasting is stressful on the body and if your body is in fight/flight most of the time fasting is only going to further drive that state in.

It may give you a “high” and make you feel good/loose weight initially but ultimately unless you are a man with a very resilient and well nourished system just a normal period of fasting over night while you sleep is enough fasting each day. .

I have seen certain therapeutic contexts where fasting was very supportive of things like weight-loss and blood sugar regulation in men.

Coffee

Coffee and caffeine are like revving the engine on a car.

If you don’t have gas in the tank it’s not going to be good or helpful.

However, if you do have gas in the tank, then it can be totally fun to move a little faster.

There are a lot of medicinal benefits of good quality, mold tested, organic, high grade coffee drank in combination with other nutrients and after or at least with food.

Some options are making sure to never drink coffee black but always with one or a few of these: raw cane sugar, raw cream, egg yolk, collagen, colostrum.

Drinking coffee can also support binding inactive iron and increasing the master antioxidant glutathione which supports the liver.

When you do not have gas in the tank or you drink coffee by itself, on an empty stomach, caffeine spikes your blood sugar which increases stress hormones and decreases insulin sensitivity. It taxes the liver and depletes glycogen stores.

When you drink good quality coffee with raw cream and cane sugar and after you’ve eaten a good sized meal, it can be very supportive to the liver.

It’s all about the context.

The context of our body is something a practitioner can help you unwind, but the ultimate rule is that you are your own best resource.

I don’t believe we will ever feel healthy if we are constantly looking to someone else to tell us what is good for us.

Each and every human has a unique set of circumstances, health histories, ancestral heritage and perception of stressors in their current season of life.

Context is everything.

You cannot expect a practitioner, even one that does their due diligence collecting as much information about your body as they possibly can to understand the whole context of what it is like to be you.

You are the only one that can do that.

You are the one that needs to run every piece of health information you receive through your body and feel how true it feels for you.

You are the one that needs to be willing to practice and experiment and move through some trial and error when it comes to healing protocols, lifestyle changes, and dietary shifts.

You are the one that needs to take the responsibility for the choices you make around your health. Period.

This is a huge piece of my body of work.

In FED, my 6 month journey into deep feminine nourishment, we start to understand our body’s history and story more clearly.

We start to understand where our habits, aversions, preferences came from and which ones are serving us.

We start to relate to our needs differently and start to really see and understand what we need to feel nourished and fed on all levels.

We begin to lovingly unwind why we continually make choices that do not serve our well being.

In my nutrition deep dives, I help you see your body story to the best of my ability and make very personalized recommendations after we take it all in together.

Then, you do the work.

You put the recommendations that feel best for you into practice and see what happens.

And along with my guidance and expertise, you start to see and create the path you want to take toward a more integrated, healthy you.

In HOME BODY we simply sit with our neutral attention on our bodies in a ceremonial field and start to see what opens.

I guide you in HOME BODY as well but it is you and only you who has the experience and knows what the experience means and what it is guiding you towards.

I am simply a guide who has made it my life’s work to be an example of how to rebuild, retouch, and remember the overflowing well of inner resources I have access to and how I can to cultivate those resources, and therefore be the permission you need to do this for yourself as well.

We’ve all heard the saying: the dose makes the poison.

Coffee can be good for you, and it cannot be.

Running could be good for you; and it cannot be.

Having a baby could be wildly depleting for you, and it could be wildly generative.

You could need to be really rigid and strict with what you eat and you could also need to let go and just eat whatever.

The context is what matters in these situations.

And only you can really know that for yourself.

Ways to Work with me:

FED 6 month group journey starts the end of August. Message me if you feel called and we’ll do a call to feel into if it’s a good fit.

Nutrition Deep Dive, 3 sessions diving deeply into your unique vessel and its story. You can message me if you feel called for this.

HOME BODY a 2 hour online ceremony honoring your body as your home. A self massage, lymph and fascial work practice and guided visulalization that helps you tune into what your body is asking for.

This month’s HOME BODY OS happening this Sunday, July 30th, 9-11am PDT. $44. This is a perfect way to come and taste my medicine if you’re feeling called but not sure where to start.

Sign up here: https://buy.stripe.com/14k8wF6j8cui9pu4gp

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

If there is one thing and one thing only I want to transmit it is: reverence for the sacredness of life.

This is my deepest and most compelling practice.

Reverence for the sacredness of life sounds “good”. 

It sounds really, really “nice” and if you haven’t actually practiced that much with it you might even say to yourself, “oh yes! Life is sacred. I know that,” and think about a baby being born or doing yoga. 

But the truth is the practice of revering the sacredness of life is something you must do every moment you are alive. 

It requires more humility than most people are willing to have. 

True humility is active surrender. 

It is not some optical illusion of self depreciation. 

It is not putting yourself last. 

It is not pretending that you don’t yearn for the accolades. 

It is not “good girl/boy” programming. 

True humility is actually quite the opposite; it is seeing yourself as the little droplet of God you are. 

It is letting the bigger wave carve you because you Know where you came from and what you are here for. 

It is caring for yourself so deeply and so tenderly as if you saw yourself as Who You Truly Are. 

There are so many places the ego could grab on to this information and make it mean something about you. 

You are not better than or different or worse than anyone else. And you are entirely worthy of whatever is being asked of you.

You are worth the work, the food, the partnership, the friendship, the money, the beauty, the support, the love. 

And this is what the practice of revering the sacredness of life is. 

Focusing on the simple, mundane, and every day pieces of life with a deep and humble respect. 

This is my practice. I don’t care how it looks or I look. It’s about how it feels. 

I am very well aware I don’t look like your typical “new age light worker” and that doesn’t matter one bit to me, because I know how much I practice and how deep I practice this message of true life reverence. 

If you’re paying attention, you can see that me not looking the part is a big piece of the medicine available here.

How do I revere the sacredness of life everyday?

I cook simple, intentional food from ingredients that I align with the sources of. 

I say thank you to all my water and food. 

I wake with the sun and sing songs to the earth and my body 

I touch my body from a place of pure love every single day. 

I take care of my body by listening to her intently every day, in every moment. 

I love my family fiercely.

I protect my children with everything in my body and let the Knowing of Life lead me as far as how to raise them; not fear. 

I clean and do the chores of home with deep gratitude and feel the intentional energy I bring to every nook and cranny of my home. And I am honest with myself about what I can and cannot do. 

I tend to the land we live on. 

I spend time in the quiet; listening with my whole body to what Life wants of me.

I go to bed early.

My mornings and my evenings are slow and full of nature and connection.

My interactions with humans are honest. I do not morph or change for anyone and my energy is almost always steady and true. 

I am always, always listening, with my being, and making adjustments.

I watch how I speak to myself and the many parts and players of my inner world do not drive me. The Truth does. I mother the parts. I care for the parts. I tend to the parts. But the Truth is the conductor of my inner orchestra.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what the world on a whole needs. 

Not from a place of panic or worry.

Not from a place of trying to rescue the world or anyone in it (which would not be reverent in any way shape or form). 

But simply a practice of; what is really going to be of service here, in this place, at this time? 

We are moving into a period of time where the internal is more important than what we see on the external. 

We think that we need to make these huge, massive, externally oriented changes. 

But the Truth is they will not come from the outside in.

We are moving into a period of human evolution where the energy with which we make a cup of tea, cook a meal, or sit in silence with our loved ones is just as important as what we “do” in the world.

What’s important is how we be in the world.

Because it’s an energetic shift that is required right now.

The new systems, infrastructure, governments, and institutions will come; but they must be born of the energy of reverence for the sacredness of life, not power, domination, control, patronizing and “saving” people as they have been. 

And so this is how I am of service, by waking with the sun and singing to my body and the earth. 

..By loving myself and my family so deeply that I could and would never put money or material things above them. 

..By making a cup of tea with so much reverence, sourcing the herbs from aligned farmers and wild crafters, thanking, filtering, and structuring my water, and moving with care and intention in the preparation, that this cup of tea becomes an actual prayer. 

The way we Live matters. It matters so much. 

The everyday is not some sort of slog to get through so that we can do the real work.

It is the work. 

We have an infinite amount of opportunities to serve the world in single day alone. 

Rest now, my friend. You are doing the work. 

Allow yourself to feel what is there. 

Let yourself love it. 

Let yourself see yourself for what you really are. 

And your life will become the service. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been really on this thread of the lie of conventional beauty standards.

They are, most certainly, a lie.

The idea that changing how you look could change how you are is a lie.

If you don’t love yourself now, as you are, you will not love yourself 10, 20, 40, or 100 pounds lighter.

If you don’t take care of yourself now, as you are, you will not take care of yourself later.

Your physical appearance does not dictate your internal experience or even your external opportunities.

Our minds and culture make up a lot of sneaky work arounds to this very cut and dry truth.

You can only change the way you are to yourself now. Right now. In this moment. The ends do not; ever, justify the means, when it comes to your body.

I know miserable, desperate, self punishing, thin people and I know miserable, desperate, self punishing fat people.

I know a thin, conventionally gorgeous woman who shared with me she doesn’t believe she can find a truly loving, committed relationship or follow her inner calling until she looses weight.

She is literally putting her life on hold until she reaches some sort of external ideal.

I know a fat, average looking woman who makes millions of dollars and regularly has hot, satisfying sex with very, very good looking men (yes, multiple).

There are no rules as to what you can have based on your physical attributes.

Humans are incredible creators and everything is energy. If you understand that, it doesn’t matter what you look like.

You will glow from the inside out. Your energy will pull in exactly what is true for you. Your eyes will shine like diamonds and life will love you, and you will feel its love.

The not so secret secret here is that it already is, you just have to surrender.

These things are true and whatever stories you have about your limitations because of your physical attributes are just that: stories. Not truth.

However, I do feel like it’s in service to be clear about a nuance here: My body has more fat on it than I want it to or than my body really wants to have on Her long term.

So I want to unwind this a bit.

It seems like there are two camps when it comes to weight:

* You need to lose weight. Pretty much everything health-wise depends on weight and if you’re overweight you should be ashamed and work really hard to change it, by whatever means necessary. If you are fat: You are less than. Gross. Undesirable. Broken.

* Fat is good. Let’s celebrate fat bodies and make fat sexy. Let’s normalize fatness. Fat positive.

If I had to choose one of these, of course, I would choose the second.

However, the second one just doesn’t actually feel completely embodied or true.

I do believe there is a lot of variation in bodies.

I do believe some people are simply made to have more fat on their bodies.

I want to be clear that I am talking about body fat specifically, not weight.

I have zero attachment to weight for myself or any one else.

You could weigh 250 lbs and have a low body fat percentage if you had a lot of muscle. You could weigh 115 lbs and have a high body fat percentage if you had very little muscle.

When I say I have excess body fat, I am not saying I am “overweight” because that’s not my concern. When the focus is on weight you put at risk the weight of muscle, organs and bone. All very important substances in the body.

I also know that women need to be around 30% body fat to be fertile, which a lot of rigid people and women might consider “overweight”, but could also look vastly different on different frames depending on muscle mass.

A woman that is 30% body fat would never have a “six pack” or a totally flat stomach. These are simply not attributes of a womanly, fertile body.

For your body to feel safe enough to bring life into this world it needs to know you’ve got some cushion.  You will never see muscles or bone rippling and jutting out underneath the surface of someone with this amount of body fat.

There are always outliers to these rules, but this is generally true.

Grown ass women tend to be soft around the edges and curvy.

There is a certain hormonal maturing that happens in the female form around 25-35 (child bearing years for most). Hips get wider. Butt gets fuller. Breasts get bigger (and possibly a touch saggier). There is a strength, well-used, and rootedness that comes with it. This is the body of the Mother.

There is another change like this at menopause.

These are natural and good.

Just like puberty; they are transitions into new phases of life for a woman.

This is not celebrated by society. And this is not at all what I am talking about when I say excess body fat.

When I say there is more fat on my body than I want; I’m not being nit picky, I mean there is legitimately excess fat on my body that impairs my movement and feels like more than my body wants to have.

This is not about my vanity or my egoic ideas of what I should look like.

And on another level, I trust that where my body is right how is exactly where it needs to be to regain trust and a sense of safety.

I am deeply in my process.

I am not frantically trying new diets or starving myself or attempting to work out super hard. There is no force. There is no abandoning of self going on. There is no desperation to change my body.

However, I am following the breadcrumbs and educating myself and finding experts I trust for now.

I am taking the space and time to listen to my body deeply and spend time feeling what she is communicating with me.

I am deeply in the practice of doing everything I can to help my body feel safe, nourished, and help her regain more precise control over her energy management system.

I’ve gotten to this place of neutrality and aligned action with my body by first accepting what is true about my body with zero judgment.

This is the piece that the “fat positive” movement glosses over. The sobriety of really feeling what the truth is if your body does have significant excess fat stored on it.

It’s one thing to say: “Fat is beautiful!” And it’s another to say, “I am beautiful no matter what and I am committed to listening to my body and her symptoms.”

To stay with your body, at its pace, through the shitstorm of society’s opinions about your body is not an easy pose.

Saying “fat is beautiful” is not necessarily staying with your body. In fact, it may be smoothing over something that is in need of more attention and is quite uncomfortable to be with.

We cannot transcend anything without first approving of it.

This does not mean we have to “like” it, on an egoic level. Trust me, my ego doesn’t like my body right now, but my ego doesn’t get a say here. I’ve had plenty of practice down that road and it’s not for me.

This does not mean we have to condone what got us here. But we do have to understand it.

We must have approval for where we are, now.

And part of true approval is sobriety with ourselves and what we actually need in the moment we are in.

Approval requires we don’t bulldoze quieter, smaller parts of ourselves.

True Approval requires slowing all the way down to the pace of our body and listening.

True self care is slow, intentional and almost painfully sober because it requires we approve of ourselves exactly where we currently are, in hard reality, no polish, no veneer, just true, honest love of self.

This is really the first and only step you can take towards a life that lives in accordance and in relationship with your body and its true healing and health.

I have two offerings that come up as I write this:

HOME BODY | Friday; June 16. 1-3pm PDT. $44. An online ceremony honoring your body as your home. Come slow down, touch and commune with your body. This is like a yoga class for body reverence and connection. Come join us.

FED | A 6 month Group Journey into Deep Feminine Nourishment. This is the foundational program of my work. This is the home of my guidance around food, body and internal resourcing. If you feel called, follow the link to get on the waitlist and I will be reaching out soon to schedule connection calls. We start in late July.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been deep in the nutrition and holistic wellness world for over a decade. If you count my obsession with food and exercise since I was about 13, it’s been well over half my life I’ve been trying some sort of diet or attempting to manipulate my body in some way. 

A lot of it in my younger years was fueled by a sort of self loathing and desperation to change how I looked and how I was perceived externally. But I’m not blind to the truth that lived in all my experiences with my body.

I don’t regret any little side road I traveled down in this realm because it has all worked its way into my embodied wisdom around nourishment.

Mistakes are actually the best teachers.

I have made it my career and work in this world to study biology, vitamins, minerals, enzymatic reactions, women’s hormones, the psychology of eating, movement, mitochondrial function, bio-engertics etc.

I have also been through many fads and trends. 

I have ran, and sometimes dragged myself, through the obstacle course of diets, new “science” rabbit holes and nutrition dogma. 

I have flip flopped around as far as what I recommend to clients and what I personally follow as far my own nourishment philosophy. 

I have jumped off and on a number of bandwagons. 

I have been a hardcore evangelist of diets like paleo and low carb, giving my whole family books like “Why We Get Fat” by Gary Taubes and “The 21 Day Sugar Detox” by Diane Sanfillipo. 

I have claimed that I would never again, in my entire life!!, eat gluten.

I have been anorexic and orthorexic for many years of my life. 

I have been vegetarian, vegan, and raw vegan. 

I have been deeply afraid of food and, inevitably, life. 

If you know anything about Human Design I am a 1/3 profile, which is also called, “The Seeker of Truth and Knowledge.” 

I am most definitely a seeker.

I follow the threads that interest me to the very, very end, almost obsessively. 

And in true three line fashion, I make a lot of mistakes, or the kinder way to put it; I undergo a lot of trial and error. 

I know this and even though sometimes I can feel a little exasperated by myself, I love this about myself deeply.

However, there is one thing comes back again and again, through all the iterations of wellness practices I’ve experimented with, and that is the concept of what I’ll call: evolutionary mismatch. 

I can say definitively that one reason there is so much disease and dis-ease in humanity is because humans are living farther and farther away from the way we evolved to live.

Our bodies evolved through millennia in congruence with nature and the earth’s rhythms.

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879, less than 150 years ago. An amount of time that is a speck of dust in the timeline of human evolution. 95% of human history occurred before the advent of farming, which was 10,000 year ago, for example.

There is a common sense piece of nourishment and understanding of the human body that seems to be overlooked far too often. We are living in a world and society that has zero regard and reverence for the basic, common place needs of the human body: good quality food, sunshine, and time spent near and in communion with the earth.

There are people still debating whether or not glyphosate is bad for the earth. There are people still saying the organically grown food is no different than conventionally grown produce laden with chemical pesticides. 

Of course these things are bad for us and for the earth. There is no question.

And so are things like processed food, vegan/vegetarian diets, super loud sounds, non native EMF exposure, fluoride in our tap water, and screens, to name just a few. Because our bodies evolved with zero of these things.

They are foreign and invasive and stressful to our bodies on a biological level. 

The concept of evolutionary mismatch is simple, but not always easy to take in. 

It can be very easy to see this and throw your hands up and say, well we’re fucked. And I feel you. Seeing what I see and understanding what I understand about the body it’s hard to believe anyone is alive.

Humans are incredibly adaptable but I do believe we are nearing the end of our adaptability as far as how much evolutionary mismatch our physical bodies can tolerate. 

My generation is the first generation in over 100 years to have a shorter life expectancy than our parents. My children’s generation is worse off. We are not collectively healthy in any way, shape or form.

This is not a superlative. It’s fact. What we are doing is not working well for us. 

The medical industrial complex isn’t working for us and the sooner you can jump off the hamster wheel of the big pharma cartel, the better. Stop trusting anyone else’s word over your own body’s knowing. Step one of all this is taking the responsibility for your health into your own heart.

Getting super restrictive with our food and cutting out entire food groups because they’re “inflammatory” or “bad for you” is just nonsense.

Our bodies are inflamed and struggling but it is not because you’re eating regular old sugar or dairy. It’s because you’re removed from your food sources, the sun, the earth, the dirt. It’s because you don’t cook and take pleasure in your own nourishment and you’re chronically stressed by your externally oriented, need to be externally validated, go-go-go life. 

Some people’s solution here is to revert back to a time before the internet and cell phones. To reject all technology and “capitalist culture.” There may be truth here for some people. There is something so healing about coming back to the land and the basics of slow living. 

However, going backwards is never really an option, no matter how badly we wish we could. 

This “let’s go back to the way it was before” story has a little bit too much f**k you energy for me to be on totally board with it. There’s too much fight in it. 

I don’t fight with the collective energies and pain bodies because that just gives them more energy. I stand firmly in the reality I desire to live in with my body, heart and soul. I stand in my Knowing of the more beautiful world we are building.

For me, I love to think about the present and how I can work with the current world and my miraculous body and where I can heal the divide between the evolutionary mismatch in my own life.

One thing I know for sure is, my body is my home and I am committed to her.

This day and age is full of evolutionary mismatch, but there is also a resurgence of something ancient we are tapping into as a collective in a whole new way. Charles Eisenstine has called this resurgence a “new and ancient story.” 

Within my body’s very DNA there is a map back to health. We have everything we need in front of us. It’s not as complicated as it seems. 

I just have to let my body get back to a place where she isn’t putting out fires constantly and can sink back into a regulated orientation and then I need to listen to Her, with my whole being.  

Humans are meant to be in nature. To live in community. To feel connected to the earth and to other people. We are actually quite simple creatures.

There is so much reverence in recognizing our simplicity.

My body is electric as well. She is made of atoms, which are made of electrons, protons and neutrons. Those atoms make up minerals, elements, which came from the stars and the cosmos. Minerals fuel enzymes and enzymatic reactions which fuel hormones. Hormones gives our body messages about what to “do.” 

Our bodies’ conductivity determines our ability to use energy freely and easily. The less conducive you are, the more inflammation and less energy you will have. To become more conductive we need electrons and a certain critical mass of minerals. 

We get electrons from good quality food, light, and the earth. 

We lose electrons from artificial food, exposure to toxic chemicals, excess stress, artificial light, not being outside, not moving our bodies, sitting in front of screens and non native EMF exposure.

Our bodies are absolutely capable of living in this world. We just need to be aware and be committed to fulfilling our bodies’ most basic needs.

Ways I Come Back Into Evolutionary Congruence with My Body 

* Eat an ancestral diet (properly raised animal protein, raw and minimally processed dairy, bone broths, saturated fats, properly prepared grains and legumes, seasonal produce, organ meats, lots of eggs). All cultivated as close to home as possible. Our foods hold light codes. It’s very confusing to be eating food that comes from hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you currently live. Understand that, if you’re body is in a nourished and not super stressed place, you need to eat like this 80% of the time, the other 20% you can have fun.

* Move my body everyday from a sense of playfulness and internal desire. Weight train with a program consistently. 

* Spend as much time as possible outdoors.

* Walk barefoot on the earth and grass for at least 45 minutes a day if it’s warm enough.

* Watch sunrise and sunset most days.

* Make sure to get at least 20 minutes of UVA light in my eyes and on my skin each day

* Do not expose myself to blue light after sunset and only have red lights or candlelight. 

* Go to bed before 10pm.

* Minimize exposure to fluorescent and blue light all together. 

* Always having my phone screen on red, only switching it to normal if I absolutely need to.

* Putting phone on airplane mode whenever I can

* No bluetooth headphones/avoid bluetooth anything 

* Having phone in a EMF defender case at all times 

* Not having my phone on me when I don’t need to

* Not wearing electronic “wearables” (apple watch, oura ring, fit bit, etc)

* Wearing blue blocker glasses after sunset

* Having Iris software on my computer screen that adjusts the blue light to match the light outside

* Putting timers on all plug ins for our wifi and all the electronics in our house that have bluetooth/wifi connection/or are on standby for power (like desktop computers and TVs) so that power is cut to them during the hours of 10pm-6:30am. 

* Wear grounding shoes 

* Using a grounding mat while I work on the computer

* Using EMF mitigation device in the house 

* Setting up non native EMF mitigation device grids around our land and home 

* Drinking and cooking with only filtered, structured, sun activated and remineralized water 

* Not wearing sunglasses or sunscreen.

***This is not a list to make you feel like you need to go and copy it immediately. I have built up these practices and lifestyle over many, many years. I’m just sharing it as an inspiration to add one or two new practices or things to your life and see how it makes you feel.

I have two upcoming offerings that come to mind as I was writing this piece:

The first and more entry level offering is HOME BODY this Saturday, June 3, 9-11am PST. $44. This is like a yoga class for body reverence. I’ll guide you through a practice of self massage and lymph attention. I’ll facilitate a place for you to open to your body and hear what she is telling you. This is a ceremony for you to hold yourself while listening to your body. Get tickets here.

The second offering is FED. She is baaaacckkk. FED is my 6 month, group journey into deep feminine nourishment. During the 6 month FED journey I will guide you into a place of deep reverence for your body and introduce you to the process through which you will be invited to learn to nourish yourself from an internally oriented place. 

You can get on the waitlist for FED here. If you have questions about it, send me a message. We will begin in July. I will be reaching out to schedule connection calls with those on the waitlist in late June. You need to do a connection call with me to be invited into FED, unless you are a previous/current client or I’ve worked with you in some capacity in the past.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been in a little bit of a portal as far as haters coming at me online. This comes with the territory. When you put your work online in this day and age you are bound to get trolls, hateful commenters, and jealous people coming into your inbox trying to shut you down.

I’m very well prepared for these types of commenters because I’ve been doing this work online for almost a decade now. And actually, when I have an experience like this, where I have multiple people coming at me in a short amount of time, I know my work is reaching a new audience and level, and that, ultimately is expansion. I’m grateful for that.

With all types of expansion there are always tests and gauntlets to traverse. My work is not about me, so ultimately my work is always to see beyond the personal attacks and into the bigger picture.

I’ve had three significant experiences in the last three weeks of women attacking my, for lack of a better term, being-ness. One suggested that because I was an “obese woman” I shouldn’t be giving health advice. I wrote about this one here.

The second was a woman in my community accusing me of copying her writing. I wrote about that one here and here.

The third just happened yesterday and it was along the lines of the first, eg you’re too fat and therefore you’re wrong, except this one came directly at me and was much more aggressive.

There was a certain flavor to this woman’s comments that I want to teach about more closely.

I’m not going to repeat what I wrote out in my “The Fat Nutritionist” piece, so that may be a good place to start if you do want to hear me address the “you’re overweight so you can’t give health advice” accusation.

The line I want to bring attention to from this most recent woman’s messages is: “If you are actually comfortable with your size and your husband actually goes along with it..”

After continuing to make comments about my weight, my teachings around “full women” (which has zero to do with the size of a woman’s body and everything to do with how a woman feels in her body and what she can give to her life), and my lack of credentials, she brought up my husband again, when she said, “Your husband is either a saint or a fool!” to deal with a fat woman.

This is the piece I would like to teach about today.

The collective mainstream consciousness and programming tells us, women, to believe that the only way they can be sexy is to have a certain, almost unattainable and idealistic, body type.

The collective mainstream consciousness tells us, women, to believe that the physical appearance of our body is our main value; that our physical attractiveness to men is the main way we wield any power at all in the world.

The collective mainstream consciousness tells us, women, to believe too much outright sexual attractiveness is slutty and too little is powerless and insignificant.

The collective mainstream consciousness tells us, women, to believe the external orientation of our worth is the only way we can know what our value is.

The collective mainstream consciousness tells us, women, to believe that “femininity” is determined by how small our body is and how big and wide our eyes are.

The collective mainstream consciousness tell us, women, to believe that we cannot trust our bodies, our fullness, our internal guidance, our hunger, our desire for physical touch, our desire for commitment, and our desire for sex.

The collective mainstream consciousness tell us, women, to believe that we need to workout, diet, control ourselves, and that femininity is being submissive and ‘lady like.’ It tells us to keep our dirty, messy, bleeding selves and our too much feelings out of the world at large lest we upset someone.

The collective mainstream consciousness tells us, women, to control ourselves and our feelings and our desires. It tells us to sit down, shut up, look pretty, and work really hard to contain all that actually wants to come through us.

I could go on and on here. But each and every one of these beliefs is straight up misogyny; eg hatred of the feminine. If you still hold any of these beliefs and you believe you are a woman who has a right relationship to the feminine, think again.

This, does not, in any way, shape or form, mean you need to be overweight. In fact, I am not a “fat positive” proponent. Taking the shame out of fatness, hell yes, I’m all for it. But, your weight is not a good indicator of health. Period.

Pay attention to the real markers of health (listed here) and gently, intimately, reverently, lovingly, and soberly, start taking the steps that feel good for you to start to address those real markers of health. Your weight will regulate over time. Weight can simply not be the main focus. It’s not not a helpful way to look at anyone’s body.

If you haven’t noticed, I am, quite literally, with my very being-ness, a stand for a completely different kind of femininity in the world.

I actually think it’s a huge part of why my higher self gave me the experience of gaining all this weight (which I did not do on purpose, see “the fat nutritionist” for more on my personal health journey) in the last couple years, because I’m not sure I could have fully let go of the collective programming without the experience of having a body that so starkly stands outsides the collective idea of attractiveness.

I have had both life experiences: I had a body that fit very nicely into society’s standards for attractiveness and now I have a body that does not.

Changing body type over the last few years has brought me on a journey into facing all of those collective beliefs around worthiness I was holding and asking, is that True?

Do I want to believe and enact these beauty standards on myself?

Do I actually want to believe that I am not sexy if I have a big belly or am a size 22?

Do I want to fall into the trap of the collective idea of controlled femininity being the only femininity that’s acceptable and continue to feel ashamed of my body? The body that holds me, carries me, and is my only home?

Do I want to believe that my body’s proximity to the mainstream ideal of sexual attractiveness determines my worth and value?

Do I want to sacrifice my innate Knowing of the perfection of my journey in favor of external validation?

Do I want to believe that my husband can’t love me as much as a fat woman as he did when I was a hot woman?

Do I want to believe that the external world, with all of its obvious sickness, imbalance, and toxicity is right about me and I’m wrong?

My answer to each of these questions is a resounding NO.

Worthiness is not given, it is claimed. It is sourced internally. No one is coming to validate you. That is your inner adult’s job.

It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but my husband and I’s connection is so much deeper than the way either of us look. I plan to be with him for a long, long time, that’s why I married him. And the truth is, to the mainstream collective consciousness, you can only be pretty for so long.

One way or another old age, sickness and feebleness are coming for you. And the earlier you can start to see and appreciate the beauty in the depth of your eyes, the imperfect dimples in your thighs, the uniqueness of your fingers, the crookedness of your toes, and all the things that make you, you, and no one else, the sooner you’ll feel at home in your own body, and there is nothing more life-giving than that.

Being fat doesn’t take away your ability to feel, want, and need pleasure and connection.

The amount of fat on someone’s physical body body has nothing to do with what gets a cock hard or a pussy wet. I am 1000% sure of this. If you drop down five layers, you Know this too, before you read any of what I just wrote. You’ve felt it before.

Real, juicy, adult, sexual attraction, turn on, connection, and pleasure comes from being present in our body. That’s it. Being willing to be present with what is and turn toward it, hungry for more.

Real, adult, connected sex is a spiritual communion. It is, quite literally, the most intimate act two adults can engage in. I have had far better sex in my fat body than I ever had in my hot body because I’ve expanded my ability to hold sensation while in this fat body.

My relationship with my husband was at some of it’s most difficult and disconnected points when I was my skinniest. Attempting to contain my life force, hating my body, and trying to punish myself into acceptable behavior and body was not in any way shape or form working for me on an internal level.

I was scarce. I was tight. I was closed. I would emasculate my husband. Which would result in both of us starving for love and connection.

This is not to say that there is any correlation between a fulfilled relationship and the size of a woman’s body, it’s just to say, the size of a woman’s body is not related in the slightest to how thriving her romantic relationships are. Her willingness to feel is.

What determines a thriving relationship is how open each partner is to each other, how deep they can go together, how much they can choose to connect instead of close down and wall off. You can only truly connect with another person if you are grounded, resourced, and full, energetically. Which, again, has nothing to do with body size.

In my hot body most of my sex was a performance, for myself and/or for my partner. It was all about how I looked and how I sounded, what I could get my pussy to do for me or for my partner. It doesn’t mean that sometimes it wasn’t hot and sexy in some ways, but it was mostly mental and disembodied. Kind of like porn.

I always felt somewhat empty afterwards. I always had the sneaking suspicion that I was the object and not the subject of the sexual encounter. And this was me, putting myself in the position of object, not, necessarily, the men I was having sex with.

Most of the misogyny out in the world today is perpetuated by women.

This woman who came into my inbox talking about my husband is a perfect example. She came into my inbox shaming me about my body, my teachings around the love of feminine cycles (like free bleeding), telling me my husband must be a “saint or a fool” to “put up with” a fat, outspoken, “un-lady-like” wife. It is truly text book misogyny. All coming from a woman and mother to another woman and mother.

My husband loves me. He is in service to our family, my opening, and Her, willingly and by his, very aware, choice. My body not only turns him on, gets his cock hard, but it feeds his Soul. And this is all because I am a fed and full woman who takes her own internal guidance and feelings seriously. He is responding to my clarity of reverence for the feminine in myself, others and the world.

He has zero misogyny in his body because I have zero misogyny in mine.

When I get scarce, depleted and closed, I am squeezing off the flow of life force to myself and, therefore, him. My scarcity, depletion, and closure is then also reflected in him and my family.

I take this very seriously. In fact, my opening is always my main focus. It is not selfish, it is actually the most responsible pose.

To care for myself, deeply and completely.

To make sure that I am generous and flowing. I don’t always get this perfect, but it is always the intention that I return to.

Believing the story of the collective mainstream consciousness would cut me off from my juice. It would create shame, tightness, rejection, and a clamping down on my energy. It would put not only me at risk of shrinking, but also my husband and my family.

I choose not to.

I choose to come back to my body every time I feel the slither of shame try to sneak in.

I choose say, “No. Not today. I am here. This is my body. You may not take up residence here. I am not available. You cannot shame me. I am un-shameable.” Not just for me, but for my lineage; for my legacy.

This is what it means to firmly stand in the future we would like to see. To, quite literally, be the change we wish to see in the world.

We mothers and women are creators. When we are tapped into and turned on to our sexual and creative life force, we are tapped into the creative force of the cosmos.

Life is happening through us. Life comes through us. It is so important that we understand the impact of our choices and take responsibility, especially when it comes to how we think of and treat ourselves because this is the seed for everything else our lives.

Come get intimate and reverent with your body at HOME BODY | A ceremony for honoring your body as your home. June 3rd. 9-11am PST. $44. Sign up here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Your family is a co-creation. 

I talk a lot about the mother’s responsibility for setting the tone and values of the family, but ultimately the family is a co-creation between all family members.

A family is an ecosystem. From the inner nuclear family stretching to all the humans that you spend any amount of time with. It’s all part of a massive web of relationships you are in a co-creative interdependence with. 

The mother is at the center of each family because she sets the tone for the beingness of the family. 

She holds the access to the most life force. 

She is the energetic force that feeds the family. 

A full woman at the center radiates fullness, well being, health, and generosity out into her family,  ecosystem and the world. 

A fully fed woman cannot help but overflow in gifts, it’s just natural.

A ripe cherry tree needs her fruit to be picked. An abundant garden gives food. A full woman is no different; she simply must serve and create. It is what feels best to her. 

The scarcity, tightness, resentment, depletion, and coldness from a woman comes when a part of her is not full. When a part of her has not been attuned to, appreciated, tended to, or fed. 

The parts of ourselves we have locked away in the dark dungeons of our beings, the parts we’ve deemed unloveable, toxic, gross, bad, disgusting, etc are the parts that have been shut away for so long they have twisted and gnarled themselves. 

They do need air one way or another and they will get it by fitting through whatever hole in the walls they can, contorting themselves into angry, mean, rage full beasts. Think the Catholic Church and the abominable sexual appetites of “celibate” priests. Sex is a biological need. It will get met one way or another.  If sexual development is coupled with shame and punishment; it results people who associate sex with shameful acts, that deserve punishment. 

You are not you when you are starving. 

There are some exceptions here when it comes to things like entities and voices of authority figures that were programmed-in to your inner landscape when you were younger, but today I am really talking about the little parts of yourself. The parts that are wounded and slower and don’t always fit into societal ideals.  The more you come to fully inhabit your own body and integrate your wounded selves, the less these other things are able to take up residence in you.

A full woman serves her family and a full woman’s family serves her fullness. It’s a perfect circle of nourishment. 

The people we choose to build our ecosystems with are the people we are choosing to co-create our lives with. 

This is no small task. It is no small thing. 

I am not writing this to encourage you to go find better people to co-create with. No! What I am truly trying to impart here is that you are already co-creating. Right. Now. You’re doing it. You’ve chosen the people you are currently co-creating with for a reason. 

What is that reason? What are you truly co-creating? Is there something you need to get honest and sober with?

Do you need to step outside your little self for a moment and remember why you are here? As a human? On this planet? 

Sean and I have been committed to a daily 10 minutes of connection practice. Most days we do eye gazing, but others we give each other massages, or have connected sex, or just snuggle. 

It sounds simple, but it has been confronting. Sean and I have been deeply committed to staying connected throughout these early years of raising our girls, but this 10 minutes of true, dropped in connection every day has me really seeing how much I prefer to stay on the surface.

How much easier it is to stay in the places where I can be victimized, resentful, annoyed, judgmental, of him and his behavior or just generally how “hard” my life is. I notice how much I want something to blame other than myself for the uncomfortable sensations in my body.

Most days I feel slightly resistant to the 10 minutes of connection. It takes a lot of holding of my younger, more wounded parts from my adult Woman to willingly engage and open to Sean for these 10 minutes. Most of the days; when I do open, I touch this well of grief and just end up crying. 

It’s not what I had expected when we took on this practice. I had expected it to be a little sexier than moving through a lot of resistance to just sitting still together and then staring at each other with tears running down my face. 

However, two months in, with a lot of commitment to the practice and to really working with what comes up as a result, I have found myself melting away the crunchy bits and starting to really feel this beautiful, juicy, warm fertile place between us.

Beneath all my surface level defiance of opening to Sean, when I do open, there is a nectar, a life giving elixir, that feeds us both. 

When we come together and I open and this amrita, drink of the gods, starts flowing between us. I am whooshed right out of the surface level resentments and stories, and into the abundant and vast landscape of co-creation. 

The true meaning of life and divine Union of two souls who love each other is so obvious in this spot where I am full and Sean is full and our family is aligned with Truth: and that is, to be here, together, having this exact experience.

All these small stories we get stuck in and hijacked by are just not even remotely close to the reason we are here doing life together.

They are truly a speck of dust in the limitless space of co-creation. 

The fact that we have these incredible physical, third dimensional bodies that can touch, kiss, and manifest together is IT. 

Our souls are so happy to be here. They chose this. Every. Single. Detail. The good, the bad, and the ugly. 

And the only way to access this spot is through opening and letting Life flow through you. And for a woman to do that, fullness helps. Fullness helps a lot. I’m not sure you can do it without being full.

Attending to our wounded and starving parts is necessary. You cannot access the conscious co-creation space without feeding all parts of yourself. 

When we are attuned to ourselves and our needs and we meet our own needs willingly and with as much grace and love as possible; we don’t have wounded little ones pulling at and siphoning away our life force. 

If I could sum this all up in three steps:

First step: feed and care for all parts of yourself. Come back into your body, all the way. Inhabit your body, all the way to its edges. 

Second step: open, serve, give, connect. 

Third step: conscious co-creation with Life and your family. 

Creation is truly what we came here for. And we will always be doing it unconsciously or consciously. 

What do you need to choose conscious co-creation in your family? What is the very next, tiny, baby step you can take, today?

If this calls you, I would like to invite you to the Mother’s Day HOME BODY practice this Sunday, 9-11am PST. Come into the field of body intimacy and reverence with us and practice listening to what is here for you. Buy tickets here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

One of the ways I know I am changing and becoming more and more authentically human is by how much I have softened as I’ve grown older; how much more I allow Life to touch me in real time. 

As much as my ego hates to admit this to the public (although I am betting if you know me well, this will come as no surprise to you): My innate nature is soft, open, grounded, and warm. 

Being in my presence when I’m fully open feels like being embraced in a loving hug in front of a fire place with the smell of stew wafting in from the stove. It’s comforting and generous. 

And yet, there is a firmness to it. An unwavering through-line. A strong back that will not break no matter you bring me. A rootedness that you can trust. 

Through my life experiences I learned to lead with this strength. 

It is the part of me that the world celebrated. It’s the part I was told was valuable. My strength, my capability, my sturdiness.  

And I cultivated and eventually identified solely as it, and I forgot my softness. 

It has only been since becoming a mother that I have really touched my softness and recognized it as myself again. 

And if I hadn’t already been deeply committed to my personal practice, I might have believed this softness was a problem. I might have believed the way motherhood rearranged me and molded me into someone completely unrecognizable was somehow wrong.

There are definitely small parts of me that believe it is.

Softness is not something people want to be. 

We don’t want to have a soft body.

We don’t want to be perceived as emotional, which is equated to weak. 

We don’t want to be mushy or quick to cry.

We don’t want to be messy, chaotic, or uncontained.

We don’t want to feel as through we are in the dark, not knowing up from down.

You can see this in the way we are obsessed with lean, lithe, hardness in our physical bodies. 

You can see this in the way we quickly brush our tears off our cheeks, sniffing hard to compose ourselves.  Or how everyone I have ever seen cry instinctively tries to cover their face with their hands. 

You can see this in the way we feel our homes need to be the pinnacle of orderliness and tidiness or else we feel we’ve failed some societal test. 

We are so ashamed of our softness. Embarrassed by it. Humiliated by our own humanity. 

The more I denied my soft heart, shoving it down and away, while I pedestalized my strength, the less and less access I had to my softness. There was a long period of my adult life where I thought of myself as a complete, almost sociopathic, b***h.  

This belief about myself served me earlier in my life in a lot of ways. I did whatever I wanted, never really got that close to people, and bulldozed my way through whatever thing it was I decided I wanted to do. If people got in my way; f**k ‘em. 

If someone around me was exposing their weakness I felt repulsed by it. Disgusted. At best, I would immediately try to “help” them by coming up with ways to fix their problems. At worst I chided them for their weakness. Using their vulnerability to climb on their backs and get myself even higher up superiority mountain. Sometimes, even, treating their humanity like it was dog s**t needing to be scraped off the sole of my shoe. 

I am not proud of this. My explanation now is very much the adage: hurt people, hurt people, and even though I didn’t show it, I was hurting. 

A soft human heart locked away in a deep, dark room does not stop aching. 

In my late twenties, a bit lost and starting to wake up to the fact that something in my life was not quite right, I experienced one of the deepest betrayals a human can experience. And this was the very start of a long and winding path to reuniting with my tenderness. 

The pain in my heart I experienced from this betrayal made it impossible for me to focus on anything else and I was forced to begin to make my way down into the depths of myself and reconnect with my softness. 

This betrayal is not something I see as negative anymore. It was the most incredible gift. It gave me my soft heart back. It shattered me in all the places I needed shattering. 

And then, I became a mother a few short years after and I was shattered again even more perfectly.  

And what I’ve learned is that this is the paradoxical nature of opening to our softness, it can come through “negative” experiences and it can come through positive ones. 

Both are sacred. Both are happening through us and for us. 

That said, it has not been easy or pretty or straightforward.

This reconnection to my soft center was not instantaneous. It is an ongoing practice of remembering my true nature and choosing it over everything and anything else. 

To see myself as this soft and beautiful thing is only barely just, in my late thirties, becoming my default. And this is what motherhood has allowed me to access. Because I was shattered so profoundly in all the right places I was able to access a deeper love than I could have before the shattering. 

Through becoming a mother I felt what it was like to direct that love towards someone. I love my girls so deeply and because of that I can love myself more deeply. 

Because I have been shattered in all the right places, I have been able to reconfigure myself and see myself from the angle of the loving mother. And this is the most nourishing balm for my aching human heart. 

This is why I came to write this today because as I was in my car driving and listening to music I found myself being brought to tears. No story. No external circumstances. I was just able to feel the resonance of the song within my own heart and I let that resonance open me up. 

And I find myself doing this more and more; letting my heart be touched.

I hear stories of other humans’ pain and suffering and I open to it. I don’t contract. I don’t protect myself. I let it go right through me. Not taking it on, but taking it in because we all need to feel more, not less.

I see a mother and daughter playing together on swing set and I feel my heart bursting with love. 

I turn my face up to the sun, feeling the warmth on my skin and I am overcome by how held I am.

I catch a whiff of rain on sage as I’m out on a walk and I let myself weep at the perfection. 

My soft heart feeds me. It is the source of such richness and depth. 

When we open, cry, are overcome with emotion like this, it is a deep release. There is absolutely nothing wrong or bad or weak about it.

Crying is like taking a s**t. It releases energy that we no longer need. It’s necessary, healthy, and feels amazing. 

Yes, taking a s**t and crying can both be messy AND they are both part of being alive and having a human body.

I stand, firmly and with my strong back, at the intersection of my own humanity and my own divinity, within the body, and my soft heart is the bridge between the two. 

I’ve said this many times before, but I don’t believe the world needs more “good” people. It needs more real people.

Real people get hurt. Real people feel pain. Real people fail and have to stand up and try again. Real people are touched by Life.

And to deny any part of this is to deny life and the sacredness of being alive.

Ekhart Tolle says, “Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”

We need our strong backs for what’s to come, yes, absolutely.

But we are also in dire need of access to our soft hearts because, paradoxically, they are what will save the world.

Current Offerings

HOME BODY

…is happening tomorrow, May 3rd, my birthday!, from 2-3:30pm PST. $44. Get tickets here.

HOME BODY is like a yoga class for building a reverent relationship with your body. It begins with a short transmission teaching by me and then is a guided practice of self massage and a shamanic journey into the body. It is an opportunity to come and meet yourself where you are.

Nutrition Deep Dive

A three pack of sessions for us to go deep into your nourishment and create a personalized plan for you.

We begin with a 90-minute session where we will go over your health history, current eating habits, any current labs you have (I can also order labs for you), symptoms, and health intentions and I will come up with a personalized nourishment plan for you to implement.

You have to be ready to make real and significant changes to your diet and lifestyle.

Once you’ve implemented your personalized nourishment plan for a month, we’ll have another 45 minute session to tweak and adjust your plan and revisit what is improving and how your symptoms are changing. In another month we’ll have our second follow up session.

Within in these 3 session you’ll have an entirely new outlook on the nourishment of your body as well as have developed clear and individualized strategies to maintain your well-being as well as feel clearly what your body wants and needs.

$999.

**You may pay also $333/month for 3 months

There is always an option for more follow up sessions and/or labs if need be.

To book this you can follow this link and book your first session, or just message me to set up a free connection call to feel into it more.

1:1 Alchemical Journey

The deepest option to work with me. This is a one year commitment. You must do a zoom connection call with me to see if this would be a good fit. Just message me to set that up if you feel the call to this.

FED | A Journey into Deep Feminine Nourishment

A 6 month group journey into deep feminine nourishment.

Enter your details at this link to join the wait list. You will be contacted when the next cohort has been scheduled.

Feel free to email or message me with any questions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe