on awareness, breath and trust. jam session with me and Susanne Mueller, holistic nutritionist
July 22, 2014
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Hey you guys,
Some super juicy personal stuff came up for me and Susanne Mueller when we got together to talk about awareness, breath and trust for Food: A Love Story.
The participants already received the recording, and because I think there’s some really good stuff in here, I wanted to share it with you, too.
You can listen to the entire 15-minute convo down below.
Or take a read-through some of what we shared, here:
LL: Sus, what does awareness mean to you and how do you practice it?
SM: Awareness was the most important part of instilling change for me in my body, the way I eat and in my life. That’s because for a long time I wasn’t letting myself be totally aware of what my patterns were and I was trying to make change without recognizing what was already happening. So I’d just kind of, anytime I wanted to make change, I’d just stumble back into the pattern that I wanted to change. The big part of the change for me was actually becoming aware of what was truly going on and looking at that honestly.
LL: As you were becoming aware and letting yourself sit with it, what was there?
SM: I found, like you did and wrote in the email, a lot of sadness, a lot of discomfort and a ton of anxiety. I noticed that was my constant state. I was always tense, anxious and worried. And when I started to realize was that I was always trying to escape that state by escaping my body. Awareness helped me notice that and see what I needed to change.
LL: Yup, that makes sense. It’s more challenging that it seems, I think, to sit with ourselves, to let the awareness come. I know that was one of the hardest things for me, too, particularly around anxiety. I’ve got a long-standing history with extreme anxiety and big time panic attacks and it was always daunting to me as well to even consider the idea of surrendering to this thing that felt so unmanageable. It was massive to have that experience, like you were saying, of meeting that rather than running from it. It amazes me how the things that feel so massive become so small when we meet them instead of run from them.
click to tweet: @lindsey_lewis: things that feel so massive become so small when we meet them instead of run from them #libreliving
LL: So breath, let’s talk about breath. What did learning to breathe and being with breath do for you?
SM: When the awareness was there and I wasn’t sure where to start or how to change it, that’s when yoga started to come into my life and yoga was what taught me how to breathe. And through being in place where I had to breathe, I started to realize that my body isn’t something I needed to fight against. I just needed to be with it, and that’s all it wanted…breathing was the piece that allowed me to come back to my body and start our journey towards where we wanted to be.
LL: Let’s talk a bit about trust. How does it link back to breath and awareness and how does it especially impact your food choices?
SM: Once we bring awareness and stop running away from ourselves, come into our bodies through breathing, I think we start to realize that we’re not helping ourselves by running away from ourselves, we’re actually causing more of what we don’t want and we start to realize that our bodies are actually speaking to us and trying to guide us in the direction that will feel best for us. I think that everywhere you look we’re told that our bodies are something that we have to fight, in order to be where we want to be. But doing that, moving in a way our bodies don’t want to move, is just creating more tension, which isn’t moving us closer to where we want to be. Our body knows what it wants to eat, what it needs to drink how much we need to eat and it’s never going to guide us in the wrong direction. Our bodies never want to overeat. They are always giving us signs of when we’ve had enough, or when we need more or what we need more of. It wants to eat foods that make us feel good–so it’s just trusting that.
LL: It’s like this radical leap from what other messaging sources out there on food are telling us to do, which is to deny, deny, deny. And to disconnect. And then it’s this leap of faith into another way of operating…