Nourishing Ourselves

Most of us learned to relate to our bodies through a lens of management. Eat the right things in the right amounts. Exercise enough. Don't want too much. Don't feel too much. The message, repeated in a hundred different ways, was to keep ourselves under control.

For some of us, that translated into difficult struggles with food or exercise. For many more, it showed up as a low-grade sense of wrongness about eating a few cookies, numbness to physical pleasure, and a sense of living at a distance from our body. We might look fine from the outside and still feel like a stranger to ourselves.

Nourishing Ourselves is a four-part series. Our culture  judges restriction, disconnection, compulsive eating, and numbness as character flaws but we know now that our nervous system needs to feel safe before it will release protective patterns. These are actually adaptive responses to conditions earlier in life that we can update for our present circumstances and capacity.

Across eight classes, we explore what nourishment feels like as a lived experience. How can we care for ourselves with more kindness?

We start with food and eating, where many of us feel the tension most clearly. What is your relationship with food? What would it feel like to eat one thing with genuine pleasure and no negotiation attached to it?

We move into gentle movement and dance. Do you regularly move during the day? Do yoga? Swim? Cycle? Breathe? Are you kind and patient with your body? Grieving loss of capacity? What it would mean to move for pleasure? What would you enjoy?

We look at nourishment that comes from people, animals, and warmth of connection. Do you feel full and well connected? Are you happy with your relationships? Bored? Distressed? We’ll explore ways to deepen and strengthen our bonds with others.

We return to something older: belonging and the regulating presence of the natural world. We know that trauma disconnects us from our body. It also disconnects us from feeling supported and connected with Earth. Where do you feel like you belong? Where can you let your guard down and fully relax? We can nurture this connection through awareness and action now.

Each class includes a guided somatic inquiry followed by sharing and connection in small groups. We explore and deepen into freedom. We are not here to fix ourselves and there is no way to do this wrong.

We are approaching ourselves with curiosity and less judgment, letting that gradually build a different relationship with the body we actually live in. We’ll focus on each topic for two weeks of inquiry, experimenting, inspiration, and sharing.

Our relationship with our body may include decades of neglect and frustration. We may be experiencing grief and unwelcome consequences of not caring well for ourselves. We can freshly approach this moment with compassion and kindness. It’s not too late to be inspired to nourish and care for ourselves now.

We begin our exploration May 31 with Food and Eating.
Details here.