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, a numbness to physical pleasure, and a sense of living at a distance from our body rather than inside it. You might look fine from the outside and still feel like a stranger to yourself.

Nourishing Ourselves is a four-part series grounded in one idea that tends to get overlooked: our nervous system needs to feel safe before it will release protective patterns. Our culture  judges restriction, disconnection, compulsive eating, and numbness as character flaws. They are actually  adaptive responses to life conditions and this can change.

Across eight classes (2 on each topic), we explore what nourishment actually feels like as a lived experience. We start with food and eating, where many of us feel the tension most clearly. We move into gentle movement and dance, asking what it would mean to move for pleasure. We look at nourishment that comes from people, animals, and warmth received and given. We return to the foundation of belonging and the regulating presence of the natural world.

Each class includes a guided inquiry followed by connection in small groups. This is an exploration and deepening into freedom. There is nothing to fix here and no way to do this wrong. We approach ourselves with curiosity and less judgment, letting that gradually build a different relationship with the body we actually live in.

Please join Sundays on our Sunday free community class link (above). Insight Timer has only the first portion of inquiry with slides.