Why Emotional Resiliency is KEY for Weight Loss (+ 5 steps to get it!)

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Why Emotional Resiliency is KEY for Weight Loss (+ 5 steps to get it!)

Christmas is just a few days ahead of us and we all know that high-intensity feelings and experiences will also come with and sabotage our efforts to enjoy it. So, in this episode, I’ll talk about the concept of emotional resiliency and how it can transform your weight loss journey. I’ll also share five steps to help you build emotional resiliency and create lasting change.

I’ll dive into:

  1. What is emotional resiliency and why it’s essential to feel your emotions during the holidays and every day of the year.
  2. How our nervous system handles emotions and follows our usual unconscious habits.
  3. How emotional resiliency can transform your weight loss journey from the inside out.
  4. The five steps you need to take to create new habits and start healing from day 1.

Remember, you have the power to heal, break free from using food as an emotional support system, and create lasting change in your relationship with food and your body. If you’re ready to take on the world and start your healing journey NOW, join us in the Five-Day Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:35 – Emotional Resiliency in Weight Loss

00:02:00 – Defining Emotional Resiliency

00:03:30 – Post-Traumatic Growth

00:05:00 – Personal Experiences with Emotional Processing

00:07:00 – The Importance of Emotional Resiliency During Holidays

00:09:00 – Coping Strategies and Emotional Eating

00:11:00 – The Challenge of Feeling Our Feelings

00:13:00 – How Our Nervous System Handles Emotions

00:15:00 – Habitual Patterns and Stress Responses

00:17:00 – Acting Out Behaviors

00:19:00 – The Need for Emotional Resiliency

00:21:00 – Five Steps to Building Emotional Resiliency

00:23:00 – Step 1: Approach with Gentleness and Mindfulness

00:25:00 – Step 2: Body-Based Work

00:27:00 – Step 3: Creating a Safe Container

00:29:00 – Step 4: Starting with Mild Discomfort (Titration)

00:31:00 – Step 5: Pendulation Technique

00:33:00 – Real-Life Applications and Client Experiences

00:35:00 – Clean Pain vs. Dirty Pain

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Full Episode Transcript:

Why Emotional Resiliency is KEY for Weight Loss (+ 5 steps to get it!)

Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Hello Body Freedom podcast. Audra here. So excited that you are here I am really excited to riff on something that feels like the meat and potatoes Of what we do at Hello Body Freedom. It’s definitely what has a standing out that I don’t know many other programs that do this.

And we’re talking about this concept of emotional resiliency. And I want to dive into that with you today. What it is, what it means why it’s so important and how it will ultimately change the trajectory of your, weight loss journey. And it doesn’t have anything to do with eating healthy. It doesn’t have anything to do with going on a diet.

It doesn’t have anything to do with joining a gym or drinking more water or, all of these things. Not that it’s bad to eat healthy food or, not that I don’t love when people want to move their body or whatnot, but, or drink more water, but that’s just not the actual key to sustainable weight loss for a lot of people.

But emotional resiliency really is the key. And what I have for you today are five steps of how to get there. I’m really just excited to bring this out to you. So let’s first talk about The definition of emotional resiliency. The way that it was described to me when I first started going through all of my trauma resolution training back in 2017, is that emotional resiliency is like, you can imagine just living, your life and you’re doing good and you’re thriving and all is good in the world.

And then, all of a sudden there’s a big thing that happens or an emotional thing that happens. And so the definition of emotional resiliency is your ability to bounce back from whatever that adversity is. So to literally be able to come back up to where you were the same level of like emotional functioning that you were at after a difficult experience.

One of the ways that it’s been described to me is that you were able to feel all the way down and all the way through, and then you’re able to pop right back up to the other side. Okay. And so I have used that definition forever. But there’s a bunch of positive psychology peeps out there that are taking that definition to the next level and they’re calling it post-traumatic growth.

And what they’re describing it as is that the actual adversity that you’ve gone through, the stressor that you have been under, whatever it might’ve been. So to not just to create emotional resiliency, but it’s actually the process of having that adversity and then being able to expand your capacity to be with that adversity.

So now, whenever you come out to the other side, You’re not just at the same emotional functioning that you were at before the adversity. You are actually higher. You actually have more capacity to hold more than you did before the event or the intensity, whatever it might’ve been before that happened.

And I really, I love that, I love that resiliency, like when we can understand, Oh, we go down and then we come right back out. But I’m curious if you have had this experience, cause I have definitely had this experience where I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to cry. I feel like a lot of things are coming up and then all of a sudden the floodgates open and I just am like having, I’m wailing it, whatever the situation might’ve been, lots of stress, grief, sadness, loss, whatever.

But really, when you have just an incredibly long, intense, like wailing and crying and right. And then when, for me, when that’s happened in the past, that’s literally like going all the way down. Like I’m feeling so much, but I don’t like to get back up to the other side.  I feel like a train wreck for the next couple of days.

Has anybody ever experienced that where you start to feel your feelings and then you can’t actually get back up to feeling good again. And so the idea of emotional resiliency is that you are able to go deep and go in and feel and then actually get to the other side of that. And I think that expanding your capacity in order to be with whatever that thing is that you’re feeling, that is the actual ticket that be like to really create that emotional resiliency to be able to hold whatever it is that is there. And quite frankly, to be able to hold it and get back up to thriving is basically says now I’m able to hold something that I wasn’t even able to hold before that.

So why would we be talking about that? Why would we be talking about that? As I’m recording this, we are like smack dab in the holiday season. We are like a week away from Christmas, two weeks away from New Year’s. It’s been going on since Thanksgiving. It’s a lot going on.  I just think that this is a great time to talk about it because emotions are really high. 

Whether they’re good emotions and happy where you see all like the thrills of the holidays and some people like really get off on that. But most people struggle with the extra added stressors of the holiday season with the people that you haven’t seen for maybe since last year that might cause you turmoil.

And quite frankly, a lot of us have. A mix of memories of this time of the year that are some happy, but a lot of them are not wonderful. And so it brings up a lot of stuff. More people are likely to massively overdrink and massively overeat so as to numb out and not feel what they’re feeling this time of the year.

 And I’m hoping that this will help you get through this because it’s not just the holiday season. It’s any time we’re basically experiencing feelings and emotions, right? And I know for me working, as the founder of Hello Body Freedom, I literally work with women every single day who instead of feeling their feelings like I did for three decades, not able to feel my feelings, I would just eat them away.

And you can put any other coping strategy in front of there. You can talk about eating your emotions. You can talk about drinking your emotions. You can talk about projecting all of your own inner shit on other people instead of actually looking at what’s going on because that’s the thing.

It’s a way to not feel what we’ve learned how to do. And so that’s why we’re talking about this right now because the bottom line is that we want to stop using coping strategies as an emotional support system. So if you are a bored eater or a stress eater or an anxious eater or you’re a comfort eater there’s all of these ways that we use food.

There’s all of these ways that something will trigger us on the inside and then we’re just going down a food rollercoaster. And quite frankly, the only way to do that, the bottom line of being able to stop using food as an emotional support system is to be able to actually feel what you are feeling.

And that’s what we’re talking about. Emotional resiliency is your ability and capacity to feel what you are feeling. And then we get good at that. We’re able to feel what we need to feel and then get right back up on the other side.  But Oh, my friends, there is a struggle with that. And I want to talk about that.

There’s a huge problem. Why the hell can’t we feel our feelings in the first place? Why?  Here’s the thing.  Our nervous system, our mind-body, our whole system has learned. That it’s not safe to feel our feelings, full stop. Now you might ask what do you mean? Why would it not be safe to feel like if you’re telling me that the answer to ending this feeling where like food is in control, right?

Where I’m eating when I don’t want to eat, I’m eating, I can tell that I’m stress eating or comfort eating or mindless eating. I have all of these behaviors around food and you’re telling me that the answer is to be able to feel my feelings. Then, gosh darn it, like I want to be able to feel my feelings, but you’re telling me that I can’t.

Why? Why would my nervous system believe that it’s not safe to feel what I’m feeling? And I want to really just give you the quick lowdown of this, right? So I want you to imagine being a kid and you start crying in a situation and the caretakers around you are not comfortable with the fact that you are crying right then and there.

Maybe you’re really tired cause you needed a nap, but then you know, your parents took you to the grocery store and you’re like having a meltdown, right? And in those moments when the caretakers around you are not actually helping you build your emotional resiliency in the moment that you need help building it.

When you’re a kid, they’re doing the opposite of that. They actually teach you and we learned this not just from our caretakers. We learned this from society. We learned this from so many ways. We learned that there are certain feelings that are just not okay to feel. All right. Pull up your big girl panties, pull up your big boy pants, right?

Big girls don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry.  You need to grow up. You need to suck it up buttercup. Like this is the society we live in.  And then we get in these situations, especially when we’re kids, we are very smart. As little youngsters, as young ones, we really can detect what is okay to be, what is allowed to be felt and what is not allowed to be felt.

And so what ends up happening are all of these either like obvious clues when our parents are literally saying do not cry, stop, whatever, or even the subliminal stuff, right? When we watch our own parents, like not able to feel whatever they’re feeling and then they end up acting out, or caretakers or society or all the ways in which we see it around us all the time. What happens, especially as children is that we turn on ourselves. We, and all of this is unconscious. Like you have no control over this. You literally realize,  “They say it’s not okay so I am telling myself it is not okay to feel this feeling.”

So here’s the problem with that, is that we as humans are supposed to feel all of our feelings.  It is a unique, beautiful Experience. It is a human experience, right? We wouldn’t have all these feelings if we weren’t supposed to.  So in actuality, our feelings are here to guide us. They’re there for a compass and they are a part of what it means to be a human on this planet.

But what we’re learning is not allowed to feel, not allowed to feel, not allowed to feel. So we turn on ourselves and then what ends up happening eventually, absolutely. When you feel that feeling again, because I guarantee you whatever that feeling is that you keep trying to not feel, you are going to feel it and it is going to come up, but what happens is that we immediately  push it away, we like throw it under the rug. We shove it into the closet. Literally, we take a big squallow and we tell ourselves, Nope, not now. Can’t feel that.

We do all of this unconscious and subconscious stuff in order to not feel like literally anything and everything we can do to not feel. And that is the problem. This is where we’re like, okay, Audra, you’re sitting here telling me emotional resiliency. Okay. All I got to do is feel my feelings and then I’ll stop stuffing my face. And at the end of the day,  what I see over and over again, it’s not that people can’t like buckle down and go on a diet and create healthy habits when they’re, when life is going good. 

It’s that when shit hits the fan that they start using the coping mechanism of calories of overeating and over drinking and all the things, right? And so what happens is that we create habitual patterns based on this emotional kind of train wreck that’s going on inside of us. This inability to touch what we’re feeling and know that it’s not going to kill us because we learned a whole long time ago that these are off limits.

We are not allowed to feel them. So our nervous system, our entire body literally has learned over the course of time not safe to feel, not safe to feel. And this is why we keep getting stuck. And so now here we are in this situation where we’re doing anything we can to not feel. And this is how we create these habitual patterns.

And these habitual patterns are reactive to whatever situation is going on that is making you feel uncomfortable. All right. So we end up creating a big mess because we don’t know to handle what is happening in this moment So let’s talk about some of these habitual patterns that we end up getting us stuck in I am gonna hand you these five steps to building emotional resiliency But first  I really want you to hear like how it very likely shows up in your life.

All right, so again, this is how habitual patterns show up that we react to. All right.  These are the things, you might see these as a stress response. You might go, okay, I’ve heard of this before. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. So let’s talk about that.  What happens when you start to feel something that feels outside of your comfort zone.

And remember, because you’ve learned to not feel your comfort zone is pretty tight. You only want to feel this little bit amount and anything outside of this. Nope, not going to feel it. Not going to feel it. So as soon as you start to notice that your nervous system is getting out of its comfort zone, Oh my God, I don’t feel this.

Then what happens? Number one, you might get aggressive. You might freak out. You might start to get hysterical. You might just start like yelling or screaming, right? All of these ways you might fight. That’s another way that we call that. We call that, the fight part of our autonomic nervous system. 

Your defenses are up and man, you are going to fight, fight, right? Which is a distraction from being able to feel what you’re feeling.  Another thing that we can do is avoid or escape. So now here we are, we’re feeling something that, ah, it doesn’t feel good. I’m just, I’m out. I’m out. I don’t want to deal with this.

I’m going to leave the country. I’m telling you that if you’re curious, that’s mine. All I want to do is leave. Leaving is my thing. I am a what is it called? What’s the attachment style? I’m called. I’m not anxious. I’m avoidant. I avoid, I’m going to avoid an attachment style in relationship. It has been the hell of my life to heal.

Now, healing is possible. That’s the other thing I want to tell you. But notice, where do you avoid and how do you escape? Do you use food to avoid and escape? Do you use alcohol or drugs, right? So whenever we are avoiding or escaping if the first one was getting aggressive and getting hysterical and getting loud and yelling or whatever, picking a fight, whatever that might be, that is called fight.

But when we’re avoiding and we’re escaping, that’s called flight, right?  Or what about just completely numbing out? How many use food to just not feel completely right? And so this is what we can call freeze.  And then the other one is when we people please, when all we’re doing is looking at other people.

And instead of being able to actually go inward and be with what we’re experiencing we are putting all of our attention outside of us and spewing it all over all the other people all up in their business. That is called people pleasing. And the terminology we use for that in terms of working with the autonomic nervous system is fawn,  right?

There’s the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response. And so with all of these reactions what we’re doing when we go into, I’m ready to fight or I’m ready to avoid or, flee the situation or I’m frozen and I’m numbed out or I’m fawning and I’m people pleasing. There are acting-out behaviors that are attached to that.

Because we just don’t want to experience and work with what is creating the feelings and sensations in the body. So instead of what we do, instead of actually feeling and expressing our feelings, what we do is we act out and this is where eating and drinking or, picking a fight with your partner or right.

So instead of figuring out how to like, go, that thing that you said to me really hurt my feelings.  Instead, you find all the other things that are wrong with your partner and you just spew them out.  And that’s an example of acting out. Another example of acting out is your teenager is acting like a total brat and you’re in the kitchen cooking and you’re

making a meal and you’ve got 20 other things on your to-do list, but you’re feeding the family, doing the best that you can. And your teenager comes in and just makes a big shit fit about not wanting to eat the thing that you’re making. And the next thing, you are in the cookie jar, five or six cookies deep as fast as you can get them in your mouth, right that is acting out, that is acting out. 

Okay. So instead of figuring out how to tolerate and how to be with the feelings that we are feeling,  what actually ends up happening is, our nervous system is doing everything it can to keep you inside of that emotional comfort zone, that little itty bitty window of tolerance that your personal nervous system has learned.

If we just stay in this place, then we’ll be okay because to feel what you’re feeling would be outside of that comfort zone. And so here we are in a shit show of a situation because what the food and the eating or the drinking or the drugs or the screaming at your partner or the spending another 500 on some, outfit that you didn’t need right.

These are just all other reasons to distract yourself and stay inside of a comfort zone. So as to not feel what you are feeling,  but here’s the situation is that what we have to do is actually learn how to be with our emotions and get out of our comfort zone. So instead, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to figure out how do I learn how to tolerate feeling outside of my emotional comfort zone?

That’s what we’re trying to do. But what we actually learn. Is fear. Can’t touch it. Not going to do it. Okay. And there it lies the problem. And so here we are, how do we do this? How do we create the ability to do this work, to actually feel what we need to feel so that we can actually come into this better, right relationship with, and not be using these coping strategies like food. 

All right, let’s have that conversation. The first thing you need to understand is that for you to get to the other side of this, the growth that needs to happen, like the only way growth happens in your life, in my life is to get outside of your comfort zone, right? If you want to better yourself at work, then you sign up for some course at night and you take the course at night.

And is it way more comfortable to sit at home and watch TV? Yeah, absolutely. But getting out of your comfort zone to make your life better, I have not found anything in my life that’s really worth having that did not require me to do things that I did not want to do. I’m just thinking about getting a college degree.

Like the amount of time it took me to get a college degree. It was hard. I had to work really hard at it. But I’m the one that had to do the work. I had to get out of my comfort zone in order to grow.  I’ll use 2011 when my entire life went into an absolute shit show. And now I’m in therapy. I’m in yoga.

 I’m doing all of these things. And guess what? All my other friends were out partying and having a good time. Audra had to go do some deep shit. I had to be willing to get uncomfortable, get out of my comfort zone in order to get to the other side, in order to heal, in order  to become more human, to really become more self-actualized.

And so emotional resilience is about figuring out how to stay with the discomfort, the emotional discomfort that we are experiencing those uncomfortable feelings that we have in our body, how to be with it, how to be present, fully present with it,  and then also be like nice to ourselves and compassionate to ourselves and learn how to actually tolerate it right to stay with and tolerate The hard moments. 

Okay. So emotional resiliency literally involves to be very crystal clear.  It involves expanding our capacity to be with the uncomfortable, icky feelings.  And so what I mean by that is I mean like the thoughts that go on in your head, the actual emotions that we are feeling inside, the physical sensations that are very uncomfortable, that are attached to the emotions and thoughts that are going on and our capacity, our ability to expand our capacity to be with that. 

That. It stops tripping us up.  We stop just immediately going to numb out and act out so that we can actually respond to the demands of our lives, to the things happening in our lives, the work, the school, the family, all the things.  With more ease, peace, and presence.  Okay? Feel into that.

What I have discovered working with my clients at this level,  when they actually do the work, which in VIP coaching they do it’s one on one, it’s very high touch, so everybody’s in it, we’re doing the work.  It’s not just that they’re, Oh, life is just feeling more ease and peace and presence.

No, it’s that they are not using food as a mechanism to fix how they are feeling anymore. And you cannot escape the law of thermodynamics y’all. We move a certain amount and we eat a certain amount. And if you are overeating the amount that your body needs, you’re just going to store more body fat and your body’s going to expand.

That’s like the most basic way to understand weight gain. Okay. Everybody that’s sitting here giving you every other fricking reason, Oh, but it’s hormones. Oh, but it’s menopause. Trust me. You are just eating more than what you need and you have been for a long time because you haven’t actually resolved this level.

And I don’t mean to go on a side note here. I feel like I say this a lot lately, but whenever you were sitting here focused on the latest diet and how fast can I lose this weight? You were literally distracting yourself from the real work. The real work is creating this tolerance to feel what you are feeling and learn how to be with it.

Learn what emotional resiliency actually feels like day to day in the body. So that instead of eating your way out of your emotions, you actually deal with them in the most beautiful way. And when you do this food just is no longer the best solution. It’s not about going on a diet. Your body just naturally will come into its ideal size.

It happens all the time inside of hello body freedom. Okay. Issue again, , I’m going to bring this full circle because it’s yes, I want that. Yes, I want that. But you have a nervous system that is literally designed to keep you safe and alive and to keep you right exactly where you are right here right now.

All it knows is what you’ve been doing is perfect. Yeah. And we can’t feel that. Nope. Nope. Can’t feel that feeling. Nope. Not going to feel that. And you keep doing it and you keep doing it and these habit patterns that you have built of taking these feelings and swallowing them down, stuffing them down with food.

It’s this kind of really unconscious cycle. Okay.  I guess I need to be really clear here. This is not a shame fest. This is not a place where this is what you’re doing y’all. This is what your nervous system has learned how to do in order to protect you.

Everything that you are doing has been created in unconscious patterns as a way to keep you safe and alive. And quite frankly, if you’re like me, I started this at six years old. It was a three-decade habit loop. Most of us have been in this habit loop of not being able to feel what we’re feeling and then going and acting out and using coping strategies like eating or drinking or smoking or whatever the thing is.

We’ve been doing this for a really long time. And then even though we want to get out of it, what ends up happening every time something gets emotionally uncomfortable, you reinforce it by telling yourself, Nope, not going to go there. Nope. Refuse to go there. Refuse to go there.

And then the problem just cycles and cycles. Okay. I guess what I want you to hear. Is that if you really want to get off that hamster wheel and you want to heal and you want to like really get to the other side of what it means to have absolute freedom, emotional freedom in this way, we can’t heal what we don’t feel. 

That’s it. We cannot heal what we don’t feel.  So the only way to change our patterns is to actually be able to go there.  And so take a deep breath with me, a big inhale and an exhale. Cause that’s a lot. I know it is.  So at this point, your next obvious question should be, okay, then let’s do this. How do I do this?

Now I understand. I see that it’s not my fault. I’m really wanting to get off this hamster wheel. How the hell do I do this?  How do I do this thing that I’ve ultimately been unconsciously, consciously and consciously been avoiding my whole life? How do I do it?  This is how, are you ready? I’m going to give you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Steps of how to do this. And the first one includes a lot, but that’s okay. We’re going to do this. Number one,  you do this work slowly,  gently,  mindfully,  compassionately.  Think about that.  Think about what you really want to do. Think about the part of you that loves speed. The part of you that’s I wanted this 50 pounds gone 50 days ago.

I’m sick of this. I’m doing this. I have a wedding. It’s coming in three weeks. I’m going to lose the weight fast. The faster you lose the weight, the faster you gain it back. The faster you go on a diet is just another way to distract yourself from actually doing this work, which is emotional resilience work, which is expanding your capacity to be with bigger feelings work.

And this work requires slowness. It also requires being like kind to yourself. How many of us who struggle with our body struggle with weight? The amount of inner self negative talk, like we wouldn’t talk to our worst enemy the way that we talk to ourselves. And that’s just not going to fly.

Like we have to come to this place of knowing that I must be gentle with myself. I must be kind to myself. I must meet myself with compassion because I have likely been having this unconscious habit for decades and it doesn’t just magically disappear in like a session or one meditation or a quick diet.

It just It doesn’t work that way.  And so our ability to be nice to ourselves along this journey really matters. All right. So the way that we do this work is slowly, gently, mindfully, compassionately.  Now let’s get into some nuts and bolts here. You do not do this work by reliving the story that’s pissing you off inside of your head. 

You do this work through the body.  All right, so many of us get really triggered and we get this big emotional kind of thing go on. And even if it’s just a mildly irritating thing, something triggered us and now we are just lost in our thoughts. That person did this to me and I can’t believe that it’s, Oh my God, what am I going to do?

There’s so much to do right now. I’m not even sure. Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I’m so overwhelmed. There’s going to be 30 people at my house in three days. Oh my God. Oh, can you believe that person said that? Oh, what am I going to do about it? Like it is all lost in your head and in your story. And if you just keep staying in the story of shit,  nothing’s going to go.

We have to be able to touch what’s going on at the body level. All right. So the thing that’s bothering us is creating thoughts. It’s creating feelings and emotions. This thing that is uncomfortable inside of us. And it is an embodied discomfort for sure. For sure. For sure. Okay. And it’s not that we ignore the thoughts.

We understand that all of that is going on, but we bring the mindfulness in to bring it back in and taking the mindfulness, not to the story where we just loop it and just stay stuck forever. But we go into the actual sensations of the body and we work at that level. Okay,  number three,  the only way I have seen to do this work and this is backed by the pioneers in trauma research out there is that we must have a safe container to be able to access and feel safe enough to feel what we’re feeling.

And what do I mean by safe container? There’s outer safety. And there’s inner safety. So outer safety is literally am I safe in my outside world? Am I in a safe place? Can I lock my door to do this work? Is somebody going to violate my boundary and walk into my room that is unsafe? Or am I able to hold boundaries against other people so that way I know I can actually do this work.

That’s an example. Outer safety might be the container in which you’re choosing to do this work. So for instance, inside of Hello Body Freedom, we are trauma-informed coaches and it is our priority to create a safe container. So that is a safe container inside of our client community. That is a safe container inside of one on one coaching.

Over and over again, it is about coming and stepping into a container where the safety can be curated and you can actually experience the outer safety for yourself. Now, inner safety, it goes back to that first one. It’s like inner safety is you’ve got to be kind to yourself. Really, you’re not going to get to the other side of this by getting mad at yourself because you just went completely mindless and unconscious and you ended up binge eating, right? 

What you have to do is go, wow, I’m actually learning. And I understand that this binge eating or overeating or stress eating whatever the pattern is, I’ve had this pattern for a really long time and I know that to get to the other side, so that way I’m no longer having that behavior, It’s going to take some work and along that journey

Messing up is going to be a part of it. I’m going to binge eat. So I just got to be nice to myself and kind. It’s just a part of the journey, right? So creating that level of inner safety over and over again. So slowly, gently, mindfully, compassionately we do this work through the body, not through reliving stories over and over again.

It is a body-based work. You must be in a safe container, inner safety.  And then the next has to do with the actual work of being able to feel what you are feeling. So when you very first start this work, the concept is called titration.  When you very first start to do this work, it, you can’t choose the thing that is triggering you the most right? The person that’s triggering you. It’s all hell. The situation that has you up in arms and you can’t even see straight and you can’t even sleep at night. That’s really hard to start there and do that work. And to think that you’ll actually be able to tolerate because those are really big numbers.

So like on a scale of one to 10, we’re talking about triggers of an eight, nine, or 10. So the first thing we want to work with are little things,  so that’s what the titration means. It means we start with a little titration. It’s like a 5 percent to 15%. So you want to start with something that’s mildly irritating to you.

Something that like rubbed you the wrong way. That’s you can tell like your little, your feathers are ruffled a little bit. But it’s not on a scale of one to 10, your feathers are not ruffled at a seven, eight, nine, or 10. No way. If you start with that, it’s not going to work.

You start with the things that are more like a one, two, or three. All right. And then that’s how you actually can learn how to be with what you’re experiencing because it’ll still feel like annoying. It’ll still feel hard,  it’s like going to the gym, and you go to the gym and you pick up like, the 50-pound dumbbells and you haven’t been to the gym in a year and you think you can do some 50-pound bicep curls.

That’s ridiculous, right? You’re literally not going to be able to, it’s too much. You start with the tight, you titrate, you start with the fives and then you titrate up to the tens and then you get up to the fifteens and eventually the fives will be so easy and you’ll be up to those 50 pounds eventually.

And that’s how you titrate. All right. You choose situations that are only mildly uncomfortable to start with. In order to build this muscle of expanding your capacity to be with this kind of uncomfortable stuff. Because again, your level of believing that it’s uncomfortable is because your nervous system has taught you a long time ago not to feel it.

You’ve just spent a lifetime not feeling it and being scared of it. Okay. But the more that you practice it, you start to realize that.   It’s not as bad as you think it is. And I want to give you an example. This is turning out to be a long episode. I was not expecting that.

I thought it was going to be short. I always think they’re going to be short and I go a little longer. Okay.  So I had a coaching call last week and it was mainly a conversation between myself and two other helloBodyFreedom VIP clients that are one on one coaching clients that we have in our program.

And the three of us were just having an epic conversation. And what I loved about this conversation is one of this clients has been with us for over a year. Another one of the clients has been with us just under a year, right? So they have a lot of practice under their belt. And I have been practicing this for, like since 2011 really.

And at this level since 2017. We’re talking a long ass time that I have been working at this level, right?  But hearing my two clients who are right at a little over a year, a little under a year, it doesn’t take decades to do this work, right? They are in this epic place. And so we were just talking about how there are legitimate hard things going on in our lives, like legitimate.

Hard things for one client, there’s unbelievable, like challenging family things going on and how to put boundaries around that. For another one, it’s in a complete and total other, like it is a life transition. It is like leaving a home that she’s lived in for something like 30 years, she’s not just leaving the home.

She’s moving to a whole other city. It’s big light, like stressors.  My stuff is just big mental health crisis inside of my family. And it is the level of pain and suffering that all of us are experiencing is real. It is intense.  These are like real-life shit, man. This is not sugarcoating anything, right? And this is the thing we live in a society that just wants that fucking sugarcoat, everything. Everything’s just happy all the time. And the second we feel anything that’s outside of that, we’re so goddamn scared to feel it.

No wonder we eat and drink ourselves to death. No wonder half of the fricking population is spun out on drugs and just God, if we’re just willing to go a little deeper and do some slightly hard work that doesn’t have to be so hard because we titrate like what we just talked about.  Anyhow, that was a tangent that I didn’t need to go on. But the point I’m making is that the three of us are having this conversation about the most epic, real, raw, Stuff because what we’re talking about it’s not that anything that we’re going through is easy.

It’s not easy,  but we are not eating our way through it. We are not drinking our way through it. We are not drugging our way through it. We are not projecting all of our shit on other people. We are not finding our way through it. We are touching what needs to be touched. And we have so many tools in our tool belt, thought tools, ways that we can speak to ourselves embodiment tools, practices that we can do over and over again.

Like the amount of tools that we have in hello body of freedom that we practice over and over again. And we’re sitting here going I think the best part of it is that it’s such big stuff, but the feelings are real. It’s all the feelings, but it’s just,  we can tolerate it. It’s tolerable on a scale of one to 10, we’re talking about eight, nine and 10 stressors.

And all of us are talking about what a gift in our life that we are learning and are able to be with what we are feeling. Because the truth of the matter is even though the three of us are going through a hard time right now, guess what?  This too shall pass as everything, what comes and goes. But the problem is if we are not willing to feel our feelings, if we are only able to unconsciously and consciously shove them down, shove them in a closet, refuse to do any hard work, refuse to feel it, it doesn’t work. Ever go away. It just gets worse.  It just gets harder and harder. It’s resume medicum.

I talk about him all the time. He’s one of my most favorite social workers. He does such beautiful work. Go check out his book.  I think it’s called my grandmother’s hands.  He’s probably got more books by now, but he’s doing all of this beautiful work and trauma resolution around discrimination and racism in our country.

It’s so epic. Okay. But he talks about this concept of clean pain versus dirty pain. All right. We all have it. You think you can get rid of pain. You think that life is just supposed to be like, you unicorns all the time. No, that’s not how life is supposed to be. But at the end of the day, pain is a part of what it means to be a human and have a human experience. So are you going to choose clean pain or dirty pain? Over and over again. I love this analogy because dirty pain is just I’m not going to feel my feelings. Nope. And then we just sit in a shithole of an experience where we’re Smoking and eating and drinking and drugging and spewing our shit all over the place instead of actually doing the work of the clean pain.

And the thing about clean pain, it’s like the dirty pain is like taking a band-aid off, like I know just one little thing at a time. Clean pain might feel challenging at first.  I think of clean pain as the second, you need to do something you just go take care of it right there. The second you need to clean up your side of the street, you clean up your side of the street right there.

The second you feel a feeling, you take the moment at a time to actually be with what you’re experiencing and what you’re feeling. You learn how to do this work instead of going and numbing out, right? Dirty. What happens? You go and eat the pizza, you eat the ice cream you smoke pot, I don’t know you drink the bottle of wine, right?

We all know that makes us feel better in the moment, but that’s what makes it dirty pain because it just piles on top of pain that we’re not actually touching. It is just a distraction from actually doing the real work.  Oh, I haven’t even got to the last one, but I’m getting to the last one right now. 

First, to do this work, we’re just going to go over them. Last time I’m going to go over it. You do this slowly, gently, mindfully, and compassionately.  Number two, you do this work through the body, not through reliving stories up in your head. That’s where the actual healing will change your life.  Number three, you do this in a safe container.

If you need a safe container, this is why we create therapeutic safety. This is what Hello Body Freedom has created. You do this, whether it’s with us or someplace else, but making sure you’re in a safe container and remember inner safety versus outer safety. We need both. Okay. Number four. titrate. We don’t start with the hard stuff, right?

So the conversation I was just having with two of these clients and myself, we are really going through hard stuff. And the reason we’re able to do it and also not have these coping mechanisms that we had for so long, it’s because we’ve started small. We titrated and we just went a little at a time.

Okay. And the last tip I want to give you is pendulation. All right. This is a term. I believe that Peter Levine like actually, I know he coined it, but I think he might have even made it up. I don’t even think it was an actual word, but if you can think of like a pendulum, right?  You don’t want to think that your entire life has to be feeling all the pain and feeling it and feeling it and feeling all the time.

That’s impossible.  The way that you learn to touch it is you do just a little bit. That’s the titration just a little bit. And then you go in and you notice and you experience the feeling and you bring your consciousness and mindfulness to it. You feel as deeply as possible.  And then you get out of it.

You pendulum, pendulation. You pendulum over and away from it. You pendulum back into feeling good into resources that make you feel good, right? You learn how to touch the icky and then you learn how to get back to feeling good. And you do this in the moment that you are feeling the icky stuff. You go to the icky stuff.

Oh, you do a little pendulation out of it. Ah,  relief feels good. You pendulum back in, you pendulum back out, right? That is the actual practice of being able to feel what you are feeling to expand your capacity to feel, which is ultimately what is will show up in your life as true Depth of emotional resiliency, your capacity to feel what you need to feel and get back up to thriving in your life. 

Oh,  why can’t we all do this? Please Oprah pick up this podcast. Let’s get this out to the world. Let’s do this work.  All right, my friends. This is what we do inside of Hello Body Freedom every single crazy day. If you want more, just go to Hello Body Freedom. If you are completely new into my world and you have not been through my five-day food and body freedom challenge, I

 Highly encourage you to get in there and learn why you are struggling with your body, why you are struggling with your relationship with food, why it feels like food is in control and really how to get out of it.  That is one of the first steps. If you have never been in, it is an epic challenge.

You can literally join right now. You go to Hello Body Freedom. As soon as you see there, you will see the link that says, join the completely free five-day food and body freedom challenge. It is epic. You will get one on one support. We have a challenge mentor in there. My girl Jax is in there slaying it right now.

And I am in there. We are literally there to support you. If you have already been in contact with, this, you’ve been through the challenge. Drop me a DM if this feels good for you, literally, we love hearing what is going on with you. If you have questions, anything of the sort, we are here to support you in that way.

And I hope that we all have just not a holiday season that’s just filled with all of this kind of like BS, smiles and niceties and all these things. But holiday season where we can just really sit with and be with what we are experiencing and all of it, the good, the beauty the bad, the ugly, the bliss, the joy, the heartbreak, because the truth is that is the most epic human experience that we can have. It is to be able to hold it all knowing that even this moment, this experience, this too shall pass. All right, my friends until next time, have yourself an epic day. I’ll see you next time. Bye everybody.