Medicine Within: A Nature Retreat for Ceremony, Movement, and Renewal

✨ 5–7 December 2025 | Phakalane Retreat, Hout Bay, Cape Town ✨

In a world that moves fast and demands more, there comes a moment when the body whispers, slow down, come home.

Medicine Within Retreat is that pause: a three-day retreat designed to help you tune out the noise of daily life and reconnect with the quiet wisdom already living inside you.

A Retreat to Reconnect and Remember

Set in the forests of Phakalane Retreat at the foothills of the Hout Bay mountains, Medicine Within brings together guided ceremony, ritual, movement, sound healing, and creative reflection.

Surrounded by indigenous plant life and the sweet sounds of birdsong, you’ll have space to listen, remember, and return to what truly matters.

You’ll be invited to explore how ceremony, nature, and embodied practices can restore clarity, compassion, and creativity: the medicine that already exists within you.

What You’ll Experience

Over the course of three nourishing days, you’ll move through:

• Morning Microdosing Medicine Ceremony with cacao, meditation, movement, and earth-honouring rituals

• Intuitive Movement Sessions to release tension, invite vitality, and play

• Creative Integration Practices through ritual, art collage, journaling, and group sharing

• Sound Healing Journey to ground and rebalance

• Nature Connection via forest hikes to nearby waterfalls

• Sauna and Fireside Gatherings for rest, reflection, and community

Every element is designed to help you re-pattern old ways of being, expand your perspective, and step into more centered, authentic alignment.

Who This Retreat Is For

Medicine Within is ideal for those who:

• Feel called to slow down and integrate the year in nature

• Are exploring ceremonial or psychedelic practices such as microdosing

• Crave embodied ways to reconnect with creativity and purpose

• Appreciate stillness, gentle community, and mindful ritual

• Seek personal growth through movement, reflection, and nature-based spirituality

Whether you’re travelling from South Africa, Europe, or the US, this weekend retreat offers a sanctuary for introspection and renewal, inviting you to remember that the healing you seek already lives within you.

Why Phakalane Retreat

Nestled in a lush forest only 25 minutes from Cape Town, Phakalane Retreat embodies wabi-sabi elegance, and beauty in simplicity. The sanctuary offers sweeping mountain views, access to pristine hiking trails, and spaces curated for stillness and renewal. It’s the perfect blend of nature’s wildness and modern comfort, allowing you to fully unwind without needing to travel far.

Your Facilitator

Francesca Rose Annenberg is a trauma-informed somatic practitioner specializing in nervous system health, microdosing and psychedelic integration, disordered eating and body image, and intuitive movement practices and contact improvisation.

Her work weaves together an animist worldview with frameworks like Polyvagal Theory, IFS, and attachment theory, creating spaces where participants can safely reconnect with their bodies and rediscover trust in their own inner wisdom.

“Your body is your greatest ally and wisest guide. Healing begins when you learn to listen.”

How to Join

Because Medicine Within includes ceremonial work, all participants are asked to book a free 30-minute preparation call with Francesca before attending.

To reserve your place:
Email hello@francescaeatsroses.com

Download the retreat brochure here.

Check out the retreat setting here.

Spaces are limited to ensure an intimate, supportive experience.
Download the retreat brochure below for full details on pricing, accommodation, and preparation.

Metabolizing Love: What Grief Has Taught Me About Recovery

I’m sitting at a new desk, in a new chair, looking out at a new view. I’ve just moved homes after closing a significant chapter in my life, and things feels tender, liminal, becoming.

New roots are still finding strength. Branches reach out unsure, yet bravely, into this unfamiliar terrain. My inner trunk steadies as I slowly make sense of what has ended and what is beginning.

Becoming My Own Inner Tree

In this transition, I am learning that no one can be the roots for me. No one can reach out and make choices that are ultimately mine alone to make. No one can act as my center.

I am being asked to become my own inner tree from the inside-out. I am learning how to show up for myself.

This wasn’t always the case. Just before moving, I reread a diary I kept during my time as an in-patient at an eating disorder clinic, sixteen years ago.

I had just finished high school, and on 2 December 2009 I scrawled: “in a depressing, badly decorated place to eat a lot of food.” Back then, I could only frame my experience through anger and rejection.

Grieving My Younger Self

The only thing I knew how to show up for was the eating disorder itself. I clung to restriction, obsessed with the size of my stomach, and grasped onto exercise to punish, soothe, and escape.

Reading those pages, I felt deep grief for my younger self who was always trying to crawl out of her own skin. Every emotion was masked as “feeling fat.” Her world shrank with each repetitive thought of “just one less kilo”, the world spinning out of control by the slightest bloat.

As I read between the lines, I could see how she was afraid of existing as herself. She wanted to be so small, so perfect, her belief of “I’ll never ever be enough” driving her out of sight.

Her obsession with muscles was her attempt at building armor, a shield from an overwhelming world she feared would crush her if she exposed her authenticity.

At the core, she feared the very vulnerability that makes connection possible — and so she remained hungry for it.

Learning to Love Without Restriction

If I could name the essence of my recovery, it has been this: learning to love without restriction.

Sixteen years later, another ending calls me back to that same lesson. As I navigate letting go, I notice the part of me that wants to go small rise again.

Rather than pathologizing it, as it had been when I was an inpatient, I welcome it in. I no longer see the ED part of me as something bad, but rather as a protector carrying wisdom.

Perhaps you’ve had moments too, when heartbreak, grief, or change stirred old patterns of wanting to control, hide, or “tighten up.” In my work, I see this often — how old survival strategies surface during times of groundlessness, not to harm us, but to remind us of the importance of moving toward safety and presence during turbulent transitions.

I’ve come to believe that even the chaos of an eating disorder is attempting to point us toward greater order and alignment.

Recovery in Real Time

As I usher this scared part that wants me to go small and give it space to be heard, I hear it whispering something deeper than the fear of “feeling fat.”

She says: “I’m scared. I don’t know if I know how to love. If I open my heart, I might get crushed — or even crush another. What if I end up alone forever? I fear I might get to the end of my life having restricted myself from experiencing love.”

I feel tears as I write this. The belief beneath these fears is simple. It’s not “I’m too fat”, it’s “I am not lovable.”

That belief shapeshifted itself into maladaptive food behaviours and body image obsessions, distracting me from seeing what was truly beneath the surface.

Beyond Food: What Eating Disorders Teach Us

Digging deeper into the words that I wrote in my diary as an 18-year-old, I was once again reminded of how eating disorders stem so much further beyond the food.

Maybe you've seen this in your life too. The belief of “I’m not loveable” may have made you shrink (physically and/or emotionally) until there was no room for love to land. It may have led you into relationships where you could not show up fully, or where the other could not show up for you. It may have driven you to keep busy, always moving, never yielding close to anything.

Each time I meet this part of me that wants to shrink out of fear, I notice I can stay a little longer with it. I meet it with softness and compassion. This is recovery in real-time.

Grief and Love: Dancing Sisters

And here I am, invited closer to the love within myself. To know its textures: from the pummeling of grief to the soaring of bliss. What a gift this moment is — an opportunity, a lesson, a rewriting of how I meet endings, transitions, and beginnings.

For how we grieve is how we love. Indeed, grief and love are dancing sisters, two sides of the same coin.

My recovery has always been about one thing: learning to metabolize love (and therefore grief). To drink it in. To taste every part of it, even the pain. To lick my lips knowing that I exist — a human, in a body, able and willing to feel it all.

Thank you for being part of this journey. I write this with the knowing that my healing is your healing, your healing is my healing, and our healing is inseparable.

If this resonated with you, I would love to hear how it moved you.

When Beauty Isn’t Real: Vogue’s AI Model and the Danger to Eating Disorder Recovery and Body Trust

Vogue’s AI Model: A New Benchmark That Isn’t Human

In August 2025, Vogue published a fashion campaign with a flawless, AI-generated model: blonde, blue-eyed, white-toothed, and toned. The only clue was a tiny disclaimer in the corner of the page.

The internet lit up with concern. On TikTok, one user wrote: “So first normal women are comparing themselves to edited models… Now we have to compare ourselves to women that don’t even exist???”

This isn’t just about fashion. It’s about the messages we take into our bodies: messages about worth, desirability, and what it means to be enough.

Perfectionism on Steroids

Social media has already trained us to edit, smooth, and filter ourselves for approval. What started as playful dog-ear filters turned into apps that reshape bone structure and erase every line.

AI takes this one step further. Now, the comparison isn’t between your body and a retouched photo — it’s between your body and a fantasy that doesn’t exist.

For anyone healing from an eating disorder, this is particularly dangerous. Eating disorders often root in perfectionism and comparison. If the standard of beauty is now AI-generated, our human attempts will never measure up. That endless striving is exactly what fuels disconnection and dissastifaction from the body.

Losing Touch With Human Beauty

Over the past decade, fashion has inched toward inclusivity, featuring more body types, ages, ethnicities, abilities, and genders. AI risks erasing that hard-won progress.

When trained on biased datasets, AI tends to replicate outdated ideals: thin, white, young, symmetrical. These “perfect” bodies promote the same unattainable standards that eating disorder recovery works so hard to dismantle.

Slowly, if we are not careful, we’ll forget what raw, unedited, natural human beauty looks and feels like. And when we lose touch with that, we lose touch with ourselves. Beauty always comes from the inside-out.

Embodiment as Resistance

Embodiment is the antidote to AI perfectionism. When we come back into our bodies through feeling hunger and fullness cues, breathing, moving with pleasure, we begin to loosen the grip of comparison. By inward, we turn away from outward competing.

Recovery asks us to honour the aliveness of our bodies, not their likeness to a machine-generated image. It invites us to trust that beauty is found in wisdom of wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, and softness — in the stories our bodies carry.

Choosing embodiment over AI perfection isn’t just personal healing; it’s cultural resistance. It says: I will not erase myself for your standards.

What We Risk Losing

This isn’t just about models. AI campaigns displace photographers, makeup artists, stylists, and other creatives whose artistry celebrates human expression. And most of all, they erase the lived experience of people in real bodies.

The danger isn’t simply that we’ll compare ourselves to images that don’t exist. It’s that we’ll forget the profound worth of our own bodies, exactly as they are.

Coming Home to Ourselves

AI-generated beauty will always be flawless. But flawless is lifeless and soulless.

Eating disorder recovery and embodiment remind us that the cracks, the textures, softness, and lines are what makes us alive. Our raw, lived experience and the beautiful wisdom gained from moving through it all is what makes us human.

In a world rushing toward synthetic beauty, the most radical act is to reclaim our body as it is. To remember that no algorithm can touch the wisdom, resilience, and depth of a living, breathing human being.

👉 What do you think? Does AI beauty fuel your perfectionism, or can it be a reminder to return to the body you’re already in?

Restore Body Trust at Home: A Somatic Practice Using a Physio Ball

Rebuilding Body Trust, One Bounce At A Time

In eating disorder recovery, reconnecting with your body isn’t just emotional, it’s a physical process. A physio ball may seem like a simple tool, but in the context of somatic healing, it becomes a powerful ally in restoring regulation, boundaries, and interoceptive clarity.

Whether you're recovering from bingeing, restricting, or body image struggles, this at-home practice can support your journey back to body trust, self-regulation, and digestion, from the inside out.

Why a Physio Ball?

The ball is both stable and responsive. When I lie on it, bounce on it, or breathe against it, I feel something solid meeting me. There’s feedback, connection, and an embodied reminder: I exist, I am supported, I belong here.

This kind of physical contact can help:

• Reestablish a sense of safety

• Awaken gut awareness and interoceptive signals

• Support the vagus nerve and digestion

• Build energetic and emotional boundaries

Somatic Practices to Try at Home

1. Yield and Be Held
Lie on your back on the physio ball, draping over it. Feel the support underneath you, especially behind your heart and pelvis.

Can you let yourself be held? Can you yield into support?
This helps signal safety to your nervous system and builds trust in resting. From here, a sense of "I have enough. I am enough" can arise.

2. Bounce to Meet Your Life Force
Sit and gently bounce on the ball, letting your spine and pelvis find rhythm. This connects you to your vitality and sexual energy in a safe and contained way, reminding your system that aliveness can feel good.

3. Define Your Edges
Breathe against the ball. Feel it push back.
This helps clarify:

• Where do I begin and end?

• What are my yeses and nos?
  This simple push builds boundary awareness, which is key for intuitive eating, consent, and emotional clarity.

4. Stimulate Gut Receptors
Place the ball or a pillow on your belly and breathe into it slowly. You might want to drape over the ball for this one too. The gentle pressure activates receptors in your gut, helping you recognize hunger, fullness, and emotional cues.

5. Regulate Before Meals
Before eating, breathe with the ball or a pillow to activate the low-tone dorsal parasympathetic system—the part of the nervous system that supports digestion and social engagement.
This prepares your body to receive food without overwhelm or shutdown.

From Dysregulation to Interoception

Over time, these somatic cues guided by the ball lead to better digestion, refined body connection (able to track, feel, and name sensations (aka interoceptive awareness)), stronger boundaries, clarity around wans, needs, and preferences, and greater regulation and trust around eating. They also help you access something even deeper — your gut knowing.

The more you come into your body, the more you can feel the subtle in-between, where the whispers of clarity and truth reside. The ball helps with that in a playful way. It gives your nervous system something to push against, something to connect with and trust.

This is the path of restoring body trust: one breath, one boundary, one bounce at a time.

Have You Tried It?

Have you used a physio ball or similar somatic tools in your healing journey? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear how it's helped you reconnect with your body.

To see me practicing with the physio ball, check out my IG post.

Photo by jerry chen on Unsplash

Why Body Checking Isn’t Really About Vanity: A Somatic Perspective on Body Image and Embodiment

Body checking is often misunderstood as vanity or obsession with appearance. But beneath the surface, this behavior is a signpost — a survival strategy pointing to deeper struggles with body dysmorphia, trauma, and disconnection.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• What body checking is and why we do it

• How it relates to identity, safety, and nervous system regulation

• Practices to support embodiment and healing from body image issues

What Is Body Checking?

Body checking refers to repetitive behaviours used to assess or measure one’s body, such as pinching, squeezing, feeling, or looking in mirrors. These actions often focus on areas of perceived “flaws” and can become compulsive.

But here’s the deeper truth:
Body checking isn’t just about size. It’s also about existence.

For many people, especially those with eating disorders or body dysmorphia, changes in the body trigger identity confusion — "If my body changes, am I still me?" Body checking becomes a way to anchor identity in a world that feels unstable or unsafe.

The Link Between Body Checking, Trauma, and Disembodiment

Often, the inability to “be” in one’s body stems from the nervous system’s history of survival adaptations.

When we’ve experienced trauma — particularly attachment trauma or early developmental ruptures — the spaces and people around us may have felt unsafe or dysregulating. Our bodies learned to brace, numb, or disconnect. We move further and further away from our sense of embodiment, which leaves us feeling like we don’t exist.

➡️ In this context, body checking is an unconscious attempt to feel real — to confirm, through physical touch or visual feedback, that we still exist and are “enough” to be here.

You’re Not Afraid of Your Body—Your Body Is Holding Fear

Here’s a reframe:
You’re not afraid of your body.
Your body is holding fear.

Fear that was never discharged.
Fear from moments where the body mobilized to fight, flee, or freeze, and never had the chance to complete that cycle.

When those survival energies stay stuck in the system, the body becomes associated with discomfort or threat. We begin to project fear onto the body itself, compounding body image issues and furthering disconnection.

Healing Through Embodiment and Safety

As we begin to release this trapped survival stress and establish safety through somatic practices, the need to body check naturally fades. Here's what helps:

• Proprioceptive and interoceptive practices (e.g., mindful movement, developmental movement patterns, breath awareness)

• Connecting to the midline and central channel — the core of your being

• Spending time in environments that feel safe and affirming

• Co-regulating with others who are committed to healing and embodiment

These tools help us inhabit the body not as an enemy, but as home.

A Message for the Part of You That Still Doesn’t Feel Safe

You exist.
You belong.
You are worthy of being here, just as you are.

Your life force is not too much — it’s not dangerous — it’s sacred.
Your body is not broken.
It’s asking to be met with safety, presence, and love.

As fear softens and your nervous system finds regulation, your body becomes less something to manage or fix, and more a place to live, love, and trust.

May you come home to body.

Photo by Wang Sheeran on Unsplash

Eating Disorder Recovery & Exercise Addiction: Reclaiming Embodiment, Balance, and the Wisdom of the Body

Treatment for Exercise Addiction: An Embodied Path to Recovery

Eating disorders are not merely coping mechanisms — they are profound expressions of the body’s unmet needs for belonging, safety, balance, and worth. Exercise addiction, often entangled with eating disorders, is no exception. When movement becomes compulsive, we must ask: What is the body truly seeking?

Recovery begins when we stop trying to “fix” behaviours and start listening to what they’re pointing toward. From an embodied perspective, eating disorders are messengers — revealing where disconnection or boundary violations have occurred, and where reconnection and resourcing are needed.

What Is Exercise Addiction in ED Recovery?

Exercise addiction is characterized by a compulsive need to move — often excessive, rigid, or punishing — even when the body is exhausted. It can feel like you have to run, walk, or work out, and stopping brings anxiety or dysregulation.

But what if, instead of pathologizing the movement, we approached it with compassion?

“Where are you running to? What are you moving away from?”

In my own recovery journey over 16 years ago, these were the questions I longed for — not punishment for relapsing, but curiosity about what my body was trying to communicate. Exercise felt compulsive (I just had to do it) and excessive (I didn’t know when to stop).

Embodiment: Returning to Center

True embodiment means that your consciousness and your physical form are aligned — organized around a central axis that holds your vitality, creativity, and wholeness. Trauma, especially developmental or relational trauma, can disrupt this center. It creates fragmentation — where safety, trust, and energetic balance are lost.

Eating disorders often emerge from these imbalances. They are not random. They point to unmet needs for safety, connection, and sovereignty. The same applies to exercise addiction — it often arises when we feel off-balance, powerless, overwhelmed, or unseen.

The work, then, is not to eliminate the symptom — but to resource the center. To bring curiosity to movement, to ask:

• Where does this movement want to go?

• What part of me is asking for release, or regulation?

• How can I bring more engagement, breath, and presence into the act of moving?

Movement as Medicine, Not Punishment

In somatic recovery, we don’t throw away the movement. We slow it down. We listen to it. When exercise becomes exploratory rather than defensive, it can reconnect us to our center.

Try this the next time you move your body:

• Focus on what helps you breathe.

• Orient toward something beautiful as you move your body (in your room, in your surroundings).

• Pause — and notice how you feel before, during, and after the movement.

• Allow your movement to be relational — to the Earth, to your joy, to yourself.

Rest Is Revolutionary

In a culture that glorifies productivity and the “ideal” body, rest becomes radical. Releasing the identity that’s wrapped up in discipline, control, and body perfectionism takes immense courage in a diet culture world.

Psychedelic healing — especially with intentional microdosing or ceremonial psychedelic work — can support this process by softening the inner critic and reconnecting us to our soul’s rhythm rather than society’s.

Recovery invites us to reimagine nourishment, not just through food, but through how we relate to energy, stillness, pleasure, and presence.

Recovery as Returning to Wholeness

Recovery isn’t just about stopping behaviours. It’s about coming into right relationship with your body. It’s about learning to metabolize safety, rest, movement, and love. The eating disorder — and the compulsive exercise that often comes with it — holds clues to the balance your body is craving.

Rather than seeing these symptoms as the problem, we can see them as the path — invitations to reclaim your center and live in deeper alignment.

Photo by Zaur Giyasov on Unsplash

The Surprising Gift of Fear: A Somatic and Psychedelic Approach to Eating Disorder Recovery

What If fear is your gateway to growth?

Today, I’m contemplating this potent quote by Pema Chödrön:

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”

Recently, I’ve been moving through a portal of fear — not fear of something external, but the fear of fear itself. This has been about confronting and being present with the physical sensations of fear running through my body.

Being afraid of fear itself can feel like a frustrating loop. Fear feeds on itself, creating a cycle that’s hard to break. Maybe you’ve felt this, too?

It’s natural to resist discomfort. Turning toward the burning, buzzing sensations we label as “fear” can feel unnatural — like going against the grain.

If you’ve ever been taught to dismiss fear or lacked role models growing up who navigated fear mindfully, this reaction is incredibly common.

Fear Is Not Wrong

It is helpful to remember that:

• Feeling fear is not wrong.

• You are not broken for feeling fear — or even for fearing fear.

Fear is a vital emotion in this human experience 💕 It helps us:

• Decide what to move toward or avoid.

• Activate survival responses (fight, flight, freeze) when danger is present.

Fear is a necessary ingredient for our survival, one of the seven core categories of emotions we all experience, alongside anger, sadness, joy, excitement, disgust, and sexual excitement.

But what happens when we experience fear outside of serious, life-threatening danger?

The Fear That Holds Our Truth Back

Sometimes, fear shows up when we’re not in danger but in a moment of expansion. Expansion invites us closer to our truth, asking us to remove the armor and defenses that have kept us small. Stepping beyond our comfort zone can feel thrilling — and terrifying. For example, you might:

• Feel a desire to connect with someone but hesitate as fear tenses up your body, holding you back.

• Be curious to try new food at a community gathering but feel fear stop you.

• Want to speak up in a circle of friends but feel your throat tighten, constricting your voice.

In these moments, sensations like tightness, burning, paralyzing, or heaviness arise — a soupy somatic mix we label as “fear.” 😨 These feelings can be overwhelming and uncomfortable and leave us feeling out of control (especially if we didn't have appropriate role modelling).

When fear dominates in this way, we try to avoid it entirely, creating a loop where we fear fear itself.

Escaping Fear Through Disconnection

For those navigating eating disorders, disordered eating, or other mental health challenges, emotions like fear can feel too big, too much, too overwhelming.

Why? Many of us were taught to suppress or numb emotions. Perhaps you were labelled a “wimp” for expressing fear or praised for being “tough cookie.” These early experiences can lead to disconnection from authentic emotions, encouraging patterns of shame, shutting down and avoiding what arises within.

To cope with these feelings, we might turn to food or our bodies to escape — not just from fear, but from the pain of denying our inner truths by only showing "acceptable" emotions to the outside world.

Personally, I see eating disorders as expressions of unmetabolized fear responses.

The thing is, is that fear doesn’t disappear when avoided. It becomes trapped in the body, undigested, and can show up as:

• Anxiety

• Digestive issues

• Disrupted sleep

• Rigidity around food, and more

The way forward is learning to gently approach fear — to meet it with curiosity, courage, and compassion rather than avoiding, numbing out or battling.

I am sharing this theme because there is a lot of fear in the collective right now. The world is certainly at a precipice of radical disruption and change.

Almost everyone I’ve spoken to recently has expressed that they’re in some kind of transition — whether it’s related to jobs, finances, homes, health, relationships, or identity 🌓

We are individually and collectively in the midst of change. And change often brings fear.

Embracing Fear as a Gateway to Transformation

Fear is not something to eliminate. It’s something to understand, hold, and soften into.

Liminal moments — those thresholds of change and uncertainty — often bring fear. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold” or “doorway.” It’s the space between where you’ve been and where you’re going.

How we approach these liminal spaces determines whether we repeat old patterns out of fear — or step into transformation with grace, and become more embodied and wiser through it 👁️

Fear holds a surprising gift: it invites us into transformation and deeper embodiment.

Three Ways to Work with Fear

Rather than tightening and hardening around fear, we can be softened by its presence. By stepping through the gateway of fear, we find opportunities to feel, move, and connect with deeper truths. Here are three ways to work with the fear of fear:

1️⃣ Give Yourself Permission to Feel Fear

Fear is a natural response and can indicate that we are moving towards a more raw, naked, real version of ourselves. It’s not about removing fear but learning to walk with it.

Transitions and change feel scary because our biology craves predictability. Our brains have evolved to avoid and reduce uncertainty (it’s more energy efficient). And the change process is fundamentally uncertain.

Since we have a strong impulse to strive for stability, the unknown inherently feels uncomfortable. By understanding this about our biology, the tight hold of fear begins to loosen.

You are not weak for feeling fear — you are human 🧬 By welcoming it with curiosity, you open the door to transformation.

2️⃣ Work with the Body

Fear is a bodily experience, so moving the body helps you process and digest it.

Here are a few ways to work the sensations of fear:

• Shake your hands and limbs to release stuck energy.

• Rock or sway gently to a favourite, soothing song.

• Walk in nature (barefoot if possible) with a friend or pet to feel grounded.

- Notice how you feel before, during and after these activities. By paying attention to how the sensations feel in your body, they become more familiar and known (see Point 1️⃣!).

It’s important to move in ways that feel within your capacity, where you can stay present to your inner experience.

Don’t be surprised if you start moving very subtly and slowly; fear needs time to come out of its shell and dethaw.

Side but important note: if you are working with fear and trauma that have been trapped in your body since early developmental years, working with it might look very different to what is described above. Working with a trauma-informed practitioner might be needed in these instances.

It goes without saying that turning towards fear requires embodied safety. You might need build a felt sense of safety in your body first before diving into it by:

• Learning about nervous system regulation and how your own nervous system works.

• Placing your hands on your heart or belly and breathing consciously.

• Pressing your feet into the ground or wiggle your toes to anchor yourself in the present moment.

• Engaging your sense — Notice what you can see, hear, or feel around you in this here-now present moment.

• Placing a weighted blanket or pillow on your body or drinking a warm beverage.

These practices build a sense of safety, containment, and regulation, helping fear soften and move.

3️⃣ Reconnect with Your Why

Why do you want to shift your relationship with fear?

Do you desire deeper connection?

More love?

To live more authentically?

These goals can feel scary, but reconnecting with your intention gives you the courage to move forward, adding radiant fuel to your inner fire.

Fear is not your enemy — it’s a messenger, pulling you closer to the truth. Ask yourself:

What is my fear trying to tell me?

What is it protecting me from?

Reframing fear as an ally that's trying to protect you rather than an adversary can help it feel less overwhelming and scary.

A Personal Reflection

Having recently celebrated my 33rd birthday earlier this month, I have finally learnt to trust that fear will not swallow me. One of my core words for my birthday this year is Trust — trusting my inner experience and letting bigger energy, like fear and love, to move through me with acceptance and curiosity.

I look back to my tender 17-year-old self when I first started my journey to heal disordered eating, body mistrust and fear of feelings (especially love) and I feel so much compassion for my younger parts that have grown and transformed.

Learning about my nervous system, working somatically, and incorporating psychedelics into my life have certainly contributed to my capacity and resiliency to hold more of myself.

I still have lots to learn but now I trust that I won’t be swallowed by fear and feel empowered knowing that I have recalibrating resources in reach to support myself in wobbly moments 🌊

Here are some simple reminders that have helped me when fear surfaces:

• Feel it in the body. Notice where fear arises in the body. See if you can also observe a place in your body that feels neutral. Shift your focus between these two places.

• Visualize it as a wave. Fear rises and falls, just like the tides. The energy will eventually subside. Breathe.

• Remind yourself you are safe. Feel your feet on the ground, take in your environment, and affirm: “Fear is a feeling. I am safe in this moment. I can feel it without being controlled by it.”

Fear is a natural response to life’s transitions and transformations. It’s not something to fix or eliminate but rather is a guide that invites us into deeper truths about ourselves.

When we learn to approach fear with curiosity and compassion — to feel it, hold it, and move with it — we open the door to resilience, growth, and evolution. We move closer to what we want and find ourselves more fulfilled. When we show up to ourselves in these ways, we inspire and give others permission to do the same.

Honouring Your Courage

Dear one, if you’ve made it this far, I want you to know: I see you, and I honour you 🙏

It takes immense courage to turn toward the challenging parts of yourself — those shadowy, uncomfortable places where fear resides. Yet, it’s in this meeting that healing, integration, and wholeness begin.

When we meet fear with compassion, it reveals its hidden gifts — courage, resilience, and authenticity.

Fear, while uncomfortable, offers us the surprising gift of transformation. It invites us to grow, to soften, and to discover truths about ourselves we might not otherwise touch. By seeing fear not as an obstacle but as a gateway, we walk the path of self-discovery with courage.

As you navigate this brave walk of transformation, remember that you don’t have to do it perfectly, and you don’t have to do it all at once. Keep going, gently, step by step.

And you don’t do it alone; remember that you are held by a force that is so powerfully benevolent beyond measure, beyond comprehension. This wider, deeper holding is what will carry you through the fear and to the other side of whatever portal of change you are navigating.

You are not alone. You are worthy of healing. You are capable.

If you need a reminder in moments of doubt, let this article be your guidepost — a small flame to light the way when fear clouds your vision.

May you carry this truth with you:

“The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.” — Thucydides

With love and unwavering belief in your path,

Francesca Rose

Somatic Healing and Embodiment: How Intuitive Eating Supports Nervous System Health

Transforming our relationship with food doesn’t start in the mind or thoughts — it begins in the body. By deepening into embodiment, we cultivate a sense of trust, empowerment, and discernment, not only in our approach to eating but in how we live our lives.

Keep reading to learn how to deepen into embodiment and how this supports our relationship with food. Explore the importance of somatic healing, intuitive eating, and nervous system health in the context of embodiment, along with common factors that disrupt this process. Let’s dive in!

What is Embodiment?

To be embodied means to:

• Connect with your felt sense and body's signals.

• Experience an organized sensory system that promotes clarity and flow.

• Trust and respond to your body's biological impulses and needs.

• Move and inhabit your body with congruency — what you say and do align.

• Discern when to engage with or disconnect from external influences.

In essence, embodiment creates a foundation of agency and clarity, enabling you to nourish yourself in ways that feel intuitive and aligned with your body's needs.

Supporting a sense of embodiment allows you to feel more yourself. When consciousness merges with physical form (i.e. the body), there is a feeling of coming home to yourself.

What Disrupts Embodiment?

Certain life experiences can disconnect us from our bodies, making the process of eating and nourishment feel challenging. Below are six key factors that interfere with our ability to stay embodied:

1. Birth Trauma

The birth process plays a foundational role in our embodiment. A traumatic birth can lead to developmental interruptions, affecting our ability to fully inhabit our bodies. Interwoven in this is generational and ancestral trauma that influences home life within the womb from conception through pregnancy.

2. Injury, Illness, or Chronic Pain

When the body feels unsafe due to internal threats like pain, injury or illness, inhabiting the body can become distressing. This disconnect makes it harder to trust and care for our vessel.

3. Physical Safety Risks

External threats, whether real or perceived, activate the autonomic nervous system into hyperarousal or hypoarousal.

• Acute trauma, in the form of a boundary violation, often causes dissociation as a survival mechanism.

• Pervasive external threats, such as toxic relationships or societal pressures (e.g., diet culture), can result in chronic disembodiment.

4. Attachment Injuries & Early Developmental Trauma

When caregivers provide inconsistent or misattuned attachment experiences, we may hold back parts of ourselves to avoid rejection or abandonment. This leads to dysregulation and a diminished sense of embodiment.

5. Sensory Processing Issues

Sensory processing challenges can disrupt our ability to feel connected to our bodies. These issues may stem from:

• Birth trauma or early developmental trauma.

• High levels of energetic sensitivity, common among those with eating disorders.

Learning to work with these sensitivities (as superpowers!) can support deeper embodiment and healing.

6. Gender Dysphoria

For individuals whose bodies do not align with their gender identity, the disconnect can impact their ability to feel fully embodied. The body may not feel like a safe or affirming space to inhabit.

How Embodiment Supports Intuitive Eating

As we deepen into embodiment, we naturally strengthen our ability to eat intuitively. When we are connected to our felt sense, we can discern:

• How to hear and honour our hunger and fullness cues.

• What nourishment our body needs.

• What food preferences we like and dislike.

• When to eat, rest, or move.

Embodiment fosters nervous system regulation, which is essential for normative eating, and digesting food and life experiences.

Reflective Questions for Embodiment Practice

• What does “embodiment” mean to you?

• How do you recognize when someone is embodied?

• What practices or environments help you feel more connected to your body?

Practical Tips for Deepening Into Embodiment

1. Engage in Somatic Practices: Yoga, mindful movement, or body scans can help connect you to your felt sense.

2. Work with Your Nervous System: Practices that support vagal toning and regulation like sounding, grounding exercises, or co-regulation with a safe person can promote nervous system health.

3. Explore Sensory Processing: Understand your sensory needs and integrate tools (like weighted blankets or specific textures) to support regulation.

4. Seek Safe Spaces: Surround yourself with environments and relationships that feel safe and affirming to your identity and needs.

By understanding and addressing the factors that disrupt embodiment, we can move closer to a state of balance, where food and nourishment feel natural and intuitive.

Transforming our relationship with food doesn't have happen in the mind or in our thoughts but it happens through the body. 

Embodiment is not a destination but an ongoing practice — a journey of inhabiting your body with compassion, curiosity, and trust.

Photo by Jamie Brown on Unsplash

How the Nervous System Influences Eating Disorders: Understanding the Mind-Body Connection for Recovery

Understanding eating disorders goes beyond food — it’s about how the body signals its sense of safety, regulation, and survival.

Our nervous system communicates essential information, guiding us to recognize when we feel safe, secure, and thriving, or, on the other hand, stressed, unsafe, and struggling. By tuning into these signals, we can uncover what our bodies need not only to survive but to thrive.

Eating disorders often reflect deeper nervous system dysregulation, rooted in survival responses to chronic stress or early developmental trauma. Understanding how the nervous system influences eating behaviors can guide us toward compassion and healing.

Understanding the Role of the Nervous System in Eating Disorders

When someone faces an eating disorder, their body is frequently in a state of survival—flight, fight, or freeze—due to accumulated stress. This response arises when the body feels unsafe or lacks the secure attachment needed to feel at ease.

• Fight Response: The body prepares to confront perceived threats.

• Flight Response: The body feels the need to escape.

• Freeze Response: The body shuts down to avoid overwhelm.

How Nervous System States Influence Eating Disorder Behaviors

Based on past experiences, personality, and environment, each person’s nervous system may respond uniquely. Here’s how different states manifest in thought patterns and eating disorder behaviors:

Freeze State (Shutdown)

When in a freeze or shutdown state, the nervous system sends messages like “I feel helpless, hopeless, and numb.” This can lead to:

• Digestive issues, such as inhibited digestion

• Binge eating to induce a shutdown feeling

• Excessive exercise to combat numbness (aka to feel alive)

• Restricted eating due to reduced hunger or fullness cues (cues are hard to detect, heard or perceive due to muted interoception)

• Emotional and physical disassociation

Fight State (Confrontation)

In a fight state, thoughts may include “I feel irritated, restless, and mistrustful.” Related eating disorder behaviors might include:

• Bingeing or purging

• Compulsive exercise

• Chewing and spitting food

• Restricting others from controlling or preparing food

• Nail-biting or gum-chewing

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Flee State (Avoidance)

In the flee state, individuals may feel “anxious, fidgety, and fearful.” Associated eating disorder behaviors include:

• Rigid dietary restrictions or food rules or specific food rituals

• Avoidance of eating in front of others

• Compulsive exercise

• Food phobias

• Constipation due to high stress

Finding Safety and Healing through the Nervous System

Healing begins with recognizing where the body currently operates within these states. By listening to the body’s signals, we can introduce supportive resources that address these needs and gradually move towards a state of safety. Safety is experienced in many different ways, primarily through connection and co-regulation with other people.

Ventral Vagal State: The Nervous System’s Safe Zone

When in a ventral vagal state, thoughts shift to “I feel open, safe, and curious.” Here’s how a ventral vagal state changes our relationship with food:

• Eating and digestion become smoother and more effective; there’s a reduction in GI issues

• Greater clarity on hunger and food choices

• Feeling satiety becomes a more regular experience

• Reduced focus on disordered eating behaviors

In this state, the eating disorder’s influence softens, allowing for a sense of grounding and connectedness within and towards others. As the body finds homeostasis, food becomes a nourishing experience rather than a battleground.

In this state of ventral vagal connection when our nervous system feels safe and connected to the world around us, there are very few eating behaviours and thoughts that exist. When we land in this place in our nervous system, it is like the eating disorder can naturally let go of us - because less defense responses (fight, slight, freeze) are needed.

Connecting with Safety in the Present Moment

By establishing a safe, supportive environment with others, the nervous system can let go of protective behaviors. Feeling safe, connected, and embodied allows the eating disorder to release its hold, making way for a renewed sense of self.

Decoding the nervous system’s messages reveals that eating disorders aren’t just about food—they’re about safety, connection, and understanding our body’s needs. By embracing supportive relationships and fostering safe spaces, we can gently guide our nervous system back to balance.

Key Takeaways:

• Recognize the nervous system state: Understand how fight, flight, freeze, or ventral vagal states influence thoughts and eating behaviors.

• Listen to the body: Decode its signals to address underlying needs and emotions through refining interoceptive awareness.

• Seek relational support: A trusted connection helps the nervous system feel safe, reducing disordered behaviors over time.

No longer needing to protect and in a place of relational safety, the nervous system can fully land in the present moment. This is when we feel embodied - and at home in our own skin.

Ready to Take the Next Step in Your Journey?

If these words resonate with you and you’re ready to explore a deeper path to healing, I invite you to reach out. Together, we can work to unlock the messages your body holds and gently guide you toward a place of balance, safety, and self-compassion. For details on my one-on-one eating disorder recovery coaching, contact me here.

Photo by Scott Carroll on Unsplash

Connection Is Our First Form Of Nourishment

Many people with eating disorders experience a deep yearning for connection. This stems from not receiving the warmth and safety of healthy attachment. Connection is not just a want—it's a fundamental need, especially for those struggling with disordered eating.

Why Connection Matters for Eating Disorders

When thinking about eating disorders, it's essential to look beyond food. Our primary source of nourishment is relationships—how we connect with others shapes our experience of nourishment in all forms, including food. Humans, as social beings, need connection to survive and thrive.

The way we relate to ourselves and the world around us is heavily influenced by our early relationships with caregivers, societal norms, and cultural structures. These relationships not only shape our emotional well-being but also impact our relationship with food, another crucial form of nourishment.

How Relationships Influence Our Connection with Food

Food provides the physical energy and life force our bodies need. Just like connection, eating is an intimate act—taking something from the outside and bringing it inside us. Our relationship with food often mirrors the way we connect with others.

For those with eating disorders, this relationship can be distorted. How we were taught to relate to food is often tied to the attachment patterns we developed in early life. If we didn’t receive the care we needed from caregivers or society, it can affect our nervous system and lead us to believe the world is unsafe and nourishment is scarce.

The Role of the Nervous System in Eating Disorders

Over the course of our first seven years, the development of the ventral portion of our autonomic nervous system forms. This is established via the act of co-regulation, which is the quality of connection that primary caregivers offer their children.

By “borrowing” our caregiver’s nervous system, our inner source of regulation, how we deal with stress, and how we relate to our emotions is developed. The primary wiring of the autonomic nervous system shapes and molds how we connect with the world and others, and how we connect with ourselves.

As children, when we don’t receive the emotional nourishment we need, it dysregulates our nervous system. We may develop beliefs such as, "My needs don't matter," or "I can't trust others to meet my needs." In response, we find ways to survive, even if they are unhealthy.

This is where disordered eating comes in. The behaviors associated with eating disorders are often the body’s way of communicating unmet needs. They are attempts to find the connection, safety, and regulation that were missing in our early attachments.

Healing Through Connection: A Path to Recovery

Recovery from an eating disorder involves adding the support and resources that were missing in the attachment system. By creating safety in the body, we can begin to heal the parts of ourselves that are holding on to past traumas. This helps the body grow its capacity to hold the fullness of our emotions and experiences.

Connection is hardwired into us, and it's through safe, nurturing relationships that we develop a sense of self and learn how to relate to the world. Healing from disordered eating involves reconnecting with our bodies and learning to trust again.

The Impact of Early Trauma on Eating Disorders

For many people with eating disorders, early developmental trauma plays a significant role. Misattuned co-regulation from caregivers during childhood can lead to feelings of shame, confusion, and disconnection from the body.

When our caregivers fail to reflect our emotions accurately or meet our needs, we start to doubt our own experiences. This can lead to looking outside of ourselves for validation and disconnecting from our true feelings, bodies, and intuition.

Eating disorder behaviours are simply the body telling us what is missing in the attachment system, and the behaviours are in some way an attempt to meet those needs and wants in the ways that the body knows how.

Understanding Eating Disorders as Survival Mechanisms

Disordered eating behaviors are not dysfunctional strategies but are strategies of survival. They are ways to avoid the pain and fear associated with intimacy and connection. Many people with eating disorders have been hurt in relationships, and these behaviors act as protective mechanisms to prevent further harm.

However, these survival strategies prevent us from fully connecting with ourselves, others, and life. Recovery is about bringing compassion to the body and relearning how to connect in safe, nourishing ways.

Reflecting on Our Relationship with Food and Connection

Eating disorders mirror one’s ability to connect with oneself and with others.

Take a moment to reflect on your relationship with food and connection:

• How connected do you feel to your hunger and fullness cues?

• How attuned are you to your needs, desires, and emotions?

• How do you digest your emotions?

• Do you feel any shame around wanting?

• How comfortable are you with intimacy and allowing others in?

• Complete the sentence: When I feel connected, I am…

  Complete the sentence: When I feel connected to the world around me, I notice in my body…

  Complete the sentence: When I feel safe, I connect to…

These questions can help bring awareness to the patterns that shape your relationship with food and connection.

As we restore capacity, trust, and safety with our bodies and with others, the eating disorder strategies soften.

Connection becomes available within and with the outside world, and with that a source of regulation, empowerment and nourishment.

Creating Safety in the Body for Healing

To heal from an eating disorder, it's crucial to create safety in the body. When the body feels safe, the protective layers begin to soften, and we can open up to connection. Safety allows us to experience the present moment, which is where healing happens.

By connecting to the present moment and the sensations in the body, we can start to heal the underlying wounds.

In order to access a sense of connection with our bodies, in relationship, and in the world at large, it requires enough safety.

Opening to connect is vulnerable. This is why safety is key to support this process of softening and opening up.

Reflect on a time when you have felt a sense of safety. Who was with you, where were you and what were you doing? How did you feel? How did you relate to food and eating and your body? How present was the eating disorder voice?

When the body recognises safety in the external environment and feels that internally, there is an embodied alignment between the outside and the inside experience that registers “I can put the guard down”.

When we feel safe, there is an opportunity for the protective layers to slowly dethaw, including the defensive walls of the eating disorder - and we can let in the nourishment of connection.

The ruminative, looping mind that is associated with a nervous system that is in fear and dysregulation quietens, making space for the body innate intelligence towards healing to guide.

An eating disorder cannot exist when we reside in the present moment.

The eating disorder feels most protected when we are focused cognitively on the past or future (e.g. thinking about a meal from the past or what we will eat in the future) rather than the present - which is where the body lives.

To connect to the present moment means we have to connect with the body, which includes all of the feelings and sensations that it holds.

Connecting to the body is the gateway to recovery. And opening to this connection needs to be done slowly so that trust and safety can be firmly established.

The Role of Connection in Thriving Beyond Eating Disorders

True recovery is about learning to receive (rather than restrict) nourishment in all forms—through food, relationships, creativity, and love.

We are allowed, deserving and worthy of these forms of nourishment.

Part of eating disorder recovery is learning how to deepen our embodied presence, to safely grow the capacity to let more of life in whilst staying regulated and connected to the body and the environment around us.

We need connection to not just survive, but to thrive. Attuning to our bodies with self-compassion and forming healthy, supportive relationships helps us build the safety and trust we need so that the eating disorder can let go of us.

Photo by hui sang on Unsplash

Eating Disorder Recovery Is A Creative Act

Eating disorder recovery is a creative process from rigidity and repetition to new ways of thinking and being.

Like most of my blogs, newsletters and articles, when I get started with the process of writing it can feel clumsy and awkward.

As I sit down, I put on some music to help me get into the zone and take a moment to pinpoint what that original spark was that brought me to write in the first place.

That spark was just a feeling that tells me, “It’s time to write”.

Armed with only a gut feeling to create, I start by playing with words with a sense of curiosity and lightness. I begin to type out and delete sentences over and over again before I feel something land.

When that “thing” lands, the writing begins to flow with a bit more ease. There’s a river to move with and a current to follow.

I share this bite of #bts because it reminds me of a similar process that many of us go on when we embark on the journey of transformation.

Maybe you can relate to this: Sometimes we have no idea why we signed up for those coaching sessions, or joined that support group, or how we even got ourselves to a plant medicine ceremony.

Yet here we are.

And somehow, we know we are exactly where we are meant to be even if we have no idea where we are going.

We followed a spark.

Something deeper was pulling us closer to ourselves. The logical, cognitive mind often cannot rationalize or make sense of the reasons why, but the intuitive, feeling body just knows that this path must be followed.

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This brings us to a concept called “organicity” which is a core principle of Hakomi Therapy, a form of somatic therapy. This concept is based on the premise that as organic beings, all humans are inherently able to self-correct, heal, and reorient to inner alignment.

This is a natural process that exists in all human beings, and when we are in a safe and supportive environment (and the nervous system recognizes this safety internally too), this movement towards healing and regulation organically unfolds (without us having to will it or force it to happen).

This shift our focus from what is wrong to what is already whole. In fact, the eating disorder behaviours themselves are also not wrong.

Rather than focusing on how the eating disorder behaviours are maladaptive or “disordered”, we can notice how these food and body behaviours are strategies of survival rather than strategies of dysfunction.

Just like the Hakomi principle of organicity, the body is always trying to return to balance and healing; although like with disordered eating behaviours, that attempt towards wholeness doesn’t quite bring resolution.

I believe an eating disorder is the body’s creative adaptation to find some sort of regulation (inner harmony) and sense of protection.

Sometimes, the eating disorder behaviours are the only strategies we have access to in order to stay connected to and functioning in the world.

At the core, an eating disorder represents a deep yearning to reach out to connect with others but, for many reasons that I won’t get into too much detail here, there quite simply isn’t a hand that we can trust to grasp onto and pull in close to attach to and feel safe with.

So, when I see an eating disorder, I see an opportunity for those who are in supporting roles to reach out our hands and meet it, because the body is communicating, “Even though I can’t reach out my hand, see me. I’m still here, I’ve survived, and I want to thrive - and I can’t do it alone.”

This is the spark.

This is the spark of creativity.

It is the spark that finds its way to healing, organically, adaptively, and creatively.

This is the spark that knows something can be different.

It is the spark that guides us towards practices, people, and places that inspire new ways of thinking and feeling. This path of thinking and embodying something different is the same path of living a creative life.

Eating disorder recovery requires creativity. I’m sure many of you reading this know that eating disorder behaviours are often rigid and repetitive, with little room for something different to occur.

Addiction recovery and healing from trauma require similar creative pathways. And so, creativity is the way through from the old status quo to the new status quo.

To access creativity requires a particular nervous system state. We have to shift from a narrow vison of protection and defense (ie. flight, fight or freeze) to a more open vision (ie. social engagement), where our somatic architecture is shaped by a sense of groundedness, belonging, dignity, and presence.

This can be achieved through co-regulation, through feeling the warm support and loving awareness of another human, animal, or nature being.

It can also be achieved through nourishing and soothing the senses, thus resourcing the body from the inside out.

A creative outlook can be achieved through practices that tease apart and soften the neural connections that strongly enforce and rigidly hold onto old beliefs and embedded constructs, such as meditation, microdosing, and plant medicine or psychedelic journey work.

And when we start to lean into the belief that, “I deserve to heal, and I am worthy of live a life that feels good for me” we create more possibility to try something other than the eating disorder. This is further strengthened when we know there is support around us.

Indeed, it takes great courage to try something different, new, or unknown!

All creative people (which includes you) know that the first word on a page, first mark on a canvas, or first step on the dance floor require bravery because in that moment of open, liminal space we have no idea where it will lead.

However, when we know in our bones, when the hairs on our neck stand up, when our when heart flutters, or when we have that gut knowing, that this is the path to follow.

When we listen to the innate intelligence of the body, we know what direction to go towards. Recovery is the practice of developing and integrating sustainable and adaptable tools and resources to face the unknown with courage and creativity.

Rather than contracting and becoming small in the face of change, we can open towards it and be transformed by it.  

Recovery, which is an act of surrender (which is different to giving up), can feed us and nourish us and change us, bringing us deeper into our own embodiment, breath by breath, step by step, choice by choice.

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As I sit here, I look back at what I have written. I had no idea that this is what I would write, but I trusted that spark of creativity, and with patience arrived that these 1328 words.

Writing this has been a nourishing act for me. Most the time, I end up writing and sharing is the medicine that I so desperately need. It is not just the content that feeds and inspires me, but it is the creative act itself that is deeply soul-nourishing.

In this creative state where so many people report a sense of flow, presence, spaciousness, connection and alignment, the inner chatter quietens.

It is in this state of being where eating disorders cannot exist. (Read that again).

There are many ways to walk the path of recovery. The recovery path is a creative path, where anything can be considered a resource and an ally as long as it resonates and lands within you.

That resonance will communicate in and through your body.

I trust you in finding your way to hearing the body, and I trust your body and its cues and signals.

You know what direction you need to go in. Trust it. Follow that spark of resonance.

It’s that same resonance that has brought us all here together, united by a similar feeling. Each of us followed a spark within, a spark from the body, to walk this path of recovery.

I am so glad we are here together, co-creating a reality that support body trust, connection, and love.

Sending you all of my deepest appreciation and gratitude.

To read more on psychedelics and microdosing:

6 Ways Microdosing Psychedelics Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery

Psychedelics Can Help People In Eating Disorder Recovery Establish Self-Trust

Envisioning The Embodiment Of Authenticity With The Help Of Psychedelics

When You Reach The End Of A Meal

Living nomadically taught me a lot about eating disorders. This is what I learnt…

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coming home after eight months of travelling has left me feeling like I’ve reached the end of big meal. I can finally lie down by the fire and rest - and let the food digest.

And whilst I’m digesting my experiences from Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, the States, and the UK, there is also certainly a lot to digest on a collective level from this year which I am sure many of you acknowledge, sense, and feel.

The ability to digest our food, emotions, and experiences is a deep and complex process.

Our digestive system is governed by our autonomic nervous system which is like our inner surveillance that oversees of all of the automatic processes in our body, including our ability to perceive and scan for safety and threat.

Being on the lookout safety and danger is something our nervous system does behind the scenes and influences what we move towards or move away from, or if we stay neutral.

The ability to do this is essential for our survival. It is quite mind-blowing when you think about it!

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If there’s a history of developmental trauma and chronic daily stress, what we perceive as safe or dangerous isn’t always accurate. It’s like the dial is tuned into the wrong station.

Stored trauma energies (aka fight, flight, freeze) and accumulated stress send constant signals to the body that it needs to be on guard and in protection mode.

We might feel afraid to face the stored stress survival energies (they are indeed powerful energies - they are here to keep us alive after all!) within us and as such, put up walls and armour to ensure these feelings stay hidden out of sight - from ourselves and others.

And if we internally feel fear, we begin to see the world through a similar lens as a scary place. As within so without.

This occurs because we always looking to establish and maintain a coherent sense of self. If our internal world is filled with fear, we will find evidence and data from the outside world to keep this inner narrative of self coherent.

It is very discombobulating when our internal narratives of who we are and what the world is like are shaken up - either through big life transitions, psychedelic journeys, or confronting changes - because we are forced to find new information as a way to update our story of self, along with rewiring the nervous system to reflect this new version of reality.

This is embodied change from the inside out.

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Polyvagal Theory points to the neurological link between regulated eating with our sense of safety. We now know from a physiological standpoint that to effectively take in food, we have to feel safe.

So, it makes sense why we can’t really sit down and have a meal whilst trying to run from a bear!

But for many of us, experiencing urgency, anxiety, or armoring (aka running from the bear) is often the state we find ourselves in when we eat, and which later leads to issues like IBS, constipation, or inhibited digestive functioning.

This occurs when survival energies of flight, fight and freeze from past traumatic experiences accumulate and get stuck in the body causing dysregulation - which shows up as rigidity, narrow perspective, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addiction, and eating disorders.

Over time, this dysregulation becomes the baseline or the new normal. We simply get used to it even if it doesn’t feel all that great.

And it’s from this (dysregulated) baseline of how we feel on the inside that influences how and what we perceive the world around us, how we engage with the others, the decisions we make, and the choices we take.

As such, Polyvagal Theory states that when we feel safe we can effectively digest our food when we reach the end of a meal.

Me looking out to the sunrise in Tulum, Mexico

So what we do to begin to quiet the inner storm, put down the armour, widen our perspective, and Notice Safety that is around us? How about we practice together:

First, let’s take a breath.

Feel your feet on the ground, allowing roots to grow from the soles of your feet into the soul of the Earth.

Orient to your surroundings, taking in light, shadows, colours, shapes, sights and sounds in and around your space.

Notice where you are, right now, right here, in this present moment.

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this right now that your environment is safe, your body is safe, and you are safe.

Recognize the safety there is here right now by attuning to yourself and yourself in your environment and check in with your body and see if there’s any part of you that wants to soften in this recognition.

Perhaps your eyes, jaw, chest, shoulders, fingers, or lower belly can release a little bit of tension by leaning into and receiving the support of the ground and the containment from your environment.

This ground that is underneath you isn’t going anywhere, and it has the capacity to hold all of you, including mixed feelings, contradicting thoughts, and opposing parts. All of you is held.

There is nothing to prove, achieve, fix, or get right. You are enough as you are and you are held in that.

Check in again. Is there anything else within you that can drop, release, or open into this support - this support that is right underneath you?

Notice how your ability to soften and put down a little bit of armour (aka tension) is relational. It is through relationship - in this case, with the stable, unwavering support of the ground and the holding container of your space - that we have the space to shift from protection to safety.

And one last time, notice your breath.

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Our sense of safety doesn’t come from just the absence of threat, but when we land in the presence of a trusted, accepting other.

On a nervous system level, safety comes from sensing that there is something reliable and trustworthy with us. This is something we can play with by noticing the ground underneath and connecting to the environment around us.

as mammals we are hardwired for connection, and our sense safety and ability to establish self-regulation comes through co-regulating - which is the process of grounding, balancing, and centering ourselves through having the presence of someone else with us.

When we are with another human who we trust, our body can finally let out a big sigh.

The armour can be put down. On a nervous system level, we move from dorsal vagal parasympathetic shutdown (freeze) and sympathetic arousal (flight or fight) into ventral vagal connection (social engagement).

When we are in ventral, we feel expansive and grounded, connected within and to the world around us, curious and creative, present and regulated.

Internally, the chaos subsides, and we can perceive the world as more welcoming and inviting.

How we feel in our bodies improves and we feel less of an urge to critique, harm, or judge our bodies.

As we feel more regulated inside, our capacity to eat widens naturally. Our digestive system also smooths out, leading to better nutrient absorption and excretion.

Emotions can flow more easily, and we can let go with greater trust.

The pervasive narrative of “I don’t know who I am without this eating disorder” has less grip and we begin to explore and embody a more aligned story of self.

As we start recognizing moments of safety, noticing how it feels in the body, and orienting to those people, places, and things that support our nervous system, the eating disorder can naturally let go of us.

This, for me, is the true process of recovery, that is sustainable, long-lasting, and deeply authentic. Recovery is a natural process that works with the capacity of the nervous system. It doesn’t require fear tactics, will, grit, or more sympathetic force or rigidity. It is an organic unfolding.

Recovery is a practice, not perfect.

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Making my way back to South Africa, I am filled with appreciation. These eight months weren’t always easy. There were ebbs and flows, ups and downs, shadows and light. There were several hard-to-swallow moments and digestive challenges, so to speak, and also a lot of beauty, expansion, and discovery. And through it all, it was all held.

I am now sitting at my metaphorical dinner table and looking at my plate. I feel complete. My tummy communicates to my brain, “we have had enough”. And with that, I wash the plates and cutlery. I go sit by the fire and let my body rest so it can process this eighth-month meal. Patience and gentleness are my allies right now as I digest and integrate.

By the warmth of the fire, I remember that there is enough for me, I have done enough, and I am enough.

I invite you feel into and explore your own sense of enoughness.

There is enough for you, there is enough for everyone, you have done enough, and you are enough.

This is the pinnacle expression of the digestive system.

I am wishing you all a smooth and nourishing last month of 2023. May this year and all that it contained integrate with ease so that you can step into the new meal that is 2024 with refined clarity.

Why I Travel The World For My Eating Disorder

Traveling has been one of the most important tools I have utilized in my eating disorder recovery journey.

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Along with the Inner journeying with psychedelics, traveling has expanded My awareness.

I have always loved traveling. I remember my first-ever solo trip when I was 25.

It was the first time I felt mentally stable enough to travel alone. Unlike many people I knew who went traveling after school, I needed a few years to work through my eating disorder to feel capable to meet the wider world on my own two feet.

Right after finishing school, I went into an in-patient clinic, and thereafter spent a number of years finding safety and trust with food and my body. 

When I decided to go traveling, I knew it was time to meet another layer of my eating disorder. I was ready to break down the routine, familiarities, repetitive patterns, and all what I knew in order to connect with the part of me that deeply feared change. 

The eating disorder part of me didn't like change. It didn't like my body changing. It wanted food to be predicable. It desperately wanted certainty. It wanted to cling to the shores of the known.

When I decided to go traveling, I took a breath and consciously chose to push off the shore and figure out how to swim in the middle of the river. 

When people ask me what helped me in my recovery, traveling is one of the things I mention. 

By moving the literal ground from underneath me, traveling requires me to develop resources and practice tools that support in finding my inner ground and that help me keep my head above water regardless of where I am in the world.

Traveling is a tool that helps me clearly see where I am still gripping to the shores of the known. 

It is a light that shines on the places that fear change - these places can often hide when I am in the routine of everyday life but are hard to ignore when I'm in the constant change of travel. 

Through traveling, we meet our most tender parts. We also have a chance to meet our hearts in a new way. We can step outside of the habitual ways of perceiving ourselves and reality and connect with our deepest longings and what we care about on a soul level.

Traveling acts like a compass that helps us excavate our values and find our centered alignment that offers direction on how to move forward on the recovery journey.

Along with plant medicine, which is a journey within, the literal act of traveling expands awareness.

Since eating disorders and disordered eating are in a sense a narrowing of awareness by hyper-focusing on food and the body, inner psychedelic journeying and outer travel become tools for recovery because they help widen our focus and help us seeing wider, deeper, higher, and further.

Throughout all of my travels over the years, I am always reminded of this potent medicine of travel.

It hasn't been easy - I have been stretched in more ways than I could have imagined, but I am emerging with new perspectives, fresh eyes, refined resources, and a newfound compass, guiding me towards what I deeply care about. 

Moving closer to what we care about brings us deeper into our aligned embodiment. And this is what eating disorder recovery is all about. 

Download my free ebook, One Way Ticket To The Soul! It’s an eating disorder recovery handbook that was created for folks who are navigating an eating disorder or disordered eating and who desire to travel in a way that supports their recovery journey. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to download it.

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

Envisioning The Embodiment Of Authenticity With The Help Of Psychedelics [Eating Disorder Recovery]

For people who want to explore plant medicine or psychedelics to support their eating disorder recovery, the first step before any journey is to practice ways of connecting with the body.

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The more we can practice listening and attuning the body (aka develop our interoceptive awareness), the more we drop out of the (often overthinking) mind and into the feeling body. This is a key skill for any psychedelic work, including microdosing.

Why is this important within the context of plant medicine?

For people with eating disorders or disordered eating, we are often disconnected from the body, living from the neck up.

We often approach plant medicine because we want to heal something. We recognise that something feels out of balance, not clear, stuck or stagnant, and we need a fresh perspective.

For people navigating disordered eating, there usually a desire to reconnect in some way. Oftentimes, there is a yearning for the repetitive, dominating eating disorder voice, rigid rituals, and restrictions placed around food, pleasure, and connection to quieten.

Feeling disconnected is often due to past trauma where one had to disconnect from overwhelming feelings that were felt in the body in order to survive and make it through a bad, scary, or confusion experience.

If we have to disconnect from our body over and over again, we develop an inaccurate perception of what is going on inside. Our interoceptive capacity is limited.

Another way of looking at it is that we are simply out of practice, so and what we perceive internally is not always correct.

When we make contact with the body, the sensations in the body are either hard to reach or the sensations are right in our face. Connecting to the body brings up feelings of fear, shame, resistance, apathy or doubt.

If we are unable to accurately perceive what is going on inside, it is hard to establish an authentic sense of self. It is also challenging to make wise decisions and take aligned action because on the inside things are not fully clear.

If we cannot perceive what is happening internally, we may misinterpret hunger or fullness cue, choose to eat something we don’t actually want, or brush over the time needed to rest and digest.

As such, recovery and preparation for a psychedelic journey is about practicing and refining our interoceptive awareness.

This is something we can practice, and over time can get better and better at it.

When we make contact with the vast body of knowledge, this very same wisdom that plant medicine speak to directly.

The more accurately we can observe our interoception during our preparation phase before the journey (which is something we practice with a coach, therapist, or with a guide), the more we practice stepping out the way, giving the analyzing part of the brain a break and give permission to the body to express.

There are many ways to develop interoceptive awareness. Noticing what resonates in your own body, what lands, or feels inspiring or curious to explore, are cues that your body gives you - and cues you can follow - to learn about what your body wants or needs.

In a world that champions cognition, we have turned away from the body's wisdom that is communicated via movement, the felt sense, and five senses.

Let us remember that when we were young, we learnt about the world and how to be in it by moving, understanding proprioception, balance and relationship to gravity.

We learnt about the world through using our senses, like touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight.

We established a relationship with the world and in relationship with others through learning developmental movement patterns, including pushing, reaching, pulling, grasping, and yielding.

Plant medicine teaches us how to turn within and how to focus on the inner cues rather than on external rules. Psychedelics teach us how to turn towards and trust the body's forms of communication.

By listening without judgement and slowing down enough to hear its subtle shares we give the body space to speak.

Psychedelics bring us into a more trance-like state, whereby the default mode network that forms the narrative of self quietens down, giving us more space for the feeling body to express.

This gives the body a chance to digest any feelings that have been stuck over our lifetime(s). As we digest these past feelings, we can land in the present.

Learning how to contact, process, and release stuck sensations and feelings from the past, is a skill we can develop and is a crucial one to practice in the preparation phase because the psychedelic experience can often bring up past material that has been hidden, ignored, or pushed aside in order to be released.

When this material is released, the entire nervous system begins to inhabit more and more of the present moment. This results in a feeling of more connection, groundedness, mindfulness, and regulation.

The innate intelligence of the body meets the innate intelligence of the plant medicine, supporting us in making choices grounded in our centered alignment.

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When people work with plant medicine, the business-as-usual perspectives and lenses dissolve, and this creates space for new associations, connections and possibilities to arise.

Seeing the world and oneself with a new lens is incredibly refreshing. The eating disorder voice quietens down, and the rules and restrictions are reevaluated.

As the eating disorder sits in the backseat, the authentic self can take the driver's seat. With the authentic self guiding the way, we point our inner compass towards the things we value and care about.

No longer being dragged by the eating disorder's wants, needs and priorities, the authentic self centers and aligns us with the deeper truths of our heart's longing.

We start to think bigger and have the capacity to envision a life without the eating disorder.

Since plant medicines and psychedelics speak to the body directly, we are able to embody this vision of life without an eating disorder, and feel in our bodies the state of freedom, compassion, acceptance, and peace within.

Plant medicines show us how to think and feel bigger.

Moving from narrow focus to a wider, open focus, we have the space (and the knowing of what we deserve) to creatively dream into being a life that is aligned with the deeper truths and values (that are often shrouded by the eating disorder).

Plant medicines don't cure eating disorders. Rather, their innate intelligence speaks directly to the innate intelligence of the body to help us imagine and teach us how to embody our authentic, aligned expression.

When we reside in this frequency, the eating disorder naturally lets go of us.

If you are curious about exploring how plant medicine can support your recovery journey, you are welcome to join my upcoming microdosing program, Journey To Wholeness. The program begins August 2024 and runs for eight weeks. Open to eight participants. Get the program details here.

Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash

Keeping Our Heads Above Water During Turbulent Times of Change in Eating Disorder Recovery

I hope that you’re finding moments of pause and pockets of grounded ease as you navigate these times.

It’s no question that we are in a turbulent chapter in the world right now.

We may be facing many kinds of feelings and questions that can feel destabilizing or dysregulating. It’s challenging (if not impossible) for our mind-body to hold all this complex, ever-evolving information in one go.

I’m aware that many of you here reading this are extra sensitive souls and you may be feeling overwhelming energies, like grief, anger, confusion, or despair.

Many of us who have a history of disordered eating or eating disorders learnt from a young age to hide or edit our feelings and found out along the way that using food or focusing on the body in certain ways kept the depth of our emotions out of sight.

Perhaps we didn’t learn or get to practice how to be with big emotions. It is possible that growing up we heard the narrative from people around us say things like, “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” or “there’s no use crying over spilt milk”.

If our emotional expressions and experiences were misunderstood, ignored, or shamed, we end up finding ways to cut off from our authentic truth in order to meet the acceptable standards created by others.

Disconnecting from our emotions simply feels safer.

I believe that disconnecting from our emotions from a young age was a survival response when we were in an environment that did not support the rich fullness of our expression.

I also believe that many people with eating disorders are incredibly sensitive, intuitive, and deep feelers. And underneath the eating disorder behaviours is a colourful tapestry of feelings, sensations, and energy.

This means that the pathway of recovery is one of reclaiming our gift of sensitivity and cultivating that into empathy and attunement that can be shared with others.

The ability to feel is a superpower and when we can fully embrace it as such, it is healing force not just for ourselves but for the hearts of those around us.

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Eating disorder recovery is the process of:

Learning to trust our inner experience and internal voice.

Validating our feelings as important and worthy.

Befriending our own feelings, and slowly surrendering into the depth of them.

Opening up to the body and practicing how to track and be with raw sensation.

Cultivating compassionate awareness as we allow more space in the body to receive the truth of our experience.

It’s possible that at this time when there are highly charged feelings swirling around on a collective level, we may automatically disconnect from our feelings.

When we find ourselves in the choppy, turbulent waters of disruption and uncertainty, we inevitably reach for the things that we know have worked in the past.

As such, you may notice that the eating disorder voice seems louder. If this is the case for you (at it might not be), remember that we are collectively and individually experiencing big and heavy waves of feelings. It makes sense that when things get extra intense, the eating disorder ramps up too.

However, if we can pay attention to that, we have a choice as to how we want to navigate these turbulent times.

My hope is that you find your way to keep your head above water by perhaps finding a log to hold onto, or a hand to reach out to as way to process in coherent and meaningful ways.

Whatever you’re experiencing right now and however you’re navigating these stormy seas, I see you.

And I trust your body’s ability to digest what you’re experiencing at a pace that feels good for you.

Finding moments of pause, feeling the ground underneath us, inviting space into the body via breath, movement, sound, or being in nature, and co-regulating with loved ones are ways we can support ourselves and our nervous systems to be with whatever we may be feeling in sincere and honest ways.

Rather than editing our feelings or reducing our experience to “it’s not that big of a deal”, we can directly connect with the body through raw sensation and tuning our embodied awareness from the inside-out as a way to hear, witness, and honour how the body is making sense of things, what it needs to feel safe, what it requires to reestablish a sense of regulation, and what it is asking from us to feel nourished and replenished.

The small actions that we take to fill up our cups amidst the bigness of these times accumulate, and significantly ripple out into the world as we build the capacity to show up to ourselves.

Thank you for the courageous and committed work that you do in the quiet temple of your heart.

This work, which is an ongoing practice, is incredibly meaningful not just for our own well-being but for those around us and for the generations to come.

May how we choose to show up in these times, connected to our bodies, and the deep and beautiful feelings that run through them, give permission to others to live whole-heartedly embodied.

Photo by Erik Dungan on Unsplash

Redefining Eating Disorder Recovery With The Support of Psychedelics

As someone who has navigated the depths of an eating disorder, I have had a tendency to become rigid.

Predictability, certainty and wanting to know can easily become the prison from which I live.

I often need to consciously choose to break down these hardened walls to keep practicing how to move with the inevitable flows of life with trust and surrender.

Over the years I have had to find ways to shake up my inner snow globe to disrupt any rigidity that may have hardened in my body, heart and mind.

Through psychedelics and plant medicine journeys, traveling around the world, intuitive dance practices, and listening to the always-in-motion movements of my body, I’ve been curious about exploring ways to shake up my well-trodden neural pathways, widen my perspectives, and let go of the familiar shore.

This is what eating disorder recovery is about.

Eating disorder recovery is a gradual letting go of what provides a sense of certainty and ground and learning how to navigate the inherent groundlessness of life.

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For people with disordered eating or eating disorders, there is usually a history of trauma which means an overwhelming, uncontrollable experience occurred where there wasn’t enough support or containment to make sense of such a big event. This results in a scared and dysregulated nervous system, where the body is holding and suppressing big, undigested emotions from the scary event.

These stored survival energies accumulate and become toxic to the body. This is the point when we see chronic illness, depression, anxiety, addiction, and eating disorders develop.

The body starts to be a scary place to inhabit, filled with big emotions. Living with these emotions takes a lot of energy, and so we inevitably find ways to avoid meeting these emotions as a way to keep living.

By implementing eating disorder-related behaviours, we are trying to continue living life in ways that feel manageable by cutting off from the body through living from the neck up, restricting, calorie counting, dieting, weighing oneself, body checking, bingeing, or purging etc.

However, the more we cut off from the body, the more we continue looping in dysregulation and the deeper the rigid grooves go.

As such, eating disorder recovery is a combination of working through these stuck trauma energies by connecting directly with the body, and building of sustainable and healthy resources that can help us move through the moments where we feel like we are being pummeled by the waves.

Through all of this, it is the body, as our ultimate resource, that provides ground for us we can stand on as the waves crash against the shore.

The body’s innate intelligence humbly resides in the here-now and its signals and cues are what provides us with a sense of self and guides our actions.

The clearer we can hear and trust our body, the easier it becomes to flow down the middle of the river that is life, without being thrown around by the waves.

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The healing potentials of plant medicines for eating disorders lies in their capacity to support this process of repatterning how we relate to our bodies in the present moment, and how we inhabit the ever-changing moments of life.

Psychedelics and plant medicine Bring An expansion of our awareness, acceptance that things are always changing realignment of what we truly care about and value, and a deepening into our unique embodiment.

When we combine psychedelic preparation support that focuses on connecting to the body, learning about the wiring of our own nervous system, establishing grounding resources and tools, and dedicating time to lean into an inspired intention, we can step into the journey space equipped and ready to face the inevitable: the great unknown, the Great Mystery, the void, raw life force energy, Source itself.

The better prepared and well-practiced we are before the journey begins, the easier it is to ride the inevitable waves of change and emotions (energies in motion) that occur when we embark on a journey with plant medicine.

The mysterious beauty of plant medicines is that they help us move from a state of narrow focus and rigid thinking to a wider and more flexible way of thinking, leading to an expansion of our awareness.

We can see and think bigger, enable to gain fresh perspective and insights.

With this wider lens, we are reminded of the fundamental nature of life: everything is always in motion and always changing.

Seeing these ebbs and flows helps us be more at ease with our emotional landscape and gives the eating disorder part that wants predictability soften.

As things soften and the layers of hardness fall away, we meet the more vulnerable parts of ourselves - we reconnect with our heart space. By residing in our hearts, we remember what our soul - not the eating disorder - truly cares about and value.

By aligning with these deeper values, we open up to living our authentic expression, following internal cues rather than marching to external rules dictated by societal conditioning.

As this begins take root, we start to feel more at home in our own skin. We deepen into our embodiment.

How we feel on the inside matches congruently with how we express ourselves to the outside. Relating to ourselves from the inside out feels innately nourishing and energizing.

We discover it’s possible to trust the body and for the body to trust us.

From this place of trust, we can surrender and let go, releasing expectations and assumptions. From this open state, we experience and discover so much more.

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Indeed, eating disorder recovery is a journey of discovery. We never end up in the same place from when we began this work.

The eating disorder recovery journey is more than recovery. It is a journey of discovery. This makes it a highly transformative path to walk.

The word “recover” comes from the Latin word “recuperare” which means “a return to health after illness, injury or misfortune.” It has links to “getting back or regaining a normal state of mind, health or strength.”

The idea that an eating disorder is a “disorder” is inherently pathologizing. It indicates that someone is abnormal or sick. From my perspective, “eating disorders” are intelligent strategies that attempt to bring a sense of regulation to a nervous system that is deeply afraid and in a state of protection. For many, this strategy is the only one they have access to or know.

Let us then remember that the language we use carries a frequency. And the current language that we use to describe eating disorders is what keeps us stuck and put the blame on the individual rather than looking at the deeper layers of illness which lie in the foundations of our societal constructs and frames.

And psychedelics are here in a big way to expand our understanding of what eating disorders are, the language we use to describe things, and they offer tools on how to think and feel more creatively.

And let’s be honest, when we walk the eating disorder recovery path, we never truly return to “normal”, nor do we come back to the place where we began.

We don’t recover.

We transform.

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When we expand our definitions of eating disorders, what else is possible? And plant medicines and psychedelics are helping us widen our frames of embodied cognition to envision a new understanding of disordered eating and recovery realities.

Expanding our definition of what an eating disorder is allows us to listen to those who navigating their relationship with food and body with more curiosity and open presence.

Redefining an eating disorder and choosing a different word to describe it changes how we look at it. It shifts how we engage with people who are navigating disordered eating - and impacts how we choose to treat it.

This is needed more than ever as we see more and more people struggling with being at home their own skin - particularly post-Covid - where our collective sense of belonging is in question, whilst the familiar cycles of our Earth home shift.

With the highest prevalence of death than any other mental health issue, traditional treatment as we currently know it as is no longer enough. This points to a deep and urgent need for an expansion of how we understand eating disorders, how we engage with them, and how we relate to folks who are navigating disordered eating.

This is why we are seeing more people curious about the potentials of psychedelics to support the healing of eating disorders.

Plant medicine and psychedelics shift the focus from behavioural change by going to the deepest roots from which the food and body behaviours developed.

Plant medicine are powerful allies in helping us shift our perspective and widen our lenses, illuminating our perceptions, beliefs and assumptions. Plant medicines give us an opportunity to clarify how we choose to relate to eating disorders by going beyond the narrow definitions amd limited symptomology, expanding our perception.

Plant medicine gives us greater cognitive flexibility, stretching our beliefs, and shifting our perspective so we rediscover our personal body story and envision our unique pathway of healing.

Plant medicines shift us out of the narrow and tight focus that the eating disorder holds, softens the rigid reality from the residue of trauma, regulates the nervous system so we can move out of a survival somatic organization.

When our soma shifts from survival to inner safety and embodied alignment, we naturally expand our creative potential that leads us to see, believe and embody a life where the eating disorder no longer needs to exist. This is where transformation occurs.

How might psychedelics expand our understanding of eating disorders and treatment by opening up our inner windows of perceptions?

If eating disorders may not only be about coping or control, what else might they be trying to communicate, resolve, protect or balance?

How might reframing and expanding our understanding of eating disorders change our self-imposed beliefs and as such, expand our very reality?

In what ways have you experienced plant medicine support you in your healing journey? Have they supported you in shifting the focus and widening the vantage point? If yes, how so?

How can psychedelics co-create a new way forward, helping us uncover and discover how our soul wants to be nourished?

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We expand into the unknown and discover places within ourselves that we could have imagined at the start of the recovery journey.

We grow and transform beyond, evolving into more of our embodied alignment. This is the alignment of the body-mind, where our beliefs and values are congruent with how we show up and interact with the world around us.

The process of discovery requires a lot of curiosity and openness, and kind-hearted support to let go of the old (enter plant medicines to guide this process).

Along the way, we will certainly recover the parts of ourselves that have been cast away for years (and sometimes generations), but through discovering new ways of being with and relating to our body, sensations and feelings in sustainable and healthy ways, we integrate these fragmented parts back to wholeness.

These new ways of relating to ourselves (influenced also by our language and frames of reference) are grounded in compassion, where we have the capacity to let go of the old and step into the unknown, allowing for embodied self-discovery to lay a fertile soil of transformation to blossom.

“Eating disorder recovery” is one of self-discovery where we embark on a journey aligning with our knowing of who we truly are and courageously embodying that deep remembrance.

And when the actual psychedelic journey ends, we tend to watering these seeds in the integration process, continuing to nurture our inner garden and tending to the path of our transformation.

Photo by S. Widua on Unsplash

Eating Disorder Recovery Is A Shift From Protection to Connection

Eating disorders indicate that the body has been recruited to protect rather than connect.

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Eating disorders are strategies of survival (they are not dysfunctional or disordered). They represent a body that is in a state of fear and protection.

An eating disorder is the body communicating in its own language about its state of embodiment. It is communicating if it’s embodying safety, fear, protection or connection.

Eating disorders also represent what has been passed through generations and societies, and as such, they represent how the bodies of other people around us growing up modeled their relationship of connecting with (reaching out) and protecting from (recoiling) the world.

Why is the eating disorder the body’s way of communicating that it is a state of protection? An eating disorder is the body saying it’s scared. And it’s scared because the body hasn’t been able to connect to something safe.

There is a difference between feeling protected and feeling safe. When you see these two words - protected and safe - what do these two words draw out of you? What might you notice in your body? How do you feel when you are protecting yourself? How do you feel when you know you are safe?

An eating disorder or disordered eating develops not because of the trauma itself but when there is a deficiency of safety To Digest the traumatic experience.

Safety comes from being with a connected other, with someone we can trust and co-regulate with. When we feel safe in the presence of another, the armour can drop, and the defenses can melt. No longer alone in the world, we can finally rest in the stability of other and be held, seen and witnessed in the initiation that a traumatic experience brings. With another resonate other person, we can start to make meaning, expand our understanding of what happened, and have our feelings and experiences validated. Co-regulation provides orientation.

We need the nourishment of connection to feel safe enough to release the stress survival energies that may have been able to be released at the time of the traumatic event. Through this processing, releasing and digesting, we have more capactiy and space to soften the protective layers that the eating disorder had built.

Connection is the nourishment The Soul needs to thrive.

Even if we cognitively don’t remember safe connection, the body remembers in its own way. The body can sense resonant connection and will find ways to orient to it and find it. The term for this in Polyvagal Theory is “neuroception” (aka the nervous system’s automatic way of perceiving what is dangerous and what is safe).

Recognize that place deep within you that inherently knows the sweet taste of connection.

Nurture that flame. Gently feed it. Let it grow.

Indeed, connection with others is a primary form of nourishment for us as mammals.

When we came into the world, the first thing we need and instinctively seek is safe connection with our primary caregivers. We rely on those around us to love us, hold us, see us, listen to us, and feed us.

The quality of how others connected with us growing up established our beliefs and rules around what we deem is acceptable or ok to attach to and connect with as nourishment - whether that nourishment is love or food.

How we show up in our relationships will show up in our relationship with food.

Our relationship with food is a representation of how we have learnt to be in relationship with others.

The ways in which we were brought up, how we watched people around us interact, and the rules we absorbed around what is an acceptable way to relate with the world around us all impact how we connect with food.

The process of taking in food is a complex one; and the process of forming relationships is also complex.

Here are the steps of how we establish relationships and how they mirror our relationship with food:

1. Establish Clarity. First, I need to establish a clear sense of self in relationship to another by noticing where I begin and end by having the space to push into the environment to feel that sense of clear beginning and ending of my somatic container. This helps to clarify my own boundaries, energetic and physical, through interoceptive awareness and this helps me discern what is mine and what is not mine. This clear sense of self helps me hear when I’m hungry or full and what nutrients I might need.

2. Effective Reach. Second, I need to know that’s safe to reach out to whomever I feel connected with, that my needs and desires are supported so that I can effectively reach for what I want. This helps me reach for the food that I want to eat without shame, and that I can prepare and arrange my food in a way that suits my needs.

3. Allowing for Satisfaction. Third, once I have connected with the other person with whom I feel safe and connected with, I can share authentically and vulnerably (aka unprotected). I can pull them into my orbit and let them into my world. This brings a sense of nourishment as I can be open and real, and be met and accepted for who I am. This supports my ability to take in food and be nourished by it, to find pleasure and joy in it, and feel satisfied.

4. Resting and Digesting. Finally, I take time to return to my own energy field where I digest the connective experience, allowing whatever arose to either assimilate into my being or be released if not needed. In this state of integrating, resting and yielding, I return to my inherent belonging and enoughness. This supports the restful parasympathetic process of digesting, where the body takes the time to pause and yield, repair and rejuvenate.

5. It is from this state of stillness, that clarity emerges guiding me towards discerning action of what is mine and what is mine to do. And so continues the cycle.

A huge thank you to Rachel Lewis-Marlow and Paula Scatoloni of the Embodied Recovery Institute who created this map.

It is same movements (push, reach, grasp/pull and yield) that we use to connect with others are the same that we need to take in food.

If we find it hard to reach out to those who we desire to connect with, we may it hard to reach out for the food that we authentically desire to consume, and instead eat foods that an external diet plan instructs.

If we learnt that our deepest vulnerabilities were not welcomed, we may over-exercise or purge after eating to get rid of the feeling of fullness because the sensation of food sitting inside of the body is an intimate feeling, akin to feeling the depths of what we hold inside.

Eating disorder recovery is not just healing our relationship with food but healing how we nourish ourselves with the relationships around us others, and ultimately how we nourish ourselves.

Nourishing ourselves with loving connection is fundamental in how we nourish our bodies with food and vice versa.

Photo by Anderson Rian on Unsplash

Soul Nourishment: How Psychedelics Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery

Sacred plant medicines and psychedelics can support the healing of eating disorders and disordered eating by nourishing the soul.

Eating disorders are not about the food. Underneath the disordered eating behaviours is a greater struggle to nourish oneself - not just with food - but with the primary nourishment of love and connection.

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The roots of an eating disorder very often lie in attachment wounding, whereby there was a malnourishment of attuned connection.

Without love and connection, the soul becomes hungry.

When one is afraid to receive, allow or take in love and connection, the soul starves.

So how can we develop courage and a sense of deservingness to heal the wound of connection in order to fully drink it in?

Sacred plant medicines go beyond the eating disorder related symptoms and dive deep into the root causes, bringing up whatever is restricting the intake of love and connection.

In a psychedelic journey, we can face the rules and restrictions we have placed around love, the protective armour we have built up to keep intimacy at bay, the young parts of ourselves that hold the burdens related to our early attachment wounding, and undigested feelings related to abandonment, shame, not enoughness, confusion, and even terror.

This challenging but necessary material arises during a plant medicine ceremony as a way to make space for love to metabolize.

As the ruminative mind (which is often the hindrance to our healing - indeed, we are oftentimes our biggest block in our transformation) slows down under the influence of a psychedelic, the wisdom of the body can emerge.

The innate intelligence of the plant medicine is in direct communication with the innate intelligence of the body.

The body’s organic orientation towards healing means that anything that is stuck, stagnant or holding us back will come up to be processed and released.

This material is not easy to face and can be uncomfortable, hence why good preparation (with a focus on preparing the nervous system), a safe environment and an attuned and loving facilitator/guide/friend are all needed.

These elements are key so we that we feel safe enough to soften the defenses, process the fear, open up to vulnerability, and ultimately to be nourished in and by love.

This is love that our deepest authentic self knows we deserve.

These experiences with plant medicines, when supported with integration practices, can carve new pathways of relating with oneself and with others, establishing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal relationships that are aligned, attuned and deeply accepting of our authentic expression.

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From Restriction To Receiving: The Pathway Of Eating Disorder Recovery

At the core of any eating disorder is the frequency of restriction. This means recovery is all about learning how to receive.

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Whether it’s restriction of food, subtle dieting, an avoidance of a food group on certain days, eating at specific times, exercise focused on weight-loss, or a suppression of emotions, social connection, or boundaries, or one’s truth, restriction and as such, hunger, is at the core of an eating disorders.

A hallmark of eating disorder recovery is learning how to reconnect to hunger cues.

Hunger says: “I need food”. It signals a basic need that all living beings have: the need for nourishment. Hunger is the drive to stay alive.

We recognize hunger through signals of emptiness, rumbling, thoughts about food, and changes in our mood or attention. 

But hunger isn’t so black and white. 

Sometimes we eat because it sounds good, or the occasion calls for it. Sometimes we eat based on our schedule and have to eat even when we’re not hungry because if we wait until afterwards, we’ll be ravenous. Sometimes we eat to soothe ourselves when we feel sad, tired, or some uncomfortable feelings.

Indeed, hunger isn’t just biological.

Diet culture has taught us that our hunger is bad and is the enemy. Wellness culture has taught us to only eat when we receive the biological signals - and to stop immediately when we feel full.

The external rules, stipulated by diet culture, cause us to bypass, override or ignore our bodies, impacting how we trust ourselves, and connect to our desire. 

Connecting to our hunger cues is a reminder that our bodies are alive and want to live and thrive. Connecting to our hunger is a practice of reclaiming and receiving our desires from the inside out. 

Connecting to our hunger cues is a gateway into reconnecting to our deepest wants, needs, yearnings and desires directly through the body.

Hunger can be an opening into exploring our needs and wants - and what rules we have learnt from society that have limited us in our self-exploration of desire. Listening to our hunger in its many forms gives us clues into our ability to receive.

The stomach is the place where we hear and feel our hunger cues and is the place that also receives the nourishment that we give our bodies.

Restoring relationship with our body’s unique way of expressing when it’s hungry or time to eat gives clarity to the beliefs we hold around trusting our hunger - not just our biological food hunger but the trust we hold (or don’t hold) for our soul’s deeper hunger.

This exploration also invites us to explore what we need in order to feel safe enough within ourselves and in our environments to nourish the deep soul layers of hunger.

Oftentimes, the soul nourishment that folks with eating disorders need is attuned relating. Being attuned to is deeply nourishing. It is the medicine and nourishment that the soul needs to receive.

“Attuned relationships give a traumatized nervous system the ability to recalibrate. When we feel safer, we can better digest trauma, integrate pain, and develop post-traumatic learning. And the more attuned relational environments we create, the more we contribute to the self-healing mechanism of the world.” - Thomas Huebl

Since an eating disorder will find ways to isolate and separate from the world and from the body itself, the medicine that is needed is compassionate connection. Recovery cannot be done alone.

the eating disorder is a reflection of the kind of connection and relational attachment one received from attachment figures that include caregivers, family, work, community, cultural, societal, and spiritual frameworks.

These attachment figures teach us in obvious and insidious rules around connection, belonging, love, and self-expression.

These figures offer conditions of attachment; in order to have safety and connection, one must follow the rules set out by the attachment figures.

And so, we may have learnt that our authentic expression wasn’t accepted or allowed because it wasn’t attuned to, understood, or validated.

In order to belong, feel safe and be in relational connection, people may shut off parts of their authentic selves to receive some form of recognition, and to gain the safety and connection necessary for survival.

It is from these places where the disordered eating behaviours manifest and represent through food the kind of connection rules one had to abide by.

the path of eating disorder recovery is learning to receive (aka metabolize) relational attunement that is in response to our authentic selves.

Receiving this kind of nourishment is deeply healing on a soul level. This is what the eating disorder wants to truly eat and be filled up with.

What is your body hungry for?

What is your soul hungry for?

Is there anything that stands in the way between you and your hunger?

Can you give yourself unconditional permission to explore your hunger and allow yourself to fully receive it?

Our hunger cues can be a gateway to listen to the deep layers of what the body wants to receive, fully.

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What Are You Hungry For? Navigating Appetite When On Psychedelics

Consider this: “I have a history of disordered eating and notice that when I am on psychedelics that I have a decreased appetite. I find this triggering after having done so much work to repair trust with my hunger and fullness cues.”

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This is a great question for anyone who is navigating eating disorder or disordered eating recovery and who are curious to weaving in plant medicines for their recovery. Having a decreased appetite when in the psychedelic journey something people may experience.

If we have been working for a long time on no longer restricting or dieting, and eating regularly without deprivation, it can be triggering when in an altered state to notice a change in the rhythms of your appetite, and observing that your appetite is lower than usual.

The effects of psychedelic drugs vary depending on the person. Factors such as the type of psychedelic and dosage can affect one’s appetite in different ways. It is possible to experience an increase or a decrease in appetite depending on what the psychedelic was and how much was consumed.

This shift in appetite occurs because psychedelics that target the serotonin receptors that alter the neural circuits are linked to mood and appetite.

As such, during a psychedelic experience it is possible to have a change in hunger or fullness cues, but it can be helpful to remember that once the experience wears off, the automatic biological processes, including digestion return to normal.

If you find yourself in a plant medicine journey, in an altered state, and you notice that there is something trigging about having a decreased appetite, with the support of the medicine, you can reflect on these triggers, diving into the emotions, fears, and needs that our bodies may hold when we sense a decrease in appetite.

We can work with our learned patterns of food intake and eating behaviours, as well as the wounds that our ancestors may have passed down around food scarcity or food abundance.

Additionally, it is important to nourish ourselves well before and after a psychedelic journey. The material that can come up in these journeys can be challenging, confronting, and require a lot of energy from the body-mind to process. Good nutritional support will help us prepare, digest, and integrate the experiences in regulated ways. This may require additional support, such as consulting an anti-diet dietician and HAES-oriented nutritionist.

 These medicines are powerful and they can shine light on how we relate to food, appetite, and our sense of fullness and emptiness in multidimensional ways.

When you notice a decrease in appetite, reflect on what you may be hungry for.

We are all hungry for something. We are all hungry for a need to be met. And an eating disorder is pointing to a deep and important need.

Those needs may revolve around the need to feel safe, to belong, to be understood, to connect, to feel regulated, or to restore a sense of worth, dignity or purpose.

In some ways, the eating disorder is an attempt, albeit maladaptive, to try to meet those needs.

Possibly those needs were never met when we were younger, or we never had role models around us to show us how to meet those needs in positive ways, or our needs were not understood or attuned to in ways that considered our sensitivity.

And so, we learn how to try meet those needs ourselves and somewhere along the way, we figure out that the eating disorder and its behaviours can somehow meet that need.

the ways in which the eating disorder works means that the need is not met in a sustainable or healthy way, nor does it address the need from the inside out – so we are always left empty, hungry. The need isn’t truly met. We never feel satisfied.

Take some time to reflect on, underneath the eating disorder, what is your soul hungry for? What need is asking to be met?

And what kind of food or soul-nourishment are required for that hunger to be met and digested with a sense of satisfaction?

Is the “food” a hug, a listening ear, nature, stillness, movement, a safe container, a boundary, emotional expression, or loving and attuned support?

And what is required for that soul food to be on your plate, right in front of you for you to drink in? 

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