Dear Wildflowers,
I am excited to once again be offering a live weekly yoga class.
Heres the truth: Yoga saved me.
I know that sounds dramatic, but the truth is that during a time when my eating disorder was as its fiercest, yoga came into my life and gave me an honest and mindful space to explore and create a different relationship with my body. It gave me tools that helped keep me from diving deeper into my disorder and cause more harm to myself. I look back often and think about how lucky I am that I happened upon this practice when I did.
It didn’t heal me on its own and I have certainly encountered my fair share of toxic yoga spaces and ideologies along the way. I know that the yoga world is far from perfect and has its own issues with disordered mindsets.
But at its core, the actual practice of yoga is filled with incredible benefits that translate into our work of recovery ten fold (or eight fold for my yogis out there ;)
An area of eating disorder treatment that quite frankly needs a lot of work is how we address the relationship we have with moving our bodies. For a long time, the way movement has been addressed while in recovery is to abstain from it. Sometimes this is medically necessary, but what I have found as a coach is that most of the time it’s because we don’t treat movement with the same priority and necessity as we do eating.
I believe that bodies need movement, not so that they may look a certain way, but because our nervous systems require it in order to process emotions and experiences. Without movement, we get caught in that feeling of “stuckness” that so often I find my clients are experiencing. Even with the best talk therapy in the world (and I do so value it), without embodied experience, we cannot complete or fully heal the cycles of trauma. Mindful movement matters and makes a difference in this way.
So beginning this week, I will be offering such a space for this to occur. Join my on Tuesdays at 10:30am EST for an hour of yoga and healing movement. I have spent the last year learning from Dr. Arielle Schwartz and how to teach applied polyvagal theory in therapeutic yoga, so this will not be like the yoga classes you get at most studios. This will be a safe and resilient space for anyone who is looking to create a shift in their relationship with movement and their body. We will breathe and play and maybe even dance from time to time. I hope to see you there.
And for my clients…