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I Help Highly Sensitive Women Change Their Relationship With Food & Their Body, Through Building Emotional Intimacy & Body Sensation Literacy.

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richelle_ludwig

I help women who feel unworthy change their relationship with food & body.
Somatic Coaching
Parts Work
Weight Neutral
Trauma Informed
🌌She/Her

Part 4/4: I used walking in nature and movement p

Part 4/4: I used walking in nature and movement practices like asana to ground me back into my body. I know my continued inner work is more important than investing in a fancy website or business coach at this point. I know that the more I continue to integrate, the better I can support my clients.

I'm settled in for the long run, in an industry that honestly likes to tell you the opposite. I've become more discerning in my journey and more trusting of my own intuition. I no longer fall for the smoke and mirrors. I'm cautious and meticulous about who I work with or learn from. That's come from my own healing work. I can see through the fluff and the marketing.

Most of my clients have either experienced working with me in another capacity, have been following my journey for a year or two or have been referred to me by previous clients. I approach each individual with curiosity, rather than believing I know what's best for them. I'm constantly humbled by my clients and what they teach me too. And this is how I write. It's not planned. It's often stream of consciousness. It meanders at times. It's an expression moving through.

On that note, I will be opening another round of ECLIPSE in late January. It's a 6 month small group (6 women) journey to inner wholeness through meeting at the intersection of shadow and light, for women who want to change their relationship with food and their body. I also have 1:1 sessions available. I offer free discovery calls so we can both feel into if we're a fit to work together. On those calls I always ask you to take 24 hours to make a decision, even if it's feeling like a yes because I value consent and don't want you to feel pressured on the call.

Part 3/4: I can offer support in helping them buil

Part 3/4: I can offer support in helping them build a relationship with the parts of them that turn to the behaviours. I've seen how over time developing these relationships leads to a decrease in the intensity and frequency of the behaviours, often dissipating.

The work is relational between myself and the client, but also between the client and their body, food, their inner critics, their younger parts, etc. The intention is for them to continue with that relationship themselves, once we're done working together. I know that I'm just one mentor/teacher/guide of many that my clients may work with. That I will only have pieces to their journey at the right time. I will never promise an outcome because I honestly can't know that. I wish we'd normalize that.

This work is slow and subtle but also profound and yes, it's magical like my client shared (BTW she gave me consent to share, which is important to me). I like to actively dismantle power dynamics with my clients, which will occur with the practitioner and client relationship, let alone with how our intersecting identities may meet.

I am also doing this work. As a practitioner I am not perfect (there's no such thing btw). I've come so far, and I'm still healing too. Right now I'm deepening into my ability to self-regulate and turn inwards more on my own. The past two and a half years I've been recieving that co-regulation from a coach and therapist and also been using healthy forms of auto-regulation. It's allowed me to deepen into feeling and sensing my inner states. It's grown my capacity and helped me become more embodied.

Now I'm working on developing new neural pathways to support a rhythm of health in my physiology, while pruning the pathways that lead me to overwhelm and disconnection. Nature has been a guide in this. I'm also exploring this with consistent ritual right now. Like I just started this week with a daily ritual. I let go of my morning practice a while ago, after seeing how much the 5am club felt like it was rooted in Patriarchal values.

I turned towards containers with coaches, therapists and colleagues to bring myself back into my window of resilience.

Part 2/4: My intention with my clients is to creat

Part 2/4: My intention with my clients is to create a secure base, so that enough internal safety can be cultivated for us to explore more than the narrative. This leads to capacity to explore the implicit, which is the unknown information that exists in the body. This can come through in the form of sensations, emotions, images, inner dialogue and an inner knowing. By learning to hold space for our own internal experience, we can work through old wounds and current stressors.

I support my clients in building neural pathways for interoception, which is the sensory system that helps us access internal feelings. We need to be able to perceive our inner state in order to be able to self-regulate. I don't just teach my client tools they can go use to self-regulate, I teach them through experience with my attunement and co-regulation with them. Developing interoception takes practice, consistency, repetition and patience.

I experienced how powerful co-regulation was for myself with a coach I worked with for 2 years. Then I learned about it through my education, which is not the conventional university education. If you want to learn more about my education, you can visit the about me page on my website that probably needs to be updated again. This experience connected the dots for me and my various experiences with other practitioners and where I was at. Many of our behaviours are strategies of auto-regulation, some healthy and others not so much. As children we learn how to self-regulate through the co-regulation we recieve from our caregivers.

Our culture doesn't support this for many, many reasons. When we don't learn to self-regulate we turn to auto-regulation, things outside of us. Binge eating can be one of these behaviours. I like to get into the nuance of this with each individual client though. I differentiate between emotional eating and binge eating. I don't shame either. I'm also not against ever using food as a tool to regulate.

It's actually the first thing we learn to use to soothe and it works. I also know the turmoil compulsive binge eating creates. I never tell clients they'll be completely free of their behaviours. I never know their timeline.

Part 1/4: I recently had a client, and fellow coac

Part 1/4: I recently had a client, and fellow coach, share that she doesn't think I mention my services enough here. That when she reads my posts she feels like people will sense that I understand them, but might not be sure how I can help them. She shared that she feels the work I do is really magical and she doesn't think people will get that through my posts. This was beautiful and interesting feedback. I honestly really dislike marketing. So much of what's taught is manipulative and not ethical. There's a lot of toxic convincing, lack of consent and shaming people for not investing in themselves.

I feel so strongly about this that I took the pledge with @theethicalmove. Much of my work is helping women anchor into their sense of Self and I realized that if I'm starting the process off by manipulating them, that's a major incongruence with the healing I want to support them with. Self-agency, confidence, self-trust, sovereignty all develops through informed consent and the space to honour our yes and no. Something my clients often haven't experienced.

Many of the humans I work with struggle with self-extraction, self-abandonment, connection with self and other, shame and not enoughness, loud inner critics, a fear of their "victim mentality" and therefore a rejection of their younger wounded parts and various maladaptions that helped them survive but now stop them from thriving.

So what can I say about what I do? How can I explain it here. In truth, I don't feel words can always convey the experience. That's how marketing and copywriting can pull people in. We can have the words and know the language but lack the integration, skill and embodiment. I'm not othering myself here either, because I've definitely done this in the past. I love the nuance that comes out when working with someone over a longer period of time. Not because I want my clients to be dependent on me, but because my work is relational in nature. There's a process of deepening into trust with someone that slowly allows for more to come through. This is even more so in a group dynamic, which is why my group program ECLIPSE is 6 months.

Some words on the journey of self-compassion. Swip

Some words on the journey of self-compassion. Swipe for more 👆🏼

You can start with acknowledging both parts. And n

You can start with acknowledging both parts. And not just logically, but deepening your acknowledgement. We do that by sensing into how you experience each part in the body. We might experience these parts as body sensations, emotions, metaphors, images, inner movements, gestures, body postures, sounds or any combination.

So often we want to think our way out of these behaviours, when they don't come from the conscious mind to begin with. When we acknowledge them, it often gives us space to deepen contact so that we can develop an inner relationship with them.

Prior to this, our inner relationship is either lacking or one of criticism. Neither are helpful. As we begin that journey of developing an inner relationship with our parts and inner states, we will notice resistance. Resistance is exactly where we get to begin. Honouring these resistant parts or states of us and not forcing them away.

They can show up subtly like a haziness or a distraction. A sense of confusion and thinking we're not doing it "right." Fatigue, impatience, doubt, even a pseudo calmness. They all belong. THEY ALL BELONG.

The critical feelings we have about our inner states, can often be a big part of the lack of internal safety we feel. It can be quite surprising how much of a shift we experience internally when we move from being enmeshed with a critical part to Self.

Judging the behaviours that were adaptive strategies developed to keep you safe at one point, just creates more lack of internal safety. Acknowledging, understanding and accepting them with compassion, contributes to developing a sense of inner safety.

Once the behaviours are no longer needed to create that sense of safety, we're then dealing with creating new neural pathways for strategies that are more supportive of connection with self, while pruning those old pathways that have often become a pattern. And, we can always have compassion for these behaviours that support us in auto-regulation when life gets messy, as it does.

Love and truth to you on your journey. 🙏🏼💜🌌

I've learned that there are two distinct types of

I've learned that there are two distinct types of fear. Who knows, maybe there's more but I want to share a little bit about the difference between fear that leads to growth and fear that's intuitive in nature. You've likely seen the quotes that talk about fear and growth. The consistent message is that fear is where we grow so we should lean in, overcome or crush our fear.

This is what I was initially taught about fear too. So what's a person who's physiology is still rooted in perfectionism, fawning and not enoughness to do? Push through the fear. Do the things. Show up. When that's what has been cheered on and you haven't found your inner anchor and developed your sense of self, you tend to follow suit.

What can happen though, is more self-abandonment. You see, I was bypassing my physiology and believing that growth was on the other side, when what actually happened was more dysregulation. More anxiety. I discovered along the way, that not all fear is equal. That some of it is actually more of a stop sign. That's the kind that's intuitive in nature.

This type of fear is connected to my integrity. When being taught or told to do something that feels manipulative, extractive, unethical and lacking in consent, this fear got loud. Underneath it was the core emotions of anger and disgust. Both communicate a very loud no to me.

As soon as I began honouring that fear that's intuitive in nature, I felt myself find my inner anchor. I felt my sense of self deepen. This deep instinct comes from neuroception, which describes how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous or life threatening.

Fear that leads to growth often has excitement with it. It feels like possibility because it's something different or new. Sometimes, there isn't excitement but there's a knowing that it's still a yes. There's no fear of safety involved. For me, there might be a fear of embarrassment which is different.

This is the type of fear I explore, starting with its edges. There can be a shadow component here of defensiveness, that doesn't want to admit when I'm wrong.
Continued below 👇🏼

Happy Friday friends! Some thoughts for you, and m

Happy Friday friends! Some thoughts for you, and me, on the pursuit of weight loss. Body image is a complex, layered topic. This might be an aspect you haven't considered. Swipe. 👆🏼

Thoughts on the victim mentality narrative. Swipe.

Thoughts on the victim mentality narrative. Swipe. 👆🏼

Thoughts on our relationship to food and our appet

Thoughts on our relationship to food and our appetite. Swipe for more. 👆🏼

Body image is a topic that's been coming up a lot

Body image is a topic that's been coming up a lot lately with clients. Swipe for some of my thoughts. 👆🏼

I actually wrote this quote over a year ago on Oct

I actually wrote this quote over a year ago on October 9th, 2019. I know this because I can see when it was added to my dropbox folder where I save ideas to expand upon in posts. At the time I was feeling fear around sharing it. I don't anymore because I've been working with expanding my capacity in my nervous system the past year.

This same topic came up in a call on Narcissism in White Bodies with @kelly_germaine and @kelly_elizabeth.co of @energeticjustice tonight. I was sitting with the list of characteristics of Narcissism and specifically entitlement.

I learned from another Kelly, @kelly.diels the concept of manufacturing authority and saw how so much of the coaching and wellness industry is steeped in this. How privilege and power are being leveraged and lifestyle and individualism are being used to exploit and sell.

I could sense how I'd partaked in that myself in the beginning too. I'm grateful I've crossed paths with mentors, coaches and guides who were doing things a different way. Who confirmed that how I felt about many of the tactics was valid and that I didn't need to use them.

Wisdom is not something we can just claim as having after a year in a coaching certification. Or a few months of working with a coach, or even 20 years of dealing with our own experiences. Wisdom does come with time and experience, but not just our own. It's also passed down. Passed down from those who were here before us. Passed down from those who are not like us. Passed down from not just humans, but nature too. What is the rush in gleaning wisdom?

There's an urgency in this industry to get to the top. But the top of what? The top of a very f*cked up system. Success is defined as the top. Personally, the more I heal, the less I need what I thought I did. The less I feel the need to be on a stage public speaking. The less I need a huge social media following. The less I need to take up space externally in an already white dominated industry. I can take up my own space more comfortably.

I can be patient with my own journey of gleaning wisdom. I no longer see what much of this industry positions as healing to be healing.
Continued 👇🏼

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Loneliness
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To The Wounded Sensitive Ones
Returning To The Chrysalis
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This badge represents my pledge to the ethical move in service of a new marketing standard based on transparency, trust, and honesty. Please connect with me if you see me not honouring my pledge.

Land Acknowledgement

I gratefully live and work in Edmonton as a settler (reclaiming my Metis roots), which is located on Treaty 6, the traditional territory and meeting grounds of Metis and First Nations people including Cree, Assiniboine, Salteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Nakota Sioux and Chipewyan.

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