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richelle_ludwig

I help womxn who feel unworthy end their fight with food & their body.
Somatic Coaching
Inner Child
Weight Neutral
Trauma Informed
HSP
⬇️🌌ECLIPSE 💜⬇️

Words from my Focusing session with @rochelle.trud

Resistance isn't something to be conquered or push
$Resistance isn't something to be conquered or pushed through. It's there for a reason. What if instead of trying to control your way past it, you softened towards it? What if you met it with curiosity? Underneath resistance is often a need for safety. Underneath resistance is often a younger part of you asking to be seen and heard. When we push through resistance we're not in consent with what our body is communicating to us. We're often attached to an outcome we're trying to achieve, that subconsciously, we may think will give us what we need. This is often driven by external influence over what will get us acceptance, love and validation. In the process, we turn away from ourselves. We self-abandon. When we instead, turn towards resistance, it gives us an opportunity to be in consent with ourselves. To get into relationship with the part of us resisting. To understand the fear or worry and to finally hold space for that. To finally acknowledge that. To be the holding this part of us may not have ever received. When we accept this part without an agenda to get rid of it, this is where alchemy occurs. Like a flower opening to the sun, we get to know and build trust with our younger parts. Sometimes we need support with the holding, when we don't have capacity or know how to on our own. Being in consent with ourselves, often means honouring the slowest parts of us, which is counter to the culture we live in. Healing doesn't happen with speed. It's speed that often contributed to the fracturing of parts of yourself, and to the wounds. Therefore it's slowness and space that support healing and coming back home to yourself.$

Building self-awareness is key to working with our

Building self-awareness is key to working with our patterns and shifting our behaviours. A common place to start is moving from identification to observation. Before we build self-awareness we're often unconsciously identifying with our states, thoughts and feelings. When we're identified with something, it's hard to get into relationship with it.

We're enmeshed and the lines are blurred. By moving into a space of observation we're accessing another part of us that isn't in the experience, but is able to witness it. Ideally we want to observe from the Self, but sometimes can end up observing from a critical or worried part. This will also make it hard to get into relationship with the part initially having the experience. We can't get into trusting relationship when acceptance isn't present.

When we're observing from the Self we will be able to access a curiosity, openness, compassion, neutrality and acceptance. Observation can be used as a way to bypass experiencing the emotions and sensations of the original part. When this happens, we're not allowing for the activation to be mobilized. Instead we're stopping the bodies process and moving up into our heads where we can think about the experience.

Of course, we don't always have capacity to experience what's present and observation can keep us safe. We want to build capacity though so we can eventually remain present with the activation of the experience, and not just observe it from afar. Life is meant to be experienced, not just observed. When we have more capacity, we can pause in between experiencing and reacting.

This allows us to use the emotions, sensations or thoughts as information on how to act, rather than the conditioned reaction. It allows us to begin shifting our patterns at their core. When it comes to changing our relationship with food and our body, reading, talking and thinking can help. Observing can help. But when we don't experience our inner environment, we're missing a big piece.

So much of what leads to the compulsive behaviour of binge eating, over exercising, restriction or body image issues, exist with the felt experience of the body. Healing, therefore occurs here too.

The self-improvement industry feeds off of not eno

The self-improvement industry feeds off of not enoughness. It's no different than the diet industry in this sense. It's roots come from Patriarchy and so it's agenda is to tell you that you're the problem. That you just need to go through their 5 steps for growth and you'll overcome all of your issues.

I cringe at the thought that I was taught some of these very tactics and used some of them in the beginning. Even though my body was telling me, "No, this isn't right." It wasn't until my own experience of moving through all that had been spiritually bypassed and doing the deeper developmental healing, that I began to trust my discernment.

The energy behind so much of the self-improvement world is rooted in the push, force, bypass, manipulate and hustle of the Patriarchy. The words can be different and instead empowerment, transformation and even healing are used. But the energy behind is not in coherence with the language being used. It's also steeped in privilege and fails to name or recognize the trauma of systems of oppression.

True healing occurs at the intersection of consent, active dismantling of power dynamics, an emphasis on safety (knowing we can't be safe to everyone all the time) and courage, fostering of self-agency, as well as the skills of communication and repair, if conflict or a rupture does occur.

When there isn't capacity to hold space with the depth and extent of our wounds or trauma, we're often taught and encouraged to self-abandon in the name of empowerment. This shit is harmful and insidious. There's nothing empowering about deny or invalidating our emotional pain. There's nothing helpful about asking us what our higher self would do, when a younger part of us is active in its wounding and needs to be seen, validated and understood.

There's no improvement in self-improvement because the Self doesn't need to improve. The Self is the part of us that is our authentic, open hearted state. The other parts of you don't need improvement either. They need to be met with compassion and acceptance, so you can understand them.
Continued below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

I find it fascinating that we're not taught how to

I find it fascinating that we're not taught how to truly feel our feelings. We might hear that it's important, but we're not taught how. This leads to us often thinking we feel our feelings, but really we're thinking about our feelings and not somatically experiencing them.

This was a shocker to me when I began to really dig into emotional intimacy and body sensation literacy. I started to recognize how disconnected from my body I actually was. I began to understand that what I was feeling, was created by the inner narrative around my feelings, not the feelings themself.

Our minds like to make meaning. It helps with a sense of certainty. Over time I've come to understand that when I change my relationship with uncertainty and the great mystery, it gives me more space and capacity to remain present with the unknown. Of course capacity varies depending on what else is going on in my life.

When we really learn how to feel, there's greater relief in the somatic experience than in logically figuring out our feelings. The body holds information the conscious mind doesn't know. Often the deeper meaning comes through once we've held space to experience our feelings.

This vital skill is not taught in our culture. And because of this we gaslight each other, saying things like:
"Get over it already."
"It's not that bad."
"What a drama queen."
"Be strong."
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
"The past is in the past."

All these comments do are invalidate the felt experience of emotional pain. And because we're not taught how to hold space for our emotions, here in begins the journey of self-abandonment. Our culture teaches us to turn away from ourselves, and because of this we also can't hold space for each other.

It's my intention to change that dynamic with all clients I work with. I've experienced the healing that occurs when someone is able to hold space for, and accept, all parts of me. Suddenly, there's room for the grief, the anger, the shame, the fear, the disgust and even the joy. In this holding, feelings begin to flow and we begin to learn what it means, and how it feels, to hold space for the somatic experience of our feelings.

Continued below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

The word power means different things to different

The word power means different things to different people. In the personal development world there's a lot of talk about stepping into our power, but what does that actually mean? When I first began pursuing accessing my own power, I was doing it from a place of ignorance of the realities of systems of oppression that put some people into positions of power and privilege.

Not too long ago I looked up the meaning of my first name. What I discovered, I didn't like at first. Richelle means rich and powerful ruler. I realized I can reclaim what rich means to me. Rich in what? Rich inner world. Rich in health, wisdom, creative energy, spirit. I can reclaim what powerful means to me. I'll come back to inner power in a moment. I can reclaim what ruler means in this connotation. The only thing I want to rule is my own sovereignty.

Inner power to me is about worthiness. It's about reclaiming the rejected parts of you the world has taught you are not acceptable. It's about being in the world as your authentic self. It's about becoming an anchor within yourself, but not all on your own. Our inner power is mirrored back to us through our community. It's knowing how much space to take up. More when in an environment where we've typically been marginalized. Less where we've held positions of privilege and power.

Inner power doesn't need to over power anyone else. It doesn't need to sit on a pedestal. It's aware of power dynamics. It's humble and doesn't need to show off. It's secure in crediting those who came before, rather than extracting. It feeds your needs and rebels against the "norms." It can be a fierce inner protectress and it can also a soft, compassionate place of holding.

Only you know, what your own inner power feels like. Just don't confuse it with your privilege. Don't confuse it with your success when you play by, as my friend Denise calls it, white supremacist colonial capitalist patriarchy's rules. Don't confuse it with your doing, achievements, things. It's none of that.

It's at your core. It's your essence. It exist along with your rage, your grief, your joy. It's exists when you choose wholeness over goodness.
Continued ⬇️⬇️⬇️

I recently did a values exercise and uncovered tha
$I recently did a values exercise and uncovered that my top 3 values are Healing, Connection and Integrity. Healing to me, is about deeply understanding yourself, developing self-acceptance, self-compassion and self-love. Unconditioning to access your core authentic self. Mending wounds and trauma resolution so that we can move from surviving to thriving. It's about learning our yes and no, feeling worthy of our needs and safe to express our unique medicine out into the world. It's a mending of the soul fracture. It's a building of capacity and resource. Healing happens on an intrapersonal and interpersonal level. Healing the personal, intergenerational and collective. I believe we should all have access to healing. Connection is about relationship. Connection to body, to Self, to intuition, to inner child parts. Connection to other, to community. Connection to a higher power and connection to the earth. Connection is about seeing, acknowledging and harmoniously dancing with the pull and pull of relationship. Nothing shifts without connection. Nothing heals without connection. Integrity is about truth and doing what's right. It's about coherence with Self. It's about justice and transparency. It's not extractive or exploitative, but about consent. It's the inner anchor of self. It's turning towards the self, rather than away. It's the honouring of the yes and no. It allows time for the process. It doesn't manipulate or control but chooses trust, surrender and aligned action. It chooses its own path, rather than following the crowd. It uses intuition and critical thinking. It's honest. I see these 3 values all interlocking. Connection allows for access to integrity, which guides and supports healing within ourselves and the collective. Without connection, we can't be in integrity with truth or right and wrong. We won't have access to truth. We will self-abandon to stay safe. And here in lies the nuance. We also need healing to be in integrity, and we need integrity to heal. Connection allows for healing, which supports integrity. Being in integrity doesn't always feel safe, and as we heal, we access more safety through the connection with our body. ⬇️⬇️⬇️$

I was out for a walk this morning as part of an ex

I was out for a walk this morning as part of an exercise to visit the land while imagining a new paradigm, for a 6 month leadership program I'm in, called Inner Activism. I was noticing a lot of runners out this morning and began reflecting on how far my relationship with exercise and my body has come. I used to train for marathons and dealt with exercise addiction.

Today on day 4 of my menstrual cycle I was honouring my body's need for restorative movement. Today, with the collective activation and dysregulation of what 2020 has brought to light for many with Covid and the Black Lives Matter movement, I honoured my body with restorative movement.

In the depths of my eating disorder I'd developed an identity around being the "fit girl." I've written about this before. As I go deeper into the real Matrix, systems of oppression, I can see how things like sexism and ageism contributed. I can also see how the Patriarchy impacted those who came before me, and how the trauma of oppression has continued to be passed down.

We're indoctrinated into systems on micro (the family system) and macro levels that don't support us with how to be with our inner environment. We turn to behaviours to cope and we recieve feedback from the environment about these behaviours and their results, based on societal norms.

When I was dealing with an eating disorder, exercise was praised. My athletic ability was praised. My commitment was praised. My thin body was praised. My control was praised. I developed that identity of the "fit girl" and didn't know who I was without it. Yet, something felt like it was missing.

I was shifting, shaping and conforming to what my environment was reflecting made me safe, loved and accepted. Because of this I lost contact to my inner essence. I didn't wholy know myself. And that's the whole purpose of these systems. When you don't know yourself, you're moldable to what serves those in power. Healing is coming back to that inner essence that is your authentic self.

Today as I was communing with nature, I was reminded of the connection I have to my inner essence now.
Continued below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Often the language around growth and living our be

Often the language around growth and living our best lives, includes pushing through our resistance. The problem with this is that we're not taking the time to get into relationship with our resistance and explore what it's communicating to us. Our logical or perfectionist parts, latch onto the concept of pushing through our resistance and we run with it, without understanding what we're actually doing.

When we look at resistance from the lense of the window of tolerance, it's communicating that we don't have capacity. That we need to slow down and resource ourselves. When we move out of our window of tolerance and try to push through resistance, we end up in behaviours often labelled as self-sabotage. I'd argue here, that self-sabotage occurs because of self-abandonment. The self-abandonment is taught through pressure to fit the norms of whatever environment you're in. Because fitting in, often means safety.

From the lense of parts work, our resistance is often coming from a protector part that is protecting a younger part. Again, if we push past the protectors and the younger part, we're not accepting them. We're definitely not listening to them or in relationship with them. Sometimes this oppression of parts of ourselves is coming from parts of our own internalized domination we've been taught through systems we're been indoctrinated into. Other times it's our own internalized subordination.

Either way, there's no relationship with resistance because it's seen as bad. It's seen as something to conquer. What if the approach shifted? What if you honoured your resistance? Because when you honour your resistance, you're honouring your body's timeline and process. When you honour your resistance, you're allowing for connection, rather than disconnection, with your body. When you honour your resistance, you're towards towards yourself.

Sometimes, along the way we also learn that what we thought was resistance, was actually our body telling us to slow down or stop. What we thought was resistance was actually our intuition saying, "not this" or "not yet." We won't ever learn the truth if we keep trying to push and force.
Continued below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

"You're too quiet."
A simple sentence that used to

"You're too quiet."
A simple sentence that used to hold so much weight.
At it's core,
you're not like us,
how you are makes us uncomfortable,
you need to be different to be accepted here.
But mostly,
you're not enough.
As there always is, over the years I've sifted through the nuance of my quiet.
Some from wounding, some from my innate essence.
And the more I've healed the shyness, the avoidant attachment style, the shame, the lack of sense of self, the good girl, the fear in speaking my truth, the more I've uncovered the gift in the essence of my quiet.
The more I've reclaimed the word quiet for myself.
I'm an internal processor.
I think deeply and feel deeply.
I take my time to explore how something lands for me.
And when I don't, because I'm still unconditioning myself in needing to respond instantly.
When I don't, I often end up self-abandoning.
My quiet says nothing about how engaged I am in something.
My quiet is part of my sensitivity.
It's not a weakness.
It's not passivity.
It's a strength, a gift, my medicine to the world.
My quiet means that I hear with more than my ears.
See with more than my eyes.
I sense deeply.
I savour slowness, stillness because it's where my answers often come to me.
My quiet is humble.
There's an understanding of not knowing it all, and therefore being open to learn from others.
There's curiosity and acceptance in my quiet.
Sometimes there's grief and other times there's joy.
In a world that seems to get louder and louder with attention seeking, my quiet knows integrity matters.
My quiet trusts that those who need to hear me, will find their way over in time.
My quiet also trusts that I will find those who I need to hear.
Ironically, or not, they're often not the loudest either.
My quiet has depth.
My quiet is comfortable.
I've reclaimed my quiet.
What have you reclaimed?

It's wonderful that the part of us that learned we

It's wonderful that the part of us that learned we needed to be perfect to be loved or feel safe, brought us to inner healing work. But somewhere along the line, if you're in the right container, that will shift. You'll see the perfectionism as another adaptation that you were merged with.

And underneath that part, is a healthy, whole being. The more we contact that inner blueprint of health, the more we're able to feel safe enough to let go of black and white. The more we have capacity to explore the in-between grey zones.

We often can't do this on our own at first. We need relationships and communities. As humans we're wired for connection. If connection felt unsafe, especially in our younger years, we heal that through connection with people who can hold us in our experiences, validate, see, hear and normalize, rather than minimize or try to change us.

Through this holding we begin to feel our worth. We begin to access our own inner empowerment. We begin to feel safe. Safe enough to individuate and explore our truths. Safe enough for difference. Safe enough to show up in our messy, fullest expression.

And, we realize there's no getting there. That this way of being is a practice. Because again, getting there would imply perfection. Our focus shifts from an attachment to arriving someplace, to a practice of engaging in the ebbs and flow of life. And, if and when perfectionism shows up, it becomes a cue to look at where we're not feeling safe and address that instead.

*Whenever I talk about safety now, I think of how there's also privilege in accessing safety. For anyone with a marginalized identity, the world feels less safe. And we can't be safe to everyone, all the time. We can learn what supports us in feeling safe, and often this will be community. I'm continuing to learn and reflect on the integration of having an intersectional social justice informed lense.

Our bodies shift and change with the seasons, with

Our bodies shift and change with the seasons, with the years, with our menstrual cycle (if you have one), with life events. Our bodies carry stress, emotional wounds, our joy, our creativity, our oppression, our power. Our bodies respond to our environments.

When we try to control and keep them the same, we end up stagnating ourselves too. And that's the whole point. Diet culture, patriarchy, sexism, they all contribute to this focus on body weight, which distracts you from truth. We end up refusing to move with the ebbs and flow of life, often not consciously. We're grasping at a certainty of remaining the same, because certainty gives us a false sense of safety.

When our system has learned that the world, others and our own internal environment are unsafe, control and rigidity becomes a solution. When the world teaches us our acceptance comes in how we look to others, but not how we express, feel or be in the world, the control of our weight can become the focus.

This control of our body weight becomes a reflection of how we then engage with life. A reflection of our attempt to control life. But life is fluid. It's moving and ever changing. As is our body. What if instead of trying to manage your body size, you learned to approach and meet life in all its mystery?

This, I know, isn't easy. It requires a certain level of safety and courage. It requires relationship and community. It needs space and time. Find people and communities to support you. Look for the ones who are truly integrated in this flow. Some will speak the language, but still be indoctrinated with patriarchal values of push, control and speed. Your body will know. And sometimes contrast is what confirms, what your body was communicating the whole time.

Let your relationship with your body reflect your relationship with life, and instead of trying to change your body, let it be a cue of where you can change your relationship with life. Where healing is required. Where wounds and trauma exist. Approach with gentle care and compassionate curiosity.

Let it liberate you. Meeting yourself in life, instead of trying to control. It's a practice and a path.

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Recent Posts

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