I want to share some with you about how I got to this place, as certified as a Massage Therapist and doing bodywork. It's a bit of a winding journey about my own healing. Consider this Part 1: How It All Began.
How it began was with emotional eating, self-loathing, and a younger, struggling me.
I started getting regular massages in my mid-20's, soon after moving to San Fransisco from the east coast. I was beginning an earnest search for what I wanted to do with my life. I felt lost, anxious, depressed, highly sensitive to nearly everything (food, scents, people, noises, violence in the media, lost cat fliers, etc) and was physically in quite a bit of discomfort.
Diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome after college, I had always had challenged digestion, and was an emotional binge eater, which certainly didn't help my gut's situation. I'd also had chronic tension and migraine headaches since middle school, as well as ongoing neck, shoulder and back pain. I'd normalized most of it, it was just "how I was".
My first real career move in SF was getting certified as a Holistic Health Coach. I wanted to help people, and wanted to be healthier myself. I had a complicated love-hate relationship with food. I loved eating, but eating didn't always love me (digestive challenges, and I had very little willpower with anything baked or sweet). In general, I ate "super healthy" by day, but hid out in the pantry most nights, stuffing myself until my stomach hurt.
On the surface I managed to look fit, healthy and happy, but I felt like I was just wearing some awful mask, and couldn't seem to stop sabotaging myself, even as I watched myself do it. I felt like a total fraud. I spent a lot of time fretting, trying to figure it all out, and trying to look like I had it all figured out. It was excruciating. All my business courses said that Imposter Syndrome was just that, but they obviously didn't know ME. My mental loops of guilt, shame, self-doubt and stress were tearing me up inside.
One afternoon I walked into my local pharmacy and there, tucked in corner, was a massage therapist offering 20 minute chair massages.
My neck and shoulders were very tight (no kidding), I was an emotional ball of rubber bands, and I decided I clearly needed it.
I had gotten massaged before maybe once or twice at a spa, and it's hard to say what was so different other than this person clearly understood. It was both the longest and shortest 20 minutes of my life! Time sort of melted with my muscles. I stood up feeling entirely refreshed and promptly booked a session.
Giving that to myself changed my relationship to my body and myself. I felt like a new, more open and relaxed version of myself after every session. It soothed my frazzled nerves and started to help me release the long-held tension I'd been bottling away. Sometimes I went every week, sometimes every other week, and it was honestly a highlight of those days. I was truly enjoying being in my body. I felt more relief and ease, less pain. I felt more connected with and compassionate for my body. I remember walking back to my apartment after one session and being overcome with a sense of feeling truly beautiful and alive from the inside out for the first time.
I can't and won't say that bodywork fixed all my problems. But looking back, I can see that getting regular bodywork created the foundation for all of the rest of my growth and unfolding, and supported all the other work I did to help myself heal.*
Bodywork put me in direct contact with the core guiding star I needed, my own body and felt experience. And the all-important questions in any given moment:
How was I actually feeling? And what was I actually needing?
My thoughts and emotions still had a lot of sorting out to do, but my body was a new resource and barometer for understanding what was true for me in a way I'd never considered. I began to feel and connect with my inner sensations more, and started recognizing real hunger versus cravings, when something was a YES or a NO, when I needed to rest, when I needed to get up and move and exercise, when I was pushing too hard.
It started to become clear that I was emotional binge eating because I had tons of unconscious anxiety and unmet needs pent up inside of me. I'd be stressed, and didn't know what I needed, but I knew I needed something, and so... comfort food?? Cereal? Almond butter? Cookie dough? Bread? Emotional comfort eating had always been a coping mechanism for me. But as a budding health professional, I wanted more than anything to have it all under control, and the more I tried to deny myself, the more I ate, the worse I felt, and the more I tried to deny myself... It was a viscious cycle.
At that point, the backlash of shame, guilt, and stomach aches was getting to be more than I could shovel under my subconscious rug anymore, more than I could avoid feeling. I was increasing my capacity to feel my body - which meant feeling all the pain I was enacting on myself, and also the contrast of what it felt like to feel good, alive, beautiful. I deeply, desperately wanted to change.
Anger is an emotion that let's us know when a boundary is being crossed, when something is not okay. My emotional eating was taking a huge toll on my health—physical, mental and emotional—and I finally tapped into the part of me that said ENOUGH!
It took practice, but I had became frustrated enough to start waking up and catching myself mid-binge. I wish I'd known how to "catch myself" with more kindness and compassion, but in the beginning it was pure desperation and loathing that did it. Anger can turn into determination and clarity if we let it.** I'd spit out the half-chewed food in my mouth and throw the rest away, sometimes twice in a night. I'd be upset with myself (for starting in the first place, for wasting food) but it was also empowering to flex this new muscle that was taking a stand for what I really wanted. I could actually do it!
Bit by bit, I was able to catch myself sooner and sooner. I started thinking of it as catching myself in a safety hammock, rather than catching some little kid doing something "bad". Eventually I just stopped binging altogether. I also chose to pause my health coaching practice, recognizing that thinking about food all the time was not giving me the space I needed to fully heal my relationship with food and my body.
I can now say with ease that I have a very healthy relationship with all food now. I eat whatever I want, whenever I want, and my body and digestion have both never felt better.
That wasn't the end of my journey, but it was the tipping point. Bodywork continued to be one of the ways that I slowed down enough to connect with what "good" and "ease" felt like in their truest sense in my body. I'm happy to share some of the other resources and things I did to support myself during that healing journey, please just reach out.
Many other things led me to become a bodyworker myself, but that's a story for another day (Part 2)! Thank you for reading my story. I hope that by sharing this, at least one other person can feel less alone, can feel more human themselves, can have more compassion and know that great, beautiful, enlivening change and healing is possible. It's actually more painful not to look.
I also want to express gratitude for my healing journey. I sometimes wish I could have had different guidance and support, but I did the best I could with the knowledge and resources I had at the time. I love myself now and hope my own journey can be of service to others and the world.
Side Notes:
*Along my healing journey, I've done mannny things, including transformative coaching progams, yoga teacher training, meditation of many kinds, writing groups, one-on-one somatic therapy, women's circles, intimate deep-dive embodied self-care programs, conscious dance, and found a mentor and community that love and support me unconditionally.
**If anger is also a challenging emotion for you, check out Joe Hudson's Art of Accomplishment podcasts (there are many on specific emotions, anger included) and website The Art of Accomplishment for emotional intelligence resources and trainings.