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PEACE WITH SELF, PEACE WITH FOOD AND:
- Stop focusing on food and start addressing the true reasons for emotional eating
- Engage your whole body and nervous system in processing emotions
- Master somatic practices to meet, recognize, and transform your emotions with ease
- Learn emotional eating SOS
- Welcome your emotions as a wise guide on the path to peace with food
No matter how long you have suffered in your relationship with food, within you is the power to transform it.
You can get to the root of what drives you to eat when you’re not hungry. You already know that it’s not about the food, your discipline, or lack of willpower. Something in you has known that all along, but maybe you haven’t known what to do about it.
I was there, too. For years, I knew it was not about the food, but I didn’t know what to do about it. So I tried what everyone tries – more nutrition interventions, supplements, alternative medicine, psychotherapy…and nothing helped.
I spent decades trying to heal. Yet, I remained obsessed with wanting to fix my body and I was tortured by how I looked and felt.
And because nothing helped, at the age of 31, I threw in the towel. I gave up. I accepted I would live with this suffering for the rest of my life.
Until one day a few years later, I was surprised to find myself free from food fear, able to choose the right foods for my body, and completely at peace with how I looked.
In fact I clearly remember the bedroom in our townhome, where I stood and looked in the mirror and found myself looking at me, and not at my belly, or my legs.
I was looking at me – fully human, one sacred interconnected whole, not an object or a project to be perfected and fixed.
This transformation caught me by surprise. After all, I had spent years trying to heal to no avail, and here I was just able to eat without fear and look at my body with acceptance and love.
I had to take a deep dive and find what had caused this profound change. At that point it had been more than 25 years of struggling with my body. What I found, completely blew me away.
I found that it wasn’t paying attention to my nutrition or exercise that healed my obsession with food and my body, it was the other way around. My body and nervous system had experienced profound healing while I was in Somatic Experiencing school and the food and body image issues had resolved on their own, once I had a more stable and healthy system.
I wrote “Peace with Self, Peace with Food” so you could have the same nervous system healing practices that helped me heal from emotional eating. I wrote it so that those of you who know it’s not about the food, can take a different perspective and can get to the root cause.
I find it miraculous that I was drawn to study SE and become a trauma practitioner, because my work with chronic pain was asking me to become intimate with how the nervous system, our traumatic history and the way we adapted to life’s challenges influenced our bodies and our health.
Clearly, something about the trauma healing tools and how I was now able to live in my body without the constant buzz of stress and fear allowed me to finally be able to see food as a nourishing resource and not the enemy, and live in my body with an ease I never thought was possible.
I went on to spend the next 5 years detailing my journey and what I had learned during my years studying and practicing trauma healing. I continued to enrich my education and work with more tools and practices, and finally, organized all of it in a book.
This chapter of the book invites you to step inside and start reading, so you can start to understand your emotions and how to be with them supported by the wisdom of your body.
May the tools in this chapter help you turn toward your emotions instead of away from them! May they be a step on your new path to peace with yourself and peace with food!
On this journey, on your own, with a community, or the support of a therapist who can work with the unconscious and implicit – you will come to a turning point. You will be asked to grow your capacity to meet, recognize, allow and be with your emotions.
Galina Denzel is a Somatic Experiencing, a Neuroaffective Relational Model Practitioner, and a Somatic Practice Practitioner.
She is also trained as a Nutritious Movement Restorative Exercise Specialist and multiple other healing movement modalities that she’s needed to support clients and students with chronic pain and complex conditions.
She teaches the Peace with Self, Peace with Food method in small groups and workshops.
Her personal story healing from her own eating and body image disorder combined with her knowledge and experience as a trauma resolution practitioner make her work inspired, compassionate, and deeply transformative.
