Peace with Food Summer Book Club
Let’s read Peace with Self, Peace with Food together and bring the somatic practices to life – so you can transform your relationship with food and your body from the inside out.
“The book not only invites us to deep listening and compassionate care. Galina’s love is also poured into every single word, and you can feel your body soften as you read. The peace is in the experience.” Nina
My book is a way to get to the roots of emotional eating and resolve it without control and deprivation
I imagine that you are in some way like me – a voracious reader. In my own attempts to heal from food suffering I devoured hundreds of books – on nutrition, psychology, self-help, on Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. I was looking for wisdom, but I was also looking for a fix.
Looking back, all these books gave me information that was valuable, yet my body didn’t know how to absorb it and turn the knowledge into embodied knowing.
When I was able to finally find peace with food, I didn’t find it through reading, but through somatic practice. It was through sitting with my teachers, mentors and therapists and spending many hours inhabiting myself differently that my nervous system learned how to move out of vigilance and constant anxiety and into the embodied ease and inner comfort which over time allowed me to nourish myself well.
You see, it wasn’t that the books I read couldn’t have been helpful; it was that my body was in a survival state and I couldn’t feel safe enough to begin a change process on my own. I needed help to do that – the kind and attuned presence of my teachers and therapists –
so that I could begin to be with myself and feel myself in a new way.
As an author, nothing would make me happier than to know you read Peace with Self, Peace with Food and that it changed your life. In fact, I get emails from people all the time who tell me that they have been practicing with the library and they have found the resolution to their years of food suffering. But for some of us (and that would have included me if I was one of my readers) – practice is needed. Time under the tender care of a well-resourced other is needed. The biology actually craves the relational field of safety and attunement in order to make a shift possible.
I tell my students all the time – you can live from habit and conditioning, from the survival programs that made sure you made it to adulthood in one piece, or you can live from the possibility of the present – connected to the senses, in real time, within a relational web of care, kindheartedness and nourishing presence.
This 8 – week Summer Book Club offers you just that – a field that you can rest and learn in. I am thrilled to meet you and to help you facilitate a lasting transformation in your relationship with food and your body.
Join me for a guided practice just like the ones we will do in the Book Club
Come Home to Your Body, One Chapter at a Time
I really want to congratulate you on being interested in working with your body and nervous system. While this is rarely the first thing that someone tries to do to heal their relationship with food, working with the autonomic habits over and over again proves to be life-changing.
The nervous system is the most reliable compass we have for understanding our body and the many ways it tries to communicate with us.
I believe you are reading this because you want to feel better. In somatic work we often say that you learn to feel better by feeling better first. That means creating predictable neutral or mildly pleasurable experiences that allow you to directly sense your body. This is very very different from merely thinking about your body or trying to control, manage and fix it.
I created the Book Club because I know what it takes to truly feel better. I understand the power of a space that offers gentle, restorative practices, clear and attuned guidance, and the deep relational healing that comes from practicing in community.
I invite you to join and:
Deepen Your Understanding
Learn how your nervous system’s past experiences and survival adaptations influence your relationship with food. Make sense of troubling habits and take the first step to get to the root of what created them in the first place.
Get Guidance, Absorb and Embody the Practices
Each session includes carefully guided practices and exercises from the book, helping you apply the insights directly to your life and grow your nervous system capacity with each session.
Build Community
Share your journey with others who understand the challenges of emotional eating. Together, we will create a safe, supportive space for healing and growth. Community experiences have the power to dissolve shame and isolation, and to offer the reparative experiences that build self-confidence, agency and self-trust. We all hear all the time that nervous system healing requires co-regulation, but someone has to actually build the co-regulating space so that’s attainable. I’ve built that space and you are welcome in!
I am excited to support you to befriend your nervous system, learn to listen to your body and find peace with self and peace with food.
How are the classes structured?
Read the book as we go: before each class, you will be reading a short and sweet chapter on your own. Most chapters take between 10 and 15 minutes to read. This will prepare you for our class exploration.
Show up and practice: in each class, your job is to simply show up. I will guide us through gentle transitions in and out of the field, and during the class, I will be offering guidance for the practices in the chapter we are reading.
Give feedback and receive reflections: the most valuable part of class is having a space to reflect on your experiences; I will be reflecting on your feedback, make necessary adjustments to your specific needs and support you in your learning.
Get care and support between sessions: I will be available to answer your questions between sessions – we have a private online space on Circle Community app where we can discuss, learn and grow together.
Find a slower pace: One of the most challenging—and most powerful—things to learn in somatic work is how to slow down to the pace that the nervous system actually allows change to happen.
In our classes, we’ll move at that slightly slower, more intentional rhythm. This pace not only supports deeper learning, but also nurtures the parts of your nervous system responsible for rest, healing, and restoration.
Q & A time: you will not only have plenty of space to ask questions, but have the opportunity to learn from others’ questions and reflections back. Community learning and the spirit of mutual support and cooperation shines here and I am so excited we get to do this together!
This class is for you if:
* You struggle with emotional eating and want a compassionate, science-based approach to healing.
* You’re curious about how the nervous system influences your unconscious and habitual behaviors.
* You want to cultivate trust with your body and create lasting change in how you nourish yourself.
* You want to learn with the book in an interactive and supportive environment.
* You are ready to move beyond dieting, cleansing, detoxing and trying to overpower your biology through using food .
* You are aware that some of the trauma history that your body holds makes it difficult to connect with your body and care for yourself with consistency.
* You want to be able to ask questions and get feedback on your practice directly from Galina who created the method and wrote the book.
Sign up for Summer Book Club Today
8 weeks of somatic practice with Galina, payment plans available
We meet 8 Saturdays, the date schedule is below
(Note on pricing – the payment platform calculates tax in your state and country, which then is paid to your state and country, this is why there are slight differences in final pricing)
How will the class support building a new relationship with food?
Food behaviors are held in place by long-locked in survival strategies. When the body is in a survival state, our ability to feel hunger, food preferences, and fulness cues and signals is compromised.
Through the carefully curated experiences from the book and the guidance which lets you practice at the appropriate threshold, the nervous system receives consistent and helpful cues for reconnection to resources, safety, relaxation and comfort.
The more we can spend time in that state, orienting to what is supportive, neutral or pleasurable inside and out, and the more the body can immerse itself in a caring and soft field, like the one created in a group, the more states of stress, high arousal, vigilance and urgency begin to dissolve.
When the body can consistently run smoothly and all 8 senses are able to tune in and support presence and wholeness, the more behaviors around food which were used to express or suppress distress, dissolve.
You will learn that your body has been expressing or suppressing stress through food behaviors, not because something was wrong or broken, but because you haven’t been able to translate the sensations, emotions, thoughts and sensorimotor responses in a way that made sense.
I invite you to 8 weeks of practice together, so you can learn how to do this, with support, care and attunement.
Here is your schedule
We will meet on Saturdays each week for 8 weeks, with one week break in the middle. These classes require your presence; recordings will be available if you miss.
Time:
9:00 am – 11:00 am PT – Los Angeles /
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET – New York /
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET – Amsterdam
Dates:
June Saturdays: 6/14, 6/21, 6/28,
July Saturdays: 7/5, 7/19, 7/26
(We’re off on 7/12 at the Beyul Retreat for Somatic Summer Camp)
August Saturdays: 8/2, 8/9
All classes happen on Zoom. Privacy is required for the confidentiality of all participants. Please ensure a private and quiet space, and use headphones if you are within hearing of others. Please put these dates in your schedule and I look forward to seeing you there.
A note for current Peace with Food School students: If you are enrolled in a 7 month Transformation Group program you can enroll in the Book Club for free. If you are in the Transformed Collective, you can enroll for 50 % off. Our student coordinator has all the info for you, email her at pwfcoordinator@gmail.com – and get help signing up.
FAQs
Is this class appropriate for beginners?
Yes. You are welcome in this class as a beginner, intermediate or advanced somatic student and no matter if this is the first time or the tenth time you are reading my book. What matters is showing up for yourself in the practices.
Do I have to do the practices at home in order to experience change?
The changes that happen in class will stay with you. You are welcome to practice more at home, but it’s not required. In fact, we see that when the practice in class is done well, it naturally serves you and weaves into your daily life without pressure.
Do I have to attend the classes live?
That is in your highest good, however if you do need to miss a class, there will be recordings.
Ready for peace with self and peace with food?
We start soon, and the spots are filling fast.
Whenever I sign a book and write a card with it, I always think about the reader I am sending it to. I try to imagine their life, their struggle, the daily contending with food and how much energy the food noise takes. I also visualize all the inner strength and resources they carry inside and I imagine a different future – one where they are at peace with self and peace with food.
I wish I had a magic wand so I can meet each reader and talk to them personally, to reassure them that there is so much we can do to heal our relationship with food, to care for what has hurt us and to move forward in a new, more embodied and whole way, where food is a friend and not a frenemy.
I hope to meet you soon in the Book Club and go on a powerful journey together, and I can’t wait to discover what is possible for you with the right care, support and guidance.
-Galina Denzel, author and creator of Peace with Self, Peace with Food