A Yogic Approach to Healing Emotional Eating

When you hear the word yoga, what comes to mind? For many people it’s a picture of a very flexible person doing something super bendy, but very unapproachable for most bodies. When I took my first yoga class, I was intimidated but interested. I took a pretty strait forward class that moved from static posture to static posture concentrating on form, alignment, and awareness of both my body and breath in a way that I never had before. As someone who tends towards anxiety and who carries a lot of tension in my body, it had a huge impact on me. I felt different in a way I couldn’t specifically explain—and wasn’t just a physical shift, but a mental and emotional shift as well. 

When I set out to become a yoga teacher in training, the very first class was all about the philosophy of yoga. When my teacher said that the yoga postures are only one small slice of what yoga is all about, my head nearly exploded! He then went on to say that the whole purpose of the yoga postures are so that we can sit and meditate comfortably. He said that the postures are a part of the yogic process so that they can assist in our ability to meditate by allowing our body to be less of a distraction to going inward, and at this, my head did explode—in the best possible way. I saw something I’d looked at in only one way from a whole new perspective, and this new perspective changed my life.

Yoga philosophy is non-dogmatic. It is not based on any religion and does not require any beliefs. It is a series of ways to grow your self-awareness from all angles so that you can fully know yourself and express your true self in an accepting, peaceful, and compassionate way. Yoga philosophy has nothing to do with what to do, but with how to be. There are 8-limbs of yoga, and the postures are only one of those limbs. Each limb builds on one another so that full self-awareness and self-actualization can occur. 

When you struggle with emotional eating, you are moving further away from yourself, you are entering a form of self-abandonment and escape. Applying yoga philosophy to healing emotional eating can be an absolutely transformative way to heal. Yoga philosophy allows a way to create ease with emotions, full self-acceptance and self-compassion, and a way to be calm, grounded, and at peace internally—no matter what.

The first two limbs of yoga offer concepts of how to be with yourself, others, and within the world. They are intended to be a guide to how to feel most connected to our true nature and include concepts such as non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing/craving, moderation, and non-possessiveness. They also consider concepts such as purity, contentment, consistency in practices, self-study, and surrender. The third limb is about using physical postures to build both strength and flexibility in your body so that you can feel comfortable and at ease physically. This limb relating to your physical body is also about embodiment and creating a healthy relationship with your body. The forth limb is about harnessing the power of your breath for mental, physical, and emotional fortitude. The fifth limb is about releasing the five senses and becoming deeply relaxed. The sixth and seventh limbs are about creating mental concentration and moving into a deeper state of meditation. The eighth limb is a culmination of all of the benefits of the first seven limbs into transcendence.

So how do these yogic concepts help with healing emotional eating? This process offers a way to be with yourself that is exploratory, curious, compassionate, and growth-focused. When integrating these concepts you become more grounded, accepting, comfortable, curious, and self-aware. Very often the part of yourself that desires to numb out or avoid discomfort through food is afraid of what will happen if you feel these uncomfortable feelings, or change your internal and behavioral patterns. This part of you is actually functioning as a protection from pain, discomfort, or suffering that it does not want you to have to handle, and is worried you possibly couldn’t handle without the old coping strategy of emotional eating. Through the yogic process, you become more curious about, and comfortable with your feelings, your experiences, and your body. Through exploring emotional eating through the lens of yoga philosophy, your mood becomes less of the driver of how to be, and more of a guide to what you need. If this all seems a little out there, I get it. I hope you will approach these concepts at least with curiosity and an open mind. However, if I’ve piqued your interest, which I hope I have, I will be outlining the process in the next few blog posts to break down each of the 8-limbs of yoga, and how to apply them with how to be with yourself, your body, your nervous system, your mind, as well as with food. 

How to Be Your Future Self Now

You know that feeling when you are super motivated and you can picture yourself exercising daily, waking up early to meditate, cleaning and organizing daily, or batch cook for the week? You can feel the amazingly powerful feeling of being this on-top-of-things version of yourself. You want to be that version of yourself so badly in the moment as you see it in the future, but then when the alarm goes off, or when it’s time to do one of those desired healthy things, you just—well—don’t. Why is this? Why are we so prone towards self-sabotage, to staying stuck, to not living in the way we can envision for our future selves? Why don’t we follow through with what we claim to want, but just don’t? While there might be a number of reasons why, no matter the reason it doesn’t have to mean this is how it has to be for you forever. You actually CAN become your future self now.

You do have the capacity to become your vision of your higher self, future self, up-leveled self in the now. You deserve to live in a space where you feel whole, healthy, confident, peaceful, and joyful. Why you aren’t always living in a way that supports becoming your best future self is often rooted in a lack of self-trust, low self-worth, and an out of balance nervous system.

The pain of staying stuck is often perceived by your nervous system as less uncomfortable now than when imagining the fear of failure in the future. Your memory networks in your brain are essentially a recording of everything that has happened up until this very point, and so it will plan accordingly, sink you into default mode, and keep you in that stuck place unless you create a lot of opportunities to show it another way to be. This is the first key to how you begin to become your future self—now.

The ability to become your future self in this moment requires having a calm nervous system. If you are living in a constant state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn and struggling to feel safe and secure from moment to moment, it makes change very difficult to create. If you have past trauma, this will become the default, living in a state of a constantly over activated nervous system. However, even without past trauma this can become the default when living with overwhelming pressures, stressors, lack of fulfillment, and any other mental health struggles. 

Learning to regulate and calm your nervous system is step one. It’s a powerful key to creating the possibility for progress. If you find that you are often stuck in fight-mode, you most likely feel on edge, like you can’t relax, frustrated, angry, irritable, easily reactive, and tight and uncomfortable in your body. If you find you are often stuck in flight mode you may feel a lot of worry, a desire to escape or self-isolate, like you need to overwork, or stuck in cycle of anxiety inducing perfectionism. If you find you are often stuck in freeze mode, you may feel shut down, blocked, numb, exhausted, stuck, in a cycle of constant anxiety inducing procrastination, and generally burned out. If you find you are stuck in fawn mode you may be overly concerned with the needs of others, feel overly responsible for everyone else, struggle with speaking up for yourself, dismissing your own needs and feelings, and always in people pleasing mode.

When you are stuck in any of these nervous system responses connected to being over-stressed or in response to past trauma, you will not feel capable of becoming your future self as your brain will always sink you into default mode as an effort to keep you in a perceived state of reaction to present or future harm. Self-awareness is another key part of this process as well, and is super empowering as it allows you to develop a plan to help yourself regulate, ground, and find your way back to rest and digest mode. When you are in rest and digest mode, (where your body is designed to live when not in a state of emergency) you are present, clear minded, connected to your self, and you feel capable of anything that you will to do.

Creating a consistent, intentional relaxation practice is yet another key to becoming your future self now. Intentional relaxation is all about offering balance to your nervous system while being fully aware of what is presently occurring in your mind, your body, and your overall energy. Intentional relaxation practices provide the opportunity to shift feeling states from any of the over-reactive states back to rest and digest mode. Intentional relaxation practices include things such as breath work, meditation, guided imagery, guided relaxation, journaling, self-massages, baths, walks in nature, gentle stretching etc… General relaxation is different than intentional relaxation, both are important to help support your nervous system function.

General relaxation is when you can check out a bit and turn off your brain. General relaxation practices include reading, watching TV, exercising, listening to a podcast or book, anything where you are in a relaxed state but not self-focused. Ideally we can engage in both intentional and general relaxation experiences daily to help create a stable, balanced, and grounded nervous system. When you are relaxed and present, you can be more open to becoming your future self now.

Once you are in a regulated, present, and relaxed state, you can do the work of living as your future self now. This is where you begin creating opportunities to show your brain new ways of being, living, and experiencing your life through imagery. This is where having a clear vision for your future self is so important and powerful. You start to show your brain other ways of being and imagining actually doing them when your body is calm and relaxed. In a therapy setting we do this with cognitive rehearsal, and in EMDR therapy, with future templates. In EMDR you practice rehearsing how you want your future self to be in certain circumstances using positive cognitions, affirmations, or positive adaptive statements, to help build the belief in yourself that you are indeed capable, while feeling that capability as truth in your body as well as in your mind.

When this future desired outcome is practiced and rehearsed consistently with the resource of a positive cognition in a calm and present state of mind, you create the opportunity for this new outcome to arise in the future. When you do this consistently, you will find that there is less resistance, fear, push back, and self-sabotage—Yay! For it to truly stick, you need to practice consistently and calmly until you just notice that you are one day living as your future self in the here and now.

Clarity is the final key to becoming your future self now. You need to get very clear on what you want, why you want it, how it will feel when you have it. Then practice getting into this feeling state regularly, creating opportunities to feel how you want to feel as your future self—now. Empower yourself to visualize this daily, practice rehearsing it in your mind and experiencing how it will feel in your body. When you do this consistently from a space of feeling calm, grounded, and deeply connected to the present moment, you create the life you want, you create the capacity within your nervous system to feel secure, and to live as your future self now!

EMDR Therapy + Manifestation

The concept of manifestation is not new, however, the way it is practiced has changed significantly over the years. Information about the brain, consciousness, imagery, and self-worth, continues to be studied and researched, and there is great evidence to the science of manifestation. So much evidence has been offered to understand more logically how and why it actually works.

I remember hearing on the Oprah show years ago, and it struck me in a big way, “you don’t become what you want in life, you become what you believe.” This is the foundation of manifestation, and why some of the concepts that popularized it, and made it seem a little out-there of just picture it and it will happen, have not proven to be how or why manifestation actually works. What you are unconsciously creating in your life, is created directly out of your level of self-worth. If you believe you are not good enough, destined to fail, are unworthy, inadequate, unloveable, or even always in danger, then no matter how much you want something, most likely you will find yourself in patterns of subconsciously sabotaging any efforts to create it in your life.

This is where EMDR therapy can be a very powerful and useful technique to integrate with your manifestation, or self-worth improvement process. EMDR therapy (if you want to learn more about EMDR therapy, you can read previous blog posts HERE, HERE and HERE) works to reprocess the memories, experiences, and feeling states that have created or reinforced the negative internalized beliefs that hold you back from living your best life. These negative beliefs create unconscious blocks to moving forward in your life. I know this to be true from both as a certified EMDR therapist, as well as a client receiving EMDR therapy. I have experienced how it helped me unravel more than one negative cognition, or negative internalized limiting belief, which has allowed me to take more intentional and subconscious action towards what I want. EMDR therapy has helped me embody how it feels to be worthy of what I want.

If you are familiar with some of the concepts of manifestation and cast it off as woo-woo, I totally get it. However, there are more and more studies and books out there explaining the brain-based science of how it actually works. I have been doing the work of To Be Magnetic (interested? try it out here with a coupon code here: TBM) for a few years and have seen it work really well with EMDR therapy. The process is logical and there in no woo-woo belief required. What I like about TBM specifically is that she has partnered with a neuroscientist and an EMDR therapist to create the process, which is a wonderful compliment to EMDR therapy, or any therapeutic technique.

Once doing the manifestation work (or any self-development work) many find that they discover that they have one or more blocks related to self-worth. Working through these blocks with an EMDR (or any) therapist can not only speed up the work of manifesting (creating the life you desire) or feeling more grounded in your sense of self, but also create more ease, self-awareness, emotional tolerance, and overall improve your mental wellbeing on many levels. 

When you create a vision for what you want and know why you want what you want, you set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When you incorporate how it will feel to have what you want, and align it with your personal values, the why you actually want it, and then practice being in that desired feeling state, you again, set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When practiced repeatedly while simultaneously clearing out the past memories, traumas, and experiences that created the blocks in the first place, you open yourself up to living in alignment with your new internalized beliefs, such as: I am worthy, I am lovable, I am good enough, I deserve what I want, In this moment I am safe, I’m ok…

Curious about integrating EMDR therapy with other types of self-worth development work? Feel free to reach out and schedule a complimentary consultation. You are capable of creating the life you want, the life you desire. You deserve to feel worthy of what you want and to do the work to support your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.