Things we dive into in this episode:
What it means to feel "alive"
Why sensitivity, creativity, and energy are key elements of aliveness
5 specific tools that will help you cultivate a deeper sense of aliveness
📘Resources
📌Episode Highlights
What constitutes aliveness?
Sensitivity:
The ability to sense things and feel feelings in your body.
So many of the things we want in life are a sense, like self-confidence and self-compassion. These things are a sense. A sense of self-confidence and a sense of self-compassion. They're things that you feel in your body. They're not things that you think.
If you become more sensitive, if you feel more alive by becoming more sensitive, you get an access to a sense of self-confidence. You get an access to a sense of self-compassion and a sense of compassion for others that fosters genuine connection and makes your life really worth living.
Energy:
Feeling a genuine burst of energy and a capacity to do the things that you want to do in your life. The sense that you have this push, this enthusiasm, this inspiration to live.
Creativity:
Not art necessarily, but creating your life and feeling like you can create the life that you desire and deserve.
5 Tools for Aliveness (that help you feel more sensitive, more energized and more creative):
Mindful Eating:
Some sort of presencing practice before you begin eating a meal and/or a snack.
A presencing practice could be taking one really big, deep breath before you take your first bite of food and looking at the plate of food in front of you (and if your food's not in a plate or a bowl, maybe putting it on/in one).
Notice if your meal or snack is a good balance of carbs, proteins, fats, fruits, veggies.
Take time to just breathe, drop into your body, and give a tiny moment of gratitude for the food.
We digest food better when we take a moment to be present with our food. It also allows us to savour and enjoy and experience the pleasure of the food more.
Food is one of the deepest pleasures of life. Food is part of our culture. Food is part of enjoyment. It's part of what makes life worth living. It's part of what helps us bond with other people. It's part of what helps us honor traditions. And it's what gives our body fuel to keep going. Food is nourishment. Food is energy. Let's just acknowledge we eat it three to five times a day. And let it be a gentle ritual.
Spend Time with Your Inner Child:
Get back to who you were when you were a little kid, when you were a baby, when you were uninhibited, free, and feeling it all. When the world hadn't gotten to you yet and you weren't so self-conscious. You were just curious. You were just dancing and singing, exploring, getting messy, and trying to learn with so much more of an open mind.
And so many of us as little kids hadn't learned that there was anything wrong with our body shape and size or anything else about us. We were just letting things kind of be.
Photos of yourself as a child can remind you that you're trying to get back to this curious, experimental, exploratory, uninhibited, and playful version of you. And photos of yourself as a young person can also remind you of where things got bumpy or where you learned that there was something “wrong with you.”
None of us came out of the womb thinking that there was something wrong with our bodies or that there was something wrong with our personalities or that there was something wrong with who we were. The world taught us that. And so we need to unlearn that.
Remember that everyone has an inner child. Everyone had formative experience as a little kid. Think about you as a child and then think about your mom as a child and your dad as a child. Imagine the three of you are sitting together. How powerful is that? Just that visualization in and of itself. How powerful is it to consider the inner children of your parents as well? This is such a vital practice for self -compassion and for compassion for others.
And also thinking about, what did you like to do as a little kid? How did you like to move your body as a little kid? How did you like to exercise when you needed to get the zoomies out as a little kid? How can you get back to that, especially with exercise? It's a really meaningful thing.
Conscious Emotional Release:
Consciously nudge yourself to feel your feelings. Consciously create spaces and containers for yourself to feel more deeply.
It is very important that we let ourselves feel it all. If there's something that we have to grieve, whether it is something as substantial or something that comes up in everyday life. It's so important that we let ourselves feel grief.
It's also important that we let ourselves feel anger about the big things and the everyday things and the things that happened long, long ago that we never let ourselves feel anger about.
It's also important that we let ourselves feel joy, like uninhibited, unconscious, full, blissful joy about the things that are joyful, about the things that we're grateful for.
Conscious emotional release can look like a lot of different things:
You can use music and intuitive movement, putting on some songs that cultivate particular emotions while you light a candle and lock the door and just let yourself feel. Journaling might also be a conscious emotional release. Watching a TV show or a movie that helps you feel a certain emotion and move it through your body. Engaging with any sort of art that helps you tap into a particular emotion can be a form of conscious emotional release too.
Do and Talk About What Makes You Excited:
There is something that makes you excited and it doesn't have to be a purposeful thing.
It doesn't help anybody and it’s not a job or career. It doesn't make you money. And it doesn't make you feel ultra purposeful. It just makes you feel excited to talk about.
Maybe it’s your favorite TV show or your favorite Taylor Swift album or your favorite houseplant or your favorite food.
Set a timer for 3 minutes and just talk to someone about this thing you’re excited about.
When you talk about this thing, you’ll light up and become extremely joyful.
Whatever it is that makes you excited, make space for it! Make moments for it. Give yourself access to your joy.
Whatever your joy is, know that you can have access to it amidst your hard days and your challenges.
Take Inventory of Your Relationships:
Make sure you are engaging in practices or in actions on a regular basis that help you cultivate a sense of relational health with at least one to five people.
I don't mean one to five people on a daily basis, but making sure that you have an inventory of one to five people that you really feel are your 2 a.m. friends.
You feel like you can call or text them at any hour and even if they don't get back to you, you trust that they're gonna be able to receive that message and not be annoyed if that you need them for support or affirmation or celebration or whatever it is.
We don't have to solve anything when we're relating to other people. We just need to share. It's just the dissolving of shame that happens through sharing with others that helps us heal and feel more alive.
Before any of the solving even happens, it's just the sharing and the dissolving of the shame that happens through sharing.
It's so profound to learn about yourself through others, to let other people notice and witness your strengths, and to let other people notice and witness your growth.
And then for you, to let yourself notice and witness strengths in others and notice and witness growth in others is just as powerful.
Thanks for listening! 💖 Stay tuned to Caitie’s website for more episode updates and other exciting programs and resources.
Transcript
Caitie: You know, there's no post-it note affirmation that is truly going to soothe the agony of body dysmorphia. And there is no like, you look so hot comment on your Instagram that's going to convince you that your body is okay if one parent or one ex or one doctor told you that it wasn't okay. And there is truly nothing I can say to anyone about the science of metabolism or intuitive eating or body diversity that's going to make the tidal wave of detoxes and filters and ozempic and jawline goals invisible to you. But you know what does empower you to get out there and embrace your body? It is space to feel your feelings. And I know that everybody says, feel your feelings, feel your feelings, but they usually don't say how and they usually don't say why.
Welcome to Whole, Full, & Alive, a podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself, and be yourself. I'm Caitie Corradino. I'm a registered dietician-nutritionist, a body image coach, and the founder of Full Soul Nutrition, a method that combines nutrition counseling with a powerful toolkit of somatic healing modalities. I have guided hundreds of clients to freedom with food, their bodies, and every aspect of their lives. I've also been through this healing myself. And on this podcast, I want to help you eat with confidence, embrace your body, form aligned relationships and create a life that you're in love with. I'll share actionable tools, no bullshit stories and interviews that will remind you why you have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive. Are you ready? Let's get into it.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full, & Alive, the podcast helping you feed yourself, feel yourself and be yourself. I am so excited to be coming to you today from London, England, where I just arrived after two weeks in Scotland, where I led my very first Nutrition & Intuition Retreat. It was an absolutely incredible experience. The Nutrition & Intuition Retreat was a five night and six day experience where a group of 10 amazing women got together to heal their body image, cultivate a healthier relationship with food, feel their feelings and turn workouts into an energizing ritual while traveling around Scotland and just making amazing lifelong friends with each other.
I don't even know where to begin to cover my feelings about what happened in Scotland last week. I am gonna try to pour some of them out in this podcast today, as well as my absolute gooeyest gratitude for every single person who made the first Nutrition & Intuition retreat possible. And because so many of you who are listening to this podcast, maybe all of you who are listening to this podcast, were not at the retreat, I am going to share five tangible takeaways from the retreat that you can implement in your life today that will help you feel more alive. As I am getting, you know, just testimonials and feedback and like genuine messages from people who were on the retreat. Something that's being reflected back to me again and again is that the people who came on this retreat left feeling more alive, feeling more alive than when they came. And one woman in our closing circle was like, I wish that I could just bottle up the aliveness that I feel right now. This sense of deep, energizing aliveness and presence that I feel and just like take it home with me and have it whenever I need it. And another woman left me an audio note yesterday saying that she just feels more sensitive to life in a really beautiful way. She said she's noticing that she feels really deeply touched by things that she wasn't feeling touched by before. She's feeling more deeply grateful for things that she wasn't deeply grateful for before. She's just feeling life, life is like coming through her a little bit more.
And I thought, what a freaking gift to know that that is the impact that this experience had on people, that they just feel more alive. I think that we live in a world that encourages us to desensitize ourselves and, you know, look at a screen and detach and I don't know, play it safe and stay inside a box and do what we're supposed to do. And that's not what being alive is. Being alive is looking away from a screen and feeling into our senses and dropping into our bodies and having feelings about things and taking risks and expressing ourselves creatively and living life in a way that it hasn't been lived before, cause that's all what we're supposed to do is kind of live life in the way that only we can. And so I'm getting ahead of myself here. We are going to go through five tools to help you feel more alive today. These five tools for aliveness are based on what we practiced at my Nutrition & Intuition Retreat in Scotland. And I'm so grateful that you are here and tuning into them today. I hope that you will leave this podcast ready to implement these things and we'll be feeling more alive very, very soon.
Before we dive into the tools, before I get even more ahead of myself, let's pull over to take a really deep breath. Maybe the deepest breath you've taken all day today. Whether you're multitasking or you're just tuning into this podcast, I wanna encourage you to drop into your body for a moment by receiving a nice deep breath in through your nose and a really long exhale out your mouth. Let's do one more. Take a nice deep breath in through your nose, fill your chest, feel your back expand as you breathe in. When you get to the bottom of that breath, let it go slowly through your mouth and feel a little bit of pressure come off. Okay.
Before we dive into today's tools to help you feel more alive, I just want to let you know that there is going to be another Nutrition & Intuition Retreat happening technically before the end of this calendar year. The retreat is going to happen in the transition between 2024 and 2025. I am so excited to announce that if you know me, you might know that New Year's Eve is my favorite freaking holiday. I love the ritual of the new year. I love to take time to pause, reflect, journal, just think about what happened over the last 12 months. And I'm so excited to host a retreat where we're going to be able to do that in addition to all the other magical things that I like to do on retreats. And yeah, the next Nutrition & Intuition retreat is going to be December 27th through January 2nd. If you're interested in being one of the first people to sign up for that retreat, get on the waitlist at the link in the show notes and you will be the first invited to sign up for this retreat when we open registration and you will get an early bird rate and you will lock in your spot on this retreat. I'm so excited to invite you to join us.
And the second thing that I want to let you know is that I have a few spaces open for one-on-one counseling right now. I combine nutrition counseling with body image healing and a toolkit of holistic modalities such as breath work, somatic work, reiki and energy healing to really help you eat with ease, embrace your body and feel more alive. So if you are interested in doing that one-on-one work, I offer single sessions as well as long-term coaching. You can visit the link in the show notes or my website, fullsoulnutrition.com to learn more about signing up for a single session or long-term coaching. And you know what? I'm just going to remind you too, that I host a community group every month. It's called my Back To You Community Group. We do breath work and then a journaling exercise and then some meaningful group coaching afterwards. And you can bring your questions about nutrition and body image with you and receive some community support around those questions. It really is a very meaningful group. It's capped at 10 people. There's never going to be more than 10 people there. And it's a wonderful space to just come back to you, stretch, breathe, journal, and feel truly held by a group. Would love to have you there. This month's group is going to be next Wednesday, April 17th at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
All right. It is time to feel more alive. I think of aliveness in three ways. The first thing that I think creates a sense of aliveness is a sense of sensitivity. And that might feel a little bit odd to hear, like, why would I want to be more sensitive? I think we kind of hear about sensitivity as a negative thing. You're so sensitive. Stop being so sensitive. Why are you being so sensitive? But to be able to sense things, to be able to feel feelings in your body is beautiful. I've talked before on the podcast about how so many of the things we want in life are a sense. So many people tell me they want to feel self-confidence, self-compassion, and these things are a sense, a sense of self-confidence, a sense of self-compassion. They're things that you feel in your body. They're not things that you think. They're things that you drop into and you feel. And so if you become more sensitive, if you feel more alive by becoming more sensitive, you get an access to a sense of self-confidence. You get an access to a sense of self-compassion and a sense of compassion for others that fosters genuine connection and makes your life really worth living.
So first and foremost, being more alive means being more sensitive, being more touched by things. The second thing that I think constitutes a sense of aliveness is energy. Feeling a genuine burst of energy, a capacity to do the things that you want to do in your life, not the sense that you're just lifting your legs out of bed, the sense that like you have this push, this enthusiasm, this inspiration to live. And the third thing that I think constitutes a sense of aliveness is a sense of creativity. And I'm not talking about art necessarily, I'm talking about creating your life and feeling like you can create the life that you desire and deserve. And it doesn't have to look like a blueprint. It doesn't have to look like something that's been done before. I think that that is the definition of creativity is producing or producing is a weird word to use, but bringing forth something that has never been done before. That's not a blueprint. That's not a framework. That's not a plan or a structure or a thing that you think you have to do. It's something that you're bringing forward that is all yours, that is a result of your self-expression or your genuine desires or your experiences or just comes from your creative mind, you've created it.
And so the five tools today that I'm gonna share with you are five things that we did on the Nutrition & Intuition Retreat. And these are five things that are gonna help you feel more sensitive. Sensing into life a little bit more so that you could be more moved by things. You can feel things more deeply and you can tap into a sense of self-compassion, a sense of self-confidence, a sense of compassion for others. These things are going to help you feel a sense of genuine inspiration and energy and drive to move forward in your life when you need it. And they're going to help you tap into a sense of creativity, bringing forth something without a blueprint that is original. And these might be works of art. Creativity, you know, very straightforwardly comes through through paintings and poems and writing and whatever. And creativity can also come through in the form of just your life, your everyday life. Every human being is a creative human being because we all have the capacity to live life a little bit differently than it's ever been done before. And you also can create just by creating a really cool breakfast in the morning or creating a really cool outfit or creating a nice birthday card for your friend or just there's so many different ways to create and that is one of the things that makes us feel most alive. So anyway, I believe that we feel more alive when we are more sensitive, when we are more inspired and energized and when we have the capacity to be a little creative and create things the way only we can.
And so these five tools for aliveness are going to be five things that help you feel more sensitive, more energized and inspired and more creative. And these are five tools that we did on the Nutrition & Intuition Retreat. What's so special about being on a retreat is that it's like this cocoon where you can just practice the tools and you can be in community with other people who are trying to practice these tools. And after we do the really big workshops and the bigger, deeper practices, you have time to integrate them and to talk about them with other people and to journal about them and to really, really process them and just step away from your everyday life. That's what's so beautiful about being on a retreat. You are retreating away from your job, from your day to day, from your partner, from your family, from your home, and just letting yourself be held in the cocoon of the retreat. And if you really commit to implementing these five tools, you will feel more alive the way the women who came on the retreat do.
Yes, the retreat is an incredibly special, powerful, transformational experience. And I know it's only possible to go on maybe one retreat per year or one retreat in your life. And so I hope that one mission I can accomplish on this podcast is to bring some of the magic of retreat experiences to people who are listening to this show and staying in their everyday life. So thanks so much for being here today. Thanks so much for committing to learning five tools that will help you feel more alive. I know it will have a positive impact on you and a positive impact on people in your life once you start implementing them and spreading your aliveness around. Remember that you being more alive and other people being in witness to your aliveness does so much for them. Just you being more alive, being more self-expressed, being more creative, being more energized, being more inspired does so much for other people, regardless of whether or not you're directly helping them or your advice giving to them. You just being in your most alive essence is so valuable to the world around you.
All right. Five tools. What are they? On the edge of your seat. Here are the five tools that I saw made some of the biggest impact on the women at the Nutrition & Intuition Retreat. Number one is the quickest and probably most straightforward one and also probably one of the most predictable ones because I am a registered dietitian-nutritionist. The tool is mindful eating. Now hear me out, I don't mean like being hyper vigilant about what you eat, like being mindful of what you eat. And I also don't mean doing a meditation every single time you eat. I mean, doing some sort of presencing practice before you begin eating a meal and a snack too, if you can. So by presencing practice, I mean taking one really big, deep, juicy breath before you take your first bite of food and maybe looking at the plate of food in front of you, the bowl of food in front of you. If your food's not in a plate or a bowl, maybe putting it on a plate or a bowl for a moment to make sure it's intentional to give yourself a good balance of carbs, proteins, fats, fruits, veggies. This isn't an episode about what a balanced plate looks like, but you know, that is part of this. And then taking time to just breathe and drop into your body and maybe give a tiny moment of gratitude for the food.
You don't have to sing amazing grace, but just take the time to be like, wow, so many things had to fall in place for this plate of food to come in front of me right now. If someone else cooked it for you, someone else had to put tender love and care into this meal to cook it for me and source all the ingredients. All these ingredients came from, you know, a farm or something somewhere. Someone had to invent this food and so many different things had to fall in place for this plate of food to be in front of me for it to nourish me right now. How cool that it's here, that I have it, that it's gonna taste good. It doesn't have to be the best meal ever for us to appreciate just some of the flavors of it and some of the pleasure that it might bring to us and the fuel that it's gonna bring to our bodies and the way our body is gonna know exactly what to do with the food. It sounds a little simple, it sounds a little trite, but I truly promise, taking time to just look at your plate of food or your bowl of food or your snack and just breathe and just take a deep breath in and a full breath out and feel your feet on the floor. It not only has an impact on your digestion. We do actually digest food better when we could take a moment to just be like, before we eat, not a meditation, just a moment before we eat. It also allows us to savor and enjoy and experience the pleasure of the food more.
Food is one of the deepest pleasures of life. Food is part of our culture. It's part of enjoyment. It's part of what makes life worth living. It's part of what helps us bond with other people. It's part of what helps us honor traditions. And it's what gives our body fuel to keep going. Food is nourishment. Food is energy. Let's just acknowledge we eat it three to five times a day. And it can be a gentle ritual. A lot of the women on the Nutrition & Intuition Retreat said they appreciated that we didn't do this whole hoopla, like crazy meditation, but we just took time to breathe before every meal. And that made it so that we weren't dominoing into the meal. We were pulling over and being like, okay, now we're eating. Now we're nourishing ourselves. And one of the things I like to kind of implement to you is just calling meals nourishment on the retreat, which might sound a little bit cheesy. And it's, it's really cool to acknowledge that food is nourishment. Food is how we fuel our bodies with energy. Food is how we feel alive. So that's tool number one.
Tool number two is spending some time with your inner child. I was really surprised how much the inner child activities and inner child meditations that I incorporated into the retreat had an impact on every single person that attended. I did not tell anyone to do this, but so many of the women when they were leaving the retreat decided to make their phone backgrounds pictures of themselves as little kids. And I thought that was amazing and incredible and wonderful because so often we just need a reminder that we were once small children and that we still kind of need to be talked to like we're small children that we still need to treat ourselves like we are fragile, delicate children because at the end of the day, isn't that what we're trying to get back to if we're trying to feel more alive, if we're trying to be more sensitive?
Aren't we just trying to get back to who we were when we were little kids, when we were babies, when we were just so uninhibited and free and feeling it all and the world hadn't gotten to us yet or hopefully it hadn't gotten to us yet. And we weren't so self-conscious. We were just curious. We weren't so self-conscious. We were just dancing and singing and exploring and getting messy and just trying to learn with so much more of an open mind. And so many of us as little kids, we hadn't learned that there was anything wrong with our body shape and size. We hadn't learned that there was anything wrong with our hair. We were just letting things kind of be. And then often something did happen to us when we were small that we shouldn't have heard or something was said to us when we were a little kid that we shouldn't, that shouldn't have been said to us. Or we experienced something as a little kid that we shouldn't have had to experience as a little kid.
And so I feel like there's like two dimensions to the inner child thing. It's like on one hand, photos of yourself as a child kind of remind you of what you're trying to get back to this curious, experimental, exploratory, uninhibited, playful version of you. And photos of yourself as a young person too, also can remind you of where things got bumpy or where you learned that there was something, air quotes, wrong with you, right? None of us came out of the womb thinking that there was something wrong with our bodies or that there was something wrong with our personalities or that there was something wrong with who we were. The world taught us that. And so we need to unlearn that. The most powerful part of inner child work for me personally is that I learned at some point, when I was a little kid that I wasn't going to be loved if I didn't perform. I wasn't going to be loved if I didn't produce, if I didn't do productive things that people found impressive. And there's this unhealed part of me that needs to heal so that I can move slow and sleep and know that I'm still loved even when I'm moving slow and sleeping and not performing. There was also this part of me when I was a child that was very intuitive and was told your intuition is wrong. Your intuition is wrong. That's not what's going on here. And it's not safe for you to follow your intuition and, you know, sense what's going on. It's wrong. And so much of healing my inner child is like saying to that little Caitie that lives inside of me, like, no, you're right. What you're feeling and what you're sensing is valid. What you're feeling, what you're sensing is true.
Another part of inner child work that's been helpful for me too is remembering that everyone has an inner child. You know, that everyone had formative experience as a little kid. And one of the most powerful moments of the retreat was actually when I invited the women to picture their parents as children too. And I invite you to think about this right now too. Think about you as a child and then think about your mom as a child and think about your dad as a child. And the three of you are sitting together. How powerful is that? Just that visualization in and of itself. How powerful is it to consider the inner children of your parents as well? This is such a vital practice for self-compassion and for compassion for others, exploring your inner child.
And also thinking about, what did you like to do as a little kid? How did you like to move your body as a little kid? How did you like to exercise when you needed to get the zoomies out as a little kid? How can you get back to that, especially with exercise? It's a really meaningful thing. So that's tool number two for feeling more alive is considering some inner child work. I by no means just covered everything that there has everything that has to do with inner child work. That's just the tip of the iceberg. That's what I want to offer you today, though.
Tip number three for feeling more alive is conscious emotional release. Consciously nudging yourself to feel your feelings. Consciously creating spaces and containers for yourself to feel more deeply. It is very important that we let ourselves feel it all. If there's something that we have to grieve, whether it is something as substantial as the death of a loved one or something as everyday as hard feedback from your boss or a falling out or distancing from a friend or your body changing and that being really hard. It's so important that we let ourselves feel grief. It's also important that we let ourselves feel anger about the big things and the everyday things and the things that happened long, long ago that we never let ourselves feel anger about. It's also important that we let ourselves feel joy, uninhibited, unconscious, full, blissful joy about the things that are joyful, about the things that we're grateful for. And I think that sometimes we all just sort of need a little nudge to get ourselves to feel. And so when I say conscious emotional release, it can look a lot of different things. I often teach my clients about conscious emotional release practices where you can use music and intuitive movement, putting on some songs that cultivate particular emotions while you just light a candle and lock the door and just let yourself feel. But journaling might also be a conscious emotional release. Watching a TV show, a certain movie that helps you feel a certain emotion, move it through your body, engaging with any sort of art that helps you tap into a particular emotion can be a form of conscious emotional release.
And I think that we're often really scared to feel our emotions sometimes because we're afraid that we're gonna get stuck in it. And with that, I just wanna remind you of two things. One is that typically what people get stuck in is actually numbness from emotions. It's not actually the emotions that they get stuck in. People get stuck in a state of non-feeling rather than a state of feeling or they get stuck in a state of thinking about feeling instead of just feeling. They get stuck in worrying about feeling and being anxious about feeling rather than just letting the feeling come through the body. Don't forget that feeling is what our bodies are designed to do. Our bodies are designed feel and when you let a feeling come all the way through and out of your body, it's like this pressure valve releases. So conscious emotional release is kind of like giving yourself a primer to feel emotions.
And we did some of that on the retreat, we created primers for feeling and releasing certain emotions about things. And I think that's why so many of the women reported feeling more alive when they left and more touched by things when they left. Because remember, when you let yourself feel all the way, whether that is sadness or grief or anger, you get access to the other side of the spectrum in a much deeper way. You get deeper access to joy and pleasure and gratitude. When you let yourself acknowledge the grief of what you've lost, you also deeply appreciate what's there. When you let yourself acknowledge the grief of breakup or a loss of some kind, you're never able to take the presence of love or the presence of relationship or the presence of friendship for granted ever again. When you can lean all the way into the loss you can lean all the way into you can lean all the way into when it's here, you know? Conscious emotional release is another tool for feeling more alive and I probably will do an episode just on this because I think that this is certainly one of my specialties, something I really like to help people through. So that's just a little nugget of it for now.
Tool number four, do and talk about what makes you excited. That sounds really simple. And you might be thinking, I don't know what I'm excited about. I don't know what I'm passionate about. Yes, you do. There is something that makes you excited and it doesn't have to be a purposeful thing. In fact, I did an activity on the retreat where I asked everyone to come up with something that they just really love that makes them excited, that doesn't help anybody necessarily. And it's not their job or their career. It doesn't make them money. And it doesn't feel ultra purposeful. It just makes them feel excited to talk about. So maybe it's just your favorite TV show or your favorite Taylor Swift album or your favorite plant that's in your house or your favorite food. And just talk to someone about it. I'm going to set a timer for three minutes and just talk to someone about it. And we were reflecting after that activity and everyone was like, oh my God, when the person was talking about the thing that lights them up, they just were so joyful and so alive and the energy was radiating off of them and I really, really want you to remember this.
My thing that just makes me excited when I talk about it, even though it it's not part of my job. It's not part of my career, it doesn't make me money. It's not of service to the world. It's Ted Lasso. I just love the TV show Ted Lasso. I could talk about Ted Lasso and all of the silly little nuances and the way they wrote the show, all the little hidden Easter eggs in the show. I love the actors on the show. I love the writing in the show. I love the character development. I love the storyline of it. I love Ted Lasso. It's my favorite TV show and I love to talk about it. And I love to just rewatch episodes of it when I feel like it. And I have a subscription to Apple TV exclusively for Ted Lasso and I'm completely unashamed about it. And it's just my thing. And it's important to do and talk about and share whatever your little thing is that makes you happy. It was such a powerful exercise to have the women on the retreat do just talk about the little things that make them happy because these are the things that make you you. These are the things that make you come alive.
So whether it's Ted Lasso or it's Harry Potter or it's your houseplants or it's whatever. You know, you might be able to find, eventually, some sort of purpose in this thing, right? Even Ted Lasso, it has all these little nuggets of like personal development and like self-helpy kind of things in there that I think are really impactful for me. And on the whole, it is just a silly little obsession of mine. And it's important to let yourself have these silly little obsessions. It's important to let yourself have these silly little hobbies. It's important to let yourself be a Swiftie or let yourself be a big fan of truffle fries. That's another one of my things. Whatever it is that makes you you, make space for it. Make moments for it. Give yourself access to your joy. Whatever your joy is and know that you can have access to your joy amidst your hard days and amidst your challenges, not in spite of amidst and not instead of at the same time, not instead of feeling sad. It's just on the same day, I can feel sad and I can access joy. In the same moment, I can grieve about something and acknowledge that I might learn from that grief. It's not toxic positivity. It's not like we're trying to turn out the dark with the light. We're letting the light and the dark exist side by side, braiding them together, letting them both be there. And that is a big part of being more alive, I think, is not blocking the light with the dark or the dark with the light, but letting both of those things exist together and recognize that without feeling one end of the spectrum entirely, we can't feel the other entirely. And without feeling one end of the spectrum, we're also not gonna be in our body fully because our body is designed to feel it all. Our body is designed to be sensitive instead of numb or avoidant of feeling. Let yourself feel both the negative and the positive emotions. Let yourself feel deeply so that you can be in your body.
It is such a big part of body image healing, surprisingly, is letting yourself feel your feelings. You know, people are always like, oh, it's about affirmations and telling yourself that you're beautiful. You know, there's no posti-it note affirmation that is truly going to soothe the agony of body dysmorphia. And there is no, you look so hot comment on your Instagram that's going to convince you that your body is okay if one parent or one ex or one doctor told you that it wasn't okay. And there is truly nothing I can say to anyone about the science of metabolism or intuitive eating or body diversity that's going to make the tidal wave of detoxes and filters and ozempic and jawline goals invisible to you. But you know what does empower you to get out there and embrace your body? It is space to feel your feelings. And I know that everybody says, feel your feelings, feel your feelings, but they usually don't say how. And they usually don't say why. How is conscious emotional release is one thing. And why when you stop trying to put sadness out like a fire, you can access really deep joy? And when you stop trying to erase body shame through dieting, you can access profound body confidence. When you stop trying to numb loneliness, you can access really deep connection with good people when it's there. Feeling the hard stuff is not going to turn your life dark, sour or small. It is going to turn you wise and soft and hopeful and it's going to let you lean into these joyful things even deeper, even more profoundly than you did before.
I feel like the last two tools were kind of just like in one big blob, conscious emotional release and leaning into what makes you happy. But anyway, the fifth and final tool for feeling more alive is taking inventory of the relationships in your life and making sure that you are engaging in practices or in actions on a regular basis that help you cultivate a sense of relational health with at least one to five people. And I don't mean one to five people on a daily basis, but making sure that you have an inventory of one to five people that you really feel are your 2 a.m. friends. You feel like you can call them at any hour or text them at any hour and you know, even if they don't get back to you you trust that, you know, they're gonna be able to receive that message and not be annoyed if that you need them for support or affirmation or just celebration or whatever it is. Making sure you feel like you have people that you can speak your shit out loud to.
You know, one of the most powerful things about retreat experience is that people were just speaking their shit out loud to each other. The opening prompt of the retreat was just, you know, where are you coming from when it comes to food and body image and what do you need when it comes to food and body image? That was one of the prompts in the opening circle and people just shared like, hey, here's my relationship with food throughout my life. Here's my relationship with my body throughout my life. Here's where I'm coming from. And here's what I need. Here's what I feel like I need when it comes to my relationship with food and my body. And we didn't solve anything in that circle. We didn't solve the problems of the world. We didn't solve all of their food and body problems and them just being able to put their feelings out there, just them being able to speak their shit out loud to other people and have it be held in a circle that was a cozy and safe, quiet environment, was so, so, so powerful. We don't even have to solve anything when we're relating to other people. We just need to share. It's just the dissolving of shame that happens through sharing with others that helps us heal and feel more alive. Before any of the solving even happens, it's just the sharing and the dissolving of the shame that happens through sharing.
And another thing I feel inspired to share too when it comes to relationships is that it's so profound to learn about yourself through others, to let other people notice and witness your strengths, to let other people notice and witness your growth. And then for you, and to let yourself notice and witness strengths in others and notice and witness growth in others. One of the best parts of the retreat is on the last day we did what I called a love shower and every single person, one at a time, sat in the center of the circle and everyone went around and said what they really admire about that person and also some people shared what growth they saw in that person throughout the course of the retreat. And this love shower was so profoundly beautiful. It took four and a half hours because everyone was just so in love with each other by the end of the retreat. And everyone reflected that they benefited from receiving the love and the reflections from others. And they also really enjoyed hearing what other people had to say about each other. And they also really enjoyed sharing love with the person that was in the center of the circle because it's just as beneficial to notice growth in others as it is to receive feedback on yourself. We learn so much from each other. We belong to each other. We are meant to grow through each other, through seeing each other, through witnessing each other, through hearing each other. We are not meant to go through life alone.
And so as I'm wrapping up this podcast, I also want to acknowledge that I didn't put on the Nutrition & Intuition Retreat alone. I put it on with the support of some incredibly amazing people that I want to thank before I sign off today. The first person that I want to thank is my retreat operations manager, Nicole, who is also my admin assistant at Full Soul Nutrition and is also my absolute best friend in the entire world. She has been on this podcast twice before. You might be familiar with her if you follow along, but she managed the operations of the retreat. She coordinated our transportation. She created the budget for the retreat. She communicated with all of the people who are in charge of logistics on the retreat so that I could just lead and hold space and plan the workshops and manage emotions and all the other things that came up on the retreat. She really let me step into my zone of genius and my gifts by planning all of the operations by putting on the logistics of this event. And I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't have done it without her and without her resilience and her creativity and her thinking on her feet.
I also want to thank Rachel at Rachel's Farm, which is where we hosted this retreat just outside of sterling in Scotland. Rachel is an incredible woman and the retreat center that she has built on a gorgeous farm just outside of Stirling was the dream venue and her warm welcome and hospitality for our group was just beyond and the retreat venue was a dream. You can see the photos and videos of it on my Instagram.
I also want to thank my retreat photographer and videographer Alyssa. She did such an incredible job capturing the essence of this retreat so that more people could see what it was like and hopefully join our next one. And she also captured incredibly beautiful and amazing memories for the women who are on the retreat without being intrusive or invasive. She was trauma informed. She was a ninja sometimes when she took photos, too. I had no idea that she captured certain moments that she did. And I am so, so, so grateful for her and her talent and her time and her energy.
And lastly, I am so grateful to the women who trusted me to guide them in this experience and be part of the very first Nutrition & Intuition Retreat. This is the beginning. I hope that you will take away five of the tools that we practiced on the retreat to help yourself feel more alive. And I hope that you'll consider joining us on the next Nutrition & Intuition Retreat. And until then, I hope you join me on next week's podcast. I'll be back here with a guest next week.
For today, I hope you know you have everything you need within you to feel more alive. And I hope you'll start feeling more alive. I'm sending you so much love for the rest of your day. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this podcast, if you don't mind leaving a five-star rating on Apple or Spotify, I'd be so profoundly grateful. Or if you'd share it with someone that you know and love that you think might benefit from hearing this message, I would also really appreciate that.
Have a beautiful rest of your day. Take a deep breath. Do what you need to feel more alive. Bye.
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