Annette Dubreuil: Harnessing the Power of Focusing for Emotional Healing and Mindful Eating

Unlock the secrets to emotional healing and mindful living in our latest episode with Annette Dubreuil, a passionate Canadian advocate for sustainability. Annette brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique approach to connecting with our bodies and nature through the practice of focusing. Inspired by Gene Gendlin's groundbreaking work, Annette shares her personal journey and insights into how this technique can transform your emotional well-being, particularly for those wrestling with emotional eating and addiction.

Discover the six steps of focusing and learn how to create a grounded state by "clearing a space" and recognizing your physical sensations. Annette guides us through the process of identifying, describing, and understanding these sensations to achieve a sense of resonance and relief. By acknowledging different 'parts' of ourselves, such as the pleaser, the numbing part, and the critic, we can foster a compassionate relationship with our inner experiences. Annette's method offers a profound way to reconnect with our body's innate wisdom, providing a foundation for healthier emotional regulation and self-awareness.

Explore practical applications of focusing for emotional awareness and mindful eating. Annette emphasizes the importance of recognizing our body's signals and incorporating self-compassion into our daily lives. By listening to our body's cues and addressing them mindfully, we can reduce emotional highs and lows, leading to more balanced eating habits and a more harmonious relationship with food. Join us for an enlightening conversation that could be a pivotal moment in discovering a valuable life skill to enhance your emotional health and overall well-being.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome everybody. I am like really, really, really excited to interview today Annette Dubourg. She is a fellow Canadian and just to tell you a little bit about her, she started out actually passionate about the environment and went and got her MBA in sustainability and the environment and trying to play a leadership role in helping us to reconnect and to cherish and to take good care of Mother Earth or just Earth, if that's better. And on the journey, she realized that the people need to have a connection to their own body and, for that to be a meaningful connection to nature, to want to take care of it. And so she landed in 2012. She discovered a practice called focusing that was invented he wouldn't say invented Sort of shared with the world, discovered. Discovered by a beautiful, beautiful man named Gene Genlon, who came out of the University of Chicago.

Speaker 1: 0:59

So a little back story. I did my undergraduate degree in philosophy and I did my master's degree in philosophy and along the way, I had discovered a book by a man named David Mark Levin and it was unlike any piece of philosophy I had ever read. It was mind-blowing. And I'm like who is this man? What is this approach to philosophy? And he talked about the felt sense and he talked about thinking at the edge and all these terms that he had taken from his colleague openly and gratefully from his colleague Gene Genlin. So I flew to Chicago, which was a lot of money for me and a big risk, but I thought I think I'm going to do my PhD with this man. And so we met and we connected and I didn't actually line up. I wound up actually going overseas to do my master's and then I didn't circle back around to do a PhD. But I digress. The bottom line is this man's work, gene Gendlin's work, spread to all these different areas and most people don't know. Most people don't know that the work of Peter Levine he's standing on the shoulders of the work of Gene Gendlin. So is Richard Schwartz. You know internal family systems that they openly have credited some. You know his work as being a piece of what got them doing, what they've brought to the table so fast forward.

Speaker 1: 2:17

30 years ago I read a book called Focusing by Gene Genlon. It lit me up. I thought it was the most amazing stuff and somewhere along the line I kind of lost my way. No one else was talking about it. This was pre-internet. I was the only one geeking out on this, you know, and I just kind of. Anyways, I got busy, had a family moved on, blah, blah, blah, circled back around to it more recently in the last two or three years and I decided to get back into this. I met Annette, I did some training with her and I thought, annette, you have to be on my web, you have to start, you have to be on my podcast, and here's how she fits in.

Speaker 1: 2:51

We know, as we walk the journey of recovery from the use and abuse of food and in particular for those of us that identify with being on the addiction spectrum with sugar and flour and processed foods that at some point we recognize that we are emotional eaters, that we are using food to suppress, distract ourselves and to manage unwanted physical sensations and emotions and experiences.

Speaker 1: 3:18

And we know that at some point, if we don't learn how to step up and to feel our feelings and to know what we're doing with them, sooner or later there might be in a moment where they're so intense that we just we go back to the food because it works so well and so focusing, I believe, is one of the most powerful modalities on the planet. Yes, somatic experiencing is amazing. Yes, ifs is amazing. Yes, somatic experiencing is amazing. Yes, ifs is amazing, and this is sort of like foundational to all of it. So I would love for Annette to tell us a little bit more about herself, if there's anything you would like to add, and your work with focusing and how you discovered and what it's done for you.

Speaker 2: 3:59

Yeah, beautiful. Well, I'll say a bit more about focusing, in that it allows us to go deeper than the emotion level we go, because when people hear the term felt sense, they often don't know what we're really talking about when we say that. And really we're talking about going to the physical level, the very subtle sensations, and really feeling those physical qualities and allowing the body to tell us something with them. And so very often we know how to do this. I would say we almost all know how to do this because we did it as babies, we do it as children, we can listen and speak from that, but we are socialized out of it, right. We're told women especially are told not to cry or not to be angry, men really not to cry, boys don't cry, that kind of stuff. And so the we lose touch with those feelings and that the knowing. And so what focusing is doing is showing us to come back to it and to go to that physical level before words are there, and then we really get what it is that's there and we're able to then learn and process. So you were saying you know what's popping up when you want to eat whatever your go-to snack is. Can we be with that and probably, if you haven't, if you're in this place where you have these bad habits or addictions, something hasn't been listened to, Many things haven't been listened to, and so focusing is this beautiful practice of learning how to listen again instead of overriding, instead of skipping over.

Speaker 2: 5:48

There's a beautiful camp song that I like that's going on a bear hunt and it's saying you can't go around it, you can't go under it, you can't go over it, you got to go through it. And I think that's true about our emotions is we have to be with them, we have to process them, and we can only do that if we know how to be with them in a safe way, and we haven't been taught how to be with them in a safe way, so focusing does that. And what I love about it, as compared to, say, somatic experiencing or internal family systems, is that we learn how to do it with peers. We kind of have a buddy, a listening partner, and we learn how to do it with peers. We kind of have a buddy, a listening partner and we learn how to create safety for each other in learning how to listen to what's physically happening in our body and create space for that, yeah, so I could go more into that, if you like, about like the six steps and listening maybe.

Speaker 1: 6:44

Sure, that sounds great. I just wanted to add that for me, one of the things that I love as well is that there is a whole community of people who you can just once you become trained in it and you have basic competency and how to hold space for somebody else as they drop in and get a felt sense of really the thing that stands. So, gene Genlon one of his lines is he starts a session by asking what stands between you and feeling just fine right now. What a beautiful question. What stands between you and feeling just fine right now? And if you were all right now on this call, as you're listening to this, hoping you're not driving, don't close your eyes if you're driving, hoping you're not driving, don't close your eyes if you're driving, but to drop in, drop into your body if that's at all comfortable or familiar to you, just drop in and get a felt sense of what stands between me and feeling just fine right now. And you're gonna find that there's all kinds of stuff there and you know the little, little little parts of us put up our hand to say, well, I, you know this, this for me and that for me, and you know, and so it's.

Speaker 1: 7:47

There's a skill involved in being able to hold space for somebody else to drop in and to connect and to get a felt sense of what stands between us and peace and joy and love and all the great feelings that we're born to feel and desire to feel. And we can also do it for ourselves, like I do in the middle of the night when I can't sleep. It's two or three and there's something in my system. I will just ask myself what stands between me deep peace right now, or sleep, or feeling just fine, and I know how now to scan my system and to try and get the felt sense of what it is. And it can take three to five minutes for me just to find the sense of it.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Oh, it's a bit of grief, it's a bit of fear, it's a bit of this right, and so it's such an exciting journey into understanding what's who we are and what's happening for us in this fresh kind of safe way. But the the piece that I'd love for us to talk a bit more about you can go into the steps is the word safety that you stressed Is that for most of us, we're terrified of our feelings. They've been painful, they're overwhelming, maybe when we cried or fussed as kids or expressed anger or grief or disappointment that we might've been shamed or ridiculed or said I'll give you something to cry about right that we've come to fear emotions. So this is totally a 180 that we're learning how to be curious with them and tender with them and eventually madly in love with them. Because this we're meeting parts of ourselves that feel as wonderfully exciting as when we're falling in love with another person. But okay enough, I digress. Clearly, clearly, clearly, I'm a fan.

Speaker 2: 9:30

Take us where you'd like to go from here yeah, well, the one thing I was thinking as you're speaking is, um, what we learn with focusing is, rather than to be the emotion and have the emotion overwhelm us, is to be with the emotion, and so there has to be enough us online, and I would call that self energy. I like capital S self, which is used in internal family systems and other practices like theory, you. So we need to feel enough grounding, enough calm energy to be with the emotion which is in that felt sense. And so you mentioned grief. Right, like the grief maybe it's in your chest or in your heart space and you can notice those physical sensations and be with them and hold space for them. And that safety piece is getting enough of that energy online so that you can be with it. And the beautiful thing you mentioned is like what's in the way of me and feeling just fine right now.

Speaker 2: 10:26

Sometimes, when we ask that to the body, the body says 10 things in there, and so in focusing, we have this beautiful practice, which that first step is called clearing a space, and it really is kind of doing an inventory. When we ask that we notice something there, we say, oh hi, I see you, I notice that you're there and just for now I'm gonna put you down beside me. Sometimes that needs to be really close, like right beside you, or you can. It's. It's kind of a visual thing. You can imagine putting it in a box or you can imagine giving it to a plant. That's very effective, like I see your plant behind you. Right, you might give it to that plant that comes from Dennis Wendigo, indigenous focusing line, and it's very powerful. Or you can imagine putting it in a bubble or putting in a rocket ship and sending it to the moon. So we find a place to put it. Just for now.

Speaker 2: 11:22

Come back to the body, ask again what else is in there, what else is in the way of me and feeling just fine right now, and you just keep doing that until it feels calm and grounded inside. It's probably similar to an internal family systems where we ask parts to step back and eventually enough of them step back. Then self is there. It's kind of a similar thing where you're noticing what do I have inside? And can I just, if I put them all down and I know they're all there, eventually, do I get out to a place where I kind of feel my sit bones on my chair, I can feel my feet on the ground and I haven't lost track of anything because I've just done the inventory and your body kind of goes yeah, okay, now I can be with one of them, and so, in focusing practice, our next step would be to invite one thing in. Let's be with one thing at a time, and then we can really be with it.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Right. So what we're doing here is we're literally being taught by Annette how to do. You know the basic outline of what a focusing session experience looks like. So the first one is clearing space and the second one is inviting one to come in as sort of the focus.

Speaker 2: 12:33

Okay, and you get a felt sense of it. So my favorite way of doing this is comes from David Rome. He calls it drop the storyline, which is you talk about it for 30 seconds to two minutes. 30 seconds is usually enough until you kind of feel some of the energy. You don't have to necessarily talk out loud, you can just review the facts that you your your perspective of it right I say facts and quotes in a way and then as soon as you notice that you've got some activation, that you've got some of it, then you drop the story, you stop thinking about it, you stop looking at words and then you notice where you have it in your body and then you notice where those physical sensations are. So that's what I was saying before. We're below the emotion level. We don't necessarily know what we're feeling yet, but we notice oh, I have it in my chest, or it's in my throat, or maybe it's in my belly or it could be anywhere. You know, it can be sometimes it's in your head or in your limbs, but it is often in that trunk of the body and so we we spend some time describing it because very often and this is kind of getting to step three the way the body's going to tell us what it's wanting us to know is not going to be to go to words right away. There's going to be an intermediary and that's often an image or a metaphor. It's like the poeticness and neuroscience wise there's more connections between the body and the right brain. The right brain is more poetic, so we get that first and then eventually it turns into words. So you know, sometimes people get the image of a pot and a lid, or I've had many times people have when they don't want to say something, they'll have like an image of a cork in their throat. Somebody had a lid in their throat that you know, couldn't open. So because it's so common to have experiences of, we have those emotions and we wanted to say something but we stopped ourselves. And so it gets to the point where you're like you're at the experience of stopping and then, if you can be with it, then you can notice what you wanted to say, for example. Then you can notice what you wanted to say, for example, and in those bits about getting the right image or getting the right word, you can tell in your body if it's the right one, because your body goes oh yes, you get that feeling of that's the one. That's what it is, similar to the way you know if you know somebody's name right, like if you've forgotten somebody's name, and you kind of cycle through them in your head, you, once you have the right one, there's a knowing. We do this also with food too, right, like what do I want to have for dinner? And you can think through and then there's a resonance with one that I do want to eat and that's kind of.

Speaker 2: 15:33

Step four is this resonance is noticing. Do they match, are the physical sensations and kind of the emotional qualities of the feeling, of it? Does it match the symbol I'm getting the word, or the image or the metaphor, however it comes? And when it does, even when you're with really difficult content you know it can be really sad or painful it feels better in the body. Having been with it, feels better than having repressed it or ignored it. And then sometimes that's all you need and you're done. But other times the physical sensation if I was in my chest and I get a word like pulling, it's still there. Maybe it lightens a bit or maybe it intensifies a bit, but it says oh, more to say and then we can ask it some questions to have more information come, so we can spend quite a bit of time in that asking space.

Speaker 2: 16:25

And then the last step or movement in focusing is called receiving or welcoming, and really this, I think, is one of the key things that makes focusing different than other practices. Lots of people might be familiar with mindfulness meditation, for example, where we notice something and then we let it go. Right, we're just constantly trying to just let things go, and in focusing practice, we're receiving, we're welcoming, we're saying, oh, you're here, what do you want me to know? And and so it's really an attitude that we need. And so when I teach focusing, I actually teach step six with step one of let's get our heart energy online, and one beautiful way to do this we could all do it now is to put one hand on your chest and the other hand on your cheek and to lean into that cheek jawline and that beautiful self-touch is a very nice way to activate some caring. We need to be at least friendly with ourselves, maybe curious, and over time we can really learn to be compassionate, right, we can learn to notice that hurt one inside of us and ask it what it needs and give it something, and so that can be really deep healing work that we do with focusing, and other times there's other things that come up, yeah, so that's kind of the six steps and and and the practice.

Speaker 2: 17:53

You know, you kind of just cycle through all of those very organically, depending on what's happening. At some points it's like, oh, what does this want me to know? Or at other points it's like, oh, it's really murky, it's really fuzzy, it's really vague, and I don't know what this is yet. So I'm just kind of being curious and waiting to see. And then suddenly, in a similar way to when you watch clouds in the sky, you know you might all of a sudden see an elephant or a dog in the cloud.

Speaker 2: 18:21

That's what happens with focusing. Suddenly the physical sensations say, oh, you know this word or this emotion or this metaphor, and it helps you slowly by like we call it, felt shift, by felt shift, like each little step in that process gives you a little step and then another little step. And that's what's beautiful about focusing in and in other ways. It's really gentle, it really is a paced thing, which I think is a much more sustainable way for most of us, because sometimes when we get. I see this a lot. You know, people get these really big kind of quantum jumps sometimes, where they go to their capital S self and they notice how they could be, but then they kind of backtrack to who they are now because it's too big of a jump to stay there. We haven't learned how to stay there and then with focusing we can really pace ourselves and bit by bit change.

Speaker 1: 19:29

What I love about focusing, too, is that it's just a constant reminder, like every step of the way, and the more you practice this and the more you do it, you'll realize that there is nothing to fix. Books and all the things that we pull for for help, like fix me, I need to fix this about me. Nothing needs fixing we are only. All we're doing is we're showing up with kindness and curiosity. We're just having these opportunities to be kind. Ah, this is something I'm experiencing. How can I bring curiosity and kindness to it? Not the energy of. I need to fix you, I need to make you go away. It doesn't work. No, that whole process shuts down. We lose connection. At one point you said it feels good that step four. So the first step is you clear space, you maybe take some deep breaths, you create some. You're looking for stillness and silence. Right, if you're doing it solo, if you're doing it solo, some stillness and some silence.

Speaker 1: 20:21

So and then you put your hand on your heart, touch your face, maybe you hold your shoulders, find a hug. That feels good, maybe you rock a bit and maybe that's part of just coming into the present. Maybe you orient, you look around you, you notice your surroundings and then we start to drop in and we try and see what's there, what's activated, what's up, what's creating distress or chaos or pain or something, and then slowly um, I I do know that in ifs that sometimes they encourage you to sort of find a name or to name those parts. Personally, when I do focusing, I find that bogs everything down, that I don't, I don't slow down to give it names and parts and draw them and I don't know, just like, oh, I kind of have that sense, okay, great, got it, and I kind of put you there, right, like I don't take a lot of time to categorize them and turn them into all these really clear parts. I have a sense of something.

Speaker 1: 21:17

And and then the second step. So that's all the first step, clearing space. The second step is where you invite one of them what's the most active, the most intense, urgent, top of the pile, like right, and you pick one as best you can, as best you can and you get kind of, and then you begin the journey of trying to get a felt sense of it, and the felt sense is really I call it the Betsy. So it's like, it's like what is your, it's your, it's your body that the sensations, images, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, like all of them come together into this kind of this very fresh experience of something that's activated in your nervous system. So that's step number three, and you'll see that there's images like, like Annette was saying, where there's the sense of it. Maybe it comes up as an image for you. Um, it could, it could be words.

Speaker 1: 22:08

But usually at step four is where you start to try and grabs for words, like it's like you're trying to understand something. Is this what you're saying? Like if net was trying to explain something like is it this? And she'd be like no, not quite. Is it this? Oh, close, but not quite Right. And as soon as I say the right word, she's going to go that's it, that's it Right. And she feels good because she was heard. There's resonance, this energy just unlocks. There's this little shift, the felt shift, the felt shift of being heard, and then you move into ah, tell me more about this, the curious stage where you're dialoguing, you're asking questions and it's slow and you're watching. Maybe the sensation shift, dissipate, come up like just it's such a total in the moment, never to be experienced again, kind of experience.

Speaker 1: 23:01

And then the final step she talked about receiving and welcoming, just to go over that in case that was fast for y'all um is that that there's part that can be integrated, that we can literally what they would call in somatic experiencing. We can complete a stress cycle or an activation cycle or a trauma cycle and some part of us becomes integrated and gets welcomed back into our system. It's so, all that and a bag of chips, let me tell you so. And this skill, this skill is, basically, even if we can only do it for a few moments at a time, and maybe even just minutes before we kick, we get kicked out of the system. It's too much, it's, you know we're too new to this um, but it is innate.

Speaker 1: 23:47

It is innate and over time, what it's doing is it's strengthening the amount of time that we're connected to self-energy, and self-energy is like it's the part of us that's connected to source, universe, god, whatever you want to say.

Speaker 1: 24:01

That part is resourced well beyond the limitations of our mind and the limitations of our body. The self-energy is the spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, and that energy. The more time we're connected to self-energy, the more intuitive we can be about our next right step, the jobs to take, the relationships to pursue, the opportunities to step into right. Like, self-energy is connected to the mind and the body and source, and so our whole life changes. So, so different. And so focusing helps us spend time with self-energy as opposed to spinning around in our mind trying to solve problems and chaotically and overworking and over-struggling. And that's what happens when we leave our mind and our body to try and solve all of our problems and meet life challenges by itself, without source energy right. So focusing does all that, does all that, and when we do all that, it can shift how we, how we use and abuse food right, how, how we relate to eating food to make ourselves feel better, because focusing can get us there in the authentic way.

Speaker 2: 25:15

Just before we get to that.

Speaker 2: 25:17

You mentioned that sometimes we can only be in the body for a few minutes and if that's where someone's at, then I really encourage people to go to positive memories and to not try to do the problem solving pieces yet and just to build the experience of being in the body with pleasant things and I can talk about. Like you know, most people find nature fairly pleasant and calming and if we ask the body for a time when we were in nature and felt good, we can create some of that practice of strengthening that access to self and and those experiences that are common grounded, and then we have that resource to use when we get activated, when we go more to the problem. So so we can walk before we run, in a way, right, like do, do, the, the, the, the, um, what would you call it like? Not basics, maybe it's basics like cover, cover, the. We take time sometimes in learning how to clear a space and and get that calm and hard energy in the body. Um, if we haven't been used to doing it I love that, brilliant.

Speaker 1: 26:30

Yeah, and you know what I? What comes up for me too, is there's times that I'm really activated. If I'm really activated, I've got lots of distress, I'm triggered. And if someone was to sit down with me to say, okay, florence, let's clear some space, catch your breath, notice your feet, orient around the room, whatever you know and someone, I want you to think of a time where you felt well, where you felt calm, like I can imagine that you know there's parts of me going Maddie's the time for this.

Speaker 1: 26:57

This is right, right, but but orienting to the positive and spending just a few minutes trying to find a place where we can feel safe and calm again is so helpful, because otherwise we'll just spin.

Speaker 1: 27:10

We'll just spin with the problems and we feel chaotic and overwhelmed, and right so, even though it can be terrifying, because the part that wants to stay hyper, vigilant on the problem is being asked to take a break just a minute. Yeah, I understand the building's burning down, in your opinion, you know, chicken little here. I got it and I'm just going to take a moment here to notice my breath or to remember the belly laugh I had with my dog yesterday, or whatever, right, and so just if you notice, if you take that suggestion to orient to the positive for a minute and you notice that there's a part that's really resisting dropping your guard and dropping into a calm, it's freaking out because it thinks that there's a crisis and it's really helpful to remind it actually, I'm just going to take a minute and I'll get back to the crisis because it thinks the house, it thinks the house is burning and it's.

Speaker 2: 28:04

It's probably and that's why it's really helpful to practice this when we're not in a burning house, right To to build up that strength and to remember that if we don't have that part of us online, we don't have our prefrontal cortex like our, the adult part that can think um isn't available to help problem solving. We need that part Right, Totally, yeah, and so it's kind of of like we can try to solve it with our teenage parts or like what we learned as kids, but they they're not the most effective um to solve our adult problems.

Speaker 1: 28:41

So right, right, right. Where would you like to go from here with your understanding of focusing and what role it can play in helping people who struggle with food? Many of us literally have struggled since we were three, four, five years old. We're talking decades of using and abusing food to sort of try and regulate our nervous system and to manage the overwhelmingness and the fear we have of feeling. So what could you say about how we can use focusing to help with our food problems? So what could you say about how?

Speaker 2: 29:11

we can use focusing to help with our food problems Well. So it's interesting. You were sharing how you don't tend to like to name parts and notice parts, but I actually do like to do that because I find a lot of the time when we, when we get to the part where we want the food it's a pretty regular pattern that has happened before that that is needed. So if I could tell a personal story that I've talked about a lot of the time, so lots of the time, maybe we start and I'm going to show things, but I'll talk, I'll explain them. So you're at work and for me, what would happen is there's, we're having ideas, so this is a, this is a self part. We're would happen is there's we're having ideas, so this is a, this is a self part. We're, you know, creative. We're having ideas and at some point, um, what would happen to me is I would take on too much, so, um, so my pleaser part would come out and it would say I can do it, I could do it. It was raise his hand, um, and eventually I've said yes, or taken, said oh, give it to me, give it to me. So many times that then I have anxiety building up, right, I now I'm like, oh, this is too much. And my body's telling me, and now there's the anxiety and that all would happen first before my part that would want to shut that down would come, and that would be I call it the number. It would numb me. I would go and eat pizza, I would, I would have, I would realize I'm like I wouldn't have energy to cook those nights. I would be like I have to go out, not cooking, and, and where I would go is have pizza and and um. So for me, noticing all of those patterns is helpful, because now, well, I'll say two more things. Actually, then, when I would be on the way to eat the pizza, I would have a critic attack. My critic would come out and it would say things like you're making unhealthy choices, you're going to get fat and you're wasting money right, you're wasting money on food, and that would be the pattern. But I would still go eat pizza, and then I'd be numb for a bit and then the cycle would repeat and what I did was in about 2015,. I had a year.

Speaker 2: 31:40

I did like a self-love project and I got to know my self compassion. I learned how it was in my body and and what I would do is my practice was when I would notice the critic. I would say thank you, critic, cause one of the things we can do is notice, we can befriend the critic. So we can like not one ways to get rid of it completely and just like knock it out. But you can have a relationship with your critic, you can say thank you, what are you worried about all this stuff? And then you can play with the self compassion, say, okay, self compassion, what do you have to say? And it would usually say it would have much more broader view, it wouldn't be worried about just the pizza. It's going back and saying, oh yeah, it knew this part of professional and it knew the part of me that had done too much. And it was saying, yeah, you did too much and we need to cancel plans, we need to sleep in, we need to maybe have a massage, and so it was a much broader view of the system and self-compassion had that.

Speaker 2: 32:41

And so what happened over time is um, I wouldn't be as upset with myself about wanting to eat pizza, because for me, I wasn't overeating the pizza. I would. I would have one slice of pizza and it's fine. I'm Italian, I'm like, I love pizza. I'm not going to stop eating pizza. So for me, it wasn't so much that I felt like pizza.

Speaker 2: 33:06

The point was, oh, I'm so overwhelmed, I'm so emotionally dysregulated that I don't have energy to cook. And that was more concerning, in a way. And noticing all the things that were there, and of course you can go further back. And noticing all the things that were there, and of course you can go further back. Why is that? Pleaser part here, right? Wow, pleaser part learned a long time ago that if I get really good grades, oh, I get attention. And my emotional self didn't get as much attention when I was smaller. So there's a hurt part way underneath all of that. That learn to be a perfectionist, to learn to try to be as efficient I think that's why I did an MBA, right, how efficient can I be? There was other pieces about sustainability, but there's like being drawn to that kind of education was because there was a drive to be efficient and do. Education was because there was a drive to be efficient and do.

Speaker 2: 34:04

And so with all of these cards, what I've been showing for those who are listening, only they're called felt sense body cards and they are an outline of a body where we can draw, where we're feeling sensations, and the great thing about them is in using color, we can sometimes capture what we don't yet have words for. We can sometimes capture what we don't yet have words for and very often we see, after drawing it, we see something, or after drawing a picture of the, the image or the metaphor that's coming, we can see more. So, for example, my pleaser part that puts her hand up and says all I can do it. Well, I drew my arm so much bigger than the rest of my body and I didn't even color in my body, like I'm, like disappearing, and there's too much emphasis on the other right, on my colleagues and my workplace, and not enough on me. So it's really in my understanding and understanding an experiential understanding, embodied understanding of emotional intelligence what's happening with me, what's happening with others, what do I need to do for me, what do I need to do for others?

Speaker 2: 35:05

And getting a better balance of that um, so, um, yeah, so that's a little bit about how what we can learn with focusing is and we and we'll um, with those felt sense body cards, we can write down the key phrases that we the thoughts and and so they. Once we've mapped that out a little bit, we can notice oh, I'm feeling cold arms, am I hurt right now? Did something in that interaction cause me to get hurt? And I contend my self-compassion can come in and take care of that hurt little girl a lot sooner, rather than letting it build up and build up and then um, and then noticing oh here I am again needing to eat pizza or whatever the thing is totally so.

Speaker 1: 35:56

I I love that and I could feel in my own body, like my, my body. There was a part of me saying I really wanted to use these cards. I haven't ordered them and that created this and it's been used by all kinds of therapists because it's brilliant. And I haven't ordered the cards and I'm going to. Are they all available on your website?

Speaker 2: 36:13

Yeah, yeah, if you sign up for my newsletter, you get them.

Speaker 1: 36:17

Oh wonderful, okay, oh wonderful, okay. I love that. Just to clarify that for me when I'm clearing space, I don't necessarily take 20 minutes to map everybody out, or it could be like half hour and I'm drawing and coloring, like that's when I was saying I don't necessarily do it. I might have some sense like oh yeah, I got it, but I don't. So when does the cards fit in? Because when I clear space I tend not to want to do 20 minutes of that, but maybe I should be tell me more.

Speaker 2: 36:42

Actually, um, clearing a space, that way of noticing everything and putting it out, is the least preferred way of of starting focusing practice, and we it's helpful to know if you have that chaotic system where there's just so much going on, but for a lot of us we prefer a more bottom up approach to start, and so doing a body scan, doing some breath work, maybe just feeling your feet on the floor, we can make that actually quite short and we don't need to go into content and detail at that stage. Yes, where these cards are helpful is when we notice something that's enmeshed right Like a, like a problem, where there's, like there's multiple parts, where there's a part of us that wants to say yes and a part that wants to say no. Once there's two parts, once there's three parts in something, then it can be really helpful to distinguish them.

Speaker 1: 37:37

Totally, I totally get that. So that would be more like at level two and you're picking an issue and let's say you're like, oh, I would like to do more fasting. Let's just say, I know this is real life for me. There's a part that feels like, oh, you know, I think it'd be great to do some fasting and it's a genuine visceral sense of that. But I have another part that comes in with its finger wagon and there'll be none of that and terrified of hunger, genuinely like I chose that. I must have starved in many past lives. I it's so irrational, it's terrified of hunger. So that's where I get that the body. Ah, I've got this part that's terrified of hunger, that there'll be no fasting part and that that's fast part. So I can see how the body cuts. Would be really great to just unpack and to be with those sensations. Those experiences of tension conflict within me.

Speaker 2: 38:28

Yeah, exactly, and so we can have a focusing session on each of those, right Like, really spend time with one, really spend time with the other. And sometimes, when we get a felt sense at the beginning, when we don't know what it is yet, we might have physical sensations in multiple parts of our body, and it might actually be that a couple parts are active at the same time and then, with working with them, noticing it becomes clearer and clearer. You know what belongs to what, what. What does a fight flight response feel like in the body? What does a folded down, shutdown place feel like? And we can have multiple ones, right? Yeah, so, depending on the situation, we can respond different ways and it's it's just really looking at the patterns, different memories of similar experiences, and then, once you have that, you can feel what it is. And because we're doing this in a with that space we were talking about right being with those experiences, not being in them, then we can have enough space to kind of witness, notice and record. And then, when we're in it, when we're living and something starts to happen, we can notice the changes in our body sooner.

Speaker 2: 39:50

And I think that's one of the pieces that people often don't realize is that if you can notice it sooner, you can intervene sooner. It's kind of like you know, if you notice a leak in your roof or something like that, if you tend to it right away, you might be able to just go up on the roof and patch one or two tiles and okay, little thing, and we fixed it. But if you let it go and go and go, then you can have structural problems and you know it's a bigger thing. So with our bodies, if we become more aware of the sensations, we can tend to them sooner. Now, that said, sometimes people are quite aware of the sensations but they don't know which parts go with it, or the opposite. We're really aware of the thoughts, maybe we're really aware of the critic, but maybe we don't notice physically what happens in our body. So some of this work is putting these things together to have a more integrated knowing of our system.

Speaker 1: 40:52

Oh, that's so beautifully put and I can imagine that there was times in my life when I was like I had two jobs and I had a teenager and I had three pets and my husband was in, out of town. I was like just trying to you know, keep all the balls up in the air that someone would talk to me about focusing and I'd be like, ain't, nobody got time for that. Who the hell has that much time to sit and color heart Like what? But? But I can tell you that actually, the more busy you are, the more you need this, and the more busy you are, the more you're going to get out of 30 seconds that this doesn't have to be this half hour thing that you do every day.

Speaker 1: 41:27

It can be because you're going to fall in love with it. It's going to be so freaking profound and it's going to clear so much distress. That will allow you to be more in self-energy and things will flow more easily. You can be, you know, in the flow of life and less in the battle of it all, but you can literally benefit from three minutes of dropping into the system. I mean people would say they can get that out of meditation. You know the stillness and the silence where we can just connect, even for brief moments. So I don't know if you want to speak a bit about that for people who feel overwhelmed by how big this could get and how much time it could take, yeah, yeah sure.

Speaker 2: 42:05

Well, often I find 20 minutes is a lot Like if you have a 20 minute turn, you can do a really good piece of work Even in 10 minutes. We can do a nice piece of work if we're doing the partnership practice right. And, like you said, pausing and just sensing for a minute or two, even 30 seconds, is very helpful on your own. So it's just noticing and and being with it can can help a lot.

Speaker 2: 42:31

The piece you said about meditation is interesting, because people often use meditation to skip over the feelings.

Speaker 2: 42:39

They go to the calm, but you're you're kind of transcending the body and you're really spiritual, bypassing right, like you're not, you're not being with the content. And and what Jenlyn said was these things are stopped, processes, they're really, they're kind of stuck, they're frozen and really they're needing attention so that they can carry forward, have that felt shift and and you can become more creative or whatever it is, and so that's a key difference with this practice is we don't use it to of just being able to carry on. We kind of go deep enough that we're doing some repair work that it was not going to come back the same way, and so I think that's really key because often we learn how to let off the steam and return to calm, but then, because we haven't changed anything, it comes back and it's just, and it becomes this process of build up and release, and build up and release and trying to get rid of anxiety, for example. But if you can just look at anxiety and say, hey, why are you there, what's going on, well, it doesn't have to keep coming back because we're listening in a more finely tuned way, um, and so in some ways, like an airplane, for example, is always auto-correcting right, and we can learn to auto-correct much more finely rather than swinging so much outside of our, for example, our window of tolerance right, like going to such highs and lows we can. We can notice sooner with this work, um, and then autocorrect sooner.

Speaker 2: 44:25

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1: 44:28

And bringing it back to food and sugar. We use and abuse food, uh, to either stimulate ourselves, like to give us some energy, uh, to sort of get into gear, or to keep into gear to support the fight or flight response. Or we can use food to numb us out, to sedate us, to support the dropping into the freeze response. So in fight, flight and freeze and fawn, food thoughts and food urges are really when they come into play, that's when you have a food thought and a food urge. We're talking about what's upstream, we're talking about the work that's upstream. So that's our cue. Ah, there's something going on upstream. It's not just about the food.

Speaker 1: 45:12

For many of us, when we think about a substance being addictive, we put all the blame on the substance. It's for sure. Once we consume that substance, it creates a predictable cascade of events, right, a blast of the neurotransmitter feel good neurotransmitters a crash and a craving. Absolutely, that does happen. But that's after we take the first bite. But before the first bite what's happening is this stuff it's a nervous system that's activated, that's seeking support to either stay in action to meet a threat or to crash right, to be numbed out from it all because it's too much, they're overwhelmed. So this is where this practice comes into play, because before we're overwhelmed and crashing, you know, going into the freeze response, and before we're moving into this stressed state, we're trying to notice what's happening at the level of the nervous system so that we can actually tend to it and integrate it and complete the cycle, so that we don't have to go into this overdrive and collapse, depression, despair, hopelessness, helplessness state.

Speaker 1: 46:19

So I hope that's kind of sort of helping people to realize how practical this is and how beautiful it is and how we will never again, once you learn this practice, ever think about the work that we're doing in any area of our life is fixing ourselves. We're not broken. We're not broken. We're just bringing kindness to our experience of whatever life is bringing us, whatever up in our system. And it's just an interesting and eventually a little bit exciting, because it's a whole world. It's a whole world of things to discover and experience and know about ourselves and how we, how we, how we relate to the world and other people. And anyways, is there anything else you wanted to add about that? How it might be applicable to food and finding peace with food and being able to stop using food to manage our emotions.

Speaker 2: 47:08

It's making me think of Amanda Blake, who says awareness brings choice. And so just that, noticing first off, you have an opportunity to do the food thing, or notice if, if you can do something else and and that prac. And it's a practice to do that right To, to, to in that space of noticing, before you act, to to pause and to to do that other thing. So, my, in my example I would, I would like I didn't get rid of the critic at the beginning, so I didn't finish that story fully. The critic would still be piping up every time I wanted to eat pizza, but with the self-compassion coming in over and over again, eventually I would notice wanting to eat pizza and self-compassion would come directly, and I didn't have the critic eat pizza and self-compassion would come directly and I didn't have the critic. And so, like there can be these shifts over time where, um, we've tended enough that some of the parts are backing up and so, um, yeah much, I'm kind of you can edit this out.

Speaker 1: 48:28

Oh no, it's okay, it's fine. I just want to give you space because I thought, oh, she's on the cusp of a felt sense and she's trying to feel into it, so I just want to well, I'm trying to bring it back to what you're asking about food um, brilliant that was.

Speaker 1: 48:40

Yeah, it was brilliant. I get it Like it's visceral and it's what a lived experience of, ah, the thoughts of pizza come up and now the self-compassion comes in and says, ah, what's going on? Sweetheart, we could still have pizza, we'll have a pizza, pizza, but what's really going on?

Speaker 2: 48:54

Instead of the oh, the drama, yeah, critic, and all the noise, yeah it's just sometimes what comes for me like is, I'll notice, like when I'm not wanting to go get pizza but I'm just like need a snack and I'm trying to decide what to eat and I'll feel into it, and sometimes the first thing that comes I kind of go well, let's follow sugar, and I don't. I've already had my sugar quota or I've already had too many carbs today. Right, like thinking of sugar more broadly, and so sometimes I will pause and sense in and say, okay, well, something else is going to come, like maybe the first instinct isn't the right one, and waiting and allowing the creativity of the body to know. And, and sometimes then something more creative comes from. It's like oh, one apple of peanut butter, well, yeah, that'll work, that fits within the basket of what we can eat and will be satisfying.

Speaker 2: 49:52

So you said earlier like it can take time to do focusing. I think you said something like three to five minutes or something, and that's true, right, like that, the felt sense. Unlike our thoughts, which are super fast and come really like they're almost immediate, the felt sense can take a minute or two. So we have to give ourselves the time and allow to stand, to like to hang out there and just be like I really want to eat something. Like once you're clear that you're, I'm hungry enough that I'm not going to be able to sleep, like I need to have a snack. I didn't eat enough today. That happens to me sometimes. I'm like, okay, I have to eat something, but I'm like waiting for the right snack to come forward and it's. I do it with my body, I don't. I don't decide just with my mind or just with some sort of analysis. I let it, it emerge, and that can take a few minutes.

Speaker 1: 50:46

Totally. I have another appointment. I am. It's pulling candy from a kid. I shouldn't use that expression under the circumstances but to pull myself away from this conversation I do need to switch gears. I will just say that we can use the felt sense for intuitive eating, but of course we know that if we're on the spectrum that we can never trust if it's calling for processed foods. We can trust our bodies when they're calling for whole foods, but we can't. Our bodies have been hijacked from processed foods because we, you know, our brains are a pinball machine. There's just far too much going on, there's too much noise around it for us to get that quiet sense of ah yes, apple and peanut butter would be just fine.

Speaker 1: 51:26

So I would love to tell you guys how to get in touch with her. She does training. So if you want to learn how to do this, she does like group coach. Group coaching programs will sort of facilitate, so you can learn how to do it in a group and then you can get buddies. It facilitates, so you can learn how to do it in a group and then you can get buddies. So just go to our website. It's pupaca, p-u-p-a, dot c-a and there's an ocean of options there for you and you can work with her one-on-one. But here's what I will say as a final word that, no matter what, do not throw this technique out, thinking oh, it's too hard, it's too much, I can't do it. You can do it and hire Annette and she can get you started. Um, and then over time, you're going to remember this conversation and go that was that was. That was a glorious day, the day I found out about focusing and and moved forward with learning this beautiful life skill. So is there any final words you'd like to share?

Speaker 2: 52:14

just thank you so much for having me. It was lovely to to be with you and and talk about focusing and food. Thank you so much again, bye everybody.