Staying Close to Yourself on the Wild and Curvy Path with Alison Rothman - a podcast by Katya Slivinskaya, HHC

Stories have the power to heal. Hearing the stories of others may empower us to tell our own story, and telling our own story can transform our relationship to our struggles. This is because, once we tell a story of struggle, we distance ourselves from it, ironically. We get to see, as if from a distance, that we are not and we never were defined solely by a struggle, a behavior, or a trait. We are the hero inside - the hero that is learning to move beyond the behavior, to solve the struggle. To integrate and heal the different parts of us. When we start to identify with the hero inside of the journey, our story changes, and we can reclaim our rightful place among the constellation of characters inside of us. Alison Rothman has been studying alternative forms of healing for over two decades, has her own healing and embodiment practice out of Boulder, Colorado, and has been in recovery for almost 20 years from an eating disorder that involved though was not exclusive to binging. In this episode, she tells her own story. Her own experience of the dark night of the soul - what can be called rock bottom - was the space in which she found the strength to evolve to the next iteration of her being. Through living in a treatment center far from her home, where she was brought face to face with the inner dynamics that were causing her eating disorder in the first place, to learning how to begin life as a functioning adult after living in a reality constructed solely of her eating disorder for years - Alison now shares the mindset changes and tools that she still uses regularly to cultivate and hone what she says to be the most important ingredient of healing - love and compassion for oneself. Please join Alison and I as we talk about the path that isn't glamorous or advertised - and yet it is the path most of us walk, simply by virtue of being human. It is the wild and curvy path - the unmarked path - the path whereby, even if we are trying our best to follow a prescribed method for healing, we still come face to face with obstacles that are uniquely our own, and there is no way through other than to solve our own riddle.

In this episode, you will hear:

• One woman's story of doing the inner work to heal her eating disorder.
• Going from counting every calorie to complete self-forgiveness and gentleness.
• How and why disordered eating may be the symptom, not the cause.
• Why waiting to wake up healed doesn't ultimately work - why being proactive is the answer, though it may not be how you thought, and what kind of gentle and loving work with yourself is guaranteed to start causing evolution and change at the level of root cause, so that you can begin to find greater and greater relief.
• Specific practices to help you change your story about yourself so that your whole view of and regard for yourself changes. This is where deep and lasting change of habits comes from.
• Ingredients of healing your relationship with yourself - hint: these have nothing to do with deprivation, self-blame or shame. In fact, these tools unravel those patterns.
• Transitioning from hiding in your eating disorder, to living and interacting fully in the world.
• How Alison used connection to others in her massage training to help provide the day-to-day engagement that supported her recovery.
• The connection between hiding in an eating disorder, and intimacy.
• Where she gets her juice and excitement for life from, now that food serves a different, more nourishing role in her life.

Find Alison, her retreats and programs at http://alisonrothman.com.

**Please read! Alison recently posted a blog on the subject of being interviewed for CurbtheBinge. If you love the raw vulnerability Alison came with in this interview, check out her writing on the subject, which reveals nuggets she didn't share here:  http://alisonrothman.com/the-silence-has-been-broken/

 

Further episodes of Curb the Binge: The Podcast

Further podcasts by Katya Slivinskaya, HHC

Website of Katya Slivinskaya, HHC