Unbroken

What is depression really? Is it a problem? Is it a sign there’s something wrong with us and our psychology? Or is it something else? In this episode, Alexandra reflects on her personal experience with depression and what she saw about the role it plays in our divine design. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and full transcript below.  Show Notes Beginning with the understanding of our innate wellness Alexandra’s personal experience of depression How depression can be like sailing the ocean Why resisting any experience, including depression, only increases our suffering Can depression be seen as a safety mechanism? What is caterpillar soup and how does it relate to depression? On how the drive to overeat and depression are related Transcript of episode Welcome back, Explorers, to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today the question is: what is depression?  It’s going to sound like initially that it doesn’t really have anything to do with resolving an unwanted habit. But the two really are tied together. And I’ll bring that together toward the end of the episode. So the first thing I need to say is I’m not a doctor. This is not a prescription, this is not a diagnosis. What I’m really going to do today is explore what depression looks like, to me based on my own personal experience. And I always, always, always want to encourage you, dear listener, to go to your own wisdom. It’s great to listen to, and to get information from, other people, of course. That’s how we learn. And then I always feel like the second step should be that we bring that home to ourselves, and see how it fits with us and see how it fits based on our own experience, and explore it with the aid of our own personal wisdom. And find out if what you’re hearing is true for you or not, it might be completely different. So I encourage that, as you’re listening to this episode. The second thing I want to say before we jump in is just that I’m talking about depression, specifically not about sadness, or grief, which I experience as being very different from depression. So that’s just something to keep in mind. We’re beginning with the premise, or understanding, that we are all being lived by a Universal Intelligence. I need to begin there because that understanding is really important to the rest of what I’m going to explore. So the same way the planets are being spun and the grass is being grown and the flowers are being bloomed, that same universal intelligence or energy is flowing through all of us. It’s innate, meaning you don’t have to create it, it’s not something you have to search for, or manage in any way. It’s just there within all of us. And that’s another important point that it’s within everyone, every single human, every single creature, I think, and living being on the planet is imbued with that Universal Intelligence. We wouldn’t say that some trees are part of nature, and some aren’t. It just doesn’t work that way. So if you think you might be the exception to that rule, that is definitely not the case. So that’s the foundation for what we’re going to explore today. And what that really looks like is that we are whole and well, always, that this wellness, that is the innate essence of who we are. So even when we’re ill, even when there’s illness within our bodies, we are still innately whole, no matter what’s going on with us physically. So given that, very often, though, depression can feel like a problem. As though something has gone wrong with us as though, there’s sand in our gas tank, that there’s something that’s broken there that needs to be fixed, especially I think, when people struggle with depression chronically. What if depression is also part of the innate Universal Intelligence that is living through all of us? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to share a little bit of my personal experience now, and I’m going to do that because that’s going to shine a light on what I see to be true about depression. And of course, I feel like if I hadn’t experienced depression I wouldn’t be able to talk about this. I always feel like I need to experience something personally in order to reflect on it and see if there’s any fresh thinking there about it. For example, I’ve never been a mother. I’ve never given birth. So I would never presume to speak very specifically about the experience of childbirth. But depression is something I can speak to, because I have experienced it. And I really reflected on what was happening as it was happening, because I was already learning about the three principles understanding. I experienced my first really serious bout of depre

Clare Assante knows whereof she speaks. For years she struggled with anxiety, which also created a binge eating habit. And like so many of us, she tried All. The. Things. to try to manage, control, and eliminate those struggles. Thankfully, Clare discovery the 3 Principles, which not only helped her with the anxiety and binge eating, they softened the blow when she received a potentially devastating health diagnosis. Clare Assante suffered with anxiety for 25 years; it made her world very small and she was doing less and less. She had tried many things but nothing helped long term until she came across an understanding of how the mind works that helped her to navigate life without getting caught up in all the drama. Clare is now a certified Change Coach and works with those struggling with anxiety, depression, unwanted habits, health anxiety or anything that’s making life feel like hard work.  You can find Clare Assante at BlindsidedByThought.com. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes, links, resources and full transcript are below. Show Notes On the difference between the other approaches Clare used to try to deal with anxiety vs. the 3 Principles Processing a devastating health diagnosis with a grounding in peace and well-being How our unwanted habits work to quiet our insecure minds How our thinking surprisingly isn’t personal On the value of living in the unknown On coaching teens about their innate resilience Resources Mentioned in this Episode Clare’s Parenting Teens More Gracefully Facebook group Dr. Amy Johnson Nicola Bird Transcript of Interview with Clare Assante Alexandra: Claire Asante, welcome to Unbroken. Clare: Hi, Alexandra. Thank you for having me. Alexandra: My pleasure.  Tell us about your background and how you got interested in the Three Principles. Clare: I was a very worried child who spent my whole childhood just worrying about things and not really knowing that was what it was. And as I got a bit older, it took hold as anxiety, really. And then, I struggled with severe anxiety for about 25 years. And it just got worse and worse. I literally tried every single possible thing that I could find and threw a lot of money at it. And, even these weird and wonderful things that you think, maybe this is the one. I did find a lot of them, a lot of the things, temporarily did the trick. I thought, “I found it found it last”, and then it was just, I think, where it just didn’t shift enough, nothing shifted enough. So then I would end up back to square one again. And then eventually, I found the three principles, which were just something completely different. Alexandra: Can you describe the difference between the two approaches that you saw? Clare: I think the main thing that I would probably describe it as is the fact that with all the other things, you’re basically trying to fix the behavior. So it felt like white-knuckling, and you’re just not really getting anywhere with that.  Whereas with three principles, you are changing something so deep within you that once it’s changed, there’s no going back. I always say it’s like when someone shows you a magic trick, and you’re completely fooled by it, and then they show you how it’s done. And then you’re like, Well, I can’t even believe in that again.  And that’s what three principles gave me. It was like having an instruction manual, to my mind, my feelings, my emotion, everything where I couldn’t look at it at the same in the same way again, it just looked completely different. And I think that’s what like, almost like a soul shift is, isn’t it? Where it’s so deep you can’t ever go back again. Alexandra: That’s such a great metaphor or analogy, that magic trick one. I love that. I haven’t heard that before. That’s awesome. Your website is called Blindsided by Thought. Tell us why you came to choose that name. Clare: So about six years ago, I was diagnosed with an eye disease. And it is something that takes hold of the cones inside of the back of the eye. I don’t know exactly how it works. But at some point, it will take my vision. Part of it, I’m not sure.  I went for just a routine eye test. They obviously saw something and sent me to the hospital. And the doctor didn’t even really tell me what it was. It’s like, oh, you’ve got this thing called retinitis pigmentosa. So that’s a bit of a mouthful and must Google that when I get home. I googled it.  And it had like blind, and I was like, that can’t be right. Surely they would have made a bit more of a facile or given me a leaflet or website to look at. But that’s what it was. So then I was thrown into this work world of the complete unknown where everything I looked at, there was no specific time scale.  Nobody could tell me when or how,

One of the misconceptions we innocently carry is that our happiness can only begin when we overcome our overeating habit and lose weight. Today I examine whether that’s true, and if not, what else might be true about our experience of an unwanted habit. Resources Mentioned in this Episode Freedom From Overeating (and other habits) online course Armchair Expert podcast episode with Ed Sheeran Transcript of the episode Hello, explorers and welcome back to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m really happy you’re here.  Today I want to talk about the question: Will I be happy when I stop overeating?  I wanted to explore this a little bit because yesterday I was doing a bunch of house cleaning, and I was listening to an older episode of Armchair Expert. That’s a podcast hosted by an actor and director from the United States called Dax Shepard. And the episode I happened to choose was an older one and his guest was Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran, if you don’t know, is a musician from the UK. They started to talk about this really interesting thing that I wanted to share, because it ties in so beautifully with what we’re learning about the Inside-Out understanding. So at some point in the interview, Ed was sharing a story about how his biggest goal as he was growing up and learning to be a musician was to have a sold out show at Wembley Stadium. And that was a North Star that kept him going. It was very specific. It wasn’t a sold out show at any other stadium. It was specifically a sold out show at Wembley Stadium. And he talked about how that happened eventually to him when he became really popular, and he had that actual experience.  What he shared was that when it happened, and the show was over, and he walked off stage, he didn’t feel the big feeling of euphoria and a feeling of having reached the peak of the mountain, that he’d made it, that everything was great and all those things that we think that we’ll experience when we reach a very specific goal like that of his.  And then Dax Shepard shared that he had had a similar experience. And his was around money; he thought that if he earned a certain amount of money, that he would feel all those feelings of euphoria and happiness and peak of the mountain stuff. And he didn’t say it on that particular episode, but I’ve heard him talk about it before. So I’m going to add a couple of extra things in here, that he had, in his mind a very specific amount of money. When he was raised they didn’t have a lot of money. He was raised by a single mom. And they were, it sounds like, it a little bit poor. His Northstar was that if he had a million dollars in the bank then he would be happy, that would be the thing that would fix all his problems and create that sense of that peak of the mountain feeling for him.  I’ve heard him tell this story a couple of different times around this subject. He was flying from somewhere to somewhere else. And I should say DAX is a self-professed recovering alcoholic and drug addict. But at the time of this story, he was actively drinking. He had time before his flight, so he went to the airport bar and had as many drinks as he could get into himself, before he had to go to his gate. And then he had an epiphany.  He realized that there he sat – I believe the story is he was he had been at one acting job, and he was flying to go to another one, so his dream of being a working actor had come true, and he literally had a million dollars in the bank. He had worked enough that that was the amount that was in his bank account. And he realized he was more miserable than he had ever been.  So I reflected on this, after listening to that episode, and was thinking about it last night, and I realized these stories are such a good example of the things that I talk about and that we explore here on this podcast. There’s a few different things I want to reflect on and point to as well.  The first is that what both of stories point to really accurately is that our experience doesn’t come from the outside-in, it comes from the inside-out.  You’ve probably got examples where you’ve heard famous people or rich people say the exact same thing: they have a goal of owning a big house or owning a certain number of hobby cars, or going on certain vacations, being able to do certain things. And they realize that when they do that, it doesn’t make a difference to their good feelings about themselves, just like Dax and Ed said. And so I just really love it that those examples and all the other ones we hear really do point to the fact that our experience comes from the inside-out. If it came from the outside-in, then in both those cases, Dax and Ed would have had all the really great feelings that they anticipated that they would have. The reason I bring this up is because I’m going to circle back aroun

When it comes to resolving a relationship with food, there are two factors involved: our bodies and our thoughts. These two brilliant systems work together and getting to know them both more intimately can help us find peace with unwanted habits. Becs Steel is both a registered nutritional therapist and a rewilding guide so we dive deep into this subject and explore how both our thoughts and the feelings in our bodies affect our ability to eat well. Becs Steele works with her clients to empower them to regain confidence and vitality through diet and coaching. Her areas of interest are mental health, anxiety, depression, hormones & weight loss. She is a registered nutritional therapist and a coach. You can find Becs Steele at BWellNutrition.co.uk You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes, links and resources below. A full transcript is also below.  Show Notes On what rewilding is and how it informs Becs’ coaching and nutrition practice The importance of connecting with our bodies Do you know that you are the safe space? On the twin drivers of overeating: emotion and thought How understanding that life works from the inside-out helps with parenting Resources Mentioned in this Episode Dr. Amy Johnson’s podcast Changeable Rohini and Angus Ross’ Rewilding Guides Program Transcript of Interview with Becs Steele Alexandra: Becs Steele, welcome to Unbroken. I’m really happy to be talking to you today.  Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and how you got interested in the three principles? Becs: It was probably about ten years ago now. I had my daughter, and I was working. And I thought, actually, I just really want to retrain in something that I’m passionate about.  So I studied nutrition. And that took four years because I had babies in between and things. And I then thought, as I started practicing nutrition, there’s more to it than just nutrition. There’s more than just giving people the perfect diet and sending them on their way and seeing them maybe once and then in six weeks’ time. And it was around that time that I found the principles I was in quite a similar understanding, actually, with a couple in America that I was listening to. Then somehow I stumbled across Amy Johnson’s podcast, Changeable. And I listened to an episode on that. And suddenly, I just saw things so differently, even though I’d been in a very similar understanding for a very long time and had quite deep experiences.  This was like, wow, I’ve seen something on a whole new level around our thinking, and how everything is thoughts and how our world is created through our thinking. And, then I thought, I actually really want to combine nutrition with that. But I didn’t feel ready because I felt like I wasn’t entrenched enough in the three principles. And then, about two years ago, did Rohini’s Rewilding Guides program. And that for me was like that gave me the confidence to then bring it into my practice. Alexandra: Oh, nice. What does rewilding mean to you? Maybe you could explain that to us, what that word means, and how it affects the work you do? Becs: I loved Rohini’s program because it was like embracing all of us, all parts of us, the hidden parts that we’d kept small or hidden away because they were not okay, the parts of us that maybe weren’t allowed to be expressed as we were children or anger. I never saw myself as angry, being able to be angry or express it in a healthy way. Even though it would rise up in me it was like that wasn’t okay or being sensitive. The parts that we say are not okay, I found that on the training it was like, well, actually, all of my experience is okay. And I can start to express these parts of me that I have suppressed for so long. So that was really eye-opening for me, that program. And then I started to bring that understanding into my practice, to see how people really do keep these parts of themselves under wraps, really, and how they can affect all their areas of their life. But they’re not aware of how they are. So for my practice, it’s really about bringing people much more aware of their bodies, because I think what happens is that we disconnect from our bodies. A lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people disconnect. And that’s through even as a child have not being able to express your emotions, being told to be quiet or have this biscuit. This will calm you down.  Go and play outside or distract, ignore. So, these are subtle ways we are not allowed to express ourselves. And maybe disconnect from the body because there’s the things that going on in us these feelings and emotions and sensations, that we’re not allowed to feel, we’re not allowed to express it in a healthy way.  And actually, over time, people start to just disconnect from their e

When it comes to breaking unwanted habits we’re up to our eyeballs in understanding. Why then do we struggle to change? In this Q&A episode, Alexandra answers Carmen’s question about her habit, what she knows and understands, and what else there is to see. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the transcript below. Transcript of episode Hello, explorers, and welcome to a Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. And I’m super excited today because I have my very first question from someone other than myself. So I’ll get to that in just a second.  If you would like to submit a question about resolving unwanted habits, you can do that just like this person did today at alexandraamor.com/question, and I would love to hear from you.  Today’s question is from Carmen. And here’s what she says:  After 7 to 10 days of eating reasonably and being conscious, I always have three to four days of falling back into my old behavior. Even though I’m aware that it is just my thinking, and that I am thinking, I still prefer to eat all the sugary foods and overeat. Why is this? I am completely conscious, and still put eating too much and the wrong things over losing weight and eating healthy. I know that this is not bad. And I try not to judge myself. But I just think it would be better and much easier to stick to good eating instead of de motivating myself over and over again. After all, I want to eat healthier because of an insight. So how can I forget about that every so often. And then she sent a couple of little points of clarification about her eating. So she said:  I don’t restrict myself, I try to eat less than before, by only eating sugar every second day. But I still eat enough. I don’t skip meals, and I eat bread, pasta, etc, whatever I feel like.  And she also says:  Even when I am completely at peace, and at my home base and connected to myself, it can still happen that I go and buy chocolate or cookies, and then eat until they are all gone.  Thank you so much Carmen for your question. I really, really appreciate it.  I want to address a couple of really, really juicy topics that are here in your question. This is such a great question. And I love it so much. So let’s jump in.  The first thing I want to address is in the early part of your email here actually, in the first paragraph, one of the really interesting things you say is, “…even though I am aware that it is just my thinking.” This brings us to a really important point about the difference between understanding and insight. You do mention that you have had an insight later in the email. But I want to start here with this clarification. We would say you’ve got under some understanding, which is fantastic. And I really feel like you’re really headed in the right direction. That you’re experiencing your thinking. So that’s really great. And I’m thrilled.  What you need now is more insight.  You said you’ve had at least one insight about food or about your eating habits. But what that question that you put forward points to is that you need more insights.  I want to talk about that and about the difference between understanding and insight.  The example that I thought of is learning to drive. I remember that when I was learning to drive what they had us do first of all, before we even got in the car, was I had to read kind of a an education book about driving. I also had to go to a class, it might have been more than one day. And I had to take a written test at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or whatever it was called at the time I was in Alberta, and do that written test. And if I passed that, then I could have my learner’s permit, and I could start to actually get behind the wheel of a car. When that happened, when the second part of that happened, and I did get behind the wheel of the car, that was a completely different experience to the learning and the understanding that I had about driving before I actually got in the driver’s seat. So it’s the same subject, but two very different experiences that I had.  When I got behind that driver’s seat, suddenly it was it was just very real. There I was, I could press the gas, the car would go, I could press the brake, it would stop. There were other cars whizzing by all that kind of stuff.  What I’m pointing to in that example, is the difference between understanding and insight. So, that example it’s a little clunky because insight isn’t always mechanical. We’re not doing something physically physical. But it gives you a good idea, I hope anyway, about how it really feels in our body when we understand something logically, and clinically, versus when we have an insight, and suddenly, everything just becomes cl

In January 2023 I was delighted to spend two days in the hills above Malibu, California with Cassandra Ogier and three beautiful horses. Those two days were powerful; they taught me about my energetic boundaries, the easily accessible (but often overlooked) quality of presence about my being, and that when it comes to experiencing emotions and other energy in my body, there is nothing to be afraid of. I am so pleased to have Cassandra on the show this week to share how she weaves the 3 Principles in with her equine guided empowerment work. Cassandra Ogier is a respected member of the Equine Guided Education & Equine Therapeutic communities. Her experience spans over 15 years as a leader in the development of horse-based personal reflection and educational programs.  She is a Certified Equine Guided Educator and a seasoned mentor and guide. Her approach to Equine Guided Empowerment® through immersion in the living intelligence of horses and nature, breaks new ground in partnering with horses rooted in the concept of free beings, horses and humans, joining together in partnership to achieve awareness, insight and understanding. You can find Cassandra Ogier at TheReflectiveHorse.com and on Instagram @TheReflectiveHorse. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Learning about innate well-being after burnout and a cancer diagnosis How horses reflect the flowing, temporary nature of life How nature helps us to be in the present moment, and be in our bodies, which helps to connect us with our innate well-being Why connecting to our bodies creates space for insight Resources Mentioned in this Episode Moved by Wonder, Living in Awe wild horse retreat with Cassandra and Natalie Benway Other events at The Reflective Horse Sydney Banks’ books Dicken Bettinger’s website Natasha Swerdloff’s website Rohini Ross’s website Transcript of Interview with Cassandra Ogier Alexandra: Hi, Cassandra, welcome to Unbroken. Cassandra: I’m really happy to be here. Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. I should have said your last name as well. It’s Cassandra Ogier.  Why don’t you start by just telling us a bit about your background. And then how you found the principles. Cassandra: I’m an equine guided educator, which means that I work with horses to help support human development, which I will go into a little bit more. But my background is as a coach in that modality, and also as a registered three principles practitioner, and I run a company called The Reflective Horse. And we can share a little bit more about that the reflection of the horses and our and our true nature.  I also run a teaching program that expands the reflected horse program out to other facilitators being able to also share equine guided empowerment, as I call it. And it is very much an inside out based coaching modality that we thread all the way through the mastery teaching program. Alexandra: That’s great. And how did you come across the principles? Do you remember? Cassandra: Yes, I remember really clearly. And when I was just contemplating your questions, and thinking where did it sort of all begin for me, and so the actual point of me, coming to the principles, what I was thinking about sharing was that it was like a developing a presence for me, over years and years. The horses at the beginning of my life really acted as a very solid presence in my life, when there was a lot of chaos and confusion, and not great things happening in my childhood. I was always able to go to the horses. And what I obviously realized, as I as I grew up, was that they were fully present. I wasn’t that great with humans, around them. And I didn’t like school, and I really was, pushing against all of that. But really, my career ended up being present for humans.  I worked for 10 years, or a little more than 10 years, in the film industry, in England, in the casting department. So putting actors in theater and, and TV and film. It was really about being present for people, and helping them to understand that things weren’t personal, because obviously, in that industry, you’re being judged and you’re being assessed, and all of this thing. And as a creative person who was bringing in the type of person we wanted for a role, within that I just did a lot of, I suppose, coaching in that way of, helping people to understand it’s not about you, this is just the circumstances.  Then I had three sons, and that is all about presence, and bringing up children, and, having that flexibility, and then as my children grew up, I got reunited with horses. And I actually was running a very successful business in equine therapy or equine guided education. I had a little bit of a distorted view of what being in servi

The pressure that comes from cravings can feel almost unbearable. It can be so powerful that it distracts us from other areas of our life. Is there a way to handle this? In this Q&A episode, Alexandra addresses this concern, talks about why it exists and what we can do about it. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Transcript of episode Hello explorers, and welcome to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor.  A reminder that I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear your questions about an overeating habit or another habit that you’re struggling with. You can submit that your you can submit your question to alexandraamor.com/question. The question today that I’m going to address is this:  When I feel a craving, it feels like life and death. How do I stop that?  So this, again, is a question from my struggle with overeating. And I hope it’s helpful for you to talk about this. When I experienced food cravings, they did really feel like life and death, they felt like I was possessed, it felt overwhelming in my body. Every once in a while, I would bump into someone really unkind who, if I was explaining that feeling, they would say something like, well just put your fork down, like, what’s the big deal? Just stop going to the fridge.  But the driving feeling that I experienced, wasn’t one that obviously was that easy to deal with, to battle to set aside and just pretend that it wasn’t there. Now I know enough to know that that feeling is part of our divine design, and that it was trying so hard to get my attention. And that’s why the feeling felt so strong. And I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for how strong it was. I’m grateful for how persistent it was because it finally did get my attention.  As I began to explore this understanding, the Inside-Out Understanding, and began to see what those cravings were really about that’s when they began to fall away.  Let’s go back to when they feel like life and death, which you may have experienced as well. I’ll just say a little bit more about what that felt like, in the hope that this might resonate with you. It felt like the craving, like it was on my mind and in my attention. If I was sitting watching a TV program and had a craving for potato chips, let’s say, I could think about very little else until I dealt with that, until I went and got the potato chips.  I could try to ignore it. But it did take a lot of energy to do that. And it often felt like the other things that were going on in my life, the volume went down on them, because I was having to pay so much attention to the craving in me and trying to fight with it. And then eventually I would just give up, of course, it was too hard. It took too much energy. It really felt compulsive. And again, that’s for a reason that feeling is trying to get our attention.  So I want to say a couple of things about this.  One is that when we feel that driving need, it’s not a comment on our moral failing, or our lack of willpower, like I talked about in last week’s episode, or our inability to take care of ourselves.  It’s not a comment on those sorts of things. And of course, that’s how we interpret them, right? We’re trying to get rid of the drive to overeat, we’re trying to stop it from coming around. We’re trying to circumvent it with all the tools and strategies that we use. And when we fail at doing that it can be really devastating. I know for sure that I had 30 years of feeling like a failure, feeling like I had this one task that I wanted to do which was just to stop my cravings or overpower them with my will. I failed and I failed again and again and again for all those years. And in one way, failing was a relief, because then I wasn’t using all that energy to fight the craving. But then of course, on the other hand, it felt terrible because I was falling down on this goal that I had set myself.  So yeah, a lot of kind of complex and, and feelings that were in opposition to one another. And we all know that cycle. I’ve even seen it described in some of the old paradigm psychological texts that I studied in relation to trying to heal this problem. That the tension of the craving builds up and up and up. And then there’s relief that comes with giving in to the craving, and then recrimination starts. And that goes up around in the cycle. And then the whole thing starts all over again. I’m very familiar with that. And I suspect you are too.  So that was the first thing that I wanted to say that, that when we can set aside any thoughts and feelings that we have beating ourselves up for fighting cravings and then failing and giving in to t

Innocently, when we are struggling with an overeating or binge eating habit, we can come to believe that peace of mind exists outside ourselves. We can believe that ‘if’ or ‘when’ certain scenarios happen – like, when we stop overeating or binge eating – only then we will feel peaceful and begin to love and appreciate ourselves. Today coach and podcaster Beka Elle is here to share that, actually, peace of mind and feelings of well-being exist within us all the time. We cannot ever be separated from them. And it is when we lean into this idea that we begin to experience lasting change. Beka Elle helps people come home to themselves. Whether it’s feeling stuck with unwanted habits and anxiety, or feeling a lack of purpose, she points people back to their own innate wisdom. she is passionate about helping people find freedom from their limiting beliefs. You can find Beka Elle at BekaElle.com and on Instagram @beka.elle.coaching You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How are thinking is so changeable yet our essential nature is constant On the different approach the inside-out understanding takes to healing issues with food and overeating or binge eating How our minds innocently try to optimize our experience of life Why holding onto thought patterns doesn’t set us free Learning to welcome all feelings and how that improves our relationship with food and ourselves Resources Mentioned in this Episode Dr. Amy Johnson Beka’s post: Guilt around food choices isn’t helpful Beka’s post: The gift of bad habits The Lived Podcast Beka’s monthly free Soul Huddles group Transcript of Interview with Beka Elle Alexandra: Welcome to unbroken Becky Gagnon. Beka Elle: Thank you so much, Alexandra. Alexandra: I’m so glad to talk to you.  Why don’t you start out tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in the Inside-out Understanding  Beka: I came into this understanding out of desperation actually. I struggled for about 12 years with cycles of eating disorders, which started out as innocent dieting in my teenage years. And then that turned into overly restrictive dieting, where I lost too much weight. And then my body fought back and I became a binge eater. Then I became a bulimic, when I felt like I couldn’t get the binge eating under control, but I still felt like I needed to lose weight. So I struggled with that. And then there was depression and anxiety in there too, sort of just this overall feeling of feeling lost, not feeling like myself, whatever that meant. Feeling as one feels when they’re just over identify with their own mind. Since the mind changes like the weather, it felt like I changed with the weather and just feeling like I didn’t know why I was here. I always felt like I needed to lose weight or be better in some way, or prove my worth in some way. So I started with that for about 12 years and tried a whole bunch of things from traditional therapy to different like spiritual understandings, techniques, different types of diets. I thought that if I was just addicted to sugar or something or some food and if I eliminated that, then all the problems would go away. But of course, none of that really worked. I happened to stumble upon Dr. Amy Johnson, just from searching on Google, for somebody to help me with binge eating. And I ended up doing coaching with her for I forget how long the package was, I think maybe nine months or something. And slowly but surely, I just began to see things in a totally new way. Then I trained with her to be a coach. And now I coach people to help with those same things and more. Alexandra: You said something really interesting in there. Well, you said a few interesting things. You said your “body fought back with the binging”. Can you say a bit more about what you see there? Beka: The way this looks to me is, our body is really wise, and wants to keep us alive. And so when we restrict too much, the mind interprets that as a period of starvation or restriction. And there’s some brain science that points back to as we evolved the mind would become obsessed with food after periods of non restriction, so that if you saw a bunch of berries, or whatever, you would eat all of them in order to be able to stay alive for for any upcoming periods of starvation. So that’s how I see how my brain reacted to that, and just how brains react to dieting in general. I see this cycle with a lot of my clients, too, it’s where it’s just like, anytime there’s like some restriction or they are trying to lose weight. They’ll go on some diet that’s either eliminating a ton of different kinds of foods or just not enough, they’re trying to eat under a certain number o

Why are diets so hard to stick to? Why do we fail more often than we succeed? The answer comes down to the brilliant way we are designed and when we work with this design, instead of against it, that’s when our unwanted habits begin to fall away. Transcript of episode Hello explorers! Welcome to this Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today I have a question for you. First I want to say to please let me know if you have questions about letting go of unwanted habits. You can do that at alexandraamor.com/question and I’ll answer your question on an upcoming Q&A episode. I’ll be happy to do that. Today’s question is, again, from me, back when I was really struggling with an unwanted over eating habit. I can only ever stay on a diet for three days. What’s wrong with me? This was something that I really struggled with, and you might as well, which is why I’m posing it. This question of willpower, and how we’re supposed to be able to have the kind of willpower that enables us to circumvent, I guess, I would say, an overeating habit. Get over it, get under it, get around it. We live in a culture that’s very willpower oriented, I’ve noticed, in the diet and weight loss and letting go of unwanted habits industry. The other thing I noticed was that a lot of places or people that want to support us to let go of an unwanted overeating habit, at least my experience was, that what they were doing was giving me alternative ways to have willpower. What I mean by that is the things that we try, for example, counting food points, having a maximum number of points that you’re supposed to be eating every day, and then assigning each food a number of points and adding those up. Or restricting the kind of food that we eat. So only eating certain things, not eating other things. All those kinds of examples are, to me now looking back, it looks like ways of bolstering our ability to have willpower, and we’re trying to strengthen our willpower. In fact, one of the healing-your-overeating-habit programs that I tried was one where it was all around the science of willpower. And getting ahead of how much willpower we have every day. The person who created this, felt that or saw in the psychology and science literature, that we have a limited amount of willpower every day. It’s like a gas tank. And when we run out, according to this theory, that’s when we fall back on over eating habits. And so the idea was that you did a bunch of stuff to make sure that your willpower tank didn’t get that empty. I remember reading that book on an airplane going to Ontario to visit my family many years ago, probably in 2015 or 2016. And thinking, oh, yeah, this is it. This really makes a lot of sense, which it did. Innocently, I grasped onto it and gave it a try. And maybe like you I lasted three days, and then it all fell apart. Maybe a week at the most. So here’s my answer to why that happens. And the first thing I want to say is that you’re not a failure, if that’s happened to you. And this isn’t about a lack of moral character on your part or even a lack of willpower. It’s really not about that. It can look that way. And of course it does and the diet industry really tells us that there’s a lot going on in that willpower area. But what I’ve discovered through the exploration of this inside-out understanding is that the answer doesn’t lie there at all. When we’re trying to apply willpower to overcoming an overeating habit, or any other habit, we’re trying to circumvent the way that we’re built, the innate and divine engineering that’s within all of us. In a way, the reason we aren’t able to do that, the reason we fail very often at these things, is because you can’t do that. You can’t fight Mother Nature. The way that we’re designed is so much more powerful than our little brains can organize. What is really going on, is that with a craving, with the feelings that we have about food and the drive to overeat, that’s a signal from our body. And it’s trying to tell us something. It’s like the check engine light in a car, or I also use the example of a flagger on a on a road. It’s not something you want to ignore. And what I teach is that when we look in that direction, when we see the wisdom of that signal, it’s really just a signal, that’s what cravings are, from our divine engineering. That’s when the need for the check engine light or the flagger on the road goes away. But if when we try to circumvent that with willpower, with increasing our willpower, and as I said, get around or over or under our natural desires to overeat it’s like trying to hold back the tide with a beach towel. I think that’s how I said it in my book. It’s like trying to stop a storm, a big rainstorm, or a s

Jason Shiers was my coach for several months in 2022. It was through our work together that I felt I reached a tipping point in my understanding of why my overeating habit existed and was then able to see it transform and release. Jason has been through it. He can share so deeply about the transformation that comes from being in this inside-out conversation because he was on a search for years to ease his own suffering and find solutions for his addictions and unwanted habits. It was only when he found the 3 Principles that he found answers to the questions that had been haunting him for years. Jason Shiers is a Certified Transformative Coach with 25 years of digital creation helping people free themselves from suffering. He has been been working with people and helping to change lives for as long as he can remember in one way or another, while going through his own change, and learning about how the mind works. You can find Jason at WideWorldCoaching.com and on Facebook @jvswwc. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How relentless searching for answers is a sign of our innate well-being Using personal development as another part of the search for peace How the heaviest thing we ever carry is our thoughts The life-changing discovery that we are never broken On addiction being part of the body’s innate intelligence Why behavioural change is the end result, not where we start when we’re trying to change an unwanted habit How is this approach to healing addiction different than the 12 steps? Resources Mentioned in this Episode Jason’s podcast: Misunderstandings of the Mind Michael Neill: The Secret to Effortless Change Jason’s article about addiction and interview with Dr. Bill Pettit Transcript of Interview with Jason Shiers Alexandra: Jason Shiers, welcome to Unbroken. Jason: Thank you. Excited to be here. I’m wondering what we’re going to talk about.  Alexandra: I’m excited to have you here. And I’m turning the tables on you because you have your own podcast about this understanding called Misunderstandings of the Mind. I’ll link to that in the show notes. Why don’t you tell us a bit about your background and how you got interested in the three principles? Jason: Well, so long story. I’ve  shared it today, in a different way, this morning on another thing that I was on, and it always it gives me a sense of gratitude, to go back sometimes and look at the chaos and the craziness in the things that I did. My life was very full of chaos, and chaos to me means everything that I could do to avoid myself, in the extremities, with drugs and alcohol, and bodies and weight loss and extreme diets and seeking, searching for myself: money, sex, relationships, everything, gambling, prostitution, anything I could, at the time, just to escape myself. I started off with a horrific childhood; the tragic loss of my dad when I was young, and then using and medicating, finding a way to cope with my internal world using something externally. I didn’t really care too much what it was, over the years. So, drugs, alcohol, food, relationships, they were all my coping mechanisms. Now, they were are what I used to escape myself. And then, for many years I was in the field of psychology, as a traditional psychotherapist, and there was more seeking in different ways, but still seeking. Seeking myself unknowingly, in psychological concepts and qualifications and status is because it really, like if this thing here that I called Jason needs to be someone in the world, it has to get things, like things being anything outside of myself, status, money, titles, letters after my name, qualifications, credentials, recognition, I thought I needed those things to be okay. It was probably one of the reasons why I did so many qualifications in the psychological world, and they were all in service of finding happiness, but none of them contributed to that. I did all those things, I completed them at the end, every time I felt deflated and thought, “Well, maybe it’s the wrong way to another qualification.” Every time it never did what I thought it was going to do. For me, it didn’t give me that endless confidence or real belief in myself or any of those things. There’s so much to that story, the endless seeking with weight, I know, we’ve talked about this. To the point of having six or seven cosmetic surgeries to change my body on the outside, hoping that somehow it would make me happy on the inside. Even twice waking up in a third world country having been put to sleep and had a surgery. I was thinking about that today, how desperate did I have to be to go to a third world country? Not necessarily a backstreet hospital. It felt pretty safe but it was a cheap hospital to be put to sl

The title of Alexandra Amor’s book about healing the drive to overeat is It’s Not About the Food. How is it possible that a ‘problem’ related to eating too much can not be about the food we consume? You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Transcription of the Episode Hello, and welcome back explorers to another question and answer episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. I’m here today with a question from early on in my exploration of this understanding. If you would like to submit a question to be answered here on the show, please go to alexandraamor.com/question and you’ll see a little form there. You can submit your question to me using that, and I’ll be happy to answer it. Today, the question is actually about the title of my book, It’s Not About the Food, which you see here behind me. And why is it called that? Why is overeating not about the food? To answer that, I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story, first of all, kind of an analogy. For years, I’ve had this weird little pain in my mid upper arm. So for those of you just listening it’s sort of between my elbow and my shoulder midway, on the outside. And it definitely doesn’t feel like nerve pain. It’s more like a kind of a pinching feeling when I make certain motions. I would say about 10, or 12 years ago, I went to massage therapy and I explained to the girl, and she got me to point to exactly where the pain was. And then she worked on that pain for, I want to say two or three appointments. And it really didn’t move the needle at all. And so I kind of left it. It’s not debilitating, it’s not interfering with my quality of life at all. I just notice it sometimes and it would be nicer if it wasn’t there. So I just kind of left it alone, because we weren’t really making any progress. Then a week or two ago, I was at a different massage therapist and she was asking me what we wanted to focus on that day. And almost as an afterthought, I said to her, “Oh, and also, by the way, I have this weird pain here in the middle of my upper arm between my elbow and my shoulder.” I pointed to it, and instantly, I mean, right away, she said, “Oh, yeah, that’s because your rotator cuff muscles are really stiff and tight.” I got her to explain what rotator cuff was. And it’s apparently a series of muscles kind of around your shoulder. And they have something to do with your with our shoulder blades. I can’t explain it entirely. I’m not a massage therapist. So what she did then was she worked on those muscles a little bit during that session. And she gave me some exercises to do on my own at home. I’ve been doing those; stretching my arms and doing various things to relieve or release some of the tension of that rotator cuff muscle. And this pain in my arm is actually improving. After the massage session, I got her to explain what that was. And she said what it’s called is referral. So there’s something that can happen in one part of the body and it will refer to a different part of the body. So that’s exactly what was going on here. That rotator cuff muscle, according to this massage therapist, is not connected in any way to my the middle of my upper arm. There aren’t any nerve paths that lead from one to the other. The muscles aren’t connected directly. And yet, this tension in my rotator cuff muscles is causing this pain in my arm. What it is, she said, is a tendon that’s being pinched between two I think she said two muscles. I walked away from that and thought you know what, that’s really interesting because there’s a real parallel with this understanding that we’re exploring, the Inside-Out understanding. And it’s this and it’s and it’s exactly why my book is called, It’s Not About the Food. And that is that when we experience food cravings and the kind of pressure and drive that causes us to develop an over eating habit or any other kind of habit, the drive the impulse the craving for cigarettes or alcohol or gambling or whatever it is. We innocently like the first massage therapist I mentioned, we go in, and we try to address the problem where it exists. So that original massage therapist massaged my upper outer arm, because she thought that that’s where the problem was. And that’s exactly what we do when we have these habits; we use willpower to try to prevent ourselves from participating in our habit, we abstain from the things that we feel we have a habit around, or in the case of food, we try to curb our eating and constrict and control and manage it. I talked about that in a previous episode about the beach ball and trying to manage keeping the beach ball under the

It seems that in our present-day culture we have an attitude that our bodies are something to be conquered, mastered, and controlled. We object to the feelings in our bodies, often to the point that we mistrust everything about them. However, what my guest today, Tania Elfersy, points out is that our bodies are wise and that we can always rely on that wisdom no matter what we’re going through, be it menopause symptoms or food cravings. Tania Elfersy has a passion for revealing rarely discussed truths about women’s life-cycle events. She is a transformative coach, speaker, writer and educator. Since 2015, Tania has been supporting women through perimenopause and menopause, allowing them to reach natural symptom relief, and a greater sense of well-being. You can find Tania Elfersy at TheWiserWoman.com and on Facebook @TheWiserWoman. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes The power of insight to create physical changes Who is the wiser woman within? How the body shares its wisdom through discomfort Why having a ‘lighter experience of life’ matters to our experience of health How our bodies only ever express love for us Resources Mentioned in this Episode Tania’s book: The Wiser Woman’s Guide to Perimenopause and Menopause Eckhart Tolle Michael Singer Transcript of Interview with Tania Elfersy Alexandra: Tania Elfersy, welcome to Unbroken. Tania: So happy to be here. Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be interested in the Inside-Out understanding? Tania: I am originally from the UK. I live in Israel. I’ve lived here for almost 30 years. I am in my mid 50s, which is significant considering what I do for a living, which is supporting women through midlife change, through perimenopause and menopause, helping them have a much lighter experience of this fascinating time. I am coach and author, speaker, educator, trying to bust through the myths of women’s health, and also the misunderstanding that we have around our emotional spiritual health, mental health as well. I’ve been around the 3 principles since 2015. I was sucked into them after a very quick experience of an insight. I was a lucky one that quite soon after I discovered the principles, I had a major life changing insight, just around the nature of thought. At the time, I was experiencing a lot of perimenopause symptoms, physical, emotional, night sweats, two weeks of PMS, and lots of migraines, skin problems, bit of hair loss, all kinds of things just to make your life joyful. And I had this insight around thought and within days all my symptoms cleared up. That made me see that there was something very interesting in this inside-out understanding. Since then I’ve been exploring it more and more and sharing it in the context of women’s health. Alexandra: I love that story. And it’s such an interesting one because it just happened so quickly for you. I occasionally mention that as an example of how we just never know when an insight is going to strike and how it will impact us. Tania: Yes, I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t anywhere special. So anyone who had the idea that we need to be under the right moon, or something like that, that wasn’t my experience of it. I read certain people that have a similar understanding like Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer. And I was impacted by this whole nature of the observer of your thoughts. So I’d already seen something around that. But that hadn’t changed anything in how I felt about my health, or I was experiencing my health or other things in my life. And then just really getting to know the principles that was sort of the major change point for me. Alexandra: Nice. So let’s maybe kind of start at a foundational level. Your website is called The Wiser Woman. Tell us why you chose that name. And who that is? Tania: It’s not me. I mean, she’s in me, and she’s in you. But it’s not only me. When I was getting to understand more about the principles and the concept of Mind, I felt that that term was a bit misleading, because it makes us think of what’s going on going on up here in our head. And I was seeing the innate intelligence throughout the body and I was trying to find a way to describe that innate intelligence. The best thing that that came up for me was the wiser woman because it really felt like there was me with my little mind and my little thoughts, trying to run the show, and then there was something much deeper, and it is an intention within me that I could actually relax into it when I remembered. And that whole concept of a guided self or a guided intelligence, or God, some people, I’m sure we would rather call it or a divine intelligence, however we want to call it whatever feel

Traditionally, we think of our unwanted habits as problems. They need to be fixed and eliminated. They are a sign of a flawed character. What if that isn’t true? What if we are designed perfectly and our unwanted habits are pointing toward that innate health? Transcript of Episode Hello Explorers! Welcome back. This is episode three of the Q&A episodes of Unbroken podcast. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. As I mentioned last week, what I wanted to do in this first few episodes that I’m calling Q&A episodes is answer questions that I had at the beginning of the exploration of this inside-out understanding. If you would like to pose a question, please do that, I’d love to answer your questions. And you can do that at alexandramor.com/question. So please shoot me an email of using the form on that page and I’ll be very happy to answer your question on a future Q&A episode. As I mentioned last Monday, what I want to talk about today is our divine design. So the question that I might have posed a few years ago would have sounded something like this: I’ve heard people say that our unwanted habits, and our cravings are actually part of our divine design, and they’re not a problem. How is that even possible? So that’s a such a great question. Thank you for asking. And here’s how it looks to me, here’s what I understand at the moment. We are as human beings, we have very what people describe in this understanding as a kind design. So we’re designed perfectly well. And we all have innate health and innate well being. And at our core, at our essence, we are peace, we are love, we are calm, and a very good feeling. One of the things that’s happening when we’re experiencing an unwanted habit, even though it can look like something like self sabotage – I mean, that was something that I felt. I must hate myself, I must be doing something terrible to myself. Why would I do that? – when I experienced my unwanted over eating habit. I would get really caught up in that kind of thinking, trying to dig down and figure out why I didn’t like myself so much that I was doing this thing that I hated. Saying it out loud, like that so succinctly, I realize now it doesn’t make any sense. But that was my innocent misunderstanding at the time. Unwanted habits that we have our never sabotage, they’re never something that we’re doing because we don’t like ourselves. We are, as human beings always, simply trying to feel better, to return to that place that we know is innate within us that that natural state of calm and peace and well being. To me, what it looks like is that the experience that we have of unwanted habits is an instinctive drive, to help ourselves to feel that way, to feel even a little bit closer to peace and calm. And because it’s so instinctive, because it’s so apparent in people all over the planet, there’s not a single group of people who don’t experience that compulsion. Everyone experiences this. When we look at that, that tells us that therefore it’s something built into our design. It’s just not a matter of our cultural upbringing, or our geographic location. It has to have something to do with the way that human beings are designed. Unfortunately, I think what’s happened in the old paradigm of psychology, which was more of a pathology based understanding, where we’re viewed as being broken in these places, and we have to be fixed, this inside out understanding or the 3 principles as it’s also known takes the opposite view. Sydney Banks articulated this back in the 1970s. Lots of other wise people have articulated it as well, he kind of pulled it all together. What he saw is that we are always innately whole, and well. And so what that leads us to see then, is that an unwanted habit a craving, is, actually it’s two things: It’s ourselves wanting to comfort ourselves and to feel those feelings of peace, which I talked about a minute ago. And then it’s a second thing as well. It took me a long time to really see this. It’s actually that feeling of craving, or what I call it the drive to overeat. That was how I felt that. It was a really unwanted feeling. And it was a tremendous amount of pressure. The only thing that would relieve it would be to eat the foods that I wanted to eat. So that feeling is actually a call from our divine selves, our innate well being. All it’s doing is reminding us that we are entirely whole and entirely well, and that it’s just that we haven’t seen that for ourselves insightfully yet and fully. And, again, it can seem like quite a paradox to say that, and to hear it. I’ll just speak personally, until I started to see for myself that that was the case it really looked like my cravings, my overeating, was a problem, like it was as a serious problem that had to be fi

This is part two in our series about the book Addiction: One Cause, One Solution. My guest is Barbara Sarah Smith, who co-authored the book with my guest from Episode 1, Christian McNeill. Barbara shares about her connection to the subject of addiction recovery, why it matters to her, and how she sees addiction differently now that she understands the principles of mind, consciousness and thought that shape our human experience. Barbara Sarah Smith is retired from her work as a mental health practitioner where she worked for over 40 years in various settings including acute health care, hospice, outpatient mental health and addictions treatment.  In 2014 she was introduced to a new, principle- based understanding of mental health that has transformed her life as well as her client’s lives in extraordinary ways. Rather than a pathology based lens, she now teaches her clients about our innate emotional health and resilience. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How our past has the ability to affect us only as long as our thinking is focused on it. On the universal nature of wanting to feel better Our fluid experience of life and how that helps with addiction recovery Resources Mentioned in this Episode Book: Addiction: One Cause, One Solution Jamie Smart on subtractive psychology Book: Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés You can find Barbara Sarah Smith at GiftsOfInsight.net and on Facebook @GiftsofInsight. Transcript of Interview with Barbara Sarah Smith Alexandra: Barbara Sarah Smith, welcome to Unbroken. Barbara: Thank you. Lovely to be here with you. Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. This is part two of our series on Addiction: One Cause, One Solution, which is the book that you co-authored with Christian McNeill. So I’m so glad to have been able to speak to the both of you. Barbara: Well, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Alexandra: We were just I was just saying before we started recording, for our listeners that many of the questions today that I’m going to ask Barbara are similar to ones that I’ve asked Christian. I did that deliberately. Because I think sometimes from different voices and different perspectives, we can hear different things, they might just strike us in a different way. So that’s the reason for that.  Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to discover the three principles? Barbara: Okay. Well, I’m an MSW by education. And I have been in the field of social work in all different forms for 46 years, I really loved it. I had a private practice for about 45 years before coming to this. And I really loved my work, I had a very full practice, very full practice. Years ago, I really started to burn out, I thought, I’m just not sure what we’re doing here is really helping anybody because I was seeing some people for years. And it just, I just didn’t have the same feeling I wasn’t showing up in the same way. And that didn’t feel good. So anyway, very long, very long story short, a colleague of mine introduced me to the principles. Or at least she introduced me to someone who she said, could introduce us to this. And I was absolutely, first of all, very skeptical, and extremely skeptical, and, but really no clue that there was anything that was going to be different than what I already knew after 46 years in the field.  So I really didn’t want to meet with this woman who was on her when I didn’t have any interest, but they wanted me to do it. And I thought I’d be nice and do it. And when she started talking about this and used words like wisdom and common sense and intuition, it just really piqued my interest. And that sort of drew me in and it was six months off again. Maybe not. Then finally, I think very skillfully, at some point, she really recognized that something had shifted and recommended that I go for an intensive, which was the turning point for me. Alexandra: Oh, nice.  And given your background in therapy and social work, and you ran a retreat center for a while, didn’t you?  Barbara: Yes. Alexandra: Is there anything you can pinpoint that that kind of helped you to, to flip the switch to see the difference between this paradigm and the pathology related one? Barbara: Honestly, I would love to know that myself. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know why I stayed with it. I don’t know. I didn’t have the money. But for some reason, I kept going back to it, I think in part because I was really, I had to keep working. So I needed to do something and I knew I couldn’t do what I was doing. So part of it may have been desperation. But I don’t know when when the tide started to turn. I’ve thought off and on. But I

When we have an unwanted habit, what action should we take to deal with it? The answer may surprise you. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Resources Mentioned in this Episode Book: It’s Not About the Food Submit your question to be answered on a future episode using this form Free video series: Finding Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits Transcript of Episode Hello, explorers, and welcome back to this Q&A episode of Unbroken Podcast. I’m very glad you’re here. I’m Alexandra Amor and these are the shorter episodes on Mondays where I answer your questions. Given that this is a brand new show, and as I said last week, I don’t have any followers yet to submit questions, what I’m going to do is search back in my memory and ask the questions that I would have asked all those years ago, or several years ago. If you have a question that you’d like to submit, I’d love to hear it. Submit it to alexandraamor.com/question, and I’ll have a look at those and answer them on upcoming Monday episodes. Today, I want to answer the question: What should I do about my cravings? This was something that I was, of course, really interested in and have been interested in for the last 30 plus years until I found this understanding. As I mentioned in last week’s episode, it might be good to go back to that first Q&A episode, I talked about how when we have unwanted habits, we tend to use a lot of management strategies to deal with them. They really feel like a problem. And we really try to get our arms around them and our big intelligent brains and manage those habits. So suppress them, control them, use willpower, use whatever tactics and strategies we can to control them and deal with them. I talked about how this exploring this understanding takes a completely different approach than that. So anything that we’ve tried in the past, a diet or measuring and weighing our food, or distracting ourselves, or anything like that is really a management strategy, and we’re looking in a completely different direction. So, given all that, the short answer to the question, What should I do about my cravings is nothing. There’s actually nothing you need to do about your cravings, about your over eating, about any maybe binge eating episodes that you’re having. They’re not a problem. And that’s why there’s nothing for you to do about them. The first thing I want to say, though, is that we are divinely designed, although hardly anyone points this out to us. But we are divinely designed to return ourselves to a state of equilibrium or peace, or calm, whatever word you want to use to describe that feeling of being peaceful, being calm, being in a state of feeling very centered, and grounded. All of that stuff is innate within us. We don’t have to do anything to get ourselves back to that state. So even when we’re really riled up, feeling disregulated, feeling really upset or jangled, or like we really want to lean into using our habit, because we’ve had a really hard day, or whatever it is, it turns out, there’s actually nothing we need to do, in order to come back to a place that feels really good within us come back to a very calm, quiet, peaceful state. We are designed for that to happen automatically, our within our bodies and within our minds as well. So when our minds get really stirred up, they too are designed to automatically and without any interference from us return to a state of equilibrium. Conversely, what’s happening when where thinking about our habit and about how to control it, how to deal with our cravings, we’re adding more thinking to what’s already there. We’re stirring the pot up, shaking up the snowglobe, though we’re doing that innocently. We’re adding another layer of busy thinking sped up thinking to a situation that is already like that. So it sort of heightens that. What we actually end up doing is making our interaction with the habit, even worse than it was perhaps at the beginning. I’ll use myself as a personal example. For 30 years, I tried to fix my overeating habit using all the self help tactics and strategies that you can mention. I mean, name something and I’ve tried it. And in fact, the other the other day, I realized one of the only things I didn’t try was acupuncture. But I tried hypnosis, I tried diets, I tried meditation, and mindfulness and emotional freedom technique, and EMDR, which is that thing that you do in therapy, I held two paddles, and it supposedly does something to your brain. Talk therapy, and just on and on and on. All these what I would consider to be healthy strategies to try to curb my over overeating habit. And it only ended up getting worse. Sometimes I saw a tiny bi

What if addiction is not a disease? What if addiction is caused by the same thing that causes fights with a spouse or anxiety about air travel or suffering about school grades: Thought. In this episode, Christian McNeill and I explore how thought plays such a huge role in our attachment to (or addiction to) substances, including alcohol and drugs, and how the solution to these attachments is simply seeing how being human works. Christian McNeill is an author, coach, and former barrister and tribunal judge. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes On the life-changing insight that ended an alcohol addiction How Christian’s creativity was enhanced by sobriety Recognizing and experiencing that insight is the key to change An insight about the importance of listening to oneself Co-writing a book from 2 separate continents Why variability of moods and life experience is nothing to be worried about What is ‘subtractive psychology’ and why does it matter? Resources mentioned on the show Christian’s book is Addiction: One Cause, One Solution Joe Bailey’s book about addiction is The Serenity Principle Sydney Banks’ book: The Missing Link You can find Christian McNeill at ElementsOfWellbeing.net and on Facebook at Recovery From The Inside Out. Transcript of Interview with Christian McNeill Alexandra Amor: Welcome Christian MacNeil to Unbroken. It’s lovely to see you. Christian McNeill: Well, it’s lovely to see you too, Alexandra. Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here honored to be here. Alexandra Amor: Oh, my pleasure. You’re going to be my first guest actually. So even more exciting. I’m thrilled to have you here. Why don’t you tell us anything about yourself that you’d like to share about your background. And maybe when you came upon the 3 Principles. Christian McNeill: Sure. Thank you. Yes, on the one hand, I have a background, a career in law, and I was a lawyer for a long time. And unbeknownst to me, at the same time, as I was training to become a lawyer, I was working out an alcohol addiction. I did not know that. I was not aware of that until it became a real crisis in my mid to late 20s. And at that point, I had a rock bottom kind of experience and followed immediately by a moment of clarity, and I got sober and it was a completely life changing shift. And although I had a lot of help from the 12 step movement in getting sober, the actual moment of clarity occurred more or less in a gutter in Edinburgh in a city street on a Saturday night. And almost everything I see or talk about now is kind of informed by hindsight. I see things differently, or I understand what was going on in a way that I didn’t at the time. I didn’t know that my life was going to change in that moment, but it did. And the thing that happened then was what had previously been a daily compulsion to drink. I mean, I was able to sort of function but I just had this daily compulsion to drink no matter what I resolved in the morning about being healthy and sober that day, it never, never worked out that way. And that compulsion disappeared in that moment. And I got into that whole sort of 12 Step thing and working the program and having a very different kind of life. That was really that was a great thing. It was a wonderful thing, but it was also I think it’s very countercultural here in Scotland. I live now in Glasgow, but I was living in Edinburgh at that point. And Scotland is a very boozy place. Everything is lubricated with alcohol, apart from some breakfast meetings, perhaps. Even more so then. I’m also not particularly secretive with it, but it became a bit of a secret side gig. It certainly wasn’t what you lead with. I had my career on the one hand, and then my secret side gig of recovery on the other. Almost just spontaneously, a lot of my latent creativity woke up at that time, and I’d always had this other interest in being good at art at school. I’d always been good at making things. I enjoyed that and really that just mushroomed. I got into things like stained glass at that point. I was enjoying the process of being sober, but I was still struggling a bit. And I think as I see it, now, I was still looking for answers outside myself, just not drink. My relationships became a bit compulsive and unhappier, frankly, than they’d been before. I think there was too much riding on them in my mind. There was a period where my smoking went through the roof. I quit that after a year. It didn’t even occur to me that this was a thing of looking outside yourself. I had some issues with overeating and bulimia and being out of control around food, and just various things like that. So, alongside the work, the secret gig,

What is the Inside-Out Understanding? When it comes to letting go of unwanted habits, how is it different than all the other techniques and strategies that we’ve tried? Answers are here in today’s Q&A episode of Unbroken. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Resources mentions in this episode Submit your question for a future Q&A episode here. Free video series: Finding Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits Mavis Karn’s website Transcript of episode Hello, explorers, and welcome to the very first Q&A episode of Unbroken podcast. This Monday edition of the podcast, going forward, is going to be me answering your questions about getting rid of unwanted habits, about letting go of an over eating habit, or any kind of other habit. And since this is the very first episode, though, there’s nobody listening yet. So I thought that what I would do is think back to the questions that I had at the very beginning of exploring this understanding, and then answer those questions. Moving forward, you can submit your questions, and I’ll be happy to answer them on a future podcast. There’s a little form at that link that you can fill out. And I’ll respond and maybe answer your question here on a future show. For today, I’m going to go back in my memory and think about one of the most pressing questions I had at the beginning of this exploration which was: How is exploring this understanding, the Inside Out understanding, different than any other method or approach that I’ve tried? Over the last however many years for me, it was about 30 years, of trying and failing to fix an overeating habit, until I came across this understanding. So the way that I’m going toexplain how this is different is a metaphor. And it’s one that I use in the free video series that’s available at my website called Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits. If you go to alexandraamor.com/start, you can have access to that. If what I say today piques your interest, or leaves you wanting to understand more, that might be a good place to start, because we dive in a little bit deeper. This metaphor has to do with a beach ball. Very often as children, we have those big inflatable beach balls, they’re bigger than a basketball, and the ones we had as a kid were rainbow colored. And something that was fun for us to do, we would throw them around and stuff at the lake as a child. But something else that was fun to do was sort of tried to submerge them under the water, when we were at the lake. You’d sit on it, and it would pop back up. It was pretty tricky to try to get it to stay submerged under the water. It took a lot of energy, it took a lot of balancing, it took a lot of just thinking about my center of gravity and how my weight was distributed those kinds of things. The the other methodologies that we try when we’re trying to get rid of an unwanted habit, the other strategies, the other approach are things like willpower or maybe rewarding ourselves when we get through a day without eating a favorite food, or restricting favorite foods, foods that we feel are problematic. or following a diet for example, or depriving ourselves of the thing that we feel comforts ourselves or gives us that good soothing feeling that we’re searching for, whether it’s cigarettes, or soda pop, or what a gambling, whatever it is, that’s giving us that feeling we try to cut ourselves off from that deprive ourselves from that. What that ends up being like, is just like me trying to balance that beach or submerge that beach ball into the lake when I was a kid. It is possible for a short period of time and some people manage it for longer than that even. The thing is, though, that the beach ball is designed to not be submerged. It’s not like a piece of concrete. It’s filled with air. And so just the basic laws of physics have it wanting to pop back up to the surface of the water. If this is a habit that we’re trying to distance ourselves from, an unwanted habit, in order to keep it to keep that ball submerged, it takes a lot of energy. Like I explained at the beginning, it takes a lot of balance, it takes a lot of concentration, like you can’t really be doing anything else, when you’re pushing that beach ball under the water. That has to be your entire focus. You couldn’t say, for example, go for a swim at the same time, as you’re trying to submerge that ball. My brother and I used to chase each other in the water all the time, when we were kids but you couldn’t do that at the same time as you’re trying to submerge that beach ball under the water. So yeah, those are the main points that it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of focus and concentration. And your your concentration ha

In this first episode of Unbroken, Alexandra Amor introduces herself, shares about the path that brought her to the Inside-Out Understanding and how it helped her let go of a 30-year overeating habit. She also shares why she works with people to help them let go of their unwanted habits. Alexandra Amor is an author, coach, and explorer who helps those who want to let go of unwanted habits, including overeating. For 20 years Alexandra has been writing both fiction and non-fiction books, all with the themes of love, connection, and the search for understanding. She began her writing career with an Amazon best-selling, award-winning memoir about ten years she spent in a cult in the 1990s. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Growing up in an alcoholic household and the affect that had Joining at cult at age 22 A very brief look at how cults work and how we get ensnared On the origins of an overeating habit and what I tried to fix that Learning about the Inside-Out Understanding Noticing changes starting to happen without doing anything How we innocently look in the wrong direction to try to fix an unwanted habit What this podcast will be looking at and who I’ll be speaking to Resources mentioned in this episode Book: Cult, a Love Story Book: It’s Not About the Food The online course: Freedom From Overeating Transcript of podcast Welcome everyone to Unbroken. This is episode one, and I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. I wanted to take the opportunity in this very first episode to introduce you to who I am, and why I’m here, and the work that I do and why I’m doing this podcast. So let’s dive in. About Alexandra Amor I’m an author, and a coach and an explorer. And I’ve chosen the title, Unbroken, for this podcast for a very specific reason. And those of you that are familiar with the Inside-Out understanding, or the 3 Principles, will know or perhaps maybe have an idea of why I’ve chosen that title. And for those of you that aren’t, that are less familiar with those things. I’ll explain along the way. I want to talk today about the reason I do this work, and one of the biggest reasons is that I had an over eating habit for 30 plus years that I tried to fix with all kinds of things, All The Things, as the kids say, these days, and nothing worked. It wasn’t until I found this, Inside-Out understanding that that started to change. So that’s one of the motivations behind the work that I do. I particularly focus on working with people who do have an overeating habit or other kinds of habits that are causing them suffering. And again, we’re going to talk about that a little bit more coming up here in just a moment. Childhood Trauma and then a Cult So a little bit of background on me. I had what I would call sort of your basic, growing up time, kind of a generic Canadian family; a mom and a dad and I had a brother, and my parents divorced when I was 11. Unfortunately, my dad was an alcoholic for his entire adult life and that really affected his behavior around everybody. I found him to be quite frightening, especially as a little child, but even into my adulthood. He was loud and big and scary, very angry. I know now that looking back that his alcoholism was, to him, it was a solution. It was a solution to the uncomfortable feelings that he felt. I think it was something that he used to soothe himself. With hindsight, I can see I have a lot of compassion for him, and a lot of understanding about what he was going through, but as a child, of course, not so much. I was frightened of him. I think what that led to was that when I was coming into adulthood, I felt very insecure, and uncomfortable in my own skin, and was really looking for answers. So that led to just after I left university, I was just about to turn 22 and I accidentally joined a cult in Vancouver. It was 1989 I guess. I should clarify and say that everybody joins a cult accidentally. Nobody does it deliberately. You join a group of people who have similar values or are fighting for a similar cause. Whatever it is, you have something in common and the group feels like a safe place initially. And in my situation, it certainly was the case; it was actually a meditation class. It was being taught in downtown Vancouver by a woman who fancied herself a psychic medium. And when she was teaching these meditation classes, and my mom had been going for a while and I had just moved to Vancouver didn’t know a soul other than my family, so I went along with her. How Cults Work With cults, then what happens is it just gets kind of weirder and weirder. But at a very slow pace that when you’re on the inside of it, you don’t really notice. And that’s how they get jobs, as they say. So, you know, at the time, I think I think I belie