What comfort food is your guilty pleasure?

Do you have certain foods that you can’t help yourself around?

When you feel sad, stressed or anxious, do you crave certain unhealthy foods to distract you from the discomfort?

Many of us - in first-world countries - stuff ourselves with food to hide from uncomfortable and negative emotions.

And entrepreneurs in particular tend to eat emotionally to crowd out the feelings of stress and overwhelm they endure keeping up with increasing and erratic amounts of work.

Watch this week's love letter on Food Self-Sabotage, which is part 2 of our 5-week deep dive series on self-care versus self-sabotage.

"When I'm anxious, I know eat food that's not good for me."

This week is week two of five. Our five week deep dive into that interplay between self care and self sabotage. That we dance. We dance across that line as empaths every single day.

Source has really pushed me to raise awareness around this because you have got to shine your light better.

Brighter, bigger, we need you, baby. So whatever it takes, we're gonna raise awareness, where you may be standing between you and your light shining at it's brightest and we just wanna honor that.

Not to make you feel wrong or beat yourself over the head for doing things that way, but instead just honoring that, that's coming up.

This week in particular, for week two out of five, the guides have requested us to talk about food. Oh man. Food, food and emotional stuffing. Alright, let's go there.

What kinds of foods do you eat? When you experience the feelings that are like the following. The following feelings of anxiety, worry, emptiness, boredom, anger, grief.

As I even just say those words, what kind of foods does your body want to ... You start getting cravings for. Is it for another diet soda? Is it for potato chips? Is it for cookies and chocolates and ... Or could it be for cheeseburgers just fill me to the brim, right? Or pizza? All of these stuffing foods versus fuel and clarity foods.

Now, a lot of my private clients, there's certain point in our sessions where we come to this one philosophy that I've said I don't know how many times, but there's two kinds of people in the world.

There's two kinds of people. You could tell by what's driving them.

People who desire clarity, and people who desire comfort. See where I'm going with this? Food.

People who desire clarity, they're going to confront the issue because they just want to clear the air, they're gonna take personal responsibility because that's empowering and it fosters more clarity. It spreads light.

They're going to take a stand and voice their opinion because we're looking for clarity. They're searching for truth.

But people who are desiring comfort are going to blame. It's easier to place blame on others or other events or things that happen in the past or imagines situations.

We're gonna place blame if we want comfort. We're going to feel more tired, we're gonna wanna rest more, we're gonna complain.

Whatever we can do to shirk responsibility and hot potato that off of us.

We're not going to express our opinion or rock the boat because if you rock the boat you'll get spanked. That's what happened in my childhood. So maybe that happened to you, or maybe you'll get denied love.

What did you learn in your childhood when you were really vocal? Were you acknowledged and held or were you punished?

Click to share the Tweet of the Week:

Know this: Most people's behaviors are motivated by a desire for Clarity or Comfort. You can tell by what’s on their plate.

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This affects our emotional relationship with food because food essentially represents nourishment for our bodies. How you nourish yourself.

Do you nourish yourself for comfort, or do you nourish yourself for clarity? What types of foods are you craving? Maybe even right now.

Be kind to yourself. This is not a beat yourself up question, this is simply an awareness question.

What types of foods do you eat or especially reach for when you're under extra stress? Or you're feeling anxiety? Or you're feeling worried? Or you're lover or the person that you love is not acknowledging you, or acknowledging your feelings?

Or the government is not acknowledging your emotions and your feelings? What do you consume? What do you nourish yourself with? Is it food that increases your clarity or increases your comfort?

Now, be kind to yourself because if it's increasing just your comfort and not your clarity, if you're falling asleep after eating something, that's a sign that you're clarity is not increasing.

You're actually taxing yourself. That's called emotional stuffing.

We're stuffing down the feelings of emptiness in particular, such as loneliness, worry, fear, anxiety, anger. That hole, we're trying to stuff the hole full.

So many empaths do this. So you're not alone, I've done this. Remember my previous video, I lived on Twix.

Talk about stuffing, that stuff probably made out of sugar and cardboard. Who knows? Maybe some corn syrup thrown in for good measure, maybe for a little bit of nutrition. Terrible.

No wonder my body at the time was horridly inflamed, and constipated, and tight, and in pain. That's years in the past now. Thank God. But be kind to yourself if you're stuffing. You're emotionally stuffing.

The alternative would be instead to eat foods that cleanse you or increase your clarity. Last month, we talked about going on a cleanse and honoring that as a form of grounding, to clear your energetic system.

Do you drink water filled foods such as foods that require the sun in order for them to be created? Fill in the blank. I don't need to know what comes up for you around foods that require the sun in order to be created and foods that are filled with water. Use your thinking cap.

What comes up for you around that? But the alternative would be to have food that comes into your body with more photons, more nutrients, dense with light energy so you can shine brighter rather than stuff down.

Now, the oracle cards that are coming forward, this week in particular, are the romance angels. I don't know if this is backwards on camera. But this is ... Now I think we have 20 decks, 20 or 21. I just got another donation of a deck. Thank you. Thank you Paula. Yay. So good.

If you want to donate to the dojo, we are always open to receiving more decks because the tribe, the whole tribe uses all the different oracle cards that we have here.

Romance angels, emotional food stuffing. Most notorious of all. We need to know about our relationship with food and love. New love. Oh my, new love.

A new person has stirred your romantic feelings. What are you gonna do with that? There's so many things that can stimulate desire and many of the ways that we shame ourselves, self sabotage, being receptive to desire and new affection. A new stimulation is we stuff it down.

"Nope, I am not lovable, let me eat that cake. Let me eat that Smarties. Let me stuff that down." Be kind to yourself if that's what's coming up for you.

If you're afraid of rejection or even afraid of being seen, to all my entrepreneurs out there. How much do we eat to stuff down our visibility, our fear of being seen? Be kind to yourself if that's coming up for you.

So how can we begin eating foods that increase our clarity as oppose to just our comfort? Comment below, send me an email back. Let me know what's coming up for you, what foods are you craving?

By the way, let me see if I can pull this book out here. Doreen Virtue has a book that changed my life, The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children.

In here, she actually has a chart of what food means what emotionally. For example, craving chocolate is a desire for romance and love. Craving beer is the desire to shut out anxiety, wanting more love, fun, and appreciation.

You can deepen your healing journey by getting and reading this book, specifically in your relationship between self sabotage and "self care," the dark side of self care in our relationship with food.

Curious to hear if you're gonna get the book. Let me know what you think of it if you have read it. Did this book change your life too? It sure did mine. Alright. I will see you next week for week three of five and get ready for it. Bye.

VictoriaWhitfield.com
Facebook.com/SenseiVictoriaWhitfield

Just for Today...

Become aware of why you are eating the type of food you are eating during the day.

Ask yourself: "Am I eating this because I want to nourish myself, or am I eating this because I want to numb myself?"

Notice how you feel at that moment - you're already healing!

-

Hello there. I am Sensei Victoria Whitfield, your business reiki master. And it's my joy to get to support empathic entrepreneurs and business owners like you in getting and staying grounded and clear in mind, body and business.

Welcome back to another installment of your weekly love letter from the dojo at naturalintuition.com and victoriawhitfield.com, my blog. These are your sources for channeled holistic stress management techniques and guidance for developing your natural intuition. Whether you're looking to improve the quality of your personal and professional life, let this love letter be your reminder that you are not alone and that together we can make that happen.

Let's schedule a chat, and see how I can help you...

The post Love Letters | Food Self Sabotage – Part 2 of 5 appeared first on Sensei Victoria Whitfield.

Have you ever felt helpless?

And did that experience warp your ability to trust yourself and others?

Concerned that you can't tell the difference between self-care and self-sabotage because of what happened to you?

Sometimes bad things happen to good people... I know.

Yet Source wants you to know that all things can - and do - work together to form greater good in our lives.

Watch this week's 11-minute Love Letter to hear my story of overcoming a very dark time in my life and how I healed from cycles of self-sabotage to embracing a lifestyle of self-care and healing.

"I only smoke because it helps me cool off."

We're continuing the series, sourced this time around has asked to continue you and I building a deeper relationship and a deeper understanding about certain concepts that come up in our spiritual lives.

This series is going to be a five week series around the dark side of self-care. Woohoo. I'm so excited.

I am so excited to bring you to the dark side of self-care. What that basically looks like is self-sabotage.

Now this first week in particular the guides have asked me to share more of my story.

I just finished a session with a new client. I'm so excited for her. It's amazing what inspires people to begin their healing journey. She's beginning a new six month healing journey, Sojourner healing journey, which means she's coming in for an hour, a private hour a month for me. She also gets unlimited meditation classes here at the dojo.

It's so interesting to hear people's stories of what inspires them to begin to heal. What motivates you to really begin healing.

It was just fascinating sharing with her some of my story of what caused me to get into all of this in the first place.

Believe it or not, it comes from actually my pain.

Simon Sinek, very beautifully says that your big why comes from your pain more often than not.

For me, it was a series of three breakups that caused me to break open. The first one was someone that I thought I was going to be with. The whole soulmate situation that you think you have and then turns out sleeping with your coworker and calls you on your wedding day to ask how are you? One.

Two, the next one broke me open again because of the color of my skin. He had decided that we couldn't be together because of the color of my skin. That also compounded my perspective.

Then unfortunately the third one that really broke me open was when I got date raped. Yes, I'm sharing that with you.

No, I'm not happy about what happened to me. I honor the fact that these were the events that grabbed my attention that something is not quite right.

Now maybe you grew up with a history of abuse or maybe you grew up with alcoholic parents or that sort of a thing.

Something happened in our lives that forced us to take a stand and say, "Wait a minute. I don't like this. I don't like this." Right?

It's those moments where you put your foot down and say, "No more. I'm not going to be beaten anymore" or, "I'm not going to select people who would do these kinds of things to me anymore."

One of my first spiritual teachers her question to me, that changed my life, was: "what is the pattern in you that's creating this situation?"

This is where we get into our five week deep dive around self-sabotage.

When I look back into those dark times in my life where I would have suicidal thoughts and would be sleeping at around 22 hours a day, only getting up to go to the bathroom and have a sip of water, trying to escape, escape, escape there were things that I was doing to self-soothe that within my compressed mindset I thought were good for me.

When you have a compressed, like as in a really limited mindset, bad stuff you can't really tell that that's bad for you.

Some of the ways that I used to self-soothe but actually turned out being self-sabotage ... Well, one it was the constant sleeping. Also, I used to chain-smoke Clove cigarettes, the black ones. Like talk about breathing death. Emotional stuffing. I used to live on Twix and Chex-Mix and nothing else except for Captain Morgan's spiced rum and Malibu coconut rum. I remember. I'm so happy that I'm sober now.

There's these things that, "I'll just have a drink so that I can soothe" or escape, get rid of this negativity, or, "Let me go have a smoke. Let me cool off." Or, "Let me just check out." There's so many things that we do to soothe ourselves that within a limited and a compressed point of view feel pleasurable and we interpret them as good even though they're working against us.

Now there was also another form of self-sabotage I would do at the time. I would work around 12 hours or so a day at a really, really toxic job. Like screaming bosses that were financial abusers as in dangling your pay check over your head in order to get you to do things that are completely outside of your principles.

Be kind to yourself if as I invoke the darker side of my story that this is resonating for you like, "Ooh, ooh, I still do some of that, Victoria" ... This is not to say like, "I'm good and you're bad." No.

I want you to know that I've been through some things and when I'm going to talk to you over the next few weeks around self-sabotage versus self-care there's some history there. I'm only tapping on the tip of the iceberg here with respect to your energy.

Click to share the Tweet of the Week:

Know this: Be kind to yourself. What motivates great healing is usually great pain.

Are you loving The Love Letters? If so, please support our healing work with a love donation:

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My story is my story and it's made me who I am. Here's the light in the darkness is that when you start self-soothing you can choose to raise the vibration of the forms of self-soothing that you do.

For example, I remember even when I was still chain-smoking I started learning more about crystals and oracle cards. "Well, you know, maybe this will help me feel better." It was something positive about these cards or I feel the energy when I'm holding this crystal. I don't know what the heck it is. I'm going to get into that in the next few weeks.

That was the turning point. It was following things that brought me joy and uplifted me in the self-soothing cycle. It's natural.

I want you to know this and watch this in yourself this week.

Watch the way that you soothe yourself, whether it's positive or negative. Just notice how do you soothe yourself when you're feeling bored, when you're feeling depressed, empty, anxious, angry, unacknowledged, lonely, et cetera. How do you soothe yourself? It is positive things? Or negative?

Most of us have a mixture of both. By the way, at the filming of this video I still have some not so good things, such as eating chocolate and ice cream, that is harmful against my body. As well as doing hours of meditation, grounding out in nature, doing reiki. I have a mixture.

This is called being human. I want us to have a deep dive now for the next five weeks around honoring that self-care versus self-sabotage dance that we're all doing.

I know that you're doing it. If you clicked play on this video chances are you're a natural empath. You're already sensitive to the energy and trying to figure out how to cope with all this energetic overload. We're going to confront this head-on.

We're going to dive deep together. I can't wait to see you next week and hear what you think.

Comment below. Tell me what's coming up for you around this.

Do you have a story that you wanted to share, by the way? Did my story bring up some of yours? I would love to witness you in sharing your story, privately, just to honor you. We don't want to post all that out in social media and all over the place.

Send me an email back and let me know and I'd be happy to set up a share your story call so that we can hold space for you speaking your truth for the first time.

I know it's tough. I feel you but we're going to get through this together.

Are you ready for this? Five weeks. Five weeks. Let's do this. Self-care versus self-sabotage. Going to the dark side. Whoop, whoop. Shining light so that we can all grow together. I'm sending you so much love and I'll see you next week. Bye.

VictoriaWhitfield.com
Facebook.com/SenseiVictoriaWhitfield

Just for Today...

Watch the way that you soothe yourself.

Track what you do to soothe negative feelings, to observe if it’s positive self-care or negative self-sabotage behavior..

Notice how you feel at that moment - you're already healing!

-

Hello there. I am Sensei Victoria Whitfield, your business reiki master. And it's my joy to get to support empathic entrepreneurs and business owners like you in getting and staying grounded and clear in mind, body and business.

Welcome back to another installment of your weekly love letter from the dojo at naturalintuition.com and victoriawhitfield.com, my blog. These are your sources for channeled holistic stress management techniques and guidance for developing your natural intuition. Whether you're looking to improve the quality of your personal and professional life, let this love letter be your reminder that you are not alone and that together we can make that happen.

Let's schedule a chat, and see how I can help you...

The post Love Letters | Self Care vs. Self Sabotage – Part 1 of 5 appeared first on Sensei Victoria Whitfield.