Today I had coffee with a new friend, that found me through my blog.  He is doing research for a book he is writing on the mind/body connection and how it can have a profound effect on diseases in the body and our ability or inability to heal from them.

He contacted me because he came across an article I wrote about Primary and Secondary Food, and he wants to use me in his book as a result.

I have actually written many articles on this topic, several right here on this blog of course, and then also for other sites and publications.

Here are a few resources to them below, so if you haven’t been following along, you understand what I mean by Primary and Secondary Food:

Feeding Your Whole Being: Reach Optimal Health And Well-Being With Primary and Secondary Food

What’s Feeding You?

How To end The Cycle Of  Dieting

This friend and I, talked a lot about how the mind can affect the body. This really brought me the inspiration for this article I am writing now.

I want to be very clear about something. I am a Health and Lifestyle Empowerment Coach, as well as a Personal Trainer. I do not do these things to focus on getting people, or myself to “look” better as the primary purpose for changing old habits and replacing them with new ones. My primary purpose for doing what I do and living the way I live is to facilitate HEALING. I mean healing on every level: mind, body, and spirit.

Looking better is a by-product of healing. There are plenty of trainers and nutritionists out there who are perfectly happy with just focusing on the aesthetic part of you, and there are plenty of you who only care about the aesthetic part anyway. I however, am not interested in the aesthetic part of the human body, as a primary focus for eating right and exercising. I am more concerned with helping my clients heal, on every level, so that they can enjoy a fruitful life and optimal health and well-being.

Yes, the mind, body, and spirit, are all interconnected and they each effect each other. True transformation occurs, when we take a look at the WHOLE being, meaning all three of these areas. We must take a look at the WHOLE life and the WHOLE being, and from there I am able to help my clients identify the areas that are in need of their attention.

I have done the fitness competitions and the figure contests, and I have pretty much won them all.

I have been voted Best Looking, Prom Princess, Front and Center Cheerleader, Homecoming Court, Student Council, Class Vice President, Modeled in Fitness, been on TV, trained celebrities, blah, blah, etc.

I am here to tell you, that none of those things ever healed me or made me feel ok long-term. They were very temporary experiences of outside validation, and yes they were great…in the moment. Then the moment passed…as it always does and will. What I had to become aware of , was the deep longing beneath it all, that I had, to feel like I was loved and accepted and a part of something important in the world.

No award will ever bring us inner acceptance, inner peace and joy, self-love, and self-respect. No school can ever vote us “Worthy” in our own minds. These prizes such as feeling worthy, loving ourselves truly, and having compassion for ourselves and others, are an inside job, and come from taking a look at the WHOLE being and the WHOLE life, and working both from the outside in AND the inside out to heal on every level.

What I wish for you, and my clients, is to find what I have found. I now have a level of inner peace I never had before. No matter what is happening in my circumstances, I am always happy about who and what I am. I may be 5 pounds up or feeling low in energy one week, but I never forget to love myself before I do anything else. Today I do not abandon myself, and as a result, I get to live a life I love, in a body I love too. ( But of course, I am always a work in progress:)

I am looking forward to working more closely with my new friend, and contributing what I can to his masterpiece. It is a gift to cross paths with others out there, making a difference in the lives of others, just by sharing their experience, strength, and hope. For this I am grateful, and because of what I have been given…I go out into the world each day to pay it forward.

I hope you are loving yourselves, being gentle with yourselves, and opting to turn within for guidance, answers, and healing.

Thanks for being here with me today. Sending you so much love and light.

xoxo

Erin