- Self help guide to eating disorder recovery for adult women
Healing Your Hungry Heart at Amazon.com
available August, 2011
Welcome.
Mindfulness practices are extraordinarily helpful tools for living well, regardless of conditions around you and challenges within you. After using them myself and sharing them with patients for many years I decided to devote some time and space to exploring them in public with this blog.
In my private practice treating adults with eating disorders we do deep work specific to the internal experience and history of the person. This is necessary for solid healing. But during the healing process, when feelings can become quite painful and intense, the person needs to stay awake, aware and bear her feelings. In this aspect of recovery work patients find mindfulness practices as a kind of life line that helps them remain present rather than sink into eating disorder behaviors.
Mindfulness practices, however, go far beyond the confines of eating disorder recovery needs. Over the years I’ve come to accept Marion’s Woodman’s words as wise words when she said,
“Healing is a coming to wholeness. A person can go on breathing without really living, or even die, if he or she is cured, but not healed.”
Mindfulness practices allow the opportunity for you to become whole. Doing the practices is a journey and a way of living that you can choose to bring into your life. The consequences are profound. They are somehow subtle and roaring at the same time.
So in this blog I’d like us to talk together about what the practices are, what you actually use, how you think and feel about them, what your experiences are when you use them and how they affect your life.
Mindfulness practices are simple, like using a pencil. You learn how to hold a pencil, sharpen a pencil, make marks on paper with it and even use an eraser. Your heart and soul, your body and mind, your discipline and values, the choices you make in your life determine how you use that pencil. Will you write a great novel or shopping lists or draw engineering schematics or sketch portraits or draw up legal briefs? Will you doodle or write letters or plays or comedies or little jokes for children?
Mindfulness practices are something like that. They are tools that you use. As you use them you develop skills you might never have had without those practices. And those skills lead you to opportunities that you might never have had.
As you use the practices you deepen. You become more present and more whole. You make choices based on a different criterion. You use that new criteria to meet your new opportunities. And over time, you find yourself in a new life, one that you find well worth living.
I hope that we can share our stories about this process on this blog, from wherever we are on this mindful journey. By all means write in.
warm regards,
Joanna
Joanna Poppink, MFT
psychotherapist
10573 West Pico Blvd. #20
Los Angeles, CA 90064
(310) 474-4165
http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com
joanna@poppink.com
To contact Joanna, to make a psychotherapy appointment in Los Angeles or to arrange a video Skype consultation, write: joanna@poppink.com or phone (310) 474-4165.
