Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body

My next workshop is Saturday, October 3rd at Oasis Day Spa in Dobbs Ferry.

Tired of struggling with your eating?
Would you like to have a peaceful relationship with food?

In this workshop you will learn what really drives your eating and how to stop using food for comfort, nurturing, and stress relief.

It takes a lifetime to build our eating habits. Changing this dynamic requires time, patience, and a willingness to do things differently.

You can have a relaxed relationship with food and a healthy fit body.

It's possible.

This is not a weight loss program; it is a system of self-care that will assist you in making real and long lasting positive changes in the way that you deal with your body and food issues.

Time: 9:30 am - 12 noon
Cost: $45
Advance payment required. Click here.

What's the Real Secret Tracy?

This is a letter to Tracy Anderson (trainer to Madonna and Gwenyth Paltrow)

Hi Tracy,
Well congratulations on hooking a nice guy. What’s your gain is Madonna’s loss but doesn’t she have more than enough of everything already? She’ll find someone else to run the Raising Malawi Charity but she’s convinced that she’ll never find another you. From what I read in Page Six in the New York Post on Monday you live with her wherever she goes in the world so that she never misses a workout. Now that’s dedication. It’s also called, I’ve got nothing else to do with myself but obsess about what I look like all day long. I know the disease. I used to have it.

They also said in Page Six that you revealed your secrets on how “Madonna molds her astonishing body.” You said: "We train for two hours six days a week. We do 45 minutes of dance aerobics, followed by work on muscle tone, flexibility and definition.”

Wow, Tracy what a reveal! You gave away your big training secret! Do you also have them cut their carbs and not eat sugar because I don’t know if anyone told you but that’s also a way to lose weight.

So working out six days a week for two hours really does the trick? Who’d a thunk it. I had no idea. Thanks for the tip Tracy. I’m going to get right on it but before I do, can you tell me the secret behind the secret? How anyone over 30 can stand to do that much exercise that often without dropping dead from exhaustion? Will you tell us that secret??? Do you put amphetamines into their water bottles? Or is there some other trick that you use? I’d love to know Tracy because right now, if I can get through 15 minutes of cardio I consider it a really good day.

Well, good luck with your job of making skinny people even skinnier and I’ll let you know how it goes--you know, using your “secret” for weight loss.

Your Friend,
Cathy

A Remembrance of Bathing Suits Past

It was the Friday of the 4th of July weekend and I decided to stop into Old Navy to return a pair of size 8 shorts that were too small. Now most women will understand that there was not an option to just go in and buy the larger size—that was Old Navy’s problem. How dare they change the sizing I thought. They have some nerve--they just lost a customer. As I continue my walk through the cavernous space and I come across a hot pink bikini that catches my eye and something about the cut of it makes me think, “maybe there’s a chance I can get away with it.” Red Flag #1 – if you’re contemplating wearing a bikini and the phrase “get away with it” comes into your mind at any point during said contemplation you need to put the thing down and walk away. You don’t get away with a bikini, you can either wear it or you can’t.

And yet, there I was in the Old Navy at Herald Square contemplating buying a hot pink bikini. I could feel that old denial that used to operate when I was much heavier rearing it’s head and convincing me, it will be OK this could look OK.

I quickly walk to the counter to make the exchange.

It is at this point that I would like to introduce you to Anthony. Anthony was the poor, unfortunate, employee that happened to be working the register that fateful Friday who also made the mistake of saying to me when I put the bathing suit on the counter: “will that be all?” When it comes to my body issues I have struggled with a kind of turrets my whole life. It’s something I definitely have in check but every once in a while it gets the best of me and when I answered Anthony, I couldn’t believe what I was saying. “Yes, that will be all and can you believe that I actually think that my fat ass is going to fit into this bathing suit?” Anthony tries to hide his surprise but letting out a chuckle and then says “Oh, no I’m sure it’s going to look great, Anthony knows.” What he doesn’t know is not to challenge the angry monster. “Really, I said? Then can you give me your cell phone number so that when I try it on at home and it looks terrible I can call you and scream?” I knew that I crossed the line with that one. Anthony laughs again and responds with: I’m sure it’s going to look great.” I realized that if I pushed the conversation any further, I’d find myself being escorted out of the store by security so I just said, “make sure you give me the receipt and don’t put it in the bag. I want to be able to return this when it doesn’t fit.” I had to have the last word.

I left the store, bathing suit in hand and went to meet up with my friend Genie. Genie is 5’8” and weighs about 115lbs. but she watches every morsel that she puts in her mouth and obsesses over gaining an ounce. It was good that I was meeting with her and not another friend who would try to take Anthony’s side in this. I wanted someone who would really get it and validate me. I didn’t want to hear another version of Anthony’s lies.

After I told her the story she gave me the following suggestion: after you paid for the suit, you should have gone into the dressing room and tried it on. Then you could have walked out onto the sales floor and screamed over to him “hey Anthony, the bathing suit doesn’t look so great does it?” Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it Anthony? Right? Look at me Anthony, the shit doesn’t fit. No this is not what looking good looks like Anthony. I told you, didn’t I?”

Genie and I were both roaring in the restaurant thinking of this scenario and I kept thinking, if only I had the nerve.

I went home after that and shoved the bathing suit into a drawer for four weeks because I really, really wanted Anthony to be right. So who do you think was right in the end? Anthony or Me? The answer is: I was! OK, maybe each of us was a little right. The top looked fine, but below the waist not so good. What Anthony needs to know but doesn’t is that I wore that bikini anyway with my sarong and yes, I looked pretty good.

Surrender Dorothy

The truth is, I became a life coach because I am passionate about helping people to get out of their own way and get what they want in their lives whether it’s a different career, relationship, or to stop torturing themselves about not having the body they want.

Before life coaching I did marketing and public relations for 8 years. I couldn’t be happier about getting out of that field. By the time I started my coaching education, I wanted nothing to do with marketing and PR and yet, here I am one year into my business desperately reading through marketing coaching blogs in an effort to learn how to build my platform, drive traffic to my website and blog, increase my google ranking, etc. This could not be more uninspiring. Why am I so pissed off and depressed lately? I'm not doing what I want to do--I spend most of my day engaging in boring admin all day. Exactly what I was trying to get away from by getting out of marketing!

But I guess the really disturbing stuff is that all of this bullshit admin is interfering with my writing which I like to think is sometimes helpful and/or inspiring to the readers of my blog. And also I do not have the time to practice the energetic techniques that I give to my clients to help them to manifest the things that they want in their lives. To do the work that I do, I need to spend a certain amount of time inside my own head where I receive inspiration and epiphany and when I’m making lists of keywords for my website, I’m not in my happy place.

And then there’s the helping others aspect of the equation which is, for me, the most important part. If I’m so wrapped up in promoting my business/workshops then when do I have the time available to be there for my friends and family members who are struggling? Although right now, I am struggling. Struggling with finding the time and inspiration to keep writing, struggling with the learning curve on building my own website and figuring out how to drive traffic to it, and how to make facebook really work for my business instead of it being the useless time-waster that it’s been since I signed up for it, and a myriad of other things that ultimately I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST IN.

I am an intuitive and spiritual life coach that helps people to manifest their dreams, not an internet marketer and I totally didn’t sign on for this.

And in the midst of the frustration and anger comes a voice: “Within everything that is difficult lies an opportunity.” Of course I know that but ranting about how unhappy I am about it is so much more alluring. But when the truth makes an appearance, it always breaks me out of my trance. And if that wasn’t enough there were the words of my wise friend Julie: “This is the part of any business that is necessary but hard. This is why a lot of small businesses fail. People can’t deal with doing the marketing work to get themselves or their product out there.”

If I’m helping people to launch their businesses then having experienced the rough parts myself can only help me in the work that I do. Oh, that’s right, this is the human experiment part. This isn’t the first time I’ve been a participant in that.

And then like a gift from above I find the wisdom of Mark Silver. I know that this like every other trial I have been through exists to bring me to a deeper place in myself that maybe I would not have been able to get to any other way. It was so random how I found him but I think somehow like all of those important messages we get in life, he found me. www.heartofbusiness.com
here’s what I was reading from his blog that made me know that in fact, I’m in exactly the right place doing exactly the right thing and getting exactly the right results:

When you don’t know what to do, instead of trying to force your way past your ignorance, trying to desperately figure out the solution as the deadline looms closer and closer, realize that you’ve reached the Divine fence of ignorance.

You have a choice: you can either push, claw, dig, or climb your way past that fence out into traffic, or you can return to Love.

Often when we’re asking for guidance, we’re asking for what to do, how to do it, and when. These are not useful questions for guidance.

Love and connection are about relationship. Instead of asking what to do about choosing your web design, for instance, trying asking in your heart:

“What would a healthy relationship with my web design feel like?”

For instance, perhaps your relationship with web design is needing more patience. Or more love. Or more compassion. See what your heart shows you. And what actions naturally arise out of that healthier relationship.

So there’s nothing left to do really but surrender as I ask myself the question, what would a healthy relationship with my marketing efforts for my business feel like?

I’ll answer that in private and get back to you.

Thank you Mark Silver for your compassion and your genius. You saved my day.

And Now for the Uphill Portion of the Journey

Sometimes I find myself holding onto this book for dear life and reading the passages over and over again. It’s become my personal bible. And it’s times like right now that I am so grateful to Steve Young for writing this book.

There comes a time in life’s journey when you’re trying to manifest something/build a business/advance your career/make art/write a book/raise a decent kid/be a good partner and all of a sudden you find yourself at what I like to refer to as “the uphill portion of the journey.” Here are a few observations I’ve made about the uphill:

1. It sucks. Plain and simple. There’s nothing fun about it.

2. It’s rough terrain and you’re probably not wearing the right shoes so you continually feel as though you’re going to fall into the abyss.

3. You will need the emotional endurance of a team of sled dogs to get through it.

4. You will need faith: in yourself and your vision.

5. There will be crying. Lots of it.

Unfortunately, many people misinterpret the uphill as failure and give up too soon.

If you are toying with giving up I urge you to read Great Failures of the Extremely Successful.

Thank you Steve, for letting us in on the struggles behind the success and for telling the world that there’s no such thing as an overnight sensation.

Treats! The non-food kind

I’ve not been posting very frequently because I kind of got into the pattern of writing about pretty intense stuff on my blog and I need to realize that --it’s just a blog and it can be about day to day non-earth shattering realizations once in a while.

So here we are, it’s Friday, August 28th and it’s raining here in NY.
Kind of a drag that’s it’s raining but in a way I’m relieved. Since I don’t have a lap top I’m often confined to my home office in front of my mac staring out the window wondering when I can be done with it so that I can just get out and feel the sun and the air and smell the flowers. So on nice days, I feel a lot of pressure to get finished with my work so that I can get outside. I was supposed to go for training to build my new website today and the class was cancelled which left me with a big block of unscheduled time and I couldn’t be happier.

In my Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body workshops one of the exercises we do is to make a treat list--things that just thinking about doing them makes you smile. The purpose of this is to identify and/or get back in touch with the things that we used to do for fun and the things we’d like to do to relax if we only had the time. We’re all so busy running around all day that we forget to do nice things for ourselves. It’s such a great way to decompress and just bring some joy into your life--especially when you’re under a lot of stress. The function of this exercise is to achieve some balance. Because if you’re doing one nice thing to take care of yourself each day, you’re a lot less likely to come home from work and plow through a pint of Ben and Jerry’s or drink 5 glasses of wine at dinner and pass out on the couch at 9:00. When we give ourselves the things we really want, we don’t have to “settle for what we can get.” Doing one treat per day for yourself keeps you from getting seriously depleted.


The one item that shows up on my treat list over and over is having a day that is completely unscheduled without a to-do list. It turns out that because of the turn of events, today ended up being one of those days for me--what a gift! I do only what I feel inspired to do and I do it when I want to do it. Can I say that when I take these days I am often way more productive than I am on my “get down to work” days. just the idea that I have 8 or 10 hours to do things in the order that I want to do them and that if I don’t want to continue with something I can just put it away and start on something else is extremely energizing to me. I don’t have to be anywhere and if I get a spontaneous call from a friend to meet for coffee or take a walk I can say yes because I’m deadline free that day. This is the ultimately luxury for me. I have a deep need to create my life minute to minute and something about being on a non-schedule puts me in touch with my deepest creativity and my most powerful thinking.

So dear readers, what’s on your treat list? Here’s a little soul-feeding exercise from Feed Your Soul workshop: Make a list of 10 things that just thinking about doing them makes you smile--they don’t have to be extravagant or cost any money at all. And then do one every day! Keep in mind some of the things on the list can be repeated and some won’t be things you can do very often but it’s good to have a mix. Some of mine are:
taking a jasmine scented bubble bath
instead of the usual lunch break - fire up my favorite play list on my ipod and take a 30 minute walk to a favorite place
Go out for cappuccino and get lost in the latest issue of O Magazine for an hour
call a friend I haven’t spoken to in a long time
Go to a Saturday matinee
Take a drive with my friend Julie in her convertible to no where in particular with the radio blasting.
Go to a fancy hotel bar and have a fancy cocktail after work

I’d love to hear yours!

I Wish I Were...

I hadn’t given this any thought in a long time--but last week while having dinner with a friend we got to talking about envy. I had almost forgotten about the big destructive fantasy that I carried around for all of my 20’s and most of my 30’s which was that everyone else’s life was easier and more glamorous than mine. There were tons of people having fun, going to parties, walking red carpets, being on soap operas, jetting off to distant locales and I was living in a tiny box on the Upper East Side of Manhattan being a temp secretary and trying to have a dance career. Of course I only compared myself to celebrities or very accomplished people, not the people I came into contact with in my regular life.

I was completely sure that these people’s lives were one delightful moment after the next, everything they did was in the flow and most of all...THE WORLD CAME TO THEM. They didn’t have to ask, chase, pursue, follow up or present. They didn’t do the calling--people called them. “They” just sat around their infinity pools with their friends while their private chefs made organic, low-cal delicious meals for them and waited for the next opportunity to arrive. Kind of like the show Entourage but without the obnoxious Jeremy Piven character.

For years, every time I cleaned my toilet my first thought was : “Look at my fabulous life, cleaning the bathroom! I’ll bet that Jennifer Anniston isn’t cleaning any toilets today!” As a matter of fact the only time she’s even held a toilet bowl brush is when it was being used as a prop. “How come she gets to not have to clean her bathroom and I’m standing here with my arm in the toilet? why her and not me?”

Whose music was I listening to back then? Patti LaBelle. Of course she has an incredible voice but when I played her CD’s I wasn’t focusing on the music but the fabulous life she must be living. What with the legions of adoring fans, the millions of dollars from all the hit records, the concerts, the traveling first class everywhere and then I would think: “when will someone come along and lift me from the bowels of obscurity and release me from my mundane existence!”

A certain NYC psychic that I saw in the 90’s told me when I called to make an appt. that she only had evening slots available. I remember grabbing one even though it was very inconvenient for me and thinking, wow, she’s totally in demand that’s amazing. What must it be like to have your phone ringing off the hook with people who want an appointment with you. When I went to see her, you would have thought that I was not even fit to breathe her air. Not because of the way she acted, because of the way I perceived things.

The scenarios I used to torture myself about other people’s wonderful lives were endless.

Every time I would take the bus down Fifth Avenue I would fantasize about the awesome lives of the people who lived in those buildings and I would think, “if only I could live in one of those apartments one day.”

We’ve all heard the Rolling Stones lyric: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.” I had the great fortune of being a personal trainer to the very rich. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. I got to hang out in those sprawling Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartments that I envied from the street. What was going on inside them was nothing like what I had imagined. I saw a lot of misery behind those facades .

One of my clients who lived in a beautiful penthouse apartment was also the author of a very spiritual book. I had read the book before I met her and actually had wondered about what an incredible life she must have living in a fabulous Manhattan penthouse and being a rich and famous author.

My fantasy of what her life was and the reality of what her life was could not have been more different. The first thing I got to learn was that even though her book was meant to heal and enlighten, she was very depressed and angry about her own life. She was constantly giving workshops in her apartment and renting rooms out to student boarders because she was so terrified about money. She ate the same dinner almost every night. A yam and a salad. She didn’t go out to dinner even though she could well afford it because she was socially awkward and didn’t really enjoy spending time with other people. She took three subways out to Queens every Thursday to spend the day with her elderly mother. She had terrible relationships with her children. Basically, she was a hot mess.

I worked with a lot of other people living what appeared to be beautiful lives of privilege that were actually very unhappy existences.

If you look at Jennifer Anniston’s life as a whole, she’s got a great career but I’m sure now that she’s 40 she’d trade it all to have someone to come home to every night.

The NYC psychic I later found out through a mutual friend, only had evening appointments because she worked during the day as a receptionist in a Dr.’s office. She eventually got divorced and had to move out of her swanky loft in tribeca.

Patti LaBelle endured the tragedy of losing her three sisters to cancer. She was diagnosed with diabetes in 1995 and in 2000 divorced her husband of 30 years. Last year she had a melt down on stage at one of her concerts.

I wouldn’t want to trade places with any of these women.

What I learned after taking the blinders off:

There is no such thing as a free ride.
Anything worth having takes a lot of sacrifice and hard work.
Money and fame are the biggest enablers of addiction.
There’s no such thing as an overnight sensation--no one ever talks about the 10 years the person worked at their craft before they finally got a break.
Don’t ever judge anyone’s situation, you never know what’s REALLY going on.
Everyone, I mean EVERYONE is struggling with something.


Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Envy is ignorance.” My Mother often reminded me to be thankful for all the things I don’t have that I don’t want. Turns out that they’re both absolutely right.