Conscious Wellness has two openings for health consultation and counseling beginning Summer 2016.I use a holistic framework to educate my clients about how and what to eat in order to feel energized, grounded and well nourished. I help them to create habits that support their health and wellness goals. This includes counseling and education around holistic nutrition, meal planning and the connection between food and mood. I help my clients to identify the core values in their lives and to understand how emotional eating can affect the realization of their goals. I help my clients develop strategies around food that support their vision for wellness in a meaningful and sustainable way.

I coach my clients on creating the life they want within the life they have by bringing consciousness to their health. I help them bring awareness to their daily habits and determine whether their habits nourish or deplete. I help them find joy within the fullness of their lives.

I will support and coach you in achieving your health and wellness goals using simple techniques you can incorporate into your daily life. I will help you to identify what is most meaningful in your life and help you make your self-care a priority.
Sessions are available in person in Santa Fe, NM or by phone or Skype.

Contact Francie now to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.

It plays a role in our personal and cultural history.  It informs our biology and genetic expression.  It triggers powerful memories and holds negative and positive associations.  It has a strong place in the rituals of our seasons, and our day to day lives.  Food provides us with a wealth of sensation, pleasure, creativity, nutrients, health, energy, and metaphor.

The choices we make around food are powerful indicators of our relationship to self, namely our attunement with our own needs, our sense of self-worth, our sense of lack and security, our experience of empowerment or disempowerment, and even our relationship with our mothers!

Our behaviors around food can highlight the inner experiences, beliefs, or feelings that are driving us.  Most of the time, these are unconscious to us.  Food is primal and has been apart of our lives from the beginning.  Literally as our bodies were forming within our mothers’ wombs we are being nourished by the foods she ate and those flavors and nutrients and even smells were coming in through the placenta and building a foundation for our own relationship with food.  Breastmilk by mom is mutable and shifting to meet baby’s needs from morning to night and throughout the months of nursing.  Formula is not mutable, but static in its composition, only the amount given changes for baby.

Solid foods are introduced in the container of our relationship to our caregivers and family of origin. Are meal times pleasurable for baby?  Or stressful?  Is baby given appropriate foods at the appropriate developmental stage?  The stress of a meal can be internal (too much food, too complex, too soon; or not enough food) or it can be external (is there tension in the family? Does it feel safe to baby to explore food with mouth and fingers?)

Family meals can lay additional foundations as children grow up. Is there enough food?  Is poverty an issue?  Do family members get along?  How is food viewed in the family?  Is the family mindlessly eating in front of the television and not talking to one another directly?  Is there a shared meal from which everyone partakes?  Is the children’s food separate from the adults?  Is the food beautiful?  Tasty? A celebration?  A chore?

The culture has its role as well. Eat more of this, less of that.  This food will kill you, this food will save you.  Lose weight. Gain weight.  Try and attain an ever shifting and impossible ideal by controlling your relationship with food and your body. Women and men are subjected to this onslaught.  We are all told to be beautiful according to media’s standards, which have nothing to do with being healthy, or culturally diverse.

As we grow up we experience life and as a result of our experiences we make decisions. We decide whether we are lovable or not, whether we are safe, whether we are worthy of love and kindness by others, whether to hide our bodies or exploit them to get what we need, whether we belong or don’t belong and how we feel about all of it.  This is normal, to make such decisions.  We are human.  Life is messy and we are all doing the very best we can.

One day, though, you can begin to take stock. You can begin to reflect and notice your behaviors and investigate what decisions you did make about yourself.  And sure it may have seemed logical at the time.  But those limiting beliefs are not serving you anymore.  Believing you are unlovable, leads only to being unlovable.  When we can forgive ourselves for believing that, with understanding and compassion for how we drew such a conclusion, then we are free to investigate being lovable.  And if we are lovable, than it follows that we are also worthy of great care and consideration.  The person who can best supply that care and consideration?  It’s you.

Here are 8 key points when it comes to using food as a gateway:

1. Don’t be analytical.
   Just listen to yourself as you would listen to your best friend, or your child.  Nobody feels better being analyzed.  If you think you already know what is going on, try and drop that story and listen deeper.  Chances are there is more vulnerability there than you might expect and analyzing yourself is not listening.  Stay open and curios.  Explore.
   
2. Don’t do it alone.
   Find a qualified therapist or friend who knows how to listen and reflect without judgment.  There is so much judgment in our culture regarding food, it is critical to find our way out of that mindset.  We can’t help but integrate it some because we are apart of the culture.  Working with another person to explore your own relationship to food can create enough space so that you can steer clear of those judgments and stay open and curious and kind.
   
3. Consider that you are the expert on yourself.
   You know your history, you know what your life experiences have felt like.  You were there, no one else.  You are your own best advocate and ally.  Don’t dismiss what you know to be true for yourself because an “expert” says otherwise. Food is more than macro and micronutrients.  It is a metaphor and a representation of many events and moments and meanings.  Each person is unique and each person’s history matters.
   
4. Take it slow.
   One step at a time.  Small awarenesses and small changes have the best effect over time.  Let go of finding the magical solution.  Let go of the idea that if you just did (blank) then you’d be (blank).  You’re on a journey.  This is your precious journey and it’s not about trying to attain some ideal.  This is about you and your discovery and learning what you came into this life to learn.
   
5. Explore your roots.
   Look into your lineage, your history and discover where you come from.  What is the history of your people?  What’s your tribe?  What have been the strengths and the challenges your people have faced?  What is the health history? Take it further than your family or origin.  Your roots are deep, no matter who you are.  Your family of origin story is important and deeply significant and you are apart of so much more.
   
6. Create.
   Cook your own food.  Or create in other ways.  Sew.  Paint. Sculpt.  Write.  Grow a garden.  You decide.  Get in touch with your creative self.  Don’t stop yourself before you start because you don’t know what to do.  Start with what you know even if it means coloring like you did when you were a kid.  No one has to know.  Just start and it will take you somewhere.  Be willing to go.  This creative part of you is a resource.  It is a safe place to lean on when you need help.  Nurture it, give it room to breathe.
   
7. Begin to notice the beauty around you.
   Pay attention to what you see as beautiful.  Is it a tree outside your window?  The shape of a cloud in the sky?  A shaft of sunlight?  The color of your bedspread?  Start noticing the beauty and train yourself to look for it every day.  This will shift the habit of looking for the problem, or the mess.  Let yourself see the beauty and it will start to heal you.
   
8. Practice gratitude.
   Be grateful for what you have.  Be grateful for your next breath.  It’s the small things.  Be grateful and let that build inside of you.  When we are grateful, we cannot be in lack and we will not need to fill ourselves up unnecessarily with food because we will already be full.  In gratitude we are more likely to respond accurately to ourselves, because we are no longer in an unconscious state.  Practicing gratitude brings us into the present moment and brings us conscious of what is right before us.
   

This is one way to move into self-discovery. There are many ways, and this is a powerful one.  The reason you do this is not because you aren’t good enough now, or because you need to work on issues or get better at life.  You do this because you matter.  Absolutely, you matter. And you are fascinating and your story is interesting and you will find that it never ends. There is always more to discover about yourself when you are willing to look under the rocks and travel the distance.  You’re amazing.  You’re worth it.  You’ll see.

The choices we make based on that information is the next step.  Mind you, I am certainly not promoting perfection or idealism here.  It is completely important to have flexibility and fluidity, especially with diet and lifestyle.  In fact, the rigid voice inside that allows for zero wiggle room, may not be the voice to ultimately listen to or take at face value.  

The perfectionist inside is not the boss, she is just highlighting how we’ve tried to manage our fear and vulnerability. Conscious wellness is not about living and eating perfectly.  It is about knowing yourself and honoring that relationship.Going out to dinner and having some wine with friends might be totally worth it for the positive benefits of social time and fun and laughter.  It might be completely appropriate to do this and take the cost that a few drinks might do to our health to have the benefit of a good time.  But maybe this isn’t the rule because there might be a day where physically you are already stressed, say from too little sleep or not enough nutrients, or exposure to illnesses or other stressors.  In that case, the cost might not be worth the drinks.  So you see, we are not static either and it is always worth it to take account of the context of things, rather than make decisions or “rules” in a vacuum and call that health.

Building trust with ourselves is an ongoing dynamic willingness to relate to ourselves.It is the opportunity to master ourselves in relationship to whatever task the world offers us, from the very small choices to the very big challenges.  Who we are is a fluid, breathing organism, affecting and being effected by the environment in which we live.  We are not meant to master each task with perfection like some outdated achievement model.  We are meant to discover who we are, and to continue exploring the depths of our Being, so that we can ultimately be living in a harmonious way.  Through listening inwardly, we build trust in who we are and choose ever more subtly this deeper alignment.  

Conscious Wellness isn’t about having perfect bodies, or even perfect health.  It is about really and truly being yourself, at the deepest level you can and being willing to continue on, as Rumi says, “to flow down and down into ever widening rings of being.”