I have taken Robin Williams death pretty hard.  I have definitely cried more than once.
I felt like I grew up with this man, that he was a part of my family, and brought my family together through his movies (I have seen Birdcage more times than I care to admit). Here is a man who brought so much joy to the world and who secretly struggled with bringing that same joy into his own life.  I relate to that on so many levels.

Part of being a counselor is about showing up. I have tried to show up more authentically in this past year in particular because I also hide behind a wall, a facade of put together, confident, happy, and thriving. When I was in Grad School in therapy, my therapist actually asked me to draw that wall.  What did it look like? What was it made out of?

To my surprise the wall I drew was made out of glass. She responded when I was done that it was interesting my wall was made out glass because then couldn't people see me? I hide yet I want to be seen. I want to see and observe life but I fear participating. I have dealt with depression most of my life. I have seen members in my family deal with depression most of their life. I have gone to the depths of my soul mucked around, lied on the carpet of my room in my mother's house for two weeks straight before, and I always come back .

I have experienced how depression takes you away from other people, it puts you in a tiny black box where perspective is hard to be seen. I am lucky enough to have a few close individuals and a mother who were always there for long phone calls, crying, and telling me it is time to get out of bed. I have had to come to terms that the hole of depression never really goes away. Some try to fill that hole with medication, some use supplements, or food, or drugs, but it is still always there.

As part of being a nutritional counselor, I know I can use my experience with depression as a strength. I can sit with my clients in the muck, in the dark, in the depth of their soul and see the beauty and wisdom that is there. I see often in my work how so many are tying to fill this void, this hole with food. It unfortunately can't be filled with food, trust me I have also tried.

I share my experience with depression and that it still hovers around me from time to time to connect with you my reader. You are not alone in your struggles. I believe so many, including myself, were shocked about Robin William's death because we just had no idea the struggles and the depth of depression he went through on a daily basis. I believe it was a triumph that he lived for as long as he could with a secret dark cloud hanging over his head and a smile on his face.

I may not know you, but I welcome anyone to reach out. I have always found the thing that brings me out of my own darkness and into the light is connecting with others and lifting our spirits together.

I have a difficult time with endings.  Endings of a class, of a life, of friendships, of a good time, of a day, of a meal.  I still think about clients after the session is over, I still think about conversations that I have had even though they are long gone, and when I have to say goodbye to my mother when visiting her its like someone has died (water works all over the place).  When I think about it, I have been this way since I was a kid. I always felt so empty after a fun sleepover and then all of a sudden that situation was over and I was back home.  I have been trying to pay more attention to this difficulty with endings through my meals recently.  During a meal, even a mindful meal, I am thoroughly enjoying myself.  Taking long luxuriously meals on the weekends that last almost an hour, chewing fully, tasting, smelling.  And then the plate is empty (and yes sometimes I will lick my plate clean if the meal was that good).  Today I sat with the joy I felt while eating and enjoying an experience of my life and I began to cry.  Sure the judgmental thoughts came up, "seriously Stephanie?  You're crying over an empty plate?"  But that empty plate meant so much more to me and it is amazing what we can realize and track through our patterns with food.

Let me back track for a second.  We all have our upper limits of happiness.  Throughout our lives and the disappointments and joys we have encountered we have set an unconscious or conscious limit to how much happiness we believe our bodies can hold.  In the past my limit was pretty low and feeling any twinge of joy made me squirm.  Keep your expectations low and you won't get disappointed right?  Wrong!  So over the past couple of years through graduate school I have slowly raised my upper limits of happiness.  Yet, I am still working with how to let the joy run through me like a stream and know that the joy will come again.  Take my meals for example.  I know that I get to eat again as soon as I feel hunger and yet after experiencing such pure joy of feeding myself nourishment it is enough to send me overboard and not truly know how to stay in my body with the immense amount of gratitude I have for filling myself up.  And then this extends to, how else can I fill myself up throughout the day? 

I offer this experiment to you.  Notice how you feel after a meal.  Do you feel empty?  Energized?  Joyful?  Sad?  This can begin to give you clues to how you end other things in life or how you let other things full you up.  And please let me know what you find out I would love to hear!

Coming into my final year of Graduate School, I am having to research and think about what I want to write my final thesis paper about.  I am currently doing a lot of research on the enteric nervous system (basically our gut).  Our gut has its entirely own nervous system, its own way of working, basically its own brain.  It can run entirely separate and on its own without any input from the brain and the spinal cord.  In one research study they took out the colon of animals who had already died and kept their guts in a saline solution.  When blown into the colon it blew back because of the increase pressure and still engaged in peristaltic action. 

I find this fascinating.  Why you may ask?  We put such emphasis on the brain in our head, the right and left hemispheres, how to utilize the brain, how to try and keep it quiet, but we often don't ask the question what brain are we talking about?  When you tune into your body when you are hungry, your mind could be telling you "I really want to some ice cream" and your gut could say "I think we need more protein today."  Both have some truths, both are giving a message, and neither is wrong to choose.  Yet the fact that we have a whole different system telling us something else goes unrecognized.  Our body is giving us useful information and perhaps we should be listening to our guts much more often than we do. 

Yet, I will further contradict myself.  Think about the old saying "gut intuition."  I would like to reframe and redefine what intuition is.  I truly don't believe in it anymore.  Intuition is nothing until you check it out.  Because we have two different brains, our brain in our head can be triggered with fear and then we feel fear in our body and our central nervous system is activated and the gut is affected and then we think that we are having a gut intuition about something when really we are triggered over past events or just having a human response to a situation. 

I would like to explore perhaps not listening to one brain more than another, but how do we integrate these two parts of ourselves?  If every symptom, feeling, illness, is a message from the body then can we slow down enough to listen to the message trying to be relayed and where is it coming from?  I will continue to update in my progress and musings about my thesis and would love input as I try to create a new paradigm of bodily integration.