Sarahjoy Marsh - Hunger, Hope, and Healing: A Yoga Approach to Reclaiming Your Relationship to Your Body and Food

Sarahjoy Marsh offers an important methodology to those impacted by disordered eatingone that creates connection, harmony, and synthesis in ones own being.

Melanie Klein, coeditor of Yoga and Body Image and cofounder of the Yoga and Body Image Coalition

In this compassionate, down-to-earth guide, Sarahjoy Marsh shares profound lessons learned from over twenty-five years of yoga practice, personal recovery, and successful 360-degree living. She gracefully integrates traditional yogic wisdom with modern psychological insight, and offers a much-needed road map to reconnecting with the healing powers of our innate life force.

Carol Horton, PhD, author of Yoga Ph.D. and coeditor of 21st Century Yoga

ABOUT THE BOOK

Yoga philosophy and practice are increasingly being used therapeutically to help people overcome disordered eating patternslike overeating, food addiction, and stress eatingand the resulting emotional distress they can cause. Sarahjoy Marsh offers a program using yoga to address food-centered behaviors and body image issues. She illuminates the nature of addiction and offers a methodical approach to recovery that is neither dogmatic nor rigid; rather, it is compassionate, hopeful, and deliberate.

Full of clear, empathic advice and photographs of the step-by-step practices, this book will help alleviate the isolation that people with food-oriented issues and body image problems feel; offer strategies for changing the behaviors; and give clear guidelines about the processes of recovery and the development of new life skills.

SARAHJOY MARSH is a yoga teacher and yoga therapist, and she has an MA in transpersonal counseling and art therapy. Her twenty-six years of experience in Eastern and Western studies includes the psychology of yoga, meditation, Ayurveda, and neuroscience. Committed to bridging yoga, psychotherapy, and social justice, Marsh founded the DAYA Foundation, a nonprofit yoga therapy center known for its integrated approach to yoga, mindfulness, and recovery. Her website is www.sarahjoyyoga.com.

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Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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2015 by Sarahjoy Marsh

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design

Cover illustration Shutterstock

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Chapter 6: Wild Geese from Dream Work by Mary Oliver. Copyright 1986 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Chapter 8: Excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, translation copyright 1984 by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Marsh, Sarahjoy.

Hunger, hope, and healing: a yoga approach for reclaiming your relationship to your body and food / Sarahjoy Marsh.

pages cm

eISBN 978-0-8348-2996-1 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-61180-193-4 (paperback)

1. Eating disorders Alternative treatment. 2. Yoga Therapeutic use. I. Title.

RC552.E18M3657 2014

616.8526062 dc23

2014014013

This book is dedicated to all those who courageously seek

to awaken from and through suffering to love again.

Also to Carmine, Gail, and Jim for your pivotal and

loving guidance during periods of suffering in my own life.

You provided light, hope, and confidence.

Contents

I N THE FALL OF 2010 MY ADMINISTRATIVE assistant, Warren Buss, gave me my phone messages for that day. Shambhala Publications called to inquire about your work with women. Theyd like to know if you would be interested in writing a book. Of course, Id be honored!

Three years later, I sent the manuscript to Beth Frankl at Shambhalas office. There are numerous people who deserve to be thanked for their support, without which this book would not have come to fruition.

First, the hundreds of courageous women who, since 2001, have attended the workshops, series, and retreats known as What Are You Hungry For? Yoga and the Psychology of Food and Body Image. These women registered for and attended a course or a weekend without the benefit of having met me through any published readings nor any readily available material on the Internet (which I have been slow to utilize). It is remarkably courageous to sign up for such an intimate and vulnerable event such as a retreat. Many women attended the retreats with no prior yoga experience. Doubly courageous! To those women, many of whom still walk this path together, and to those who have read this manuscript, and offered their hearts along the way, thank you! It is an honor to walk beside you.

Second, adding the undertaking of a book to an already full life cannot occur without the support of persons near and dear:

To my staff at the DAYA Foundation, I would not have been able to turn my attention to this project without your dedication to the yoga therapy programs we provide, the communities we serve, and the partnerships weve created. Thank you to Warren Buss for maintaining just about everything behind the scenes and, especially, for consistently backing up my computer files (something I am too forgetful about myself). To Kate Conwell, who came in just in the nick of time, for taking over the daily operations of studio coordination. Without your support both the book and the community of teachers and practitioners would have suffered. To Lilli Faville, who consistently held the front desk operations together, including walking my little handicapped dog in his wheelchair, and provided me with water, snacks, and assurance every day. To Kerstyn Olson, for your ongoing camaraderie and for always receiving my graphic design delegation so gracefully. To Chelsea Harper, for your groundwork as well as your birds-eye perspective and for living a life that is the art of grace and a role model to women everywhere. To Jess Jarris, for your vision and constancy. You see possibilities that have eluded or intimidated me. You make them compelling.

To my students at the yoga studio: thank you for your interest in the material in this book, on behalf of women everywhere. Whether you identified with the issues I have written about or not, your continuous expressions of curiosity, support, and joy were fuel for the writing process.

To the friends who have seen little of me in the last year, and who walked through the ups and downs of life events that occurred while writing this book, I am indebted to you for your patience with me. I look forward to resuming the camaraderie of life as the book moves into the hands of the publishers! A special thank you to Barney McDowell and Judith Roth for reading the first chapter I drafted, Fervency: Desire and Discipline, and for your enthusiastic responses. You fueled my own fervency and boosted my confidence that this book would work.

And to the most near and dear, my love, Jay Gregory, for your immediate delight about this book project and your ongoing support. As well, thank you for making the meals, tending the garden, building the shed, managing the small remodel with much patience, taking on the care and feeding of the household including many pets, and for reading pages of the book while barbecuing dinner. Thank you also for contributing your personal and professional wisdom to my writing process as well as to the content, especially the sections on anxiety, shame, and behavior change. Im honored to have you as my love, my friend, and my companion. And to the boys, Jason and Ryan, thank you for your patience during school breaks when my homework continued and I was unable to hang out with you.