Intuitive Eating is a non-diet approach that helps you to reconnect with your unique cues for nourishment, helping to heal your relationship to food, movement, and living fully. And this experience of growth and connection is unique for every body.

While there are plenty of books and podcasts about Intuitive Eating that can be helpful, the Intuitive Eating Principles, the daily practices of reconnecting with with your intuition, your Belly-brain awareness, is a somatic experience that can be made more conscious and accessible when it’s supported with a relational and developmentally-informed approach.

Intuitive Eating is about progress, not perfection.

Intuitive Eating is about reclaiming your Life Force.

Baby steps, no quick fixes.

Curiosity, Compassion & Care.

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Are you a therapist interested in deepening your awareness of the importance of inviting clients into body-based practices supported by trauma-informed research and developmental movement patterns?

Did you know that relational attunement sets the stage for biological functioning? In our upcoming 5hrs Ethics CE workshop Integrating Somatic Therapy into Intuitive Eating for Relational Nourishment, counselors will learn more about the psychoeducation of nervous system functioning & the rhythm of firing and relative refractory period of the vagus nerve for deep nourishment.

Learning about these anatomical process increases ethical competency by gaining a deeper understanding of the science of the vagus nerve and how relational somatic practices can affect bodily functioning and Intuitive Eating.

The most recent debate about polyvagal theory—sparked by the back-and-forth between Stephen Porges, founder of polyvagal theory, and Paul Grossman, a researcher and outspoken critic of polyvagal theory—has a lot of well-meaning helpers offering their support of the theory as well as others pointing out what they see lacking.

Read Porges’ February 2026 statement here

Read Grossman’s February 2026 statement here

While these Porges/Grossman statements could feel either/or, you might want to read more a more expansive, science-informed, and lived-experience take on how we can mobilize, move, express ourselves in authentic, bold, productive ways:

The originator of Chi for Two® Dee Wagner explains more in depth in a recent blog post. I invite you to check out Dee’s take on the debate, which is embodied in the Chi for Two method, in these two ways:

• Instagram post for some bite-sized words, or

• see the Chi for Two blog post here. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section on the blog post!

From the inevitable day-to-day stress, to when the world feels particularly more politically intense, exploring the capacity to “handle” your energy, enables you to better be in relationship with others while maintaining presence and steadiness with your unique sense of self.

Instead of losing yourself in a mountain of overwhelm — from work emails, to skipping another meeting, to the principal’s phone call, to the possible layoff, to after school tantrums, to that growing pile of laundry — you want a way to manage, focus, persevere through what you know you can no longer escape.

You know you don’t want to revert to old habits — checking out through avoiding the hard conversations, fueling yourself on air and adrenaline instead of food, or finally raging because you’re sick of saying yes — because you’ve experienced too much emotional growth to feel that defeat again. You want to continue moving into your highest, wisest, most embodied, most adult self that can handle your vulnerable feelings too.

In overwhelming, life threatening situations, thank goodness (!) for your body's survival mechanisms that cause you to blur out, dissociate, shut down or fuel you with energy to use adrenaline to fight or flee. However, many daily situations, that aren't actually life threatening, can activate these trauma responses because an underlying thread of threat needs attention, curiosity, support and repair.

When you feel that familiar swell of activation, there are somatic practices that help you to move the feelings, the emotion, the energy that can feel intolerable. These specific gesture practices are developmentally-informed and are initially invited to be explored with relational support, with a helper, so your feelings, your experience, can be transformed into action.

Relational Somatics for Healing & Growth

While Somatic Therapy has become popular in the wellness world, and somatic methods can indeed vary widely, I often explain to new and potential clients that while somatic work goes beyond words, and it can be a rich compliment to talk therapy, the therapeutic relationship is still a foundational layer of the experience. Meaning, the experience of relational support, how a trained helper and agreed-upon relationship supports you, is part of the experience of not only nervous system regulation but also healing and growth.

In other words, no quick fixes for feeling stuck or sluggish, or unmotivated or depressed. However, movement, particularly and specifically Contralateral Movement practices that are relationally- and developmentally-informed can help birth inhibited moves, allow for more ease, can help invite energy to flow more freely, for areas or parts that feel stuck, blocked, stagnant, lost.

While there are so many mixed messages about food, eating, exercise, heart and bone health, hormone balancing and exercise recommendations, there is a way to get clear on what satisfies and sustains you. But, it’s not another diet, or a specific number of steps, or the best gynecologist (or otherwise influencer) who has the crystal ball prescription for your settling your mood swings.

I’m human like you, and I was almost shaped by the diet and power-over culture that tries to tame people:

• I grew up in the humid step classes at the YMCA in the 90s bombarded with cottage cheese pressure—but my “steps” now are walks and other movement practices that birth clarity, creativity and self empowerment.

• I was taught to praise systemic power-over prescriptive cultures—but I now listen to my body and respect my gynecologist (and science) because she honors my choices emphasizing there are no one-size-fits-all regimens for birthing, nursing, hormone dips and dives.

So while I now have a relationship with food that fuels and satisfies me, and I love a variety of movement practices that invigorate my aliveness, and I can listen to my body while also tending to preventive and medical care when necessary, it’s not always been easy to nourish my body, my voice, my gut.

It’s National Stop Bullying Day!

Whether bully energy pokes at the water cooler, the playground, or online, both kids and adults feel the jabs, and they can sting. But they don’t have to.

Instead of making someone the “bad guy” or the “good guy,” M-Bodied helps people to recognize the roots of bullying behavior in an effort for healing, repair and growth.

Instead of bursting other people’s bubbles to build oneself up, and instead of letting other people burst one’s bubble, M-Bodied supports elders move through their own big feelings in order to more presently support the next generation.

On Dieting as a Distraction

Diet culture is sneaky. Weight stigma is concerning. We used to stand in line to weigh at Weight Watchers stripmall stores. Now, Noom ads and macro-counting apps tempt us to count points, portions and protein on-the-go, privately, conveniently, all day long. Plus, elimination diets, intermittent fasting and GLP-1 medications (the medicalization of weight loss rather than blood sugar management) could feel like more to consider, but conflicting messaging from various providers about side effects, long-term effectiveness and for whom can feel confusing, even shaming, like yet another distraction, another roadblock to body attunement.

If you struggle with body appreciation and diet culture, it is not your fault. To be responsive to your body’s cues, to be flexible in your thinking, to move in exploratory rather than anxious-ridden or frozen ways are all experiences we learn in relationships along the way. If we are chronically starved for connection, our body receives these imprints, and we become physiologically and psychologically conditioned to survive until we have support to explore new ways of living, of eating, of relating, of moving into the world.

Dieting as Clues to Deeper Hungers

Instead of looking at chronic dieting, compulsive eating or exercise, or body image blues as fixed states of distress or pathology to be swallowed or consumed with another cookie cutter plan or quick fix, what if you consider them as clues to discovering your deeper hungers, your appetite for life?

If your relationship to dieting could reveal a deeper relationship to your self, your matter, how do you release your desperate grasp on counting, weighing, binging, restricting?You know that “just stopping” a behavior or urge or compulsion is really darn hard, if not impossible, and there’s good reason: Your body doesn’t want to restrict or feel deprived or feel stuffed or feel worn out, it wants you to pay attention to its deeper callings. Your body craves support and nurturance, but it needs relational support rather than another lonely deprivation and binge cycle.

M-Bodied® Coaching is thrilled to announce that both Caroline and Nick Gebhardt were featured and contributed to children's technology expert Titania Jordan’s newest release Parental Control: A Guide to Raising Balanced Kids in the Digital Era. Drawing from her expertise as a co-founder of Bark Technologies, a leading internet safety company as well as her own personal experience as a parent of a teenager, Jordan explores the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of how the digital world is affecting children both today, and tomorrow. 

Caroline Gebhardt, who is a licensed mental health counselor and parent coach, offered her expertise about early brain/body development and the need for connection with elders for co-regulation rather than an increase of relying on screens. She focuses on how parents and elders get to be the anchors, the Circles of Support, for their children at various stages of development and how to navigate the digital dimension for embodiment rather than disembodiment.

Early on, when our elders can catch and celebrate our bites, recognize them as the spaciousness and primal energy we need for moving into ourselves. We don’t need to, using Resmaa Menakem’s words, blow pain through other bodies, onto our peers, our children, our lovers, our neighbors, our fellow citizens. 

My mother saw man after man in her life store secrets. Heartbreaking, shameful secrets passed down to their male bodies, nevertheless, damning to others. Quick fixes, like infidelity and addictions, don’t produce long term gains but long term pain. When generations of children are not invited to be who they are, their life energy, their prana, their chi is stored deep in the crevices of their core, their pelvis, hidden unfairly from their own sense of self. Reaching for relief, normalized by the culture of misogyny, tells men it’s okay to grab a woman by the pussy to fix what feels wrong about themselves. 

Connection Trumps Control

In my Somatic Therapy for Family Nourishment - Part 1 blog post, I wrote about the relational process of invitational care and how it offers more sustainable bodily and relational healing. I used examples of my experience working at an eating disorders treatment center in an effort to highlight how the relational process, the capacity for the caregiver to offer a Circle of Support to one in need, sets the stage for integrative body-mind healing and nourishment.

In this post, I’ll specify a little deeper how caregiver connection trumps control, particularly as it relates to a robust quality of embodiment we all deserve to experience to live with satisfaction, empowerment and authenticity.

Family Support for Individual and Collective Integrative Healing

Because therapeutic journeys can offer reparative experiences in ways that enhance both relationships and nervous system functioning, using a family lens and family approach—whether it’s chosen family or family of origin—can help to re-feed these reparative experiences so all members of a family have potential to restore deep nourishment emotionally, psychologically, mentally, physically, spiritually and relationally.

From group therapy, to one-on-one sessions with individuals, to family sessions and family meal groups, one can have reparative family experiences and more sustainable bodily functioning. But within these therapeutic relational journeys, it’s important to take a closer look at how autonomy and client’s preference can still be valued by those who have built-in power authority.

Did you know 70% of our love dynamics involve mismatch, being out of sync? This includes parent/child interactions! (Tronick/Gold, The Power of Discord)

Did you know that co-regulation from parent to child and the child's development of Social Engagement system functioning needs more than just “staying calm?"

Children and their developing nervous systems depend on their parents/caregivers to….

Meditative Practices without Relational Support: the Possibility of Disembodying

Thanks to yoga—which has stretched its way into the West in the 20th century—our culture has lapped up various meditative arts that show up everywhere from cognitive-based therapeutic approaches, to ecstatic dance, to maybe my favorite—mindful tea bag tags. 🍵

Years ago, when yoga studios began popping up on every corner, I craved the urge to play with yoga shapes, to explore pretzel poses with my naturally bendy body. However, I felt great resistance to opening my heart in the ways my teachers suggested—ways that seemed to encourage losing myself. I felt like I couldn’t fully be myself in my yoga community.

I was already a “good girl,” a classic people-pleaser who didn’t need to shape-shift toward any more teacher expectations. Like a raw nerve, I needed to develop more energetic skin rather than less. I needed to stay in my body rather than transcend it.

The Importance of Play to Re-parent Your Nervous System Functioning

Learning to provide (relational) Support, helps us play. It helps us playfully “dance” through our lives, finding creative solutions for challenges. It helps us find the pathway, sensing the importance of Play. 🧠👣🌟

M-Bodied® Parenting focuses on womb-to-walking-and-beyond parenting stages. However, the challenging, oppositional patterns and worrisome coping mechanisms tend to cause most distress to parents, which also often benefits from therapeutic support and/or relational repair. M-Bodied Parenting psychotherapy and embodiment coaching offers experiential somatic practices that involve exploration of polyvagal theory, trauma response and attachment. We look at how the intersection of the three can shed light on common experiences and reactions of both caregivers and children. Using specific trauma-informed co-regulation practices that are relational and developmental, we explore how those oppositional response patterns can be better supported and embodied—versus pathologized—for both caregivers and children.

When we can become curious about disembodiment and dissociation, avoidance of conflict, gossiping or bullying, chronic freeze patterns, urges to flee, and tendencies to bite or snap back, we can become more interested and compassionate with expanding on the idea that something wants our attention, our love, our consideration, our bravery.

Interested in seeing Chi for Two in action? Dee and Caroline had fun creating a taste of Chi for Two, a multi-generational trauma healing method, while demonstrating a few practices on our YouTube channel.