How did you do it? How did you get to where you are? Did you never fall?
My daughter and I have a WhatsApp group called Mommy Shares. This is different from our regular thread. This is where I share my thoughts on life after I am given permission. Where we catch the voice notes, we don’t want to get lost in our regular chat. Where I send her my afterthoughts from daily conversations, after brewing them in my journal first.
Recently, I gave a talk. Even though I broke all my rules about preparing talks (not preparing it the same day, not using ChatGPT to help organize my head, not going without slides), this was the first time I felt ready to speak about SoulFood: what it is, why it is different, who it is for, and how it’s done.
When she asks me questions, they always start with food. After all, her mother is a food coach. But the conversation usually moves past the food rather quickly. Afterall, it’s never about the food… As a seminary girl, she wants to get to know life—what it is, why we oscillate between on and off, and essentially how life works, meaning what to do about it.
SoulFood is my brainchild. It was born in the pages of my journal over the past decade as I left my own food golus behind and untangled my relationship with eating.
What emerged was a method for cleaning up one’s relationship with food and improving one’s eating habits. What I didn’t expect was that the process would teach me something much bigger: how to live an intuitive yet “mesudar” life in general, one with space yet structure, awareness yet grounded action.
It happened at the intersection of all that makes me me: living as a Jew, learning from life through the pages of my journal, and watching the pieces fall into place through the “hashgacha pratis” divine providence, of how I show up in the world, first and foremost as a wife and mother. Later, the professional pieces: writer, fitness trainer, wellness and addiction and recovery coach.
“There are days when the sun is shining, and I get to the classes and the gym, and I can eat well, and all is good. And then there are days when I am off. I skip classes. I scroll for five hours, and I just crash into bed.’
“Mommy, what do I do?”
She wasn’t really asking about food. She was asking what to do when life knocks her off center.
Though I have been coaching for almost ten years and am in the middle of the sixth SoulFood course, the pressure to crystallize the method and specify how it’s different from intuitive eating or abstinent-based eating sent me into a tizzy. The talk was scattered and, in my opinion, downright bad.
But it wasn’t just the talk that knocked me off center. It was a whole bunch of things.
Regardless, I landed in a cloud of dysregulation upon arriving home that night. Still unaware that I was losing touch with myself , thank G-d, I had my rules to save me from the permission-giving thought:
“I didn’t eat much at the festival. I can just have a cheese stick…”
(For those of you who don’t know, I promote Mesudar Eating. See that piece in the habits section in the blog for the definition.)
When habits become part of you, they don’t just affect you, but those around you.
Another daughter saw me pining around the kitchen.
“I know you ate. It might not have been good, but you ate. And you don’t eat now.”
Thank You, Hashem, for the structure that ripples outward.
I made my way upstairs and went to bed.
The dysregulation still moved through me, but it no longer got to drive the bus. The structure held.
Of course, it still had to be processed. That’s where the journal and tools came in.
“Chaya, growth happens in the off moments.
It’s not that I’ve never missed the target I set for myself. Over time, however, I built a structure that protected me from myself—from my impulses, my inborn tendencies, my reactive heart, even my pining soul.
But we can’t build a structure without first carving out space.
Imagine a sandcastle. First, you have to dig out the space. Then you have to bring the sand there.
We want to build an internal structure that protects us when the missiles start flying, whether literally or figuratively. A lot of things feel like missiles to our hearts, our nervous systems, and even our bodies.
When those missiles start flying, you have to hear the alarm going off (awareness) and make your way to the protected space (structure).
That space is the journal. Or a reflective conversation. Or any place where you can stop long enough to hear yourself think.”
They say you know you really own something when you can explain it to a five-year-old. Now, Chaya is nineteen, but the fact that she was asking me for the building blocks and foundational pillars of SoulFood was not lost on me.
There is a wellspring inside, and within it are living waters.
As the pasuk says, “And a river flowed out of Eden…”
We have to get back to that place—the source and truth of it all.
To get back to that place, we need:
Space:
Space to see.
Space to catch.
Space to reflect.
Structure:
Structure to allow the process to unfold.
Structure while in the process.
Structure for when things go awry.
Space and structure, however, are only the beginning.
Once we learn how to hear the alarm and make our way to the protected space, something remarkable happens. We can finally reconnect—to ourselves, to others, and to Hashem.
And from that connection emerges conversation.
A real dialogue with the deepest parts of ourselves and with the One who put them there.
That conversation is where the real work happens. It is where we stop reacting and start responding. Where we stop living on autopilot and begin living intentionally.
Food may be the portal, but it is not the destination.
The destination is alignment: becoming a kli capable of receiving and expressing the life Hashem created us to live.
It is one thing to be aware and catch life. It is another to respond instead of react.
It starts, ends, and begins again in the journal, or through making space.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— Viktor Frankl
We do not need to be crushed to bring forth those sweet waters within.
If we carve out space, step into that space, support it with structure, and learn to gather the gems along the way, through connection and conversation, then living an intuitive, soul-aligned life is very, very near.
Thanks, Chaya, for pulling me out of me.
