Marla Mervis-Hartmann is a dynamic speaker, bestselling author, and coach specializing in body confidence, food freedom, and self-love. As the creator of Love Your Body, Love Yourself, and the bestselling book BE-Friend Yourself: Finding Freedom with Food and Peace with Your Body. Marla empowers people to transform their relationships with food and their bodies through self-compassion and spiritual practices. Featured on TEDx Salinas and in major media outlets like ABC, NBC, and FOX, she integrates expertise in Reiki, integrative somatic trauma therapy, and women’s wellness to help people move from despair to hope and thrive in their lives.
Connect with Marla!
Web: Love Your Body, Love Yourself
IG: @loveyourbodyloveyourselfalways
FB: Love Your Body, Love Yourself
YT: @MarlaMervisHartmann
TEDx Talk: The Secret Ingredient to Feeling Good in Your Body
Book: Love Your Body Love Yourself
Free Gift! Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Eating
Connect with Marla!
Web: Love Your Body, Love Yourself
IG: @loveyourbodyloveyourselfalways
FB: Love Your Body, Love Yourself
YT: @MarlaMervisHartmann
TEDx Talk: The Secret Ingredient to Feeling Good in Your Body
Book: Love Your Body Love Yourself
Free Gift! Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Eating
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Wendy and this is Divorce Doesn't Suck. I'm
talking all about the life you can live after divorce.
You'll hear regular people's stories about their divorces and how
they reinvented themselves and grew. You'll also get invaluable advice
from experts who serve in the divorce community. A little
about me. I'm a former TV producer and mom of two.
I got divorced in two thousand and eight when there
were really no outlets or platforms for me to turn to.
(00:22):
So I'm paying it forward and have created a platform
to help men and women learn that there absolutely is
a fresh, new and exciting life after divorce. Come with
me on this journey and paint your brand new blank
canvas of happily ever after divorce. This episode is brought
to in part by the Needle Kuda Law Firm guidance
that Moves lives forward. Welcome to another episode of Divorce
(00:43):
Doesn't Suck. I'm Wendy Sloan, your host, and my guest
today is dynamic speaker, best selling author coach specializes in
body confidence, food freedom and self love. And I know
we all could use that no matter what creative, the
best selling book Befriend Yourself to inspire others to embrace
self acceptance and vibrant living. We all need so much
(01:06):
of that. I can't wait to dive into this and
how she integrates her expertise in reiki, which I just
experienced my first reiki, so we're going to talk about
that too, Integrated somatic trauma therapy, woman's wellness to help
people from despair to hope to thrive in their own life.
We all need this. Thank you so much for being here.
Welcome Marla Mervis Hartman.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Thank you so much for having me, Wendy.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
I'm so excited over that, and it will dive in
when we get into the reiki stuff. I'll tell you
that I just had my first experience with that and
I was like overwhelmed by.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
All of it.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
And you're all the way from Maui.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I am. Yeah, I'm on the beautiful island of Maui.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
That's so amazing. So you aren't living literally your best life.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I'm doing my best to live my best life for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yes, you have a twelve year old son, you're married
for thirteen years, have you guys, how long have you
lived in Maui.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
We've lived in Maui for four years. So before that,
we were in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Okay, and you're from the East, pro you've been all over.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I have been. I've been in Pittsburgh and New York
City and Ashland, Oregon and LA and yeah, I've been.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I've been around amazing. All right, let's start by sharing
your journey and how. And I wanted to step all
the way back to when this started, the day that
you stepped on the scale and you realized that you
were the thinnest you've ever been, but that didn't equal
to you being happy. Take us back to that journey.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah. So my story, Wendy is something is one that
a lot of people can relate to. It's not a
unique story. I think a lot of specifically women, but
a lot of men too, really struggle with their relationship
with their body and their food. And their relationship with
their body becomes their way of self worth, the way
(03:04):
of determining if they're successful, if they're not successful, how
they ate, how they the number on the scale. And
so I had a very dysfunctional relationship with my body
and my food. To look at me, you wouldn't know
that because I've always been born healthy, thin.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Woman.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
And yet I know, and what I've seen from working
with countless people is that it doesn't really matter what
kind of body you're in, it's how you feel about
your body. So you can be in a body with
you know it's very voluptuous, and you can feel really,
really confident, and then you can have that ideal beauty
(03:45):
standard of a body and feel so not okay and
feel judged and criticized and uncomfortable. And So when I
was struggling a lot of struggle binge eating, over exercising
a lot of restriction, I did pretty much everything right.
(04:06):
I kind of played with it all and to manage
my body, manage my food, and manage my emotions. And
it came to a point where I was like, Okay,
I'm I'm going to really I'm going to buckle up.
I'm really going to control. I'm going to get my
body to that weight that I know that when I
(04:26):
hit that number that means that I'm going to be free.
Because that's what I wanted. I wanted freedom. I just
wanted to feel okay. I wanted to know that I
was going to feel safe around food, that my body
was going to be, you know, thin is what I wanted.
And then when I finally got to that place, and
you can listen to my ted X talk or watch
my ted X talk to give that full story, that's
(04:49):
when I realized how miserable I was, and how that
number on the scale and the journey that I was
on had nothing to do with my body my weight,
that it was actually an in ternal job and it
was something it was more of a spiritual component, and
there was a lot of healing to do, and that
took me on a whole journey of recovery. And at
(05:12):
that point, there weren't many There weren't many Marla's. There
weren't you know, body image coaches and freedom with food
coaches and people talking about this. I had to piece
me all my recovery together, and so I did, and
now you know, all these years later, I can say
that I have healed this and it's a bloody miracle.
(05:33):
Because when you're in it, and if you're listening to
this and you're in it with your body and your food,
you know that it feels very hopeless. You can feel
like you're not ever going to get out of it,
because you always have to eat and there's that food
sitting right in front of you, right.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, and it was and that was the moment that
you realized like, here I am at everything that I
was trying to achieve. I got here, but I'm not happy.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I'm not happy. But that's not like whenever it all
turned around. It turned around like after years of actually
working on it and unwinding these behaviors, unwinding my body
from my worth, unwinding food behaviors, and also finding new
ways to cope with life, to cope with stress. And
(06:17):
so you know, if we're talking to the divorced person,
you know we're also looking transition or yeah, we're looking
at these moments in our lives where we were maybe
in one body when we when we started this relationship
and then there was a breakup, and now we're in
(06:38):
a completely different body, and there can there can be
a lot of fear in that. I mean, I've had
a lot of clients or people say to me like, well,
I'll start dating when I'm back and when when I've
lost that weight, or I'll start, you know, looking for
a new job, or when my body is okay and
(06:59):
there's a piece of that I get that feeling confident,
And yet I think we can hide behind our bodies
and not actually have the life that we want because
we're waiting for our bodies to miraculously be something that
maybe they're never meant to be, right.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And as women, we go through so much, you know,
in our in our life cycle as a female. And
then also when you have children, and there's so much
pressure to get back to be thin again after you
have your children, to lose the bite bat and your
whole body and your body changes no matter what once
you have those kids, and we should be proud that
we can bear those children, right.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, I mean that is always so saddening to me
when I have people come to me and they're like,
I just cannot stand this weight. I'm just and I'm like,
this is this is your impostpartum, you just had a baby.
Your your body is not meant to This is the
season where it may be softer to be the mom.
(08:00):
You're to be that soft, yummy mom right now. And
I've seen a lot of women hurt their bodies by
pushing themselves to get their their bellies back on track
and have actually made it worse. I've done a lot
of training on on postpartum, for the for the belly, rectus,
(08:22):
diasts and all of that, and just how women are
really using exercise in such the wrong way during that time.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
So how did you how did you start your journey
back when, especially because there really weren't there weren't Marla's
out there right, how did you start piecing that together yourself?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
So I started going to a group therapy program, and
I had a therapist, and then she had recommended me
going to I did overad as anonymous at that time,
and that really that really helped me because I got
to realize I wasn't alone, and see what we're doing
(09:03):
right now is kind of normalizing that conversation. And there
are a lot where you can go on and you
can hear a lot of people. You can go into
my Instagram and see all my stories and have me
share that I didn't really have that. It wasn't like
there was social media back then, so there weren't people
sharing stories. So here I'm in this room with a
lot of people talking about things that they did with
food that I was like, oh my gosh, I do that.
(09:23):
I had just so much shame, the amount of shame
that I had, and so to be able to be
with people who were talking about this and making me
feel like I wasn't alone was super helpful. Now in
those rooms, I also that's where I found reiki. There
was a woman who was there and she had one
hand on her belly and one hand on her heart,
(09:44):
and she was just giving herself some love. And I
was like, totally annoyed. You were totally annoyed. Oh God,
what is she doing. She's just loving herself blatantly in public,
you know. And of course it's because I wanted what
she had. I was drawn to it. But it struck
(10:05):
me like it was like it was like it hit
me in the face. And then afterwards I went up
to her and I said, what are you doing? And
she said, I'm doing reiki. So she sent me to
my She introduced me to my a reiki circle. That
then changed my life. So I started going to that
reiki circle. I met my reiki master. I've been teaching
with reiki for I've been doing reki for about twenty
(10:29):
five years now. I've been teaching it for about twenty
And for those of you who don't know, reiki is
a healing modality. It's a spiritual practice, and at the
end of the day, reiki helps us tap into the
energy of unconditional love. It is divine love. And so
at the end, at the core of everything that we're wanting,
desiring for any sort of healing, it is unconditional love.
(10:53):
Like if you go down to the bottom of the
bottom of the bottom, at the end is that's what
we're wanting. So that's literally what we're calling in. We're
calling in a higher vibration of love. And so as
a practitioner, the energy flows through me and it goes
to a practitioner long distance. I do it long distance,
which is fabulous to be able to do, and it
(11:15):
releases stress in our body, so our body heals ourselves.
So how does this relate to my relationship with my
body my food? Well, that's how I coped. My food
was the way I coped. Have a feeling, figure out
a diet, have a feeling, eat some ice cream, right,
And so here was, all of a sudden, another way
to deal with my emotions. Also, it being a spiritual practice,
(11:40):
I got to notice where I was so mean to
myself and how critical and how I would be doing
reikie and feel all this love and then all of
a sudden, I would be saying, oh my gosh, you
look so ugly. Oh wow, you're fat. And the contrast
of that, the contrast of being in this loving energy
and then having the contrast of these negativity, and so
(12:04):
it has changed my life. I use it with all
my clients. I use it in my life. I feel
like it's such a beautiful, a beautiful tool to access
love and to deal with stress.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And to look at you. I mean, they'll see your
picture up but I know this is only audio, but
you would look at you and you'd be like, she
doesn't like herself, she doesn't think she has self worth,
she doesn't think she's pretty. It's like, oh my god,
you're gorgeous and you're so kind and you're so loving,
and you look amazing. It's amazing. So you sharing your
(12:42):
story and your journey. We're gonna talk more about that.
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Love Yourself, Marla Mervis Hartman. It's the whole reiki experience.
(14:32):
So I experienced it, and I thought the vibration. I
felt so much heat from and to my chest. It
was unbelievable, and I felt so calm afterwards, and like
I had slept for twenty four hours. It was just
an amazing feeling. And that was my first experience with it,
(14:54):
and I'm like, I need more of this, I want
more of this incredible. I'm surprised at people don't know
more about it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Well, I mean, I mean probably because I see it, right, Yeah,
And so the more you do reiki, the more accumulative
it is, right, it's and it works on so many
different levels. Like so for you, what I heard is
like it really because it's such a heart based energy,
you know, really goes into the heart and helps us
(15:23):
our body to relax. That on an emotional level, it
can help us to allow emotions that are kind of
that are stuck in the body, that can bring it
up to be released. So a lot of people can
feel really emotional afterwards. Here on Mali, I do a
body love Reiki circle at an eating disorder recovery center
and that's always such a beautiful offering to give to
(15:47):
mainly women are there who are really struggling to love
their bodies and to allow allow love, allow God, Universe,
whatever you want to call it, to love our bodies
when we're not able to do that.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think, do you think that a lot of people
going through transitions, and especially divorce, and you know, regardless
it's like a death right. Divorce is like a death
of whether it's a happy divorce or or you know,
such a high conflict divorce. And do you think we
take it out so much we don't realize what's happening
inside our bodies when we're going through this kind of stress.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
I think that it's like a it it's like you're
coming out of your own skin.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
When when we have this type of transition, divorce or
whatever transition that anyone is going through, there is that death.
And I think what happens is we want to jump
over those those uncomfortable feelings and we can miss out
on an opportunity to get to know ourselves more. No,
(16:52):
it's not fun, it's not comfortable, and I think that's
why we need people. We need others. We need people
to hold us. We need to be held. We need
to be whether that's with a therapist or someone giving
you reiki, or having an opportunity to talk to a
friend that can really hear you and not try to
fix anything, because in these moments there's sometimes we feel
(17:12):
like it's so uncomfortable that we have to fix something,
but it's actually there's not anything that needs to be fixed.
We're just finding ourselves in this new alignment. And when
you're finding yourself in a new alignment, you are there
can be grief. The grief of okay, the way I was,
even though this relationship was not good, there are certain
things that I received from it that I'm not going
(17:34):
to receive or in the same way. And so a
lot of those places we need to step up and
hold that for ourselves. And then there's other parts that
are like hallelujah, Oh my gosh, I'm free, and that
is so liberating. And but what what I've seen is
in the big transitions in our lives. And I'll have
(17:57):
people who come to me they're like, I had a
needing sort of really young, or I had some good
stuff early on or negative body image and it went away,
and then I went through a divorce and it came
back up, and I don't know what, Like I have
no idea why. And it's like it's survival mode we receive.
(18:18):
Let me say that in a different way, we when
we have those moments maybe in our early childhood or whatever,
where food comes in or dieting comes in as a
way to help us cope. That's in our programming. And
so when we have that same sort of experience that
a big transition like this can be or you know,
(18:42):
even like medopause, right, it can bring this up like,
oh my gosh, I'm not safe. We can we now
draw in from these earlier coping mechanisms. So it's just
important to know that we all have coping mechanisms and
there's nothing wrong with having them. It's just realizing that,
(19:04):
like I know, for me, when I start having any
sort of negative body image or any sort of food
weird things going on, I know that there's something deep
or going on that it's not about the food that
I'm uncomfortable. I'm maybe fearful about something that I haven't acknowledged.
So these behaviors can be a sign that we need
(19:25):
to attend to something inside of ourselves. Quite honestly, Wendy,
people just rather go on a diet than to meet
their emotions.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Right and that. And I don't remember who it was
that said to me something because I've never been one
to I've never been one to diet or all of
those kind of things. And I'm trying to, like now
in my older age, try to have more protein, eat
better than you know, back of chips or something. But
they said, like if you're not going to do if
(19:56):
you're not going to do a diet, that you're going
to stick with for the rest of your life. It's
not going to work, right, basically, it's not going to work.
But why do why do you think so? I mean,
I think so women are so hard on their bodies
and they're hard on their selves to look a certain way,
to be a certain way. It's it's a it's so saddening.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Mm hmmm, it's I mean, it's often passed down from
generation to generation. And there's a huge diet industry. Diet
culture is a huge industry. It's a seven billion dollar
industry that is telling us that there's something wrong with us,
telling us that our bodies are wrong. So they're invested
(20:40):
in us not feeling good so that we will buy
their products. So we understand that we're in a we're
in a system here, and women have been in one way.
It's a beautiful thing for our bodies to be glorified
and for our bodies to be seen as this beautiful beauty. However,
(21:01):
that's gotten twisted around and we've used that as to
hurt ourselves. And I also feel like it's you know
a lot of people say, oh, it's a patriarchy that
I think a lot of women are doing that same thing.
To each other. They're talking about their weight all the time,
We're talking about what diet they're on. All the time.
They're talking about like restricting or oh my gosh, you
(21:22):
lost weight, Oh you look good, what are you doing?
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Or I'm cleansing again, or I'm this again, or what's
good for me to eat, what's not good for me
to eat? And all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, and I think you know, our bodies are ever changing,
depending on the season that we're in and depending you know,
if you have a menstrual cycle, right, it depends your food.
Your body changes within that month. And so what you
think you can do at the beginning of your cycle
to what you can do at the end, it's different.
(21:56):
And then there's the seasons of life, you know, the Maiden,
the Mother, the chron those are different seasons and our
bodies are asking for different foods at different times. And
so it's practicing being detached. Oh my weight is here
right now, Oh my weight is here, And it's being
(22:18):
detached by that. So, like what you had shared, Wendy,
which you said in just a really easy way, you said,
I've never been one to diet, and now I'm looking
at how I can change my diet, so that for
someone who doesn't have body issues or doesn't have diet issues,
(22:40):
is coming from the place of health. So when we
come from that clean place of like I want to
love my body and give my body nourishment and the
food that I want that can be an easy choice
and had some more protein. I'm going to stop eating
so much sugar for someone like myself. Other people who
(23:00):
may be listening to change their diet has so much
baggage in it. It brings up so much. It brings
up scarcity or lack or fear or I don't know
how to do it, or I'm gonna you know, it's
that black and white thinking of either like they're on
a diet or they're off to the races, and those
(23:23):
two extremes people are living in for so long that
they don't even realize that there's that middle of the road.
And your comment that you said is that middle of
the road, there's a different way. And that's what I
teach people. I teach people how to realize that they
don't have to beat themselves up with dieting. They don't
(23:44):
have to make themselves wrong. And that doesn't mean that
now they're you know, shoving a bunch of food in
their mouth. There's this middle of the road and that
comes from that place of health, that comes from that
place of self love, and that comes from the place
of unwinding a lot of these behaviors that are are
stuck in trauma or wounding. So we get actually clear
and a ligned And.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Is that you use your Can you talk about you
use your reiki? The integrade of somatic trauma theory? What
is that therapy?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I'm sorry, yeah, so sematics soma is the body, ramatic soul. Yeah,
so when we think about therapy, we can think about
a lot of talk therapy and so important to tell
our story and to share and to be present and
to be heard, and our bodies hold the information. So
(24:35):
we need to connect our body to the story. So
lots of times there are emotions that are stuck in
our heart, in our pelvis, and so it's it's meeting
our stories through the body. And the reiki can be
a big part of that breath movement, but a very
(24:57):
specific way that I guide people when they're working with
me to connect it to their body and to release it.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I encourage everyone to listen to your ted talk too,
and tell us about your free gift, your book, Breaking
the Cycle of Emotional Eating.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yes, yeah, so my free gift is it's a course.
It's a seven module course, Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Eating. No,
it's free, but I give a lot of good nuggets
in there's me to apply to for a session with me,
and we really go into So when I say emotional eating,
(25:35):
emotional eating isn't just it's an umbrella, and it's an
umbrella for binge eating, boredom eating, emotionally, dieting, restricting. All
of those things go underneath there. And so if you
have an issue with any of these things that I said,
this would be a great place to start to get
(25:57):
an idea of what is even going on.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
And you can do all this stuff that reiki and
everything long distance. I mean you could do it on zoom, right,
you can do it.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah. I love that. It's such a powerful thing. People
can just lie on their bed and you know, would
drop them into meditation and then send them reiki. It's
it's such a powerful thing. I'm so so grateful of it.
I mean it's like prayer, right.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, wow, I'm gonna have to experience that with you too.
This was so this was so eye opening and so important.
And that's one of the reasons this podcast is so
important to me because I don't want I didn't have
a podcast to listen to when I was getting divorced
way back when, or to talk to. So it's it's
so important to know that you're not alone and that
(26:44):
there are other people and you're not You're listening to
this helps like, oh wow, she is like that, she's
like me, or she got you know. It's so important.
So we have to keep talking about. What you're doing
is so important and sharing your story was so important too.
So thank you so much. So everyone all heard, all
the social It will all be up on the social
(27:05):
Marlin Mervis Hartman, creator of Love Your Body, Love Yourself.
She has a free gift. It's a course breaking the
cycle of emotional eating. I encourage everyone to get and
I encourage everyone to try reiki at some point or
another for sure, no matter what. Thank you so much,
Thank you so much. Wendy Nito Kuda Divorce and family
(27:26):
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(28:11):
five five seven nine five zero zero
Hi, I'm Wendy and this is Divorce Doesn't Suck. I'm
talking all about the life you can live after divorce.
You'll hear regular people's stories about their divorces and how
they reinvented themselves and grew. You'll also get invaluable advice
from experts who serve in the divorce community. A little
about me. I'm a former TV producer and mom of two.
I got divorced in two thousand and eight when there
were really no outlets or platforms for me to turn to.
(00:22):
So I'm paying it forward and have created a platform
to help men and women learn that there absolutely is
a fresh, new and exciting life after divorce. Come with
me on this journey and paint your brand new blank
canvas of happily ever after divorce. This episode is brought
to in part by the Needle Kuda Law Firm guidance
that Moves lives forward. Welcome to another episode of Divorce
(00:43):
Doesn't Suck. I'm Wendy Sloan, your host, and my guest
today is dynamic speaker, best selling author coach specializes in
body confidence, food freedom and self love. And I know
we all could use that no matter what creative, the
best selling book Befriend Yourself to inspire others to embrace
self acceptance and vibrant living. We all need so much
(01:06):
of that. I can't wait to dive into this and
how she integrates her expertise in reiki, which I just
experienced my first reiki, so we're going to talk about
that too, Integrated somatic trauma therapy, woman's wellness to help
people from despair to hope to thrive in their own life.
We all need this. Thank you so much for being here.
Welcome Marla Mervis Hartman.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Thank you so much for having me, Wendy.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
I'm so excited over that, and it will dive in
when we get into the reiki stuff. I'll tell you
that I just had my first experience with that and
I was like overwhelmed by.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
All of it.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
And you're all the way from Maui.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I am. Yeah, I'm on the beautiful island of Maui.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
That's so amazing. So you aren't living literally your best life.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I'm doing my best to live my best life for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yes, you have a twelve year old son, you're married
for thirteen years, have you guys, how long have you
lived in Maui.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
We've lived in Maui for four years. So before that,
we were in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Okay, and you're from the East, pro you've been all over.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I have been. I've been in Pittsburgh and New York
City and Ashland, Oregon and LA and yeah, I've been.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I've been around amazing. All right, let's start by sharing
your journey and how. And I wanted to step all
the way back to when this started, the day that
you stepped on the scale and you realized that you
were the thinnest you've ever been, but that didn't equal
to you being happy. Take us back to that journey.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah. So my story, Wendy is something is one that
a lot of people can relate to. It's not a
unique story. I think a lot of specifically women, but
a lot of men too, really struggle with their relationship
with their body and their food. And their relationship with
their body becomes their way of self worth, the way
(03:04):
of determining if they're successful, if they're not successful, how
they ate, how they the number on the scale. And
so I had a very dysfunctional relationship with my body
and my food. To look at me, you wouldn't know
that because I've always been born healthy, thin.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Woman.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
And yet I know, and what I've seen from working
with countless people is that it doesn't really matter what
kind of body you're in, it's how you feel about
your body. So you can be in a body with
you know it's very voluptuous, and you can feel really,
really confident, and then you can have that ideal beauty
(03:45):
standard of a body and feel so not okay and
feel judged and criticized and uncomfortable. And So when I
was struggling a lot of struggle binge eating, over exercising
a lot of restriction, I did pretty much everything right.
(04:06):
I kind of played with it all and to manage
my body, manage my food, and manage my emotions. And
it came to a point where I was like, Okay,
I'm I'm going to really I'm going to buckle up.
I'm really going to control. I'm going to get my
body to that weight that I know that when I
(04:26):
hit that number that means that I'm going to be free.
Because that's what I wanted. I wanted freedom. I just
wanted to feel okay. I wanted to know that I
was going to feel safe around food, that my body
was going to be, you know, thin is what I wanted.
And then when I finally got to that place, and
you can listen to my ted X talk or watch
my ted X talk to give that full story, that's
(04:49):
when I realized how miserable I was, and how that
number on the scale and the journey that I was
on had nothing to do with my body my weight,
that it was actually an in ternal job and it
was something it was more of a spiritual component, and
there was a lot of healing to do, and that
took me on a whole journey of recovery. And at
(05:12):
that point, there weren't many There weren't many Marla's. There
weren't you know, body image coaches and freedom with food
coaches and people talking about this. I had to piece
me all my recovery together, and so I did, and
now you know, all these years later, I can say
that I have healed this and it's a bloody miracle.
(05:33):
Because when you're in it, and if you're listening to
this and you're in it with your body and your food,
you know that it feels very hopeless. You can feel
like you're not ever going to get out of it,
because you always have to eat and there's that food
sitting right in front of you, right.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, and it was and that was the moment that
you realized like, here I am at everything that I
was trying to achieve. I got here, but I'm not happy.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I'm not happy. But that's not like whenever it all
turned around. It turned around like after years of actually
working on it and unwinding these behaviors, unwinding my body
from my worth, unwinding food behaviors, and also finding new
ways to cope with life, to cope with stress. And
(06:17):
so you know, if we're talking to the divorced person,
you know we're also looking transition or yeah, we're looking
at these moments in our lives where we were maybe
in one body when we when we started this relationship
and then there was a breakup, and now we're in
(06:38):
a completely different body, and there can there can be
a lot of fear in that. I mean, I've had
a lot of clients or people say to me like, well,
I'll start dating when I'm back and when when I've
lost that weight, or I'll start, you know, looking for
a new job, or when my body is okay and
(06:59):
there's a piece of that I get that feeling confident,
And yet I think we can hide behind our bodies
and not actually have the life that we want because
we're waiting for our bodies to miraculously be something that
maybe they're never meant to be, right.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And as women, we go through so much, you know,
in our in our life cycle as a female. And
then also when you have children, and there's so much
pressure to get back to be thin again after you
have your children, to lose the bite bat and your
whole body and your body changes no matter what once
you have those kids, and we should be proud that
we can bear those children, right.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, I mean that is always so saddening to me
when I have people come to me and they're like,
I just cannot stand this weight. I'm just and I'm like,
this is this is your impostpartum, you just had a baby.
Your your body is not meant to This is the
season where it may be softer to be the mom.
(08:00):
You're to be that soft, yummy mom right now. And
I've seen a lot of women hurt their bodies by
pushing themselves to get their their bellies back on track
and have actually made it worse. I've done a lot
of training on on postpartum, for the for the belly, rectus,
(08:22):
diasts and all of that, and just how women are
really using exercise in such the wrong way during that time.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
So how did you how did you start your journey
back when, especially because there really weren't there weren't Marla's
out there right, how did you start piecing that together yourself?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
So I started going to a group therapy program, and
I had a therapist, and then she had recommended me
going to I did overad as anonymous at that time,
and that really that really helped me because I got
to realize I wasn't alone, and see what we're doing
(09:03):
right now is kind of normalizing that conversation. And there
are a lot where you can go on and you
can hear a lot of people. You can go into
my Instagram and see all my stories and have me
share that I didn't really have that. It wasn't like
there was social media back then, so there weren't people
sharing stories. So here I'm in this room with a
lot of people talking about things that they did with
food that I was like, oh my gosh, I do that.
(09:23):
I had just so much shame, the amount of shame
that I had, and so to be able to be
with people who were talking about this and making me
feel like I wasn't alone was super helpful. Now in
those rooms, I also that's where I found reiki. There
was a woman who was there and she had one
hand on her belly and one hand on her heart,
(09:44):
and she was just giving herself some love. And I
was like, totally annoyed. You were totally annoyed. Oh God,
what is she doing. She's just loving herself blatantly in public,
you know. And of course it's because I wanted what
she had. I was drawn to it. But it struck
(10:05):
me like it was like it was like it hit
me in the face. And then afterwards I went up
to her and I said, what are you doing? And
she said, I'm doing reiki. So she sent me to
my She introduced me to my a reiki circle. That
then changed my life. So I started going to that
reiki circle. I met my reiki master. I've been teaching
with reiki for I've been doing reki for about twenty
(10:29):
five years now. I've been teaching it for about twenty
And for those of you who don't know, reiki is
a healing modality. It's a spiritual practice, and at the
end of the day, reiki helps us tap into the
energy of unconditional love. It is divine love. And so
at the end, at the core of everything that we're wanting,
desiring for any sort of healing, it is unconditional love.
(10:53):
Like if you go down to the bottom of the
bottom of the bottom, at the end is that's what
we're wanting. So that's literally what we're calling in. We're
calling in a higher vibration of love. And so as
a practitioner, the energy flows through me and it goes
to a practitioner long distance. I do it long distance,
which is fabulous to be able to do, and it
(11:15):
releases stress in our body, so our body heals ourselves.
So how does this relate to my relationship with my
body my food? Well, that's how I coped. My food
was the way I coped. Have a feeling, figure out
a diet, have a feeling, eat some ice cream, right,
And so here was, all of a sudden, another way
to deal with my emotions. Also, it being a spiritual practice,
(11:40):
I got to notice where I was so mean to
myself and how critical and how I would be doing
reikie and feel all this love and then all of
a sudden, I would be saying, oh my gosh, you
look so ugly. Oh wow, you're fat. And the contrast
of that, the contrast of being in this loving energy
and then having the contrast of these negativity, and so
(12:04):
it has changed my life. I use it with all
my clients. I use it in my life. I feel
like it's such a beautiful, a beautiful tool to access
love and to deal with stress.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And to look at you. I mean, they'll see your
picture up but I know this is only audio, but
you would look at you and you'd be like, she
doesn't like herself, she doesn't think she has self worth,
she doesn't think she's pretty. It's like, oh my god,
you're gorgeous and you're so kind and you're so loving,
and you look amazing. It's amazing. So you sharing your
(12:42):
story and your journey. We're gonna talk more about that.
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your device. I'm back with the creator of Love your Body,
Love Yourself, Marla Mervis Hartman. It's the whole reiki experience.
(14:32):
So I experienced it, and I thought the vibration. I
felt so much heat from and to my chest. It
was unbelievable, and I felt so calm afterwards, and like
I had slept for twenty four hours. It was just
an amazing feeling. And that was my first experience with it,
(14:54):
and I'm like, I need more of this, I want
more of this incredible. I'm surprised at people don't know
more about it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Well, I mean, I mean probably because I see it, right, Yeah,
And so the more you do reiki, the more accumulative
it is, right, it's and it works on so many
different levels. Like so for you, what I heard is
like it really because it's such a heart based energy,
you know, really goes into the heart and helps us
(15:23):
our body to relax. That on an emotional level, it
can help us to allow emotions that are kind of
that are stuck in the body, that can bring it
up to be released. So a lot of people can
feel really emotional afterwards. Here on Mali, I do a
body love Reiki circle at an eating disorder recovery center
and that's always such a beautiful offering to give to
(15:47):
mainly women are there who are really struggling to love
their bodies and to allow allow love, allow God, Universe,
whatever you want to call it, to love our bodies
when we're not able to do that.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I think, do you think that a lot of people
going through transitions, and especially divorce, and you know, regardless
it's like a death right. Divorce is like a death
of whether it's a happy divorce or or you know,
such a high conflict divorce. And do you think we
take it out so much we don't realize what's happening
inside our bodies when we're going through this kind of stress.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
I think that it's like a it it's like you're
coming out of your own skin.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
When when we have this type of transition, divorce or
whatever transition that anyone is going through, there is that death.
And I think what happens is we want to jump
over those those uncomfortable feelings and we can miss out
on an opportunity to get to know ourselves more. No,
(16:52):
it's not fun, it's not comfortable, and I think that's
why we need people. We need others. We need people
to hold us. We need to be held. We need
to be whether that's with a therapist or someone giving
you reiki, or having an opportunity to talk to a
friend that can really hear you and not try to
fix anything, because in these moments there's sometimes we feel
(17:12):
like it's so uncomfortable that we have to fix something,
but it's actually there's not anything that needs to be fixed.
We're just finding ourselves in this new alignment. And when
you're finding yourself in a new alignment, you are there
can be grief. The grief of okay, the way I was,
even though this relationship was not good, there are certain
things that I received from it that I'm not going
(17:34):
to receive or in the same way. And so a
lot of those places we need to step up and
hold that for ourselves. And then there's other parts that
are like hallelujah, Oh my gosh, I'm free, and that
is so liberating. And but what what I've seen is
in the big transitions in our lives. And I'll have
(17:57):
people who come to me they're like, I had a
needing sort of really young, or I had some good
stuff early on or negative body image and it went away,
and then I went through a divorce and it came
back up, and I don't know what, Like I have
no idea why. And it's like it's survival mode we receive.
(18:18):
Let me say that in a different way, we when
we have those moments maybe in our early childhood or whatever,
where food comes in or dieting comes in as a
way to help us cope. That's in our programming. And
so when we have that same sort of experience that
a big transition like this can be or you know,
(18:42):
even like medopause, right, it can bring this up like,
oh my gosh, I'm not safe. We can we now
draw in from these earlier coping mechanisms. So it's just
important to know that we all have coping mechanisms and
there's nothing wrong with having them. It's just realizing that,
(19:04):
like I know, for me, when I start having any
sort of negative body image or any sort of food
weird things going on, I know that there's something deep
or going on that it's not about the food that
I'm uncomfortable. I'm maybe fearful about something that I haven't acknowledged.
So these behaviors can be a sign that we need
(19:25):
to attend to something inside of ourselves. Quite honestly, Wendy,
people just rather go on a diet than to meet
their emotions.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Right and that. And I don't remember who it was
that said to me something because I've never been one
to I've never been one to diet or all of
those kind of things. And I'm trying to, like now
in my older age, try to have more protein, eat
better than you know, back of chips or something. But
they said, like if you're not going to do if
(19:56):
you're not going to do a diet, that you're going
to stick with for the rest of your life. It's
not going to work, right, basically, it's not going to work.
But why do why do you think so? I mean,
I think so women are so hard on their bodies
and they're hard on their selves to look a certain way,
to be a certain way. It's it's a it's so saddening.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Mm hmmm, it's I mean, it's often passed down from
generation to generation. And there's a huge diet industry. Diet
culture is a huge industry. It's a seven billion dollar
industry that is telling us that there's something wrong with us,
telling us that our bodies are wrong. So they're invested
(20:40):
in us not feeling good so that we will buy
their products. So we understand that we're in a we're
in a system here, and women have been in one way.
It's a beautiful thing for our bodies to be glorified
and for our bodies to be seen as this beautiful beauty. However,
(21:01):
that's gotten twisted around and we've used that as to
hurt ourselves. And I also feel like it's you know
a lot of people say, oh, it's a patriarchy that
I think a lot of women are doing that same thing.
To each other. They're talking about their weight all the time,
We're talking about what diet they're on. All the time.
They're talking about like restricting or oh my gosh, you
(21:22):
lost weight, Oh you look good, what are you doing?
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Or I'm cleansing again, or I'm this again, or what's
good for me to eat, what's not good for me
to eat? And all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, and I think you know, our bodies are ever changing,
depending on the season that we're in and depending you know,
if you have a menstrual cycle, right, it depends your food.
Your body changes within that month. And so what you
think you can do at the beginning of your cycle
to what you can do at the end, it's different.
(21:56):
And then there's the seasons of life, you know, the Maiden,
the Mother, the chron those are different seasons and our
bodies are asking for different foods at different times. And
so it's practicing being detached. Oh my weight is here
right now, Oh my weight is here, And it's being
(22:18):
detached by that. So, like what you had shared, Wendy,
which you said in just a really easy way, you said,
I've never been one to diet, and now I'm looking
at how I can change my diet, so that for
someone who doesn't have body issues or doesn't have diet issues,
(22:40):
is coming from the place of health. So when we
come from that clean place of like I want to
love my body and give my body nourishment and the
food that I want that can be an easy choice
and had some more protein. I'm going to stop eating
so much sugar for someone like myself. Other people who
(23:00):
may be listening to change their diet has so much
baggage in it. It brings up so much. It brings
up scarcity or lack or fear or I don't know
how to do it, or I'm gonna you know, it's
that black and white thinking of either like they're on
a diet or they're off to the races, and those
(23:23):
two extremes people are living in for so long that
they don't even realize that there's that middle of the road.
And your comment that you said is that middle of
the road, there's a different way. And that's what I
teach people. I teach people how to realize that they
don't have to beat themselves up with dieting. They don't
(23:44):
have to make themselves wrong. And that doesn't mean that
now they're you know, shoving a bunch of food in
their mouth. There's this middle of the road and that
comes from that place of health, that comes from that
place of self love, and that comes from the place
of unwinding a lot of these behaviors that are are
stuck in trauma or wounding. So we get actually clear
and a ligned And.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Is that you use your Can you talk about you
use your reiki? The integrade of somatic trauma theory? What
is that therapy?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I'm sorry, yeah, so sematics soma is the body, ramatic soul. Yeah,
so when we think about therapy, we can think about
a lot of talk therapy and so important to tell
our story and to share and to be present and
to be heard, and our bodies hold the information. So
(24:35):
we need to connect our body to the story. So
lots of times there are emotions that are stuck in
our heart, in our pelvis, and so it's it's meeting
our stories through the body. And the reiki can be
a big part of that breath movement, but a very
(24:57):
specific way that I guide people when they're working with
me to connect it to their body and to release it.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I encourage everyone to listen to your ted talk too,
and tell us about your free gift, your book, Breaking
the Cycle of Emotional Eating.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yes, yeah, so my free gift is it's a course.
It's a seven module course, Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Eating. No,
it's free, but I give a lot of good nuggets
in there's me to apply to for a session with me,
and we really go into So when I say emotional eating,
(25:35):
emotional eating isn't just it's an umbrella, and it's an
umbrella for binge eating, boredom eating, emotionally, dieting, restricting. All
of those things go underneath there. And so if you
have an issue with any of these things that I said,
this would be a great place to start to get
(25:57):
an idea of what is even going on.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
And you can do all this stuff that reiki and
everything long distance. I mean you could do it on zoom, right,
you can do it.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah. I love that. It's such a powerful thing. People
can just lie on their bed and you know, would
drop them into meditation and then send them reiki. It's
it's such a powerful thing. I'm so so grateful of it.
I mean it's like prayer, right.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, wow, I'm gonna have to experience that with you too.
This was so this was so eye opening and so important.
And that's one of the reasons this podcast is so
important to me because I don't want I didn't have
a podcast to listen to when I was getting divorced
way back when, or to talk to. So it's it's
so important to know that you're not alone and that
(26:44):
there are other people and you're not You're listening to
this helps like, oh wow, she is like that, she's
like me, or she got you know. It's so important.
So we have to keep talking about. What you're doing
is so important and sharing your story was so important too.
So thank you so much. So everyone all heard, all
the social It will all be up on the social
(27:05):
Marlin Mervis Hartman, creator of Love Your Body, Love Yourself.
She has a free gift. It's a course breaking the
cycle of emotional eating. I encourage everyone to get and
I encourage everyone to try reiki at some point or
another for sure, no matter what. Thank you so much,
Thank you so much. Wendy Nito Kuda Divorce and family
(27:26):
laws attorneys have guided Connecticut and New York families through
complex divorce actions, contested child custody, and alimony disputes for
over thirty years. Their Connecticut and New York attorneys have
extensive experience in family matters involving substance abuse, domestic violence,
mental illness, and many other X factors that can complicate
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them at Needlecuda dot com or call two O three
(28:11):
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