June 4, 2022 • 17 mins
OUTWEIGH: Samantha Skelly, Pause Breathwork CEO & Founder, is our guest today. She shares with us her eating disorder journey and how breathwork led to healing & recovery. Samantha had been on 50 different diets in 4 years, she was always excited about going to bed so that she wouldn't think about dieting & anxiety…not a fun place to be…but so many of us can relate! She then started reading books and listening to people who had gotten past their ED, and then found breathwork, which was the final piece of the puzzle to get her into full recovery! Breathwork can be a great tool for those with eating disorders or disordered eating behaviors.
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Samatha’s Instagram: @SamanthaSkelly
Pause Breathwork App HERE!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I won't let my body out out way everything that
I'm made do, won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning to love who I am again. I'm strong,
I feel free, I know who every part of me.
It's beautiful and then will always out way if you
(00:24):
feel it with your hands in there, she's some love
to the food there. Let's say good day and did
you and die out? Happy Saturday. Outweigh fam Amy here
and I'm sitting with Samantha Skelly. She was actually a
guest on my Four Things podcast a couple of weeks ago,
and while we were talking, I learned that she has
(00:47):
had her own journey to healing with body image and
food issues. So I thought, well, let's connect and let's
have you on Outweigh because I'm all about hearing other
people's journeys and journey to recovery and reminding people that
whatever season they're in in their eating disorder, journey. Why
(01:08):
can't I think of a better word than journey right now?
I think I've said journey five times in three seconds.
But they're not alone, and that's that's why we do outweighs.
So thank you Samantha for for sharing some of your
story with us. Yeah, I'm so excited for this. I
think sharing stories honestly helped me get out of it.
And so the fact that you have this podcast just
sharing stories of some of the darkest days is going
(01:29):
to create so much liberation. So thank you for having me.
I'm gonna just go ahead and read a little. Samantha
scaly Bio. She has spent the last decade of her
career revolutionizing the personal and spiritual development industries. She has
appeared on networks and in publications worldwide. She shared her
message on over four hundred stages. I mean, I could
go on and on and on. But you work with
(01:51):
powerful people, you work with regular, everyday people. You're very
into breathwork. You have your own breathwork app. You've written
a book called Hungry for how Venus? So where does
you're eating to sort of fit into this? And what
what was that story? And then what was recovery like
for you? I grew as a dancer from such a
young age. I always knew I wanted to dance an
express and to this day I still that's my favorite
(02:14):
thing in the whole world, is dancing. And so I
went all the way to like professional with dancing, and
in that there was a lot of ballet that needed
to take place. I hated ballet, but I needed to
take it in order to have the technique to do contemporary,
which was the style that I that I loved most.
And the pressure of being a ballerina and the pressure
(02:35):
of being a dancer and being a child actress manifested
into an eating disorder when I was eighteen. The interesting
thing was is I had really like aggressive body to
s'more feel like crazy up until eighteen, but it was
eighteen when it turned into disordered eating. I remember I
was living in Australia at the time, and I was
on the beach and I was thinking to myself, I'm
(02:56):
not dancing as much as I was. I need to
go on and die it. And it was like the
first diet I went on and it was the cabbage
soup diet. Did you ever do that one? Of course? Yeah,
of course. So I went to I went to the
store and I just bought craploads of cabbage and I
just ate cabbage suit for days and days and days
on end. And during that time period I was on
(03:17):
over fifty diets in less than four years. I had
no idea how to just eat normal. I had no
idea what intuitive eating was. I would wake up and
it was interesting. I would wake up in the morning
and the first thought on my mind was I cannot
I literally can't wait to go to bed tonight. And
I wasn't so excided, like I didn't want to die,
but I didn't want to live with the thoughts and
(03:39):
the body image issues and the how uncomfortable I was.
And so I really was living in this state of
just extreme anxiety, just overwhelmed numbness. I felt like a
prisoner in my own body, like I always wanted to
just like escape my body. And it was It's very
interesting psychologically because I was actually the that same size
(04:00):
I am and I am now, and now I'm at
a place where I'm like, I really love my body
so much and nothing physically has changed, which is so
wild to me, Like it's just goes to show the
power of the mind. And so I got to this
place where I'm like, I can't live like this. This
is really this is so unhealthy, Like I need I
need to get help. And so that's when I started
(04:22):
to read a lot of books and listen to a
lot of stories of other women getting through it, and
I'm like, Okay, what I know to be true is
it's possible for me to live a life where I
am not so bogged down by food and body. I
know that's possible because I've seen so many women do
it and I've heard so many stories of it. Now,
what is my way of getting there? Like? How do
(04:42):
how do I get there? And I think when we're
going through this, like I woke up every single day
and I created a vision for myself of what it
would be like when I no longer struggle with this,
like how how I would laugh and how I would
dress and how I would drive my car, and like
I created the whole other reality of what does Sam
(05:03):
Scali's life look like when she doesn't struggle with disordered eating?
And I woke up and acted as if that was
already done. Like I was like, it's already done. We're
already over this. And I I conditioned myself and I
told my body and I changed my mindset, and I
was living this other life like it was so interesting,
of like this is who I am and this doesn't
exist anymore, and and I was making a lot of
(05:24):
progress and then I went to BALI. I was reading
Elizabeth Gilbert's You Pray Love like I shared on the
last podcast, and I found breath work. And breath work
was that final tool that helped me get into my
body discern the difference between an emotional hunger que and
a physical hunger que. It helped me actually know that
I had an intuition, like people would say, just listen
(05:45):
to your intuition, and I'm like, I am so numb
in my body, Like I don't even know what that is.
Like as soon as I would feel any sort of
sensation in my body, I would either over eat or
restrict or over exercise or do something destructive in order
to get back into a place of numbness. And so
there was no chance I would be able to feel
my intuition. When I found breathwork and I begin to
(06:06):
really be an advent breather every single day and really
using this practice. It helped to liberate something that I
couldn't get to either with talk therapy or journaling or meditating,
or there was something there was another layer of depth
that I couldn't get to without breath work, and so yeah,
that was the journey and it's really interesting because now,
like I built a whole business on this, and I
(06:28):
wrote a book on this, and my podcast used to
be called hungry for having this podcast, like it's all
I used to talk about. But it's interesting now because
it almost feels like a different life. I'm like, wait,
I used to say no to plans because I didn't
like how I looked. I feel the contrast so much now,
of of it's the same life. I'm still Samantha Skelly.
But there was a time in my life where it
(06:49):
was so dark and so deep that I had no
life like I had. I squeezed the life out of myself.
And now my life looks and feels completely different, and
it's been an interesting, beautiful ride. And you know, I mean,
I'm just like you're speaking, and all that I'm thinking
is like, this is offering so much hope. This is
(07:09):
a story of hope. And for people that feel hopeless,
I'm sure you can agree. If you've experienced an eveny
sort or whatever it is that you're using to numb out,
you almost have days where like, Okay, well this is
just how I am, and this is how I'm going
to be the rest of my life, and that is
very hopeless. And so to hear you share the contrast
(07:30):
and how you were once there and now how drastically
different your life is, it's like, wow, this is yet
another story of hope. And of course you had to
put in the work to get there. It didn't just
like happen overnight, just like you kept taking the right
next step towards that. And then as if we've heard
(07:51):
that from I would say multiple people that have come
on in recovery, like that's been a common theme of
like even when you're in it, like you were just
in the early stages, but I still have to use
as if and I've been in recovery for two years,
because sometimes a thought will creep back in and I'll
be like, I shouldn't get the pizza because blah la
la whatever, And then I'm like, nope, I'm gonna go ahead,
(08:14):
and as if that this is my this is normal,
and as if like this is what I would do
if my brain didn't just say that, and I order
the freaking pizza totally totally, And what we're actually doing
is we're in training the body by doing that. You know,
it's so powerful, It's not just a quick little mindset thing.
We're literally putting new information in our body when we
(08:38):
choose that, and it really is a choice because sometimes
when the voices in your head, it's so loud and
powerful and it feels like truth, and it feels like
the only way. But if we can observe the voice
rather than identify with the voice, we create liberation, We
create spaciousness from it. And so that was my whole journey,
is how can I observe all of the emotionality and
(08:59):
all of the thought in my mind and know that
I am not those thoughts and I am not those identities.
Like for the longest time, my identity was I am anxious.
I am anxious. I am an anxious person, and I
wore that identity every single day, and I would make
excuses to not do things because I am anxious, until
I realized that, no, I'm actually not an anxious person.
(09:21):
I experienced the sensation of anxiety at times, but I'm
not anxious. And when I allowed myself to be liberated
from that identity, that's when things really begin to shift.
And not only can we liberate from stagnant old identities,
but we can actually choose the identities and the beliefs
that we want to step into. I am somebody who
(09:41):
uses food for fuel and and hunger. I am somebody
who loves their body. I am somebody who feels so
vibrant in the world. And I am somebody who feels
so good no matter what she wears, like it doesn't
even matter. But getting ourselves into the vibration, into the
belief of these new identities from that future self that
(10:02):
we're stepping into. Right, who are you when it's not done?
Who are you when you no longer struggle? And what
are you gonna do with all the spaciousness that your
mind was was, you know, clogging up with with the
disordered eating, Like, there's so much spaciousness to create and
to be and to play and have fun and do
whatever you want to do in life. It's a beautiful
(10:24):
healing process. And it's really hard. Like I'm not going
to sugarcoat that, no bunont done it. I'm not right.
It's really challenging to show up every single day and
to shift those thoughts and choose ourselves and take those
breaks to breathe and to feel and to cry when
we need to and to release, Like that is the
ultimate game of self love, Like how can I really
(10:44):
treat my body with so much compassion and care and
kindness and when it's hard to admit that it's hard
and know that this is this is a marathon, it's
not a sprint, And so from that angle, it's just
like there's a lot of healing that gets to happen. Yeah,
I wouldn't even say I'm totally on the other side yet,
because I still feel like two years in, I'm still
I'm infancy in my recovery or like at least coming
(11:08):
up on a toddler or something. But I still have
to work, but I already get to see this whole
other world that I never knew existed. And I get
to experience food as joy too. I know you mentioned,
you know, as fuel and and as to fulfill hunger
and and it is that but for me for so long,
because food was a big part of my family and
(11:29):
it was a love language and we gathered around the
table and my dad loved to cook. And some of
my listeners, if you're new, you don't know this story,
but some of my listeners know, like I missed out
on so many family meals because I either just like
didn't eat, or I didn't go or I brought my
own food, which was like completely causing the one way
my dad was trying to connect caused disconnection. I mean,
(11:53):
I don't think he was like super offended and never
he never held it against me, Thank goodness. He was
very kind about it and didn't if any thing. I
was the one I was bringing all this toxic energy
into the meal because I'm like, I can't believe you're
going to eat that, you know, sort of attitude and vibe.
And then it's just crazy how food can be joy
(12:13):
And now I can gather around the table with family friends.
I mean even in our theme song for this podcast,
which I recorded with Britney Spencer, who I just absolutely
adore up and coming country artists. That's just so amazing.
I encourage you to check her out. But one of
the lines is gathering basically for family meals around the table,
(12:36):
eating what grandma cooked. Because now I'm able like a whoa,
I just got goose bumps. And that line was important
for us to put in because she experienced missing out
on certain things too all because what we're trying to
conform to this or something, there's different narratives for everything.
There's different reasons why we're doing it. But a lot
(12:56):
of times it's like, oh, well, I can't have that
because I D says this, this, this. But then there's
there's a lot of reasons why we do what we
do are we are very complex human beings. But the
beautiful thing is something as simple as is not the
whole part of the healing package. But for you, breathwork
was imperative to your healing. And I just want to
(13:17):
encourage others to go check out our chat that we
did on my four Things podcast a couple of weeks ago,
and also to check out Pause breathwork dot com, which
is where they can find out more info about breathing.
And then on Instagram you're at Samantha Skelly s k
E l l Y and people can check out the
pause app and even start the breathing because maybe if
(13:39):
they're just like they don't even know where to start.
And I feel like if they're listening to this podcast,
they're either curious about what's going on with them, or
they're in the thick of it, or maybe they're also
in recovery and they need extra tools to just keep
on that track. Wherever you are in your journey, you
can probably find thirty seconds to three minutes to five
minutes a day to just start in corporate that breathing
(14:00):
which will help calm you. And Samantha can give a
quick rundown of like how that can just help reset you,
especially if you're on the verge of like a binge,
or you've been restricting, or you're about to go to
the gym and you know, purge through a three hour workout,
maybe stop and try breathing first. Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
It's like when we have those behaviors, right, whether it's
(14:22):
been drinking or binge eating or restricting or over exercising,
what we need to acknowledge that there's a really pure
need underneath the distructive behavior. Right, So the destructive behavior
is all of our survival strategy, right, It's like that
fear mind ego, like I'm going to die if I
don't do this type of thing. But when we get
into a relationship with our survival strategy, just ask your body,
(14:46):
ask yourself, what do I actually need right now? Is
it to go to the gym and bust out a
three hour workout? Like what is the pure need, and
when we strip it down, the needs are so simple.
It's like I need presence, I I need love, I
need connection, I need validation, I need warmth, whatever it is.
(15:09):
And so then we get to ask ourselves, how can
I meet these needs in a really healthy and sustainable way? Right?
How can I actually feel self love? Because it's like,
why do we go to the gym and work out?
I'll just create like one narrative, right, we go to
the gym and workout because we want to be skinny. Right, Well,
why do we want to be skinny because we want
to look at? Okay, well, why do we want to
look at because we think that will be more loved? Right,
(15:30):
that's just an example. Okay, Well, the true need is
I want to be loved. I want to feel loved.
So how can we meet that in a really healthy,
sustainable way without doing the thing that's destructive for for ourselves.
This is where we can really like untangle and unwind
the path of healing. And this is where we get
to bring in a lot of compassion for our destructive behaviors, right,
because at the at the core of it, there's a
(15:52):
really pure need. It's just being manifested in a destructive
behavior which is driving us crazy. I love that you
said compassion too, because please be patient with yourself and
just because you're not where I am, or where Samantha is,
or where your friend is, your coworker, whatever it is,
how whatever brought you here to listen to outweigh wherever
(16:14):
you are, I'm gonna say the word journey, which is
what's ironic is I'm literally wearing a journey when you
said so good, so um. I started off by saying
journey a bunch, and I'm going to end by saying
journey a bunch, and then I'll give a song pun
and be like, don't stop believing yourself. You have the power,
(16:35):
and I know it can seem overwhelming and daunting, but
proceed with compassion and with grace for yourself, and be
gentle with yourself because this isn't something that happens overnight.
And you're not alone. Yeah, so not alone. So thank
you Samantha for sharing some of your story with us
and some of your wisdom and insight. Definitely appreciate it. Again,
(16:59):
y'all can finder. I'm sure the best thing. Samantha Scully
dot com s k E l L Y and all
of your links and everything are there, so I just
I I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on four things
and then again doing outweigh and breathwork looks like that's
that's it's like the writing thing, and it's like get
(17:21):
an get in on it, get in on it all right.
Thank you, Samantha. Of course, my pleasure
I won't let my body out out way everything that
I'm made do, won't spend my life trying to change.
I'm learning to love who I am again. I'm strong,
I feel free, I know who every part of me.
It's beautiful and then will always out way if you
(00:24):
feel it with your hands in there, she's some love
to the food there. Let's say good day and did
you and die out? Happy Saturday. Outweigh fam Amy here
and I'm sitting with Samantha Skelly. She was actually a
guest on my Four Things podcast a couple of weeks ago,
and while we were talking, I learned that she has
(00:47):
had her own journey to healing with body image and
food issues. So I thought, well, let's connect and let's
have you on Outweigh because I'm all about hearing other
people's journeys and journey to recovery and reminding people that
whatever season they're in in their eating disorder, journey. Why
(01:08):
can't I think of a better word than journey right now?
I think I've said journey five times in three seconds.
But they're not alone, and that's that's why we do outweighs.
So thank you Samantha for for sharing some of your
story with us. Yeah, I'm so excited for this. I
think sharing stories honestly helped me get out of it.
And so the fact that you have this podcast just
sharing stories of some of the darkest days is going
(01:29):
to create so much liberation. So thank you for having me.
I'm gonna just go ahead and read a little. Samantha
scaly Bio. She has spent the last decade of her
career revolutionizing the personal and spiritual development industries. She has
appeared on networks and in publications worldwide. She shared her
message on over four hundred stages. I mean, I could
go on and on and on. But you work with
(01:51):
powerful people, you work with regular, everyday people. You're very
into breathwork. You have your own breathwork app. You've written
a book called Hungry for how Venus? So where does
you're eating to sort of fit into this? And what
what was that story? And then what was recovery like
for you? I grew as a dancer from such a
young age. I always knew I wanted to dance an
express and to this day I still that's my favorite
(02:14):
thing in the whole world, is dancing. And so I
went all the way to like professional with dancing, and
in that there was a lot of ballet that needed
to take place. I hated ballet, but I needed to
take it in order to have the technique to do contemporary,
which was the style that I that I loved most.
And the pressure of being a ballerina and the pressure
(02:35):
of being a dancer and being a child actress manifested
into an eating disorder when I was eighteen. The interesting
thing was is I had really like aggressive body to
s'more feel like crazy up until eighteen, but it was
eighteen when it turned into disordered eating. I remember I
was living in Australia at the time, and I was
on the beach and I was thinking to myself, I'm
(02:56):
not dancing as much as I was. I need to
go on and die it. And it was like the
first diet I went on and it was the cabbage
soup diet. Did you ever do that one? Of course? Yeah,
of course. So I went to I went to the
store and I just bought craploads of cabbage and I
just ate cabbage suit for days and days and days
on end. And during that time period I was on
(03:17):
over fifty diets in less than four years. I had
no idea how to just eat normal. I had no
idea what intuitive eating was. I would wake up and
it was interesting. I would wake up in the morning
and the first thought on my mind was I cannot
I literally can't wait to go to bed tonight. And
I wasn't so excided, like I didn't want to die,
but I didn't want to live with the thoughts and
(03:39):
the body image issues and the how uncomfortable I was.
And so I really was living in this state of
just extreme anxiety, just overwhelmed numbness. I felt like a
prisoner in my own body, like I always wanted to
just like escape my body. And it was It's very
interesting psychologically because I was actually the that same size
(04:00):
I am and I am now, and now I'm at
a place where I'm like, I really love my body
so much and nothing physically has changed, which is so
wild to me, Like it's just goes to show the
power of the mind. And so I got to this
place where I'm like, I can't live like this. This
is really this is so unhealthy, Like I need I
need to get help. And so that's when I started
(04:22):
to read a lot of books and listen to a
lot of stories of other women getting through it, and
I'm like, Okay, what I know to be true is
it's possible for me to live a life where I
am not so bogged down by food and body. I
know that's possible because I've seen so many women do
it and I've heard so many stories of it. Now,
what is my way of getting there? Like? How do
(04:42):
how do I get there? And I think when we're
going through this, like I woke up every single day
and I created a vision for myself of what it
would be like when I no longer struggle with this,
like how how I would laugh and how I would
dress and how I would drive my car, and like
I created the whole other reality of what does Sam
(05:03):
Scali's life look like when she doesn't struggle with disordered eating?
And I woke up and acted as if that was
already done. Like I was like, it's already done. We're
already over this. And I I conditioned myself and I
told my body and I changed my mindset, and I
was living this other life like it was so interesting,
of like this is who I am and this doesn't
exist anymore, and and I was making a lot of
(05:24):
progress and then I went to BALI. I was reading
Elizabeth Gilbert's You Pray Love like I shared on the
last podcast, and I found breath work. And breath work
was that final tool that helped me get into my
body discern the difference between an emotional hunger que and
a physical hunger que. It helped me actually know that
I had an intuition, like people would say, just listen
(05:45):
to your intuition, and I'm like, I am so numb
in my body, Like I don't even know what that is.
Like as soon as I would feel any sort of
sensation in my body, I would either over eat or
restrict or over exercise or do something destructive in order
to get back into a place of numbness. And so
there was no chance I would be able to feel
my intuition. When I found breathwork and I begin to
(06:06):
really be an advent breather every single day and really
using this practice. It helped to liberate something that I
couldn't get to either with talk therapy or journaling or meditating,
or there was something there was another layer of depth
that I couldn't get to without breath work, and so yeah,
that was the journey and it's really interesting because now,
like I built a whole business on this, and I
(06:28):
wrote a book on this, and my podcast used to
be called hungry for having this podcast, like it's all
I used to talk about. But it's interesting now because
it almost feels like a different life. I'm like, wait,
I used to say no to plans because I didn't
like how I looked. I feel the contrast so much now,
of of it's the same life. I'm still Samantha Skelly.
But there was a time in my life where it
(06:49):
was so dark and so deep that I had no
life like I had. I squeezed the life out of myself.
And now my life looks and feels completely different, and
it's been an interesting, beautiful ride. And you know, I mean,
I'm just like you're speaking, and all that I'm thinking
is like, this is offering so much hope. This is
(07:09):
a story of hope. And for people that feel hopeless,
I'm sure you can agree. If you've experienced an eveny
sort or whatever it is that you're using to numb out,
you almost have days where like, Okay, well this is
just how I am, and this is how I'm going
to be the rest of my life, and that is
very hopeless. And so to hear you share the contrast
(07:30):
and how you were once there and now how drastically
different your life is, it's like, wow, this is yet
another story of hope. And of course you had to
put in the work to get there. It didn't just
like happen overnight, just like you kept taking the right
next step towards that. And then as if we've heard
(07:51):
that from I would say multiple people that have come
on in recovery, like that's been a common theme of
like even when you're in it, like you were just
in the early stages, but I still have to use
as if and I've been in recovery for two years,
because sometimes a thought will creep back in and I'll
be like, I shouldn't get the pizza because blah la
la whatever, And then I'm like, nope, I'm gonna go ahead,
(08:14):
and as if that this is my this is normal,
and as if like this is what I would do
if my brain didn't just say that, and I order
the freaking pizza totally totally, And what we're actually doing
is we're in training the body by doing that. You know,
it's so powerful, It's not just a quick little mindset thing.
We're literally putting new information in our body when we
(08:38):
choose that, and it really is a choice because sometimes
when the voices in your head, it's so loud and
powerful and it feels like truth, and it feels like
the only way. But if we can observe the voice
rather than identify with the voice, we create liberation, We
create spaciousness from it. And so that was my whole journey,
is how can I observe all of the emotionality and
(08:59):
all of the thought in my mind and know that
I am not those thoughts and I am not those identities.
Like for the longest time, my identity was I am anxious.
I am anxious. I am an anxious person, and I
wore that identity every single day, and I would make
excuses to not do things because I am anxious, until
I realized that, no, I'm actually not an anxious person.
(09:21):
I experienced the sensation of anxiety at times, but I'm
not anxious. And when I allowed myself to be liberated
from that identity, that's when things really begin to shift.
And not only can we liberate from stagnant old identities,
but we can actually choose the identities and the beliefs
that we want to step into. I am somebody who
(09:41):
uses food for fuel and and hunger. I am somebody
who loves their body. I am somebody who feels so
vibrant in the world. And I am somebody who feels
so good no matter what she wears, like it doesn't
even matter. But getting ourselves into the vibration, into the
belief of these new identities from that future self that
(10:02):
we're stepping into. Right, who are you when it's not done?
Who are you when you no longer struggle? And what
are you gonna do with all the spaciousness that your
mind was was, you know, clogging up with with the
disordered eating, Like, there's so much spaciousness to create and
to be and to play and have fun and do
whatever you want to do in life. It's a beautiful
(10:24):
healing process. And it's really hard. Like I'm not going
to sugarcoat that, no bunont done it. I'm not right.
It's really challenging to show up every single day and
to shift those thoughts and choose ourselves and take those
breaks to breathe and to feel and to cry when
we need to and to release, Like that is the
ultimate game of self love, Like how can I really
(10:44):
treat my body with so much compassion and care and
kindness and when it's hard to admit that it's hard
and know that this is this is a marathon, it's
not a sprint, And so from that angle, it's just
like there's a lot of healing that gets to happen. Yeah,
I wouldn't even say I'm totally on the other side yet,
because I still feel like two years in, I'm still
I'm infancy in my recovery or like at least coming
(11:08):
up on a toddler or something. But I still have
to work, but I already get to see this whole
other world that I never knew existed. And I get
to experience food as joy too. I know you mentioned,
you know, as fuel and and as to fulfill hunger
and and it is that but for me for so long,
because food was a big part of my family and
(11:29):
it was a love language and we gathered around the
table and my dad loved to cook. And some of
my listeners, if you're new, you don't know this story,
but some of my listeners know, like I missed out
on so many family meals because I either just like
didn't eat, or I didn't go or I brought my
own food, which was like completely causing the one way
my dad was trying to connect caused disconnection. I mean,
(11:53):
I don't think he was like super offended and never
he never held it against me, Thank goodness. He was
very kind about it and didn't if any thing. I
was the one I was bringing all this toxic energy
into the meal because I'm like, I can't believe you're
going to eat that, you know, sort of attitude and vibe.
And then it's just crazy how food can be joy
(12:13):
And now I can gather around the table with family friends.
I mean even in our theme song for this podcast,
which I recorded with Britney Spencer, who I just absolutely
adore up and coming country artists. That's just so amazing.
I encourage you to check her out. But one of
the lines is gathering basically for family meals around the table,
(12:36):
eating what grandma cooked. Because now I'm able like a whoa,
I just got goose bumps. And that line was important
for us to put in because she experienced missing out
on certain things too all because what we're trying to
conform to this or something, there's different narratives for everything.
There's different reasons why we're doing it. But a lot
(12:56):
of times it's like, oh, well, I can't have that
because I D says this, this, this. But then there's
there's a lot of reasons why we do what we
do are we are very complex human beings. But the
beautiful thing is something as simple as is not the
whole part of the healing package. But for you, breathwork
was imperative to your healing. And I just want to
(13:17):
encourage others to go check out our chat that we
did on my four Things podcast a couple of weeks ago,
and also to check out Pause breathwork dot com, which
is where they can find out more info about breathing.
And then on Instagram you're at Samantha Skelly s k
E l l Y and people can check out the
pause app and even start the breathing because maybe if
(13:39):
they're just like they don't even know where to start.
And I feel like if they're listening to this podcast,
they're either curious about what's going on with them, or
they're in the thick of it, or maybe they're also
in recovery and they need extra tools to just keep
on that track. Wherever you are in your journey, you
can probably find thirty seconds to three minutes to five
minutes a day to just start in corporate that breathing
(14:00):
which will help calm you. And Samantha can give a
quick rundown of like how that can just help reset you,
especially if you're on the verge of like a binge,
or you've been restricting, or you're about to go to
the gym and you know, purge through a three hour workout,
maybe stop and try breathing first. Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
It's like when we have those behaviors, right, whether it's
(14:22):
been drinking or binge eating or restricting or over exercising,
what we need to acknowledge that there's a really pure
need underneath the distructive behavior. Right, So the destructive behavior
is all of our survival strategy, right, It's like that
fear mind ego, like I'm going to die if I
don't do this type of thing. But when we get
into a relationship with our survival strategy, just ask your body,
(14:46):
ask yourself, what do I actually need right now? Is
it to go to the gym and bust out a
three hour workout? Like what is the pure need, and
when we strip it down, the needs are so simple.
It's like I need presence, I I need love, I
need connection, I need validation, I need warmth, whatever it is.
(15:09):
And so then we get to ask ourselves, how can
I meet these needs in a really healthy and sustainable way? Right?
How can I actually feel self love? Because it's like,
why do we go to the gym and work out?
I'll just create like one narrative, right, we go to
the gym and workout because we want to be skinny. Right, Well,
why do we want to be skinny because we want
to look at? Okay, well, why do we want to
look at because we think that will be more loved? Right,
(15:30):
that's just an example. Okay, Well, the true need is
I want to be loved. I want to feel loved.
So how can we meet that in a really healthy,
sustainable way without doing the thing that's destructive for for ourselves.
This is where we can really like untangle and unwind
the path of healing. And this is where we get
to bring in a lot of compassion for our destructive behaviors, right,
because at the at the core of it, there's a
(15:52):
really pure need. It's just being manifested in a destructive
behavior which is driving us crazy. I love that you
said compassion too, because please be patient with yourself and
just because you're not where I am, or where Samantha is,
or where your friend is, your coworker, whatever it is,
how whatever brought you here to listen to outweigh wherever
(16:14):
you are, I'm gonna say the word journey, which is
what's ironic is I'm literally wearing a journey when you
said so good, so um. I started off by saying
journey a bunch, and I'm going to end by saying
journey a bunch, and then I'll give a song pun
and be like, don't stop believing yourself. You have the power,
(16:35):
and I know it can seem overwhelming and daunting, but
proceed with compassion and with grace for yourself, and be
gentle with yourself because this isn't something that happens overnight.
And you're not alone. Yeah, so not alone. So thank
you Samantha for sharing some of your story with us
and some of your wisdom and insight. Definitely appreciate it. Again,
(16:59):
y'all can finder. I'm sure the best thing. Samantha Scully
dot com s k E l L Y and all
of your links and everything are there, so I just
I I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on four things
and then again doing outweigh and breathwork looks like that's
that's it's like the writing thing, and it's like get
(17:21):
an get in on it, get in on it all right.
Thank you, Samantha. Of course, my pleasure
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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