Hi {!firstname_fix}

 Well, I am back on the road again. We just finished an awesome seminar in New York City. What a great time we had. Thank you all for coming. I am now on my way to Minnesota. I am meeting with members of the University community for some planning and with some Foundation folks who are excited about the Native American Project. I will be going up to the Northern part of the state to meet with members of the Ojibwe Band at the White Earth Reservation. We will be talking about introducing the ideas of the alcoholism treatment curriculum in their community as well.


If you are Native American and would like to share in our discussion please come join our new Radiant Native American elist. We have started having some wonderful conversations.

Please feel free to pass this week's newsletter on to your friends and family. Let me know what you like and would like to see. We recently started a new group called radiantbudget and the conversation is rockin! You ask, we listen.

A copy of this newsletter may also be found posted to the web at http://www.radiantrecovery.com/weeklynewsletter. If you wish to unsubscribe, use the link at the bottom of the page.

And be sure to visit our Radiant Recovery website and Community Forum regularly. Warmly,
Kathleen

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March 1, 2004
** Quote From Kathleen **


There is a miracle brewing here. A community, a way of eating, but something more. Radiance is drifting into many households.



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** Your Last Diet: More Than What You Think**

As I said last week, I have started looking at some of the lesser known reasons why losing weight is sometimes hard. Man, it is a complex subject! But I now have 100 3 x 5 cards with notes. I am taking them to my hotel and am writing up the story as simply and as clearly as I can. YLD members will get this info as soon as I have it written up.

Come join us and learn new pieces of the puzzle!

http://www.radiantrecovery.com/YLD_signup.htm


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** Radiant Recovery Seminars **

Our annual four-day ranch will be held in Albuquerque May 19-22. Radiant Ranch is the highlight of the year. . We all are getting so excited! Here is a schedule of what we will be covering if you want to check it out. You will need Adobe Acrobat to access it.



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** David's Corner **


As I promised, here is the info regarding our best sellers:

January

  1. George's Shake
  2. Journals
  3. Cookbooks
  4. Pro EPA
  5. Cheese Snacks
  February

  1. George's Shake
  2. Journals
  3. Flavorings
  4. Cookbooks
  5. Pro EPA
Here are reasons why these products are making you so happy....

Thanks to the people who have started sending in ideas for the store. I am already discussing some of them with Kathleen, so stay tuned. Please send questions and suggestions for items you might like to see in our store.

Thanks,
David

And of course, we have something for everybody in our store


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** Featured Topic**
Take Some Time With Your Program
by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.


This is a REPEAT of this article (smile)...a LOT of you are rushing, rushing. Reminders are good!

Let your program settle in some. Now, think about where you are in the process. Have you been rigorous, detailed and persistent? Have you dallied, played or poked with the steps? Are you weighing yourself all the time? Are you being attentive to how you feel? Have you kept a journal? As you go through this process, notice how you criticize or judge yourself. Do you ascribe "good" to rigor and "bad" to dabbling? Listen to your inner judge carefully and discover if she or he is an ally or a saboteur.

Work with the inner voices. They are crucial to your long-term success. This process may not work the way you might expect. Sometimes diligence is less useful than dalliance. For many, many years you have demanded that you be self-disciplined. You have pushed yourself and felt guilty when you couldn't do what you demanded of yourself. Perhaps there is a different way of doing this work. Perhaps we can change your relationship to your body and your way of making change.

When I first started doing my own plan, I thought that "getting" the program meant doing it fully, being diligent, following the instructions and not "poking around." I still held the belief that being disciplined and focused were the only ways to go. Now, I am not so sure that these are the criteria for succeeding with the program.

Now, I am convinced that something else is operating, something a little more subtle and unexpected. I believe that showing up and being in relationship to your body will help you more than being tough on yourself. Let me outline how I got to thinking this way.

I used to lead a ten-week guided imagery series called Finding Healing From Within. Each week, we would do a guided meditation. After the meditation, the participants would draw what they experienced and the group would share their feelings. Sometimes a group member would sleep through every single meditation and "make up" a drawing because they had no memory of anything in the meditation. This made me really uncomfortable. Was I failing these people? Were they failing the group? Were they in denial? How could they sleep through my wonderful imagery?

At the end of ten weeks, we reviewed the progress of everyone in the group. How had they changed? How did they feel? Surprisingly, time and time again, the "sleepers" would have as remarkable a change as the "doers." Not once, not twice, but every single time. Ten weeks of sleeping through and they would report a profound sense of inner healing. They didn't "work it." They slept through the meditations on a conscious level. But they were there. They showed up and they drew the pictures and they talked about their process.

This experience taught me something. The act of showing up creates change. It creates powerful change even if on the outside it may not seem so. Making a commitment to healing starts a process - a chain of events that is much deeper than we may think. When you say, "I will get better," when you begin to hold the idea of "Whatever it takes" something starts to shift.

Given this, I looked again at the effect dalliance and diligence might have on the 7 steps of healing sugar sensitivity. I started looking at my own process of doing the steps. What was happening when I was playing around? Could those times be like the sleeping times in my guided imagery class? Could change be happening in spite of what seemed to be inattention? I looked in my journal. I discovered something astounding. When I was there attending to the steps, listening to my body, writing in my journal, even if I wasn't doing it perfectly, change was happening. I was making progress even when I was being kinda sloppy.

Think of the sleepers. The sleepers were there in the room with the group. Every week. They woke up, colored with the group, and talked about sleeping. So when I showed up and kept the journal and wrote about sleeping through my food plan, I was still engaged with my body and working the steps. I was talking with myself about what was happening. I was not criticizing myself for food sleeping, I was simply watching. And I kept coming back to the journal. I kept coming back to my body and my healing.

The nature of the sugar sensitive person is to give when things get difficult. Like the C57 mice, you crouch in the corner and think you can't stick to your plan. Your biochemistry supports learned helplessness. You feel inadequate, overwhelmed and unable to follow through the way you hoped. A thousand failed diets from the past reinforced these feelings. As soon as you "sleep", you say "Yah, see you did it again!" So you run away from the program, run away from yourself.

This time it will be different, because knowing your are sugar sensitive lets you finally, finally understand the nature of who you are. Knowing you are sugar sensitive lets you shift the perspective from worrying about a thousand "failed" diets to being open to a solution. Think of that. You are tenacious. You keep going, you search and continue. You may be impulsive and impatient, but you can be and are committed to finding a solution. This program helps you use your tenacity in a new way. Because you now finally understand why other diets haven't worked, you can start to make choices. You can change the voices that say, "I know this won't really work" into "hmmmm, let's sort this out." "Why am I bored?" "Why don't I like the journal?" "Why do I sabotage my efforts?" These questions become a part of our healing. They are not the old tapes of inadequacy. They may be the same questions, but they are asked from a different perspective.

Say to yourself, "I will do whatever it takes to heal this. I will give it time, money, energy, whatever it takes. Taking care of my food will be at the TOP of my list. Not after my job, or after my family or maybe when I get to it. But every day." You have made these affirmations a thousand times. But generally, you make them in your head. You "think" about your affirmations. But mostly you do not actually put the affirmations into practice. What would it mean, really mean to "do whatever it takes?"

Copyright © Kathleen DesMaisons, 2004. All Rights Reserved.